Greetings, all two of you who read my embryonic beginnings of a blog. Now that I finally have internet up and running, it occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here since December.
My original concept of this blog was way too formal, potentially pretentious, and unnecessarily stress-inducing. I intended to write perfectly-constructed, near-irrefutable essays about the state of things in modern music, the role of the Artist in society, and other such topics about which I do, genuinely, care. But that neither makes for entertaining reading nor fun writing. And besides that, the concept kept me from writing anything at all, because I would worry either that someone, somewhere, would poke giant holes in my argument and expose me as an intellectual fraud, or that I would just come across as a pompous know-it-all. I AM just a fiddler, after all, and one still lacking a degree in anything. (Pass more quickly, O Time.)
So basically...the new rules here are that there are no rules. I hope to be writing more frequently, often about music of various sorts, and usually opining about something or another, but sometimes I'm just gonna go off topic and write about something goofy I saw in the metro yesterday, or bizarre tales I've heard from my old violin teacher. Or anything I feel like, really. My subject matter will vary wildly. So might my writing style. It's anyone's guess, really, and my only hope is that not only will it be an enjoyable pastime for me, but that whoever you are reading this might get some entertainment or even enlightenment from my curious musings. At the moment, it's late one Saturday night and I'm relaxing halfway through a bottle of decent wine, so the ideas are coming a little more easily tonight.
If I may free-associate, speaking of rapid changing of styles according to mood. Just today I downloaded (legally) the second-most recent album from a Czech rock band I like a lot, Traband. I liked it a lot...and yet...it was COMPLETELY different from the next-most-recent album of theirs I have, which in turn is notably different from the earliest one I know. I might almost think they were two or three different bands if I didn't know any better. The most recent album is very laid-back and low-key, folky, melancholy, with a sort of indie-rock overcast that reminds me a little unsettlingly of the stuff we would blast soulfully over our iPod speakers all summer at music camp back in the high school days. (So far my favorite song on the album is "Vlaštovky".) But compare that to the high-energy, classic-rock, "Katarina" from an album from just a few years earlier. (Side-note--why did it take me this long to realize that song is in Slovak?) Which in turn is quite different from...whatever this is...from some years earlier. I like it all. But can it all really be the same band!?
I have to say...because it's 12:30 AM and wine is making its way into my bloodstream, and I can make grand pronouncements without either hypertension or irony...as a classically trained musician, I have MAJOR envy of this ability to switch styles, re-invent, goof around and try new sounds at will. I mean, I like to think I try more of that than the average conservatory denizen (some times this past year I played so much folk music that I almost died of hruskovica poisoning and insomnia) but we're still a pretty straight-laced, unadventurous bunch. When every last one of us does the EXACT SAME goddamn "slide" from the A to F-sharp in the opening theme of the Tchaikovsky concerto because that's how Heifetz did it...well.
Can't we all be a little more radical, or at least adventurous? There's a place, and an honored one, for tradition and following in the footsteps of the great masters, but--they weren't copying anybody. They were THEMSELVES. And a lot of the time I feel like our generation of musicians--I'm speaking specifically about classical ones--has become so preoccupied with "living up to the standard" of the great greats of past years that we've forgotten how to BECOME new greats ourselves.
There's always great risk in creating the new, whether you're composing an opera or just trying to pull together a fresh and alive-sounding interpretation of a Beethoven sonata that everyone in the audience has heard ninety kajillion times. Probably, for every success, you're going to have ten bombs. The more I get involved in playing very new music, the more I realize this is true. I have discovered modern masterworks, and to get to those few gems I have had to play a lot of crap. The same, though, was probably true for Joachim and Schuppanzigh too, we just never hear about the awful stuff they premiered because it's been long enough for the flops to completely fade from memory. (I'm convinced that it's entirely Milos Forman's fault that any of us have heard of Salieri, but that may be a gratuitous bit of snark for tonight.)
Fellows, we'll always have our Bach and Beethoven and Brahms. They've been loyal and unceasingly wonderful for centuries, and they aren't going anywhere. We can always turn to them whenever we need or want to. So...how about a little more risk-taking here? A little daring? Dare to play something your own way...composers, write the music you want to even if the critics think it's stupid...violinists, please start writing music for yourselves to play again, seriously, the fashion of the virtuoso-composer REALLY needs to come back in style...
Undoubtedly some of our new stuff is going to suck. But some of it will be good. And we'll have fun along the way. It could be the revitalization of our art, it could end up just turning into a whole movement of undergraduates jamming in low-rent recording studios and hammering out incoherent manifestos on Saturday nights while getting increasingly loopy on French wine and sleep deprivation. But let's just TRY, people.
(Vínečko bílé,
jsi od mej milej,
budu ta pít,
co budu žít,
vínečko bílé.)
Bottoms up, fellow artists...cheers...maybe this post will look silly in the morning. :-))))
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Lament for the Freelancers
By now I'm guessing just about everyone has seen this dismal piece in today's New York Times. The gist of it is that, at least in the greater New York metropolitan area, freelance musicians are finding themselves suddenly without work or the future prospect thereof. New York City, the wildest melting pot of cultures this country (and maybe the world) has ever seen, can't find jobs for musicians. My friends, just what in the hell is going on here?
According to the article, as well as hearsay from my friends and colleagues, a large part of the issue in NYC is the fact that Broadway musicals, formerly the NY freelancer's biggest meal ticket, are by and large switching from having live orchestras in the pit to having nothing but synthesizers and recorded tracks accompanying the singers. Presumably, the theatre managers are doing this so they can save money and not have to worry about paying those pesky fiddlers and trumpeters.
Gentle Readers, I beg your pardon for my strong language today, but I as a musician find such practices to be nothing less than immoral. Obviously, worst of all is that it deprives musicians of work and can force them into desperate financial situations. But it also deprives the show's singers and actors the privilege of working with an orchestra of real live human beings and a real live conductor, where tempos, dynamics, colors etc can be adjusted "on the fly" if necessary, and where there can be an actual rapport between stage and pit, creating a more unified and organic performance. And it deprives the audience of the pleasure of hearing live music at the show they have paid good money to attend. NO ONE benefits here except the theatre managers who get to line their own pockets a bit more.
The other problem, as mentioned in the article, is that many part-time and community orchestras are simply ceasing to exist. The root of the evil is money, again--in these harsh economic times, these privately-funded orchestras are completely losing their cash inflow. Apparently no one cares much to support the fine arts.
I must wade into politics a bit here, for which I again beg your forgiveness, dear readers.
The United States of America spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military. The States accounts for nearly half of ALL military spending for the entire world. With this kind of money just sitting around to throw away for the purposes of killing people, is it really too much to ask that the state spare just a little, a handful of change, to keep the fine arts afloat in this country that is supposedly the world's lone superpower?
Whenever I bring up the subject of government support of the arts, my American friends and colleagues tend to get nervous. It will lead to censorship, many think, artists becoming paid mouthpieces of politicians and government interests. But plenty of countries in Europe have survived having their arts organizations well-funded by their governments without excessive ill effects. (The recent Dutch meltdown notwithstanding.)I don't know of any cases of government interfering in artistic pursuits since the fall of Communism. What I do know of are better-funded and more-secure orchestras, opera companies and conservatories, and (this may be just a cultural difference based on history, and may also be my own biased opinion) a greater society-wide appreciation of the place of fine arts and music in a person's life.
But again, for me it seems to be a question of morality as much as anything else. In my humble opinion, there is something very wrong with a country that spends extraordinarily huge sums of money building tanks, guns and bombs--funding the lowest and most base of all human pursuits, destruction--but thinks it somehow superfluous or inappropriate to spend more than a few token pennies to keep some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit and mind alive.
According to the article, as well as hearsay from my friends and colleagues, a large part of the issue in NYC is the fact that Broadway musicals, formerly the NY freelancer's biggest meal ticket, are by and large switching from having live orchestras in the pit to having nothing but synthesizers and recorded tracks accompanying the singers. Presumably, the theatre managers are doing this so they can save money and not have to worry about paying those pesky fiddlers and trumpeters.
Gentle Readers, I beg your pardon for my strong language today, but I as a musician find such practices to be nothing less than immoral. Obviously, worst of all is that it deprives musicians of work and can force them into desperate financial situations. But it also deprives the show's singers and actors the privilege of working with an orchestra of real live human beings and a real live conductor, where tempos, dynamics, colors etc can be adjusted "on the fly" if necessary, and where there can be an actual rapport between stage and pit, creating a more unified and organic performance. And it deprives the audience of the pleasure of hearing live music at the show they have paid good money to attend. NO ONE benefits here except the theatre managers who get to line their own pockets a bit more.
The other problem, as mentioned in the article, is that many part-time and community orchestras are simply ceasing to exist. The root of the evil is money, again--in these harsh economic times, these privately-funded orchestras are completely losing their cash inflow. Apparently no one cares much to support the fine arts.
I must wade into politics a bit here, for which I again beg your forgiveness, dear readers.
The United States of America spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military. The States accounts for nearly half of ALL military spending for the entire world. With this kind of money just sitting around to throw away for the purposes of killing people, is it really too much to ask that the state spare just a little, a handful of change, to keep the fine arts afloat in this country that is supposedly the world's lone superpower?
Whenever I bring up the subject of government support of the arts, my American friends and colleagues tend to get nervous. It will lead to censorship, many think, artists becoming paid mouthpieces of politicians and government interests. But plenty of countries in Europe have survived having their arts organizations well-funded by their governments without excessive ill effects. (The recent Dutch meltdown notwithstanding.)I don't know of any cases of government interfering in artistic pursuits since the fall of Communism. What I do know of are better-funded and more-secure orchestras, opera companies and conservatories, and (this may be just a cultural difference based on history, and may also be my own biased opinion) a greater society-wide appreciation of the place of fine arts and music in a person's life.
But again, for me it seems to be a question of morality as much as anything else. In my humble opinion, there is something very wrong with a country that spends extraordinarily huge sums of money building tanks, guns and bombs--funding the lowest and most base of all human pursuits, destruction--but thinks it somehow superfluous or inappropriate to spend more than a few token pennies to keep some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit and mind alive.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Après un rêve, or, Why Hello There.
Last night I dreamed I was driving down an overgrown country road at the height of a sun-drenched summer. I don't know where I was going or where I was coming from, but suddenly the car’s radio crackled to life and out came an old Ruthenian song. It was the kind of piece you’d expect to hear in a smoky bar on Brighton Beach full of shady post-Soviet itinerants playing cards. The bass player has to hold his instrument at an odd angle to fit it under the low-hanging ceiling, the cimbalist is trapped behind his cimbalom, backed into a three-sided corner, the violinists must be careful not to impale one another on their bows, the accordionist sits sideways on a stool with a dreamy expression on his face, singing the sentimental songs of the old country…play on, gypsies, play on…
And it was that same old song that was going through my head as I awoke in a half-dreaming haze of nostalgia. I’d played that song too once, at the very end of the summer in a strange little neighborhood in Queens. Those days are gone, as are the ones before it and the ones before those, as I’m always reminded in this time of year when the leaves are falling and the sun seems to be giving up on life.
But Proust had his madeleines and I have my songs. Putting my iPod on shuffle is the next best thing to having a time machine, and I can travel half the world without going more than three blocks in any direction from my apartment.
Just today, when I went to the laundromat, the place’s Chinese owners were listening to some Bollywood-sounding music on their radio. Three notes of that and I was instantly transported back to my freshman year of college and the strange long nights hanging out with my friend across the hall, listening to Pakistani rock and gossiping about our latest Model United Nations meeting. Ten minutes after putting in my laundry, I was eating a muffin at the bakery across the street, where they were inexplicably playing German pop songs from the 80s and 90s. And there I was back in my childhood briefly spent in Scandinavia, where any time you turned on the radio out came either ABBA or whatever was topping the charts in Berlin.
Music has always had a power over me that nothing else, not even any other of the arts, can claim. Poetry comes close, but in the final estimation there is something unexplainable and unearthly about music that, the more I think about it, the more it bewilders me. What is it about certain combinations of longer or shorter sounds at different frequencies, vaguely approximating certain natural laws, that can evoke faraway places, stir intense emotions, and preserve, in a way, a composer’s living soul? Why does music even exist, where does it come from? Whether God or Nature or some combination of the two created humankind, you just have to wonder where, when and why the instinct for music got thrown in.
So here I am, at some unknown point after midnight, listening to the rain outside my windows briefly make me forget that I live in the middle of Manhattan. And for some reason, I’ve decided to start a blog, writing about music. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. This could go one of several ways, two of the more unfortunate possible scenarios being I post one more entry and give up, or I accidentally become a critic.
But, as any composer knows, the hardest thing about writing anything is the first three lines, and deciding what to write for my First Blog Post was no different. Next time, I’ll actually have something to say, or a nice YouTube find to post, or anything. But for now, my mind is fogged like the windowpane and it’s just raining.
And it was that same old song that was going through my head as I awoke in a half-dreaming haze of nostalgia. I’d played that song too once, at the very end of the summer in a strange little neighborhood in Queens. Those days are gone, as are the ones before it and the ones before those, as I’m always reminded in this time of year when the leaves are falling and the sun seems to be giving up on life.
But Proust had his madeleines and I have my songs. Putting my iPod on shuffle is the next best thing to having a time machine, and I can travel half the world without going more than three blocks in any direction from my apartment.
Just today, when I went to the laundromat, the place’s Chinese owners were listening to some Bollywood-sounding music on their radio. Three notes of that and I was instantly transported back to my freshman year of college and the strange long nights hanging out with my friend across the hall, listening to Pakistani rock and gossiping about our latest Model United Nations meeting. Ten minutes after putting in my laundry, I was eating a muffin at the bakery across the street, where they were inexplicably playing German pop songs from the 80s and 90s. And there I was back in my childhood briefly spent in Scandinavia, where any time you turned on the radio out came either ABBA or whatever was topping the charts in Berlin.
Music has always had a power over me that nothing else, not even any other of the arts, can claim. Poetry comes close, but in the final estimation there is something unexplainable and unearthly about music that, the more I think about it, the more it bewilders me. What is it about certain combinations of longer or shorter sounds at different frequencies, vaguely approximating certain natural laws, that can evoke faraway places, stir intense emotions, and preserve, in a way, a composer’s living soul? Why does music even exist, where does it come from? Whether God or Nature or some combination of the two created humankind, you just have to wonder where, when and why the instinct for music got thrown in.
So here I am, at some unknown point after midnight, listening to the rain outside my windows briefly make me forget that I live in the middle of Manhattan. And for some reason, I’ve decided to start a blog, writing about music. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. This could go one of several ways, two of the more unfortunate possible scenarios being I post one more entry and give up, or I accidentally become a critic.
But, as any composer knows, the hardest thing about writing anything is the first three lines, and deciding what to write for my First Blog Post was no different. Next time, I’ll actually have something to say, or a nice YouTube find to post, or anything. But for now, my mind is fogged like the windowpane and it’s just raining.
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