A Fine Young Violinist and a Shaggy Black Dog

For a couple of months we were planning to host a recital for Ivan Abedelmalak, but then Israel and Iran started firing missiles at each other, and we thought we would have to cancel the concert. Fortunately, the ceasefire ended this round of hostilities, so we went ahead with the recital.

Ivan is a Roman Catholic Palestinian from the Old City of Jerusalem who has been fostered by the prominent Israeli violinist, Robert Canetti since he was seven. Ivan played an ambitious program with well-deserved confidence, though when he's not holding his violin, he is a shy young man with a sweet, bashful smile.

Canetti and his wife Bella, an energetic musician and educator, have worked for years with young musicians from East Jerusalem. Ivan is far from their only success story.

We squeezed about twenty-five people into our dining room, and everyone was swept away by Ivan's performance. Strangely, our dog was responsible for the recital, and he lay quietly at Ivan's feet while he played, making his concentration ever more impressive.

The Canettis have two dogs, and I met Robert with his dog at the dog park near the Liberty Bell Garden. He's a modest man, and I didn't know that he was a great musician. Through Yaron, a high school teacher and dog walker, our dog connected with theirs, they mentioned the possibility of holding the concert to Yaron, and that's how it happened.

Many things can connect people, both dogs and enthusiasm for music. We feel privileged to have such fine musicians play for our friends in our house. We provide the venue and refreshments after the concert, the audience makes a contribution to the artist, and we are all enriched.

Music, Ironies, and Tragedies

 Before removing a crown, beneath which my tooth was decaying, my dentist asked me what music I'd like to hear during the process. At first I wanted to say I didn't care, but then I asked for string quartets. "Which ones?" he asked. I opted for Haydn. 

The quartet his program chose contained the beautiful tune that eventually became the German national anthem. How ironic, I thought. Music originally written by an Austrian court composer for a Hapsburg emperor before there were nation states in Europe became the anthem of an aggressive nationalist state (and remains the anthem of a liberal democratic state). 

However, irony isn't the right term, at least if you attribute an ironic intention to History, with a capital 'H.' History, an entity that only exists in human minds, cannot have intentions and clearly can't be ironic.

Music is composed and performed at specific historical moments, and we hear and play it at different historical moments. That's a truism that applies to every sort of art. Artists live human lives and undergo historical events. Biographies are written about them, often trying to link their works to the events of their lives, personal and historical. But those links are surely speculative at best, irrelevant to the deep pleasure we get from art and the meaning we find in it.

As for speculation, what if Schubert, Mozart, Schumann, and Mendelssohn has lived as long as Haydn? What wonderful music they would have given us, and how different the history Western classical music would have been. The early deaths of these important composers were tragic for the men themselves and their families and friends, but not because History was writing a tragedy. Perhaps we appreciate their music more, knowing that they died too young.

We listen to their music our historical vantage point and may be puzzled that German culture, which produced a regime so monstrously evil that it's become iconic, should also have produced such profound and brilliant musicians. We are stuck with our vantage point and its puzzles. Art, however, can raise us out of history and present us with its own puzzles.

Very Loud Speakers

Last night someone who lives near us had a party and treated the entire neighborhood to live music, amplified a horrendous level, so that in our house it was much louder than we ever turn up music we want to listen to. Not only was the music beyond loud, it was also beyond vulgar. I hated being subjected to that auditory invasion. It's illegal here to make noise louder than a certain decibel level, but I didn't call the police, because I'm sure it wouldn't have helped.

This abuse of sound systems is common in Israel, where I live, but I'm sure Israel isn't unique in this respect. I have attended weddings where the background music, as it were, was so loud you couldn't hold a conversation without shouting. Time and time again I have asked waiters to have the music turned down in restaurants. Sometimes it works. I have often attended concerts, not of classical music, where microphones were placed in pianos, even in small halls. Why? It spoils the sound of the piano, an instrument capable of flooding a vast auditorium with music. All the instruments in a jazz ensemble, except the guitar and bass, are naturally very loud. Why bother with microphones? At least string quartets aren't amplified. Perhaps that day will come.

Soundmen are all afflicted with megalomania. Or else by now they are all so deaf, because they have bombarded their own ears with so much noise that they can't hear unless they amplify music to the level of distortion.

A Performance

 I have been playing baritone saxophone in a big band for the last two or three years. We meet just once a week, and we're all amateurs, so we'll never get even near to the level of one of the run of the mill professional big bands of the swing era, let alone the great bands. We're probably not as good as a high school band with a good music program, let alone the bands of college music schools. But we have fun and gradually reach a decent level in a small repertoire of swing tunes.

Last night (May 25, 2025) we played in a community center with a pub for a large and enthusiastic audience, and the performance was a success. I practiced pretty hard over the week before the performance and was able to play without too many mistakes. I also worked on mastering the changes for the solos. I think I did all right. We paid someone to make a video of the performance, so I'll be able to hear myself soon enough. I hope I won't be disappointed.

I've been playing bari sax for more than thirty years, and I ought to be a lot better than I am at it. I bought my first instrument, from a musician in the police band who was retiring and couldn't play such a heavy instrument anymore. That was in the mid-1980s, I think. Before I bought that instrument (it was a Grassi, an Italian company), I had never even considered acquiring a baritone sax, but the price was low, and the man who sold it was very nice, so I went for it. I played it in a few ensembles. It wasn't a great instrument, and I wanted a better one. When my father died in the early 1990s, there was some cash in an account he left, so I splurged and bought an excellent Selmer saxophone and have been playing it since then. By now, both it and I are vintage!

In a way, owning a baritone saxophone is a little like being the one who owned the ball when we were choosing up sides in the park when I was a kid. If you owned the ball, you had to be included. Bands almost always need a baritone saxophone player. I played in a couple of community wind orchestras and pretty good big band for ten years, but I left when I reached the age of seventy. The rehearsals were late on Sunday nights, about a 45 minute drive from Jerusalem, and I would get home exhausted, not get enough sleep, and be off kilter for the rest of the week.

I had no intention of joining another big band, but a friend of mine invited me to a performance of a group he was playing in. They put on a good show and needed a bari player, so I joined. It's been fun. I'm the oldest guy in the band, and I always wonder how long I'll be able to keep at it. After I had a hip replacement, it was hard for me to handle the heavy instrument, and I measure my recuperation by how well I can manage it now.

Until I began playing in big bands, I prefered small jazz ensembles. But I've learned to love the music. Even our amateur band excited the audience, and when the audience is excited, the excitement flows back to the musicians. Being in the band and rehearsing the parts makes you aware of just how sophisticated the music is, more sophisticated, probably, than the audience realizes. 

I hope we get to play for an audience again soon.

Do Chords Exist?

 A central concept in music theory is voice-leading. For example, in the transition from a C major triad in the root position (C-E-G) to an F major triad in the second inversion (C-F-A) the voice-leading is obvious: the E moves up a minor second to F, and the G moves up a major second to A. The concept of voice-leading is valuable for understanding chord progressions and transpositions from key to key.

I have been learning Telemann flute duets, the six sonatas, TVW 40, which are essentially exercises in two-part counterpoint. There is plenty of voice-leading, as, for example, Telemann adds a G# to a run, leading to an A, and signalling that he has modulated from the key of D to the key of A. But I wonder whether Telemann was thinking in terms of what we now know as classical Western harmony.

There are plenty of arpeggios in these duets, spelling out chords, and they lead from one measure to the next, but I find myself wondering, as I play them, whether Telemann thought of them as chords. By contrast, if you look at the lead sheet of a jazz standard, you'll see a melody line, written in the treble clef, with the names of chords written above it. The musicians who play the piece use the chords as indications of how the melody should be accompanied and as the basis for improvisation. To fit the improvisation over the chord progression, or to play a walking bass line, you have to know what the notes of the chords are and what scale they suggest. Most of the time, this isn't an insuperable challenge. To take a slightly uncommon example, when you see a chord labelled C7#5, you have to understand that the chord notes are C-E-G#-Bb (=A#), which implies a whole tone scale: C-D-E-F#-G#-A#-C. My question is the following: is a C7#5 really a chord? Those four notes do not appear together in any ordinary diatonic scale. Similarly, a very common chord in jazz is written as a six, as in C6 (C-E-G-A), but it's really an A minor seventh in the first inversion. If it really is anything.

When did Western European composers begin to think of their music as based on progressions of chords? By the baroque period, composers were definitely thinking in terms of keys. The fourth Telemann sonata is clearly and intentionally in the key of b-minor, though one of the movements is in the relative major, D. But Telemann never stays for very long in the nominal key, and he uses voice-leading to move from key to key. A passage in F#7 is followed by a passage in b-minor, as classical harmony tells us that it should. But how did Telemann conceptualize it?

The name of a chord designates a certain collection of notes. A musicologist looking at a score sees an array of notes and labels it as a chord. In a sequence of chords, a chord progression, one chord leads to another. But the reason why the arrays of notes move forward is undeniably the voice-leading, the movement from the notes in one chord to those in the following chord.

In jazz harmony, people talk about tension - the tension created by a dissonance such as the minor second (or major seventh) between B and C in a C major 7 chord - and the release of tension in consonance. The tritone (augmented fourth or diminished fifth) in a dominant seventh chord (e.g. B and F in a G7 chord) is resolved into a major chord - in Western classical music, in rock and roll, in popular music, and in jazz.

That, dear readers, is a matter of voice leading, which underlies harmony.

Phenomenal Talent

Last night, a cold, rainy winter night, my wife and I went to a small venue in a back alley in downtown Jerusalem to hear Simon Starr, a visiting Australian musician, who spoke some Hebrew, with two Israeli musicians, Omri Mor, the pianist, and Aviv Boneh Iddrissu, a young drummer. They played in what was once a half-underground cistern, left over from the time before there was a national water carrier. I don't think as many as a hundred people can fit into the place, which is a shame, because the performance last night was exhilarating.

About a month ago I heard Omri Mor play on a Friday afternoon in the same tiny auditorium in a tribute to the Moroccan-born Oud player, Nino Biton, a gruff old man. Omri was one of Nino's many students and joined them on the stage about halfway through the tribute, playing Andalusian music. Once Omri was at the keyboard, the music took off. His playing was brilliant, but he wasn't trying to outshine the others. He inspired them and raised them to a higher level.

I knew Omri back in the 1990s when he and I attended the workshops led by the late Arnie Lawrence. Omri was then a high school student, and I was (and still am) more than old enough to be his father. Even then Omri was such a good pianist that I wondered what he could possibly learn when he went on to study at the Jerusalem Academy. Since then I haven't followed his career closely, but I'm aware that he's gone on to develop an international career and played with major jazz musicians. I've heard him play here in Jerusalem on many occasions, including once in our home.

I was awed by Omri's raw talent when he was young, far eclipsing my bumbling efforts to play jazz. But it was a pleasure (and, in retrospect, an honor) to play with him. The music erased the discrepancy in age and talent.

Simon Starr played the double bass nicely, introduced his own compositions, and sang, but between Omri and the drummer, he was outclassed. The drummer, Aviv Boneh Iddrissu played as well as any drummer I have ever heard. He responded to Omri and Simon, he played absolutely perfectly, loud and soft, fast and slow, in many styles, as an accompanist and a soloist, and he's only sixteen! As much a prodigy as Omri was.

At the concert last night, he and Omri played an intense duet, improvising on Milestones, the tune by Miles Davis. It was breathtaking. There is nothing like live, improvised music when it's on such a high level.

A Successful House Concert

Last night an unusual trio played in our house for an audience of about thirty-five of our friends: Yinon Muallem, an Israeli who now lives in Sweden and plays oud and percussion, and sings; Saman Alias, a clarinetist from Iraqi Kurdistan, who also lives in Sweden now; and Dina Kitrossky, a versatile Israeli pianist. They played original compositions based on Middle Eastern music.

The audience's response was heartwarming. We are privileged to be able to host concerts in our home and enable the musicians to create an atmosphere of warmth and joy. We began hosting concerts in the 1990s when accomplished Russian musicians arrived in Israel and couldn't make a living, and we continued because it is so rewarding for us to provide a venue for fine musicians who appreciate the chance of playing for a small, intimate audience, even though they don't make as much money from such performances.

Recently we spent five days in Paris on our way home from California to Israel. One evening, in a restaurant we happened to go to, a jazz duo played: a guitarist and a bass. They were excellent musicians and played fairly traditional tunes. Both the fine food and the fine live music made me happier than I have been in a long time. A day or two later we went to a recital of cello sonatas in a huge theater near the Champs Elysées. Although both the cellist and the pianist were on the highest level, and the sonatas they played were fabulous, they were separated from the large and enthusiastic audience by being up on a stage, with the house lights off. 

Hearing live music is always a special experience, and hearing it in someone's living room, when you're not  separated from the musicians at all, is even more special.