Happy Bach’s Birthday! Celebrating in the NYC Subways–and “Everywhere”

It’s J. S. Bach’s 327th birthday.

Dale Henderson and about a dozen (last count I heard from him) other cellists and other musicians are celebrating by playing Bach in the NYC subways. A year ago, I was part of the first “Bach in the Subways Day.” Invited and inspired by Dale, I brought a cello and a folding chair, plopped myself down on the 96th St. 1/2/3 uptown platform, and played and played. Tips were offered and declined.  “Happy Bach’s Birthday,” I’d say.

It was one of the most enjoyable, interactive music-making experiences I had while in NYC on sabbatical, or anywhere else, for that matter. Now I’m back at DePauw, teaching this week, not able to play in a subway.  Poor me!

Then it came to me–go play Bach other places.  So a some of my student and faculty friends are putting on DePauw’s first annual “Bach Everywhere” event.  An elementary school assembly program later this morning.  A free, informal, bring-your-lunch concert at the Methodist church on campus.  We’ll be playing outside, dropping into classrooms (where the teacher has invited us), showing up at the Rotary club.

It’s going to be a fun day.  And what better way to celebrate Bach, and music, than by giving away musical presents?

Kindness Helps Us Survive

“Nature Is Strong, But Kindness Helps Us Survive” is the current headline at the Huffington Post main page. (It’s not the headline of the article itself, about survivors of last year’s disaster in Japan.)

Kindness.  A survival mechanism. Perhaps hard wired into us?

Yesterday, (Saturday) at the Indianapolis International Airport.  My sister, her nine-year-old twins, and I sat down at a table before they go to board their flight home.  “Oh no! I forgot to put all my makeup and stuff in my suitcase.”(That was my sister; in a few years, it could be my niece as well.)

She has a lot of makeup and stuff.

3 ounces containers of liquids and gels inone clear quart-sized bag per person.That’s the essence of the rule. We start going through things, sorting out the mascaras other powders from the liquid and gel stuff. One 6-ounce bottle of skin conditioner; one big 5-ounce tube of hair gel (well, it’s 2/3 used so maybe it would count).  And one gallon-size zippered plastic bag.

We could get all the small bottles into the gallon bag, about half full.  But what if a TSA screener was feeling particularly rule-bound and wouldn’t allow the gallon bag?  It was well over a hundred and fifty dollars of stuff, my sister said.

So we went to the store with the books and magazines and doodads.

Man, you could make a killing selling quart-size bags for, say, a buck a piece, I would have thought. If we got three, we could have easily divided things up, one bag per passenger.

We asked the lady at the counter.  She didn’t think they had anything, so she went off to ask someone else.  A guy, probably the manager, came and told us they had one bag, with some bottles in it, and pointed it out to us.

$16.95!  Airport prices. And it looked pretty crappy, too. We just couldn’t stand the idea.  Plus we’d need two or three of them.

The cashier lady said, “Wait a minute.  I’ll look in the back.” After a few minutes she came back, with a quart-sized plastic container that must have previously held someone’s lunch, probably hers.

That would probably get vetoed sooner than a gallon-sized bag.

But how extraordinarily nice, how kind, of her to make the effort.  And to offer us her container.

So we came up with a plan.  My sister would go up to the TSA agent who checks IDs and boarding passes, explain the situation, and show him or her the  bag.  If (s)he said it would be OK, they’d proceed.  If not, they’d come back to me and I’d mail the stuff to them Monday.

It worked.  The TSA agent said OK (not entirely surprising, since they seem to be calmed down about these things), and my sister, niece, and nephew proceeded through security (which in my experience has always been efficient and pleasant in Indy).

I saw that Huffington Post headline, and thought about how essential kindness is in a crisis.  And I thought about that very nice lady who went out of her way trying to help us out, and to keep us from getting ripped off with the $17 plastic bag.

(And thanks, Greg, for the nudge.)

“Ladies and gentleman, there is no interpretation.”

Turns out I’m not the only classical instrumentalist with a penchant for improvising who loves Frank Sinatra.  Jeff Agrell has a great post about his experience playing in an orchestra backing up Sinatra-embodier Steve Lippia.  Jeff adds a brilliant description of techniques jazz singers use that classical players hardly ever do, and, asking himself why jazz singers do what they do, offers wise insight into what makes effective performances so effective:

1) Variety. The success of every composition depends on the proper balance of unity (what you can predict) and variety (what you can’t). Too much unity and the listener is bored. Too much variety and the listener is frustrated. A 50/50 balance is just right, where the listener can guess what’s coming next about half the time.

[big snip]

2) Expression. None of the tracks were unaccompanied. All vocal lines have a band supporting them, contrasting with them, providing solid beat (predictable) plus phrase end fills, occasional bridge choruses, and rhythmic punctuation along the way (variety) against which the vocal lines can create their magic.

(Read the whole post–it’s worth it.)

This balance of steadiness and freedom, of predictability and surprise, about which Jeff writes so clearly, is one of the essentials in a great free improvisation. Which is why, I suppose, I love improvised melodies over drones or ostinatos (repeated patterns), which provide a solid platform to be creative over.

I’m reminded of when years ago I played in a small orchestra backing up Smokey Robinson.  Smokey toured with his own rhythm section and added local strings, as I recall. (Maybe winds, too.  I’m not sure.  But bless him for hiring those of us he hired!)

We locals had a rehearsal with his music director, who played a Dr. Beat metronome, set to its most clanky setting, through an amplifier.

“Ladies and gentleman, there is no interpretation,” the m.d. announced, with obviously-practiced authority, seeming somewhat grim about having to retrain yet another set of overly-lyrical musicians.

“There is no rubato.  There will be no slowing down or speeding up. You will stay exactly with the beat”   Resigned but determined, he worked to make sure we knew the charts and kept everything steady.  (OK, there may have been some ritards as songs ended, and some cued entrances and holds. But 99% of the time, we were amazingly rock-solid and did not adjust to what he was doing.)

It seemed obnoxious in the rehearsal. In the concert, I got it. We hadn’t rehearsed with Smokey.  Didn’t need to.  Because there was no interpretation on our parts.  He did his magic over the solid foundation his music director made sure we gave him.   We were steady so he could be free.

And here he is, in the most recent video on his website, in which the virtues of a steady-as-a-rock rhythm section are in abundant evidence:

The Lie Down Bach Concert: How Was It For You?

I’m just back from an enchanting late-evening experience. Lying in semi-darkness on my favorite comforter on the floor of Greencastle’s Gobin Memorial United Methodist Church, I and about 45 or 50 college students (a number in pajamas) were enveloped by Katya Kramer-Lapin‘s beautiful, varied, wide-ranging playing of the Bach Goldberg Variations.  An arts-presenter friend estimated the total attendance at 65-80, including those (mostly of post-college age) sitting in pews.

45+ students at 9:00 PM on a Sunday night, with no “recital attendance” credit.  They came just for the experience. Many were lying down, eyes closed, throughout the event.  Some multi-tasked, working on laptops or smart phones. The ones I spoke with loved it. “We should do something like this once a month,” one told me.

I could go on and on, and perhaps will tomorrow.  Meanwhile, the purpose of this post is so those who attended can add comments sharing their experience, and ideas for future engaging, inviting, and unconventional performances.  If you were there, add a comment.  If you weren’t, ask a question.

Sunday Night: Lie Down with Bach

Katya Kramer-Lapin, a wonderful pianist finishing her doctorate at the IU Jacobs School of Music and one of my DePauw colleagues, is playing the Bach Goldberg Variations tonight (Sunday Nov. 13) in the beautiful Methodist church nestled in the heart of the DePauw University campus.

We’re dimming the lights, lighting some candles, and, most importantly, making as much floor space available in the sanctuary as possible.

Floor space?

Yes, so the audience, most of whom we expect to be college students, can bring comforters, blankets, sleeping bags, and pillows, and listen to the music lying down. Pajamas are welcome, even encouraged, if not required.

You know what?  There’s some buzz about it.

A bunch of young people who would not voluntarily sit for 90 minutes in a church pew or an auditorium seat are excited about being able to experience Bach while lying down. There’s a legend to this piece: that it was commissioned by a wealthy insomniac patron, for the latter’s keyboard-prodigy servant (Goldberg) to play while his master tossed and turned trying to sleep. So it seems apropos to offer a similar opportunity to a larger group.

And, of course, listening to music while lying down is wonderful.  People do it at home all the time; in a public space, very rarely.  But how extraordinary it should be to stetch out, relax, and experience a world-class pianist making music.  I’m really looking forward to it.

We’re framing the event as a study break and a time of meditation.  We want to balance the informality and novelty with the idea of a peaceful, quiet space, and not have it devolve into a silly pajama party.  It’s all come about through conversations between Katya, me, and members of the first-year seminar class for music majors I teach at DePauw, in which one of the topics is the question of how to get college students to enjoy classical music.

I’ve just read through Greg Sandow’s recent series of posts (here, here, here, and here), and the 93 comments to date (many voluminous and all surprisingly civil in tone), on outreach, education and what I think is Greg’s brilliant insight, one that’s changed my life, which I’ll paraphrase: hey, before anything else, let’s get our peers to listen to our music. My head is still spinning from the discussion, which roams through white colonialism, the brilliance of hip hop, the lack of African Americans in classical music (with notable exceptions).  Images of a graduate course on “Rhythm” at SUNY Stony Brook, where I couldn’t understand most of what people were saying, or why they were saying it, came to mind.  (I sat in on the first session and did not register for it.  I do remember, though, that most of what I couldn’t understand, which flowed forth spontaneously from eager-to-impress theory, musicology, and composition students, was quickly dismissed as the bullshit it was by the professor, although he didn’t use that word.  It was just more bullshit than I thought I could handle.)

Which is not to put Greg or any of the commenters down. Greg started off by saying that while outreach and education are great, we, especially young musicians, need to be getting “people like us” to come to concerts. The conversation, though, does seem to want to avoid the question (perhaps not surprisingly, since it’s so hard to answer) of how we engage new audiences–especially people under 40–without sacrificing artistic quality.  That’s not exactly how Greg phrases it.  For me, though, that’s the question.  My sabbatical in New York, the hundred or more different performances I went to, Greg’s Juilliard course that I sat in on, and everything else?  What I got from it was a question. This question. For me, the question.

Questions are more important than answers.

And so I’ve been asking it of lots of people, including those who play and sing in concerts I organize. Katya’s one of them.  So are my students.  We imagined this together.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.

 

Sunday in the Bar with Johann and the Preschoolers

One of [le] poisson rouge‘s motto’s may be “serving art and alcohol,” but when Orli Shaham and company take the space over on Sunday, it’s only musical art being served, so bring your own . . . whatever.  Not exotic cocktails but zippered plastic bags of Cheerios, fruit, and other treats will be in plentiful supply at the bring-your-own-snacks event. With the bar closed, might a thermos bottle of something stronger find itself lodged in amongst the juice boxes in the diaper bags?  Don’t ask, don’t tell.

No matter what you’re (not) drinking, Baby Got Bach returns to lpr this Sunday morning at 11:00 AM.  The wonderful carnival of musical exploration in the Gallery Bar space will once again precede an interactive concert in the main performance area. Orli, mother of pre-school twins, knows her audience–kids, parents, and grandparents alike–and puts on a fun, engaging event with top-level music.

I had a great time at BGB last April, even without kids in tow.  (Hey, I just remembered who I know who has kids in the city–I’m going to email them. If I had kids (and we were in New York), I’d definitely be taking them this weekend to hear Orli and a woodwind quintet play music by Bach, Berio, Schumann, Ligeti and others. My youngest child is no longer a child (a college junior), and my oldest is teaching English to first and second graders in China. Were I in New York, I might show up anyway, just to hear that combination of musical voices, and take delight in the delight of the kids.

My friend Greg Sandow has written a series of posts (here, here, here, and here) criticizing aspects of the outreach/education imperative in institutional classical music.  I’m just starting to wade through the discussion.  One thing that’s clear to me, though,is that it’s OK to play music you love for as many types of audiences as possible.  

And that’s one of the things I loved about Baby Got Bach when I attended an event last spring.  It didn’t feel like some contrived let’s-do-an-education-project-to-get-a-grant thing.  It’s a mom, who’s a fabulous musician, putting together concerts for kids, hers other people’s, and their parents. A terrific family event. In, of all places, a trendy Village venue.

Where, usually, “alcohol is our patron.”

But not for Baby Got Bach. Art isn’t free, and they aren’t selling drinks.

So if you’re in New York, take your kid or grandchild or niece or nephew, buy tickets (they aren’t expensive) have a great time, and think about making a donation.  Because this is worth it, not so someone might one grow up and one day subscribe to the symphony (although they might, or help reinvent the symphony); because it’s just a great way to share music, and kids deserve that as much as anyone.

Hallelujah!

This is fun.  And what a great project in must have been for the fifth grade students at Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat in Quinhagak, Alaska, and their teacher(s) and others involved in the filming and editing.  I don’t think they expected to become a YouTube sensation. Some things you just can’t help.

How do you like your Xanatini?

Shaken or stirred?

My tai-chi approach to practicing the left-hand pizzicati pieces for tomorrow night’s concert is working.

But I’ll admit that a couple days after my previous post, I was feeling dismal about it, and suggested to the composer, Gene Pritsker, that we not list the piece on the program in case it didn’t get together.  Gene, a great guy, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll make it work.”  And so he and Dan Barrett, my cello buddy of long standing and a cofounder of the International Street Cannibals, and I got together yesterday and went through it.  We slowed the tempo down a bit, found that some of the most awkward of the notes could be be omitted and keep the musical effect.  It’s basically a cello quartet Dan and I are playing, two arco (bowed) lines, two pizzicato lines, with the pizzicato being down by available fingers of the left hand.  And it’s working–it’s going to be fun.

Then another curveball from the universe.

At today’s big rehearsal for tomorrow’s concert, I played through what I thought was Dan Palkowski‘s entire new solo cello piece, Gayageum, for him (this is the other left-hand pizzicato challenge work). I finished and he said something about looking forward to the “the fast part.”

What fast part? I asked.

“What do you mean, what fast part?” he said, and he showed me his copy of the part, which was about four pages longer than the one I had.  Turns out I was mistakenly sent the PDF of an the early version, with only the slow part. Luckily, it’s something I was able to sightread a bit under tempo and will have learned by tomorrow evening. (We’re doing with added percussion in this concert, which I’ll blog about in my next post.)

It’s been a stressful week for personal reasons, aside from the left-hand pizzicato nightmares.  At our late group lunch after the rehearsal, I told Dan that I had joked to Gene that at one point I thought I might need a Xanax and a martini.

“A Xanatini!” Dan replied.

Exactly.

But I’ve practiced, so I don’t need one after all.

 

Tai Chi Cha Cha and the Left-Hand Pizz Stress Challenge

(Or just give me a Xanax with a scotch on the rocks.)

So first the universe said to me, “and you will greatly expand your left-hand pizzicato skills this week.”

Last week and into this scores have been arriving via email for this coming Sunday’s 7:30 PM International Street Cannibals Tai Chi Cha Cha (how could you miss that?) concert at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in Manhattan.  (The New York one.  We probably have an Indiana one somewhere, along with our own Brazil and Poland.) It’s Fall Break, a whole week, at DePauw, and, having played on two of the Cannibals concerts while on sabbatical in New York last winter/spring, I invited myself to play in this one.  So I’m flying up there in the morning.

Two of the pieces have lots of left hand pizzicato.  If you’re not a string player, pizzicato is the fancy-pants Italian word for plucking.  (Classical musicians still use Italian terminology with each other because in the the 1600s opera started in Italy and became really popular.) 95% or more of the time we pluck with the right hand, the one that holds the bow.  But sometimes we are playing a note, or notes, with the bow and pluck other strings with the left hand, which is also holding down a string or strings.  This is just about as difficult as it sounds.  Maybe a bit more, especially if you haven’t done a lot of it for a while.

One of these pieces almost put me over the edge yesterday.  I can’t play this a voice said somewhere in me.  Keep calm answered another.  First learn the slightly awkward double stops and then figure out how to add in the pizzicatos. 

Took a break.  Laid down on the couch and Figaro, one of my cats, plopped down on my belly.  “Help!” I posted on Facebook.  “I took a practice break and now there’s a cat on my belly and I can’t get up.”  A friend added a comment to the effect that cat therapy is good for the playing.  Eventually the cat moved on, I got up, and returned to the cello.

Just did everything in  s  l  o  w    m  o t  i  o  n.

Very, very calmly.

My thoughts went quickly to Dale Stuckenbruck, the wonderful violinist (and musical saw player) who was my RA when I was a 16-year-old high school junior at the North Carolina Schoolof the Arts.  Dale would help me practice, bless him, and he taught me more about practicing (calmly, intelligently, methodically, and focused) than anyone else.  Thank you, Dale! (Isn’t that great . . . we can still be learning from our earlier mentors 35 years later?)

It’s going to be alright, it turns out. Just have to work out the choreography–which finger will pluck which string when.  And then it will speed up on its own. (And it just occurred to me that I’m practicing in tai chi-like slow motion for the Tai Chi Cha Cha concert.  Neat, huh?)

So that was handled.

Then the universe said, and you will be humbled.

I made a quick trip to the DePauw recording studio this afternoon, to record the Prelude and Gigue of the Bach G Major Suite for a doctor friend who is making some educational videos and needs some music for them.  Oh, I’ve played these movements a zillion times, it will be a piece of cake.  Ha!  As I listened to the playback of the takes, I kept thinking, man, I’d like to give this guy a lesson!  We’ve got something useable, and I may like it better a year from now, but I really need to do a lot more recording of myself. Holy fuck, this music is amazing and needs something more than me winging it.

OK, now back to practicing that left-hand pizzicato.

 

Painting to Music

Here’s a painting-in-progress, done to a recording of songs by Indiana folk musician Joe Peters.

I’d never seen someone do a painting live, with a music performance, until I saw it done at Joe’s CD release party last year (on which I played).  Then I saw it done on one (or was it two?) of Mike Block’s GALA NYC concerts last spring, and at the opening Summer Stage concert by Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble in New York’s Central Park (Times review here).  It’s a fascinating collaborative, creative component for a concert. Does it add anything to “the music”?  Not really.  To the overall human experience?  Sure!  I definitely want to program it this coming summer on a Greencastle Summer Music Festival concert.

Anyway, I love Joe’s music.  Enjoy.

(BTW, if you like the cello playing in the intro, the player’s initials are “E.E.”  If you don’t, then, uh, I don’t know who the guy is.  The wonderful violin/viola playing is definitely my dear friend and former spouse, Allison Edberg, who did the string arrangement.)