Barry Brisk is the conductor of the
Beach Cities Orchestra.
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Barry Brisk is the conductor of the
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March 29, 1978 I really owe you an apology for having been tardy tonight. I could tell you the 'whys', but in the end they really don't alter anything, and a rehearsal delay is a rehearsal delay. Mea culpa! It's also true, and recognized, that you must feel in a bit of an awkward position with respect to "balling me out", or maybe even with respect to interpretation considerations. Please be reassured that 'vertical relationships' with respect to chairmaning and the like are not 'my bag' to begin with, and that when I'm playing oboe, in an ensemble situation, the conductor is 'boss' and no offence will be taken if you would like to hear something played differently. We sort of have a tacit understanding of this kind anyway, I think, but I wanted to state this to you so that any lingering concerns which you might have, anything which might inhibit you from saying, "Leroy, can you play X passage this way?" would be dispelled. Will try to have a more pp 'F' (together with the measures just before, in the second movement of the Piston) by Sunday. Damndest thing, reeds, endurance, and the like. Plus the frustration of having the mental sonic-conception of how that recapitulatory passage should end, and to make it happen in that register is just a little like dancing the limbo with a razor blade instead of a pole at your neck. Had Piston written slurs there it would have been a bit easier-but no complaints meant here. It's just a 'touchy' passage, that's all, I've been playing it a bit safe by making it a bit louder than I'd like so the notes would be there, while fooling around (at home) with fingering and the like in an effort to make the most 'covered' sound which is still intonationally secure. (A little sharp tonight, so back to the drawing board in the 'reeds' department.) It might be of interest to you that the kids (students) have expressed, to me, their positive thoughts and feelings with respect to your conducting and the conducting class. Teaching conducting is a bit like teaching applied communicative kinesiology, isn't it? It's instantly recognized when a conductor, student or otherwise, 'addresses' an orchestra properly, when the visual representation of sonic tension, or relaxation, is there. (Possibly this might be expressed as a king of 'coupling' of kinetic-visual-tactile considerations, the coupling existing between the k.-v.-t. muscular expression of the music's shape by the conductor and the performer's physiognomy). Royce and Fred, for example, have not yet made the connection between motion and sound: neither of them could communicate the analogous relationship between conductorial muscular-musical involvement and the orchestra-members' muscular involvement with making that sound happen. Steve Primo, despite the various technical problems he had, at least 'addressed' the orchestra, and, though there wasn't much in the way of phrase-shaping, or much in the way of communicating harmonic and dynamic 'pressure', was at least there, present, palpable, in a 'real time' (now time) way. - - -Very difficult to put into words. The gesture of making the stick go up and down is an abstraction unless other, subtle, elements are also present having to do with a perceptible muscular-tactile involvement of the conductor with the sound that he hears and the sound he wants to hear. Making the size of the beat larger doesn't have anything to do with dynamics unless the muscular tension is also visible in some way, that muscular tension somehow relating to the greater energy which goes into playing loudly. Anyway, Barry, I'm glad you're relaxed with the idea of letting the students conduct even when they aren't prize examples of the conductor's art. Will cease this omnibus letter now. August 11, 1981 Dear Friends, What a pleasure it was for B and me to have some time with both of you! The food was very good, of course, but the company was even better. Thanks so much for having facilitated the "making real" of something we, B and I, had wanted to do for some time but had left in the realm of the "wanting to". And I do hope we get to meet your little person soon. Judging from the photos, which help to take things out of the mythical sphere and put them on a more actual plane, you've doubtless got a chip off both blocks. This business of watching someone grow from babyhood through infancy, and so on, brings to mind so many scenes from my kids' "littlehoods". I've also had the pleasure of watching this happen, on a "spot check" basis, with Heather Grierson. I mean, who could forget Heather meeting me at the door, pulling up the cat's tail, and saying, "Hi. This is Thelonius. Here is his anus." By the way, I hope I didn't create the impression
that I consider Mozart to be among the "lesser lights" in our discussion. Au contraire.
Of course he was brilliant, a genius, and wrote an outstanding number of first class works. I
certainly can't join Jim Hopkins, who considers Wolfgang a, quote, "ring a ding composer." Please don't construe this as an attack on Mozart's plots, by the way. I cannot pretend to assess their value as a literary person might: being semi-illiterate I can really only react on my own terms. But is it true for either of you that you enjoy more the idea behind, say, Marriage of Figaro than you do the idea-plot-drama of Don Giovanni? No reason you shouldn't, of course, but that tragedy-symbolic hidden in the 'comedy' in Don G. is for me more moving than the sort of circuitous solving of romantic and other entanglements in Figaro. And I say this not in the "intellectual" only sphere-I actually feel something more when our woebegone Juan is receiving "justice" (of a kind) and defying it than I feel for the old fella in Figaro who finally realizes he's been had for a chump. (Of course you feel a bit of empathy for both of the characters in question-and a bit of anger too. Why shouldn't one be able to have his cake and eat it too? And of course one feels instant sorrow for Giovanni just for his being at the end of his seducing career: one could-only semi-seriously-feel a bit of nostalgia and identify with him. The feminists are well-served too, because they may inwardly cheer and say, "Serves him right". One never views these matters entirely as objective necessary-to-the-plot matters! Anyway…) I must tell you that I enjoy the idea of Ariadne in something of the same way that I enjoy Giovanni with respect to the tragedy/salvation matter also being bound up in the comedy. In Ariadne it's part of the premise from the beginning, of course, and more explicit-just as effective in its own way, though.* That multi-level aspect of the drama-that aspect which might be called "studies in non-communication", the sort of allusions to Wagnerian endings at the conclusion of the work, the fact that Ariadne is still a kind of self-enclosed "shut the world out" person at the end (she's never learned a damned thing from any of her experiences or from other human beings), the playing with musical and with theatrical conventions, and of course the music itself-it all adds up to making it my favorite among the Strauss-Hofmensthal collaborations. About Puccini, you know we never did get very far in discussing him. His works, I mean-though the man himself is certainly not without interest. Well…I don't have too much to say, myself. He's one of those sorts of composers about whom there doesn't seem to be too much ground for agreement, disagreement, or whatever. Writes nice tunes, orchestration is usually resonant, seems to work dramatically (though I've not seen all his operas, and I think I've only heard Rondine once, so that's a limited generality). I like the first part of La Boheme and Il tabarro a close second. Butterfly is a bit too *In this wise, I think it would make the picture-frame aspects of the opera within a context more believable, and bring the work full circle, if the fireworks were to begin, off-stage, by projection or something like that, while the work is concluding. None of the three different productions I've seen did that. melodramatic for me, but that's doubtless just a matter of personal response. I really like his mass, though. It's really an Italian opera in Latin, with a rather larger role for chorus than is usually to be found in operas. And it's kind of a kick hearing what Puccini had learned from hearing Verdi with respect to the ways he handles melodies and sometimes in accompanimental textures. Of course he was only 17 or 18 years old at the time. I'd give him an 'A' in theory if he were my pupil. It seems to have been a kind of demonstration piece for the faculty at the Luca conservatory, something on the order of a thesis, so he shows that he can write a fugue with stretti and so on It emerges as a bit naïve but rather lovable. There is little opportunity to hear it, but I played in a performance up at Idyllwild, and there are two recordings available. Incidentally, one is not at all incorrect in hearing foretastes of Puccini's operas in the work. He appropriated the Agnus Dei music for a love duet in Manon, for example. Ah, but to return to that very difficult "fish vs. oranges" question you asked, Cathy, about Mozart being a greater or lesser symphonist than "X"-Sibelius, Brahms, or whoever. Obviously Mozart was a great symphonist. Unquestionably. Was he greater or lesser is close to impossible to answer because of all the obvious reasons. I would say that he has a truly large number of symphonies which are not great, though, and that if it is valid to make evaluative comparisons between composers of different eras the humdrum ones have to be taken into account as well as the truly fine ones. On this score-how many of the symphonies in a composer's output are top-drawer. I'd have to put Brahms at the top of the list with 100%. Of the total number of symphonies that he chose to write, Brahms' are all, arguably, great. Mozart's symphonies are, unarguably, not all great. I'm not sure it makes much difference though, or really means anything, to observe that. I get a kick out of considering such matters, though, which makes you guys especially great company! I hope you enjoy such discussions, because you seem to respond to those kinds of tug of wars with intensity: I never consider such discussions to be arguments, and I always learn something from them-if nothing more than how foolish I sometimes am! I'm not sure that I can agree with you, Barry, about Mozart being on a higher plane than most other composers. He's a great composer, right up there in that upper strata of the musical firmament, unquestionably. The reasons you advanced for putting him on a higher plane than, I take it, any other composer, are good ones. I'm still mulling them over. I think there's a chance you may be right, when you put the matter in the framework of succeeding in so many different areas, or mediums if you will. Where I have some problems with the height of Mozart's plane is in a few areas which can mostly be reduced to: "It's easier to write a good classical symphony than a good 19th century tone-poem, or symphony". (What counts is what one says and does with a musical vocabulary, and only secondarily does the vocabulary enter into question of relative musical greatness, but still, Mozart would have to be considered a somewhat lesser light than Haydn with respect to distilling the idea what the best Classical symphony could be in terms of its historic development. Let's just say that Mozart was just as much the beneficiary of a great deal of previous development of the symphony and musical conventions as was Brahms, which takes nothing away from him, but does put him in a certain perspective. He wasn't like Bach in terms of summing up an era, nor was he like a Monteverdi in terms of initiating a new one, so his plane might have to be adjusted a bit when one tosses this into the works.} The parenthetical remarks were random thoughts out of sequence! Forgive the lapse, please. To return to the point, those classical conventions, and the nature of the vocabulary and style, are such that any good composer can write a pretty decent classic symphony. Try writing a decent Brahms symphony, though. Believe me, the magnitude of the difficulty is of a higher order. It's easier to write a respectable Beethoven facsimile, and that's a fairly tall order in itself, than it is to write a respectable fifth Brahms symphony. That thorough unification of thought and effect, that subtle interpenetration of leading motives throughout the musical fabric, the challenges he set for himself in the formal area (such as the third movement of the second symphony and the last movement of the first) and the sheer class of his solutions, these are just damned hard to equal. This is not to claim that it's easy to write a great Mozart symphony. But in two weeks I could write you a Mozart-type symphony as good as any of the first twenty-honest. Give me three years and my Brahms facsimile will still be unequal to the master, and in my heart of hearts I know that. I have spent some time writing a Brahmsian violin sonata,* incidentally. I've had as much pleasure doing that as I've had from writing any other piece I can remember. A few more swipes with the polishing cloth, and I may have it performed, contrary to my usual policy with such things. (My Schubertian string quartet, Mozart piano sonata, etc., lie safely in drawer, or are contributing to landfill someplace). It's not as good as Brahms' sonatas for violin, but it's pretty good, and I think it may give pleasure to some. Hoping I've not overstayed my welcome on your desk, table, or wherever you read your mail, I'll close now. You see how excited I get by this kind of discussion? I've actually been sitting here writing for several hours. Let's not let the weeds grow under our asses before we get together again. O.K.? This time it's our turn to initiate, for sure, and B and I promise to do that. Meanwhile, thanks again for a very lovely evening, for a fine dinner, and for taking the initiative. I enjoyed you tremendously, and B enjoyed herself so much and was so excited that she finally went to bed, at my insistence, at a time somewhat after 2:00 AM. Your pal,
Dear Barry, Just finished listening to your performance of the Bruckner 4th Symphony. I really liked the no-nonsense tempo in the first movement! It proves that music can sound magisterial without being in a "totentempo". Interestingly, the fastest performances I have on tape or record of the first movement of this symphony are by Otto Klemperer (recording in the early 50s) and by William Steinberg (with Pittsburg, from the old Capital Classics days), for whatever that may be worth. By comparison to the Klemperer, the Boehm and Jochum are soporific in tempo, though not necessarily in effect. Anyway, the movement comes off, and I'm very impressed. Second movement, a good tune despite the over-addiction to two bar phrases, is fine. There are things I like about this movement, even its starkness, but I must say it's not my favorite Bruckner second movement, probably because he is awfully obsessive about the principal rhythms. Third movement: It works, but I felt it to be a bit on the slow side. Maybe I've heard too many Hell-bent-for-leather (whatever that means) performances. Trio was just right. It's got to be one of A.B.'s most lovable Trios, especially that wonderful one-time-only dissonance between flute and clarinet. Last movement: Barry, I think the tempi, etc., were good. It's impossible to make this movement really "jell" (Bruckner's fault), but you damn near succeed! You've got some good players in this orchestra. I was particularly impressed with the maturity of the brass, most especially at the low end. One of the most impressive performances I remember hearing was with Wallenstein conducting Chicago (coupled with, of all things, Stravinsky's Symphony in C). Oh, that Dale Clevinger! Makes horn playing sound easy, while we all know what a treacherous thing it is. But you've got a good horn section, particularly your numero uno (your fourth sometimes gets a bit under pitch in the pedals). Anyway, I'm impressed over-all, by you and by the orchestra. It was enjoyable to listen to, and that's something in this day when we can compare performances from almost any-time within the era of recorded sound. Sincerely,
March 16, 1985 Dear Barry, So glad you could be on the NACUSA concert. I think you performed both works just fine, and I'm liking your songs better each time I hear them. I cannot say the same for the Sonata though, and did not imagine you would want a copy of it either: whatever the composition may have had in terms of small virtues was more that obliterated by her abominable performance. (If you are interested in the Stevens Duo, I will shortly be getting a copy of a better performance than the one of March 6).-You have Granet, Brisk, Perla and Southers, all complete. Try using Dolby on playback. Naturally the money will take much longer. It takes three minutes to write and record a check, and it takes only an hour to make this tape, so the tape will obviously reach you much sooner. Thanks again for your cooperation and contribution.
POSTCARD FROM VIENNA Hi Guys!! Just wanted to let you know that we will be bringing home kinderbuchen for Phillip. We already have "Goofy als Ludwig van Beethoven" (no kidding!), and intend to pick up "Donald Duck als Hans Pfitzner (now I'm kidding). Stayed three days in Wien, and am now writing from St. Florian, because I had to see Bruckner's environs (naturlich!) "Crashed" a tour in progress at the Augustinian monastery, sneaked into the crypts to see the sarcophagus, etc., and actually drove to Ansfelden to inspect the exterior of the Geburst (sp?) haus by night. At this moment am being amused by the andante moderato snoring of some asshole in the next room. Later I intend to shove a mute up his nose!! Finished a movement (Palendrome) of the piece for violin and marimba before leaving, but haven't written a note on the trip, yet. Hope you're shaking out a new piece right now. Spater,
Sept. 17, 1993 Dear Barry, Well, now that we've settled in a bit, I can write you, and will write to Cathy also, to wish you well in your new single status, and to tell you how things are with me/us. First is my concern for you. Since it sounds like both of you good friends believe separating is for the best, then the sundering of the relationship must be the right thing to do. (I am a master of the obvious.) Still, I'm sure there must be some regrets, some missing of the former partner, and of the good things which were a part of your lives together, at least at the beginning and for some time thereafter. In my own experience it's the good memories which are the hardest to deal with, at least for awhile. Then they finally fall in perspective, together with the realization that your life would have been the poorer without them. Complications of children make life much more difficult, and I imagine your situation is rather different from what mine was/has been in this respect. I have no observations, astute or stupid, to make about this, because Jill and Erik and I were on very loving terms until after the divorce. A big part of the trauma for me was that I knew whatever our relationship might be or become, it would never be as good again as it had been, and I was right. My understanding is that you have never been very close to/with Phillip, so our experiences will be quite unalike. In any case, I hope you consider me a good enough friend that you will call if you feel depressed, or just want to talk a bit, or for any reason at all. We're living in Meredith, New Hampshire, and are likely to for some time, despite the ridiculously long commute from Boston, because we cannot afford to move again now. C had neither the time nor the money to find a house nearer Boston before the Mayflower van would be arriving. You can't really find a place without paying first and last month's rent, etc., in a community where nobody knows you, and of course she grew up here in Meredith. Except for the absence of compatible friends, and I can't really count C's relatives in this respect, this is a rather nice area in which to live. Right now everything is heart wrenchingly green - pines, maples, oaks, balsams, ash, etc., to say nothing of all the New England underbrush. In a couple of months, or sooner, everything will be reds, rusts, yellows and golds, which I know will be spectacular. But for a few near-major cities, such as Concord and Manchester, the whole state is mainly forests, lakes, tiny little farms and picturesque villages, with Colonial and Victorian houses nestled among the trees. We're just a block or so from Lake Winnipesaukee, a beautiful and unpolluted lake, filled with islands, ranging from those which are just large enough to support a stand of trees to those with settlements. Tourism is the state's largest industry, but by this time the summer people have left and the "leaf peepers" have yet to come, so Meredith has reverted to its natural sleepy status. 60% of the state consists of protected forest lands, so loggers and developers will not be able to ruin things in the near future. I tell you Barry, I'm not the biggest nature buff, in that I don't like extended hikes, sleeping in tents, and the like. But two evening ago I was standing looking up in a parking lot, mouth agape, as I watched low rolling black clouds, luminescent and outlined in silver, filling the sky and majestically passing over the tree tops. I've never before actually lived anyplace (and we moved a lot when I was a kid!) that so satisfied my need for a feeling of "rightness" in the environs. Our house sits in a yard the size of which is unappreciated until you mow it, with a garage and basement both filled to the brim with cartons at present. On the first floor there is a lengthy screened in porch, with a smaller one off the kitchen, a hall and stairwell, a good sized kitchen with walk-in pantry, a dining room about the size of the one we had in Tujunga, and a living room which is a bit smaller than we had before. Upstairs are a bathroom, a corridor, and three bedrooms. But for the linoleumed kitchen and bathroom, the floors are wood throughout, and the walls are covered with Victorian-style pebbled tinning, painted off-white. I really don't think you could rent anything like it in Los Angeles, and certainly not at $600 a month. But ye Gods, the commute! Mondays I'm up at 4:00 AM in order to get to Boston before 10:00 (yes, they have their traffic jams too). On this, my easier day, I have an office hour, a meeting, and five hours worth of classes, before going with the Dept. Chairman to Weyland to sleep on his couch overnight. Tuesday I'm up before 6:00, I go to Berklee with Jack and teach for eight hours, with a one hour lunch break, then take two subways to the Trailways station, ride the bus to Concord, which arrives at a closed-up station at about 9:30 PM, where I wait for C to pick me up and drive the remaining hour and a half to Meredith. Still, this schedule allows me three days at home, to decant containers, try to get the house looking decent, and write music. In the world of writing, I'm hard at work doing something thoroughly out of step with this period late in the century. In memory of his mother, Gary Hammond has commissioned me to write for piano, and I'm obliging with a set of contrapuncti. The problems are several in number, including making the cabinetry good so that the drawers open and shut correctly, of course, but the harder parts have to do with making real music that touches both head and heart, and not sounding like the contrapuntal side of Stravinsky, or like warmed-over Hindemith. There will be seven contrapuncti in all, surrounded by a Prelude and Postlude. So far I have completed the Prelude, Contrapunctus I. (Fugue a 3, to be played at breakneck speed), Contrapunctus II. (Canon a 2 @ M13, Pastorale alternating with 'B' sections having more rhythmic bite), and Contrapunctus III. (Prolation canon in ratios 1:2:4). Contrapunctus IV. (Dramatic Fugue a 4) is causing me no end of toil and waste basket filling. I'm convinced that it was easier to write music when you could just be tonal, even pretty. Ay Caramba! John Jensen of the Miracourt Trio is supposed to record them for CD release on Gary's Sound-Search label, after they're all completed. All of which suggests that I'd better get back to composing, and to making a Syllabus for my Counterpoint I. Class. Please write and let me know how things are "by you". Your old buddy (since 1958)
Sept. 26, 1996 So happy to hear that Phillip has, well, developed and turned out better, spectacularly better, than I thought he might. This must be more than just a relief to you. Ain't it great having a son of whom you can feel proud? I'll assume that your new job is working out fine, and is satisfying. You know that you're doing the most vital and important kind of teaching, of course. Without that good start, that foundation, there's nothing, not even a potential audience member. Decent music, and decent music education are more or less on the edge of extinction, and without people like yourself everything we stand for will be like fossilized bones found only in a few museums, and I sincerely mean that. You're doing something that I could not. I have absolutely no talent or patience for dealing with children in an educational capacity, and could no more begin someone on the violin or oboe than I could construct my own electric turbine. There are plenty of people who can do what I do at the university level, yourself included. But there are damned few who can do what you do, and do it well. So I doff my winter cap (from Wales) to you, and wish you the best in this vital enterprise. So much has happened since my Christmas brief message, much of it rather sad. So far in 1995-96 I've lost my mother, three uncles, 80% of the vision in my right eye, and my brother's been hospitalized with kidney failure. He's now in a hospice type facility, and my Dad has more or less moved to New York for the nonce to help take care of him during whatever time he has left. We had to have our 19 year old dog, Max, put away because his loss of bladder control finally became too much to handle. (He's been replaced by a bundle of fluff, a genuine lhasa apso (sp?) puppy, now about ten weeks old but still looking like a mitten you use to dust furniture.) On the positive side, we've purchased a house much larger than the one we were renting. (I may have mentioned our intentions in that Christmas note.) It has a very large living room for this area, a large kitchen, three bedrooms one of which is now an office, two bathrooms, a two car garage (still filled with unpacked boxes), a very large basement which is becoming my smoke filled den of music and iniquity, a good sized swimming pool, an immense producing apple tree, and a garden with raspberries, rhubarb, and asparagus (all planted before we ever even knew about the property). There are woods and meadow on our 1 and 1/3 acre, together with an historic cemetery registered with the local Historical Society - all eight interments are from the 19th century, pretty recent considering that Meredith was founded in 1748. We have virtually no neighbors, except for those living directly across the street, and are surrounded by forest type land, with a view of the mountains. Most of the time I enjoy the wildlife that visits us here. We leave seeds out for the jays, doves, phoebes, finches, two kinds of squirrels and a family of chipmunks, most of whom are gradually becoming trusting, Hadley (our dog) notwithstanding. On a Sunday late last month, while entertaining about 16 of C's relatives, we heard a thwacking thump from the street running right in front of our house. We ran up to the stone wall, hearing the most piteous growling moans. A bear cub of about 1 and ½ years had been struck by an older couple from Florida, who were quite shaken by the event. The poor tyke mercifully died within about two minutes. The Fish and Game Commission people hauled away the carcass the next day. Come to find out, a mother bear and her other cub live within a mile or so of us in a den down the hill from our property. We've heard them at night eating on our Granny Smith apples, and hope they'll confine themselves to our yard rather than trying to cross the street. In answer to your questions, C hasn't found any venues for acting and I have to say that I don't think she'd have the energy for it now. Teaching at Gilford Middle High School with a new principal who makes things rough for students and faculty alike, together with all the teacher-parent things, French club activities, etc., leaves her drained. She enjoys most of her students, with fewer than the usual number of rotten apples this semester. She has continued to sing for weddings, funerals, etc., which does give her a small recreative outlet. Yes, I continue to commute to Boston on Mondays and Tuesdays - up at 4:00 AM, go by car, bus and subway to Berklee, teach, return, and arrive at our digs at about a quarter to 10: PM. But how could I complain, when so few folks have only a two day work week? I no longer think that I want to be employed full time, with responsibilities for committee work, having to be on campus at least four days a week, etc., et al. Of course I'd like to have a few bennies - a retirement plan, health coverage etc., but there is always a trade-off. The fact of the matter is that the faculty seems about to go out on strike, which they did successfully 10 years ago, with 93% of the full and part timers honoring the picket lines. We're fully unionized, which has its good and bad points. I certainly hope that the strike proves unnecessary (there goes our mortgage, etc.), but if it comes to pass I will honor it. Otherwise one's life with colleagues turns to the smelly brown stuff, and I'd be black-balled. Now to the tape - You understand of course that I can listen through the few and expected technical shortcomings to hear what went right, and to hear the spirit and intentions underlying an amateur performance. And your intentions in the Delius were all the best. You've got those folks playing with intelligence, shaping phrases, giving the piece atmosphere, and creating an overall effect which is really very convincing. Moving along the beginning of the Dvorak was a good idea. That opening melody then comes into conformity with its pace in the climax that caps the Development section and at the same time begins the Recapitulation. (Imagine, that Dvorak then writing a total of three measures for the English horn, the one and only time it appears in the piece.) The spirit in this movement is very good, I think. Ditto the second. Keeping the tempos on the spiffy side like this helps to scrub out any cloying qualities which can otherwise inhere in Dvorak's ecstatic countrified burbling. The "sadder but wiser" qualities in the mildly melancholy third movement mostly make their points here, though I might wish for a bit more in the way of dynamic swelling and waning. In the Trio I've never articulated the melody with quite this much pointedness when I've played it, but it makes good sense and is quite convincing played in this way. (If I'm ever involved in another performance of Dvorak's No. 8 I'll reconsider this matter.) I suppose the 1th trumpeter felt like committing suicide after clamming in the beginning of the fourth movement, but it was just an incidental fluff that's soon forgotten, more than compensated for by the wonderful cuivre horns in the more pugnacious variation. And by the way, that 1st hornist is a standout, as is the leader of your 'cello section. Anyway, I'm glad that you didn't compromise your sense of the appropriate tempos to accommodate the difficulties in the piece, except perhaps in the last part of the Coda, and the orchestra mostly brought off everything very well. About the Pasatieri - well, I really don't mean to offend you, hurt you, or direct any barbs your way at all, and the part you played certainly made the performance better than the composition. In truth I can't imagine the composer being other than extremely bored with his own music; writing this must have felt like drudgery in the extreme. Using any vocabulary from the past is O.K. with me, provided the composer actually says something using that vocabulary. But these empty generic gestures, like the Warsaw Concerto without a tune, in a context of driving a simple-assed motive into the ground in a constant (piano says it-- part of the orchestra says it--) structural environment with no drive, no energy, a loud part obligatorily thrown in here and there with no interior dramatic motivation…well it must have been about as sincerely exciting for you as a trip to the hardware store. But I'm glad you included it anyway. I had read of Pasatieri's "retro" music before, and now I know what I haven't been missing. At least the audience thought that they had heard something. Thanks for the tape, Barry. I really did enjoy hearing what you've been doing with this group, and I'm glad to see that you're carrying on with your ambitious programming. Like many other friends, I had to miss you when I was in California in August. With my now-impaired vision (more about that in a moment) I find it difficult to drive on the freeways, especially at night, so I kept my driving down to the mostly essential, like going from San Diego to Mammoth Lakes to play in the Eastern Sierra Music Festival. The friend with whom I was supposed to stay, Gary Hammond, who lives in Hacienda Heights, came down with E Coli, which of course scotched my plans in many ways. I did get to see the Griersons and my own children, and you're right in your letter about it having been hot: 112 F where my daughter Jill lives. It was really quiet in Chula Vista with neither my mother nor my father there. I flew out of San Diego just in time to escape the crush at the airport caused by the concluding of the Republican convention. In Re: my eye. What happened was apparently a stroke, a veinous occlusion, within the part by the optic nerve. It seems I've lost my macular vision in the right eye, so that what I try to look at straight on just disappears. There's a little vision left around the edges, but that's mostly just responsive to motion unless I'm in dimly illuminated conditions (for some reason I see a bit more without a lot of light). I've had five different laser surgeries now, of two different types, which can leave one in pain for at least two days, not to restore what cannot be regained but to keep the glaucomic pressure down that results from the eye now sending out a tangle of new veins because it "believes" that more blood is needed. Those torturous veins grow over the channels that allow ocular fluid to move in and out, and have to be burned away. Thank goodness I'm 80%covered by C's Blue shield plan, since the surgeries run over $1200 a pop. Anyway, I'm learning to compensate, and I still have my left one. And the brain accepts the better image from my left eye, so that the vertical lines don't bend all over the place, as they do in the parts that I can see with my right eye when the light is not too bright. Things could be a lot worse, so I spend no time at all feeling sorry for myself. But there are times that I miss being able to use my Stereoscope, 3-d books, and other optical paraphernalia, with which I've always been fascinated. Although I'm sure I've already bent your own
optic nerves too long with this letter, I can't leave you with this kind of a "downer thought".
So I'll tell you a vulgar joke I heard from a waiter at the Dixie Kitchen, a New Orleans style
Cajun restaurant near my school. I guess I haven't changed all that much. I hope Cathy finds a publisher without difficulty.
I keep thinking that I'll finish this Toscanini discography and start using the few connections
that I have, but then some obscure firm will release another series of scratchy old broadcasts
with Arturo conducting, and I'm obliged to buy them and write some more. At least it keeps me
young, sort of.
Dear Barry and Cathy, Thanks so much for sending me the CD of the Beach Cities Symphony Orchestra performance of Nov. 12, under your capable direction. And thanks also for the articles in re; our mutual friend, Mike Thomas. I can offer you only weak excuses for not having thanked you sooner for the Beethoven, but I did want to listen to it more than once before writing to you. (I've heard it three times.) Of course this is not the L.A. Phil. Or the NBC Symphony Orch., but what went right in the performance is certainly more important than the technical flaws. The intricate textures in the second subject in mvt. 1, for example, are well sorted out. The working on the shaping of the phrases in mvt. 3, which you obviously did with the group, really paid off. Plus it's refreshing to hear that "slow" movement taken at other than a soporific tempo. I imagine that this CD is a real morale booster for your charges, and maybe it will help you to shake a few more funds out of the donors that support the enterprise. I don't know what you have planned for your other programs in the present season, but I opine that you have a good relationship with the choral conductor, Back. Well, no doubt you'll have to work together to come up with something to top this 9th Symphony in the next season. I had a thought which might seem extravagant at first, but on closer examination would not be as impractical as initial reaction might suggest. Boito's Prologue to "Mephistofele" can make a magnificent effect, and with the exception of the soloist, is not really difficult. The string parts are easier than those in the Beethoven, you have the woodwind horses to cover the reed writing (which is hardly virtuosic), and would have only to come up with a few more brass players, with which the L .A. area is bristling. Local high schools could most likely come up with trumpet and trombone players capable of playing the brass stuff, and that kind of involvement can boost attendance. The choral writing is less taxing than that in the "Choral" Symphony, which leaves only the simple, one pitch bit for children's chorus, and if you have any connections with an elementary school music teacher you'd probably be able to secure a few kids for the Cherubim without much difficulty. (Their parents would further swell your audience.) The soloist might be a bit more difficult, but on the other hand, what bass wouldn't love to sing such an applause getting role with an orchestra? If your instincts were for doing something a little less familiar, and which might garner some publicity, and if your board doesn't have certain prejudices, you could go in an entirely different direction and invite the Gay Men's Chorus to work up Sibelius' The Origin of Fire (Ukko, the Firemaker). If Leo Arnaud could bring this off in Highland Park, I'm sure you could make it go in the Beach area. I was even thinking of L.A. 1sts that might give you a presence of a different kind, and although it's probably too long, I came up with the von Suppe Requiem, a much better piece than anyone would expect, and practically unknown anywhere. (I'll send you a tape, if you'd like.) Though it requires a certain sensitivity, it's not as fraught with difficulties as his overtures, and would likely bring reviewers to the event. Anyway, I just thought I'd share my thoughts with you, for what they may be worth, not because I think I know better than you what you should perform, but just as a kind of brainstorming effort that might set your mind off in alternative directions. Incidentally, it was good to hear Nina Hinson again. I haven't heard Nina for many years. (The last time was a Hollywood Bowl Concert conducted by MTT which featured Mahler's Third Symphony.) And I was wondering if Roger Quadhamer might be related to the choral conductor Quadhamer under whom I played a MESSIAH many years ago. The tenor was the only one among the soloists that I didn't really like. Thanks also for sending the announcements
about other programs with which you've been involved. They set me wondering whether you had found
any outstanding compositions or composers among the transplanted Oriental contingent. I'm not
familiar with those highlighted on the concerts. On other fronts, I finally have a handle on who at Norton might be sympathetic to a Toscanini discography, so I'm putting the finishing touches on what has grown into a tome (more than 180 CDs given individual critical reviews), and should send it off within a month. If they don't want it, I'll try Lippincott and others who have published significant works about this conductor. If all else fails, I'll find a way to foot the bill myself. I have copied 11/2 mvts. of my Serenade for 10 wind instruments, a piece so friendly that it is even a bit retro, but have stopped in favor of putting on my reviser's hat. The internal critic is a cruel master! It's scored for standard woodwind section, plus two horns, in other words, the same instrumentation as Mozart's E-flat and C minor wind serenades plus a pair of flutes. I seem to need to alternate between composing more rigorous music requiring an audience to have kept up with more intellectually demanding vocabularies, and music which is more accessible, and this one is on the accessible side. (it provides an antidote to the Contrapuncti, which gave me a hernia of the frontal lobes.) We're planning to sell the house in Chula Vista, since my father now lives in North Dakota with his "new" wife and won't be going back to California any more. This will cut off the last of our property ties to southern California, but then I don't miss the geography one bit, just our friends. We're going to try to convert the proceeds into something which is income producing, since I know that I won't be able to levitate my ass out of bed at 4:00 AM for the Boston commute for too many more years. Well, old friends, I'd best cease bending your eyeballs, and anyway it's now 2:30 AM and time to do a bit of reading before trundling off to bed. Thanks again, for your many informative and enjoyable "sendings". I hope all is well for all of you. Your old buddy,
Feb. 25, 2001 Dear Friend Barry, I am sitting here listening to your Brahms again, you mid-European you! I think Bruno Walter, and maybe Klemperer in his more sane years, would have appreciated your lyrical conception of the first movement. You've shaped it all very nicely, and it stands as your statement on its own account. Like any other person who has let the fascination of, and potential meanings in music dominate his life, I have my own conception of this movement which is slightly different from yours. But you know, Barry, at our age (s) those differences are as much "fun" as anything else can be, and I don't want to hear a familiar composition played the same way all the time, recordings be damned. To hear another way a piece can be done is sometimes to enjoy it the more. I'm pleased that you kept things flowing in movement two. It's so damned easy to be misled by the kind of profundity in the main idea's contrary motion, and the sense of gravity that can be placed there, or to fall in love with the warm moments, to the extent that the music becomes a series of stretched out episodes instead of one event leading to the next. And you didn't do that, but rather made it a connected-together musical statement. Bravo! (Do you detect a generic similarity between the syncopated theme introduced by oboe, and a theme which begins nearly the same also in oboe, but proceeds differently in Johannes' Serenade No.2, mvt. 3?) Very interesting 3rd movement. A less legato approach than one usually heard in the main idea, more pulse and lift oriented in the oboe. And what woodshedding you doubtless had to do, to get strings, especially, together in the more ebullient "variations" (we may as well call them that in this hybrid movement, since the 'B' section is quite brief compared with the rest; oh, that clever old Brahms). That they weren't 100% together all the time we both appreciate, while your intentions come through loud and clear. I think the finale is the real glory in this performance. Swashbuckling spirit is just right, and I can sense your mind at work in so much of the detail work, especially the near hocketing effects among the woodwinds and sometimes the strings, where I just know you worked on getting the balances as they should be. (In re: the retransition leading to the Recapitulation in this movement. Did Mahler have this in his ear when he came up with the main idea in his Symphony No.1, mvt. 1,or did Brahms foreshadow Mahler? It's all perfectly logical in this context, of course.) Well, Barry, I continue to believe that you are doing all the right things for this orchestra, an educational experience for them as well as a pleasurable musical involvement, with you being the teacher. I'm spending almost every waking moment not
occupied with the necessities with which we all must deal working on my Serenade No. 2 for you
and your orchestra. It's a piece to be enjoyed, not packed with profundities perhaps, but more
than just a piece of fluff (no slapstick or corny cartoon humor). There's little in it that wouldn't
have been understood in the 19th Century (though it couldn't have been written then), and nothing
in it that will frighten your audience. Every now and then I need to compose a piece like this,
which is friendly, mostly free of Angst and anger, and not intended to push the envelope but rather
to give pleasure in its contents. Don't let the fact that it's in six movements frighten you.
None of them are lengthy, and the outer movements are marches, as befits a serenade. (Those marches,
especially the brief final march, which you will recognize as adapted but different from the exit
march in my wedding music-which was far too complicated for its purpose-are too big to represent
a little band of musicians, and each of them runs only about two minutes, but I think they fit
in rather well, and are integrated with, the general context.) Instrumentation should fit your
group also. No harp, piano, synthesizer, wind machine, Heckelphone, or anything out of the ordinary
but a contra-bassoon (made up for by the fact that there is no tuba, more or less like Brahms
in that respect). The 2 flutes will have to have piccolos, but most often they already do anyway,
these days. Though I can't give you a hard figure, because I have one movement yet to write, I think the total time will not exceed 15-17 minutes. In other areas, I'm truly looking forward
to surgery on my back in May. I'm so damned tired of having my lower back/upper pelvis feel like
someone's hitting me with a tire iron, having a pain and tingling down the back of the whole of
my left leg, and having to clutch a cane while looking even older than my 60 years warrant (well,
almost 60; my B'day is July 13). The only problem, after they've trimmed away the disc that is
ruptured and squeezing all the nerves in my spinal column off to one side, will be the No Smoking
policy in the hospital. Maybe I can bring in some kind of burn bag, or oxygen tent with no 02
in it. Recovery time can range from 2 days to 2 weeks. I'll probably be in the facility for some
time in between those general outer limits. Back to thinking about Mvt. 2, now, (mvt
1, if you don't count the entry march, which ends softly). I don't know that I want to write a
full-fledged sonata movement in this serenade, as I did in my more Stravinskian Serenade No. 1
for 10 winds. That could easily overbalance the rest. But we'll see. This one is a bit more like
the way R. Strauss addressed the rococo, rather than the way Igor S. reviewed earlier periods.
- Do you know the Minuet in Strauss' JosephLegende? It is one of the high points in that uneven
piece (for HUGE forces; they must have had to rebuild every orchestral pit in which that ballet-pantomime
was performed!). I didn't use that as a model, but it is somewhat reflective of the general flavor
of this work.
March 5, 2001 (Where's the monolith?) Dear Barry, Sorry that it has taken so long to get around to listening to the tape that you were kind enough to send. My time not spent in dealing with school-type obligations has been dominated by my medical situation (more about that in a bit), dealing with deaths of friends, relatives and former teachers, trying to straighten out problems with a Jeep Cherokee, a vehicle we leased that turned out to be a turkey, and especially, the day and night work I've had to do on HOMAGE TO INGOLF DAHL, reconstructing the lost score, extracting the parts, and getting everything ready to meet a tight deadline. That will be performed in Ann Arbor, MI, on March 21 by a new music group named "Prime Directive". Thank God there was no school today due to the killer storm now in progress. This is, quite literally, the first day in nearly two months that I don't have to get reader's eye, writer's cramp, sitter's ass and ink stained fingers from dealing with my tribute to Ingolf. About medical stuff, and I will be very succinct because such problems are intrinsically boring, my upper pelvis and back of left leg have been on fire since before Christmas. I've had to take massive amounts of pain killers, which is contraindicated for those, like myself, who are grossly anemic, and I have to use a cane when hobbling around Boston, hoping my leg won't give out before I reach the bus station to return home after a painful day on my feet in classrooms. My sciatic nerve is part of the problem, the other being a super squashed disc in my lower back. MRI and bone scans are coming up, and the results taken into consideration before any programs to offer relief will be forthcoming. I hate all of it, and simply refuse to accept being all stove up like my father. Anyway, I won't mention this boring health matter again until it's either "cured", or I'm consigned to some home for ailing composers. I'll be short about dealing with the sad realities of mortality also. This week, alone, I've had to send out sympathy cards for three who have passed away. With one exception, all of my former teachers at USC are gone, and my relatives seem to be dropping off at the rate of one every three or four months. Without being callously indifferent, or minimizing the importance of those I'll never see again, I've been compelled to become efficient at dealing with irrecoverable loss, while no doubt it's taking emotional tolls underneath, or more properly inside. No doubt I'll be interested in reading BEETHOVEN'S HAIR. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to send me the name of its author. Probably I'll have C order it for me through one of the Net sources. About the tape, the Raickovich is quite effective in its 'retro" way. Which brings me instantly to the question you asked about whether I might have anything suitable for performance by the Beach Cities Symphony. I believe it would be best if I composed something new especially for your forces, which I've come to know fairly well over the years thanks to your tapes. My own solutions/approach to the problem of not driving an audience that has not yet entered the 20th Century, never mind that it's already the 21st, out the door will have to be different from that of Raickovich. I have in mind to write a memorial piece for my mother and my brother, who should have outlived me. I really appreciate your consideration. It would be great to be given an orchestral performance again. Let me suggest the following. I'll write the piece, most likely beginning in about a month, completing it by the early part of Summer, send you a copy of the score, and if you think it'll work for one of your programs, wonderful. If you find it unsuitable, no hard feelings. Does that sound reasonable to you? If not, let me know soon, because, believe it or not, I do have other requests. Back to the performances. This Mozart is actually one of my very favorites among his piano concerti. It's quite well done, and I'll want to listen to it again. I have searched the tape over, trying to find the Brahms. I believe that somehow it missed being duplicated here, despite what I'm sure were your intentions. I'll bet you planned to put it on, but one of your cats, who's an avid Wagnerite and not at all inclined toward this quintessential neoclassic master, put a hex on the endeavor. At any rate, the tape arrived set up for Side B. (I had to rewind it for Side A.), so I imagine you were all set to put on the Brahms and then the aforementioned Katz interfered. I'm returning the tape, not because I don't like it, but rather because I also want to hear the Brahms, my second favorite among his symphonies. (Obviously I love them all. But Nos. 4 and 2 have special places in my "heart", right there besides the Violin and Double Concertos.) When I receive a CD from the performance of HOMAGE TO INGOLF DAHL in Michigan, I'll send you a tape of that plus the latest of three performances of FIVE CONTRAPUNCTI, done very well by members of the Berklee faculty on the 8th of the February just past. The rendition given those mind-benders by "Brave New Works" was something of a disappointment because there were too many places where the flute just wasn't in the same measure as the clarinet and oboe, as disastrous to my music as it would be in music by any other composer. For your amusement I've enclosed a copy of a tape I made for Armondo Bayolo, to use as he sees fit. (He's the "leader" of Prime Directive.) Armando had wanted me to speak to students and faculty of the U. of M. if I were able to come. Since I'm not able to go there, I made this tape, which anyone who wishes to might peruse. Time to return to the mundane chores with which we are all afflicted. Mostly as ever,
Aug. 6, 2001 DANSE - I'm a sucker for the hemiolas and such in this piece, plus it's very healthy music, in other words no Mahler-type Angst, and now and then we need music like this to clean out the saturated brain cells. Went very well, don't you think? DVORAK: One of my favorite violin concertos, among what might be called those of the second-tier. A more exciting and memorably tuneful work than the Goldmark, for example. You probably came to know this first by way of Milstein's recording, as I did, or maybe the one on VOX by Branislav something (not Hubermann). It wasn't until I was already in college that I actually got to play oboe in the piece, with the then concertmaster Leonore Sherman as the soloist. (Many eons later we did it at LMU with Kevafian, or is it Kefavian - Hell, I'm getting to the age in which I forget where I live and whether or not I've eaten my pills - Ida anyway, who had just won a silver medal in some competition, and Bogidar of course.) Hey, orchestra and soloist are well together, and I can't tell Linda Wang's age from the photo, which could have been taken twenty years ago in any case, but she negotiated it all quite handily and convincingly. Nice playing in the winds, which is not to ignore the strings, but like Dvorak's later 'Cello Concerto, the winds have such special roles in this piece. And what a nice sense of breathless hush you got out of the players in the appropriate places in mvt. 2. Barry, do you know if Dvorak ever got into bird calls? In both of his string concertos there are a few licks that lead me to believe that he might have. And there are a couple of passages in that slow movement which are almost Brahmsian. Anyway, it's been a real pleasure listening to this. Interesting that the audience was particularly impressed by mvt. 2. Almost all of the many little potential train wrecks in the Furiant weren't (didn't happen). One of my favorite passages in this finale is the rustic, galumphing 2/4 vs. 6/8 portion. A bit unkind to the horn, to be sure, but he (she?) made the effect anyway. (I have to tell you that most of the spacing problems and such are because that damnable arachnid has set up housekeeping in my typewriter AGAIN. Suddenly margins reset themselves, the carriage can go skittering across the page, the space bar doesn't work, or might go into retrograde mode, etc., all accompanied by electronic bleeps. The last time this happened he/she/it bounded out of the machine after having been subjected to enough low voltage shocks. This one evidently dotes on them, and it's in a thoroughly inaccessible place. If he gets out I'll just let him go, because he's had the "huevos" to bear them.) WAGNER: Evidently either your machine or mine doesn't like Good Friday, because the recorded sound is a bit insecure at the start, but settles down in short order. (What would that spider write if I just left the machine on?) Don't you love the voice leading in the individual sort of separated chords after the initial part of the intro? Leading tone down to the fifth of the Tonic in the soprano part, just as we were taught not to do, and which Copland later did in the Old American Folk songs version of "Simple Gifts", to suggest a naïve church musician. Again, good wind playing. Evidently the oboist, clarinetist and flutist do not smoke? Such killer parts, to the chops and the breath, but they made them all work. I must say that this piece worked well even though what seems a very dry acoustic environment tends to mitigate against it. On the tape, at any rate, it sounds a bit like NBC's Studio 8-H before the acoustic shell was installed (done in 1943 I believe), meaning that it can be a bit cruel in providing something like an X-ray perspective of the most detailed kind, so that not even a minor whisker in the sound will escape detection. But there were very few of those, and the totality made a splendid effect in the sweetest music this side of Siegfried Idyll. You made the lines soar in the right places, shaped those suckers nicely, and kept the impulse alive, without sagging, which isn't always easy to do in a piece which emphasizes the quality of breadth to this degree. (As if I had to tell you that! I truyly - Hell, maybe I won't let that spider live. I hope he gets cancer or something. - I truly don't mean to sound patronizing or something. Just remember that I'm a near master of the obvious!) RIMSKY-KORSAKOV: Might not be his most subtle composition, but I used to dote on the archaic flavor and the motoric aspects of the piece when I was a kid; it wouldn't do to just have Sherchen's recording on Westminster. I had to have Paray and Stokowski as well. I felt then, and still do now, that there's a bit too much up and down in tempos, so that the energy has to be rebuilt too many times, but that hasn't stopped me from enjoying the piece. You might have taken the faster parts a bit more briskly if you had the N.Y. Phil. at your disposal, but it's certainly better to be a bit conservative and have it work, than it is to leave the impression that the winds are out of breath and the strings are scrambling to keep up. As you well know, there are ample opportunities for those collisions on the railroad in this piece too, especially when the winds (mainly) have slightly rhythmically-irregular accompanying chords to the melody in 8ves mainly in strings, and though they may not have been pristine in attacks, there was certainly nothing to wince at. Though I've never been on the baton end of a performance of this piece, I think there must be conductorial challenges in such passages, and obviously you surmounted them. Anyway, the Allegro tempos may be a bit more stately than I'm accustomed to, but they might be more appropriate to the representation of dancing before the arc than the more driving effect. After all this isn't supposed to be a kind of religious orgy. (Parenthetically, I think I don't truly understand the 19th Century concept of orgies. Berlioz, in HAROLD, makes his sound like an orgy of rape and pillage. Tchaikovsky introduces a fugue in his, in MANFRED, making his orgy something of an academic exercise, unless you think the polyphony represents bodies doing some kind of physical counterpoint. Saint-Saens, in S.and D., seems to be all about dancing, which is O.K. but not exactly the main activity in a good orgy. I will say that an energetic performance of Wagner's Bachanalle, or Bachanale, convinces me that Tannhauser would have been a lot better off if he had just stayed in Venusberg, having a good time, instead of becoming reinvolved with that colorless woman. Would have been a short opera, I suppose.) I supplied the missing portion from memory in the Korsakov. I don't know why I can remember things like this while forgetting if my coffee cup is in the microwave or on the kitchen table. Your choices of repertoire made for a good program, with plenty of contrasts. I just knew it would work well when you told me of your selections over the phone, and hearing the concert reifies that thought/feeling. Sad news on another front. C and I are in transition right now - to put it bluntly, splitting up. The sequence of events, the background, and everything else about this are so soapy as to be nearly implausible. To me it seems so unnecessary because we still love each other, but having little choice in the matter I'll be moving out soon, and will of course send you my new address. (Any mail or phone calls will still be all right to direct here for the next week and a half or so.) If there weren't someone who loves and adores me greatly, since high school years in fact, and is in fact overjoyed that we now have the opportunity to reconnect, I'd probably blow my brains out. Giving up 15 years of one's life, and saying farewell to all that's been is an agony I had hoped never to have to repeat. Anyway, I'll spare you the details of all the misinterpretations and misunderstandings, and problems in our relationship that weren't addressed in a timely fashion, and assure you that I will make it. If things go as they seem to be, C is going to be with her boyfriend of her high school and early college years, and I will be with mine, with the ten year difference in age of course. Going through this reorientation and change is a real bitch for both of us, and we're both half fried, emotionally. There are no bad guys here, we're not at each other's throats, or in some kind of mutual blame syndrome, just parting with great and very real sorrow. C wants us to check in with each other from time to time, which I'm certainly willing to do, but it would take some kind of miracle of synchronicity for us to wind up together again. And anyway, I now have to plan for a very different future, which actually promises to have very positive qualities of its own. It will bring my "romantic" life full circle, a little like going home, and in a way represents the continuation of something which maybe I should never have ended to begin with, after a very long lacuna. Without meaning to denigrate anyone else, Jackie is one of the most intelligent women I've ever known, has been in an unsatisfactory marriage since something like 1964, or maybe it was '63 - half of forever….Can you imagine, we used to study piano together with the same teacher. We both just want to have some happiness together in our declining years, and I think we can do that. (Imagine how it would be for a one-eyed 60 year old man with a bad back to have to go out into the singles world again, and try to start all over from scratch.) I believe C and I mainly want each other to be happy; I sincerely hope that her fellow can do that for her, and by description, I guess I'd probably like him. Enough of that, and I hope I haven't bored you to death. And when that spider emerges I don't know if I'll admire it for being so persevering, or wring its little neck for disabling the correction-ribbon function. Hope all is very well with both of you. I'm pretty well exhausted now, living alone at the moment in the house that was ours, and contemplating the odious business of what to do with wedding tapes (in which my now dead mother and brother appear-and of course you do too), and other artifacts of shared times, both good and bad. I've done enough weeping to start a Lewis Carroll type caucus race, and now just have to tuck all those memories to bed. Yours,
December 22, 2001 Dear Friends, Forgive my long epistolary and telephonic silence. So much has happened, and not all of it pleasant. To begin, I had to have spinal surgery, which meant that I abrogated my summer teaching contract, and spent a long time in physical therapy, etc., TRYING to recover. Those long nerves in the spinal cord take half of forever to heal. I can still be awakened ca. 3:00 AM with a leg that feels on fire on the inside, while being numb on the surface. But at least I'm back to teaching now, and I no longer have to worry quite so much about whether I'll actually be able to make it to the next block while hobbling around in Boston. Then C and I more or less came apart, though we still remain civilized friends, in a confluence of events that would beggar the imagination of the most jaded author of soap operas. After all is said and done, C is living with her boyfriend of 30 years ago, and I have reconnected with my girlfriend of 40 years ago, though until the Medieval divorce laws of Connecticut are satisfied, I am and will continue to be living alone. (In that unenlightened state the laws with respect to settlement are designed to create an adversarial relationship, and to drag things out for as long as possible in order to keep lawyers in funds.) My Dad married his high school erstwhile sweetheart at age 81, so it must run in the family. Anyway, I had to move in a hurry, while keeping my same mailing address. My new phone number is…..but I can't use my phone to phone out except with a prepaid phone card, because the owners from whom I have leased this town house until June put a block on outgoing calls, presumably to insure that a tenant couldn't run up large phone bills and then skip out. There's plenty of room here for one guy-a downstairs bedroom and bathroom, kitchen, dining room, all laundering room (very convenient) and associated hallway. The patio, like the neatly maintained golf course I look out upon, is unusable during winter months, even though there are only a couple of inches of snow upon the ground right now. Since I am free of all responsibilities for property maintenance, snow removal, etc., I can do my writing, school work, etc., undistracted by vexing outdoor chores. And it is almost unearthly quiet here - I'm told one of my neighbors is deaf. The moving was accomplished in my absence, which means that the downstairs bedroom is filled with cartons of everything, from the CDs and tapes to the piece I was nearly finished writing for you. I cannot assail those filled cartons, which are hemmed in by bunk beds, because I'm forbidden to lift anything weighing more than 10 lbs., and let me tell you, I have really paid the price in terms of acute pain when I've tried to get at them. It's so frustrating, because I can't set up my sound system, get at the music I was writing for you, get at my school materials, in short, I am half crippled in terms of so many of the things I need and use. But I do have a boom box on which to listen to the miniscule number of tapes and CDs which were not packed, and on which I made this tape for you. As per the 'J' card (I do not know why this name was given to the compact cassette information liner slip), this Serenade was given its first performance at the Eastern Sierra Music Festival in august of the year now all but entirely spent. It represents a departure from the more stern challenges with which I usually bedevil myself, and is a bit more like the piece I'm writing for your orchestra. Mozart's great c minor Serenade, Schoenberg's Serenade and that by Britten notwithstanding, I think of the genre as suited to happier and lighter musical fare, rather than as a "form" for dealing with knotty philosophical and psychological problems. Oh, there's enough in the way of left brain content to keep any analyst happy, but the audience doesn't require a close scrutiny of inter-related motives, transformations, schemes of tonal centers, etc. to understand the music, unless they've never even dipped toes into the 20th Century. As to the performance, in many respects I've been pleased, as it is represented on the CD I was sent (I couldn't attend for the obvious physical reasons, and because with only one eye I'm now reluctant to drive around California on the freeways and so on). The spirit is there, the ensemble is mostly quite well together, almost all of the notes are correct and in the right places, and considering how few rehearsals they had on a piece that doesn't exactly play itself, the accomplishment of these instrumentalists is quite admirable. Unfortunately the 1st Hornist is sharp a good deal of the time, and there are other minor flaws of intonation and balance. But don't worry, you won't spend 23 minutes just wincing, and if you like music that is "pretty", in the best sense of that word, you may find things to enjoy here. This is one of the strangest Christmas seasons
I've ever experienced. On the day itself I'll probably just be alone, correcting final exams and
final projects submitted by my many Berklee students. But that's O.K. because my sweetie will
shortly be spending a few days with me. And now I must close this remarkable egocentric letter, in the interest of getting it into the mail so that it will arrive before New Year's Eve. Don't be strangers to me! I miss you, you know. Your buddy,
Jan. 11, 2002 Dear Barry, Well, you were right about a number of things related to DANAE, and I was wrong. I was correct in that the first performance of DANAE was at the Salzburg Festival, in 1956, if memory serves, meaning that Strauss never heard an actual performance. (It was first taken to dress rehearsal, I understand, but the 1940s production was cancelled. Though I do not know the actual reason why it was not brought to the public until after Strauss' death, the time frame of that first, aborted production suggests that the exigencies of war had something to do with it.) But you were correct in that there have been other productions of the work subsequent to the U.S. premier by USC's Opera Theatre in 1964, though not numerous until recently. Currently there are three commercial recordings available, of which I shall shortly be purchasing one, probably the one conducted by Bottstein. The work was not particularly well received at that Festival premiere, and following that, those who commented on it, whether they had heard the opera or not, portrayed it as one of Strauss' weaker operas. (Of course old Richard no longer called his works for the lyric theatre "operas"; this one is a "Merry Myth".) I believe it was held that Strauss was repeating himself, quite out of step with his times, and a bit of whatever was negative about those first impressions/reviews may also have been influenced by the tarnish on Strauss' reputation during the first decade of the post-Nazi era. In my view, in 1964 and now, this is a retrospective work, a post Post-Romantic piece that looks backward, in a loveable way to be sure. I don't demand that Strauss should be a Schoenberg, or someone else. There were plenty of other composers doing the "other", the more progressive thing, and like Saint-Saens who lived well into the 20th Century, and Elgar too for that matter, Strauss sought to express himself through vocabularies he had long since mastered. And of course Strauss does supply the interest which comes of colorful orchestrations, his fascinating way of twisting through keys, and using effects born of juxtaposing remote keys, and sometimes interesting rhythmic relationships. There is a passage in the last EntreScene in Act I where he uses three different meters simultaneously, the downbeats of which coincide every so many measures. (Hindemith does the multi-metric thing to more striking effect in the 2nd mvt. Of his Symphony in B-flat for military band; this is smoother and less obtrusive in effect, as Strauss does it.) And, though not on quite the elevated plane Strauss would shortly achieve in the final scene of CAPRICCIO, this composition represents Strauss at his most lyric, with definable melodies in the voices as well as in the orchestra. As to the production, well, this is obviously a student performance. But seen in that context, it is quite an achievement, not only because most of the voices are decent enough, but also because some of the writing for the orchestra is technically very difficult, particularly in Act III, scenes 2b and 2c, and it mostly comes off. The worst offenders are in the opera chorus. Oh, they generally make the pitches, but that body of singers was staffed by pianists and such with no vocal training whatever, people who were satisfying an ensemble requirement in this way, and it shows. The pirate copy of the tapes made over the
nights this was performed had a bit of high frequency-type saturation in places, and the open
reel copies I made of this synthetic production put together from two different renditions had/have
deteriorated themselves over the years. Tape curl was so prominent that when I made my cassette
copy from the old reel to reel tapes that I have, I had to lightly hold my finger to the moving
tape to maintain playback head to tape contact. Don't let me give you the impression that this
is unlistenable, because it isn't , and most of the time the sound is quite good, all things considered.
But play this WITHOUT DOLBY, TAKING THE TREBLE RANGES DOWN JUST A LITTLE to avoid excessive hiss. The abridged table of Leitmotiven is included
just because it might be useful the first or second time around. I do not have a copy of the vocal
score, and so far as I know, the full score is only available on rental, though that picture may
soon change. (I'll never forget how my English horn part was missing four very important pages,
and had to be returned to Boosey and Hawkes for a corrected copy.) therefore I had to pick the
keys rather arbitrarily, and as I remembered some of them, but that doesn't matter so much because
any of those motives appears in a number of keys and harmonic contexts. I have never seen a "cook
book" of these operatic ingredients, and don't know if one has been published yet (though
the commercial recordings may include them; I don't know). My associations have been made inferentially,
from their apparent contextual meaning as interpreted over the whole work. But I'm sure that in
some instances, at least, more than one way of describing the meaning of the particular motive
may be valid.
Dear Barry, A fairly brief letter to let you know that
I'm not ignoring, dallying or just out and out forgetting my obligation to provide Beach Cities
Symphony with a composition. The SERENADE NO. 2 is virtually finished so far as composing is concerned.
Bu t meanwhile I've written another orchestral work, bearing in mind your admonitions about dissonance,
untraditional musical vocabularies, and so forth. My reasoning was as follows: If such extra players as English hornist,
Bass clarinetist, etc., should strain the orchestra's budget to too great an extent I'll pay for
those myself, since they are vital. (Oh, I should mention that both flutists should have piccs.,
but no alto flute or bass flute required.) Hope to hear from you soon.
October 27, 2003 Serenade no. 2 is too long for your purposes.
I'm working like crazy on "Of wind, of ships and sea", which will run ca. 12 minutes,
and will make a good program closer. Scoring: 2 flutes (2nd doubles picc.), 2 oboes, English horn,
2 clarinets, Bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contra bassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba,
4 timpani, 2 percussionists, harp, and the usual strings. Should be a colorful crowd pleaser.
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