People have always been drawn to the idea of a child, a miniature person, performing at an adult level. The preternaturally gifted child becomes a small-scale replica of an adult, with the skill and power to gain the respect and attention of adult society. From the child prodigy’s point of view, however, the situation appears otherwise.
“What a beautiful big sound!” How often do we hear this comment during intermission or from musicians discussing a colleague they admire? This commonly voiced and seemingly flattering exclamation is problematic to me and stands as a disturbing commentary on the state of music making today.
Having entered Brown University as a committed but less than stellar physics major, midway in my studies I suddenly found myself a music major courtesy of one of those lightning bolts that transform lives.
In the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, European composers regularly inflected their music with tunes rooted in Gypsy culture, whether heartfelt laments or exuberant dance tunes. The result was a warmly embraced hybrid that bridged cultures by enrichment rather than condescension. The sources of these Gypsy melodies varied from authentic to ersatz, with many folk-like pieces “improved on” by their incorporation into more urbane works.
On June 2, 1988, twenty-six of the greatest pianists of the 20th century convened in New York’s Carnegie Hall to mount a concert unlike any other before it. The evening was organized in honor of Steinway Piano’s 135th anniversary, but the pianists who gathered around the honored instrument seemed to overshadow the very instrument that occasioned the event, the 500,000th piano built by the venerable firm.
Orientalia was the title of a slender début anthology of verse, published in 1913, by Marietta Shaginyan (1888–1982), a promising Symbolist poet of Armenian descent, born and educated in Moscow. Shaginyan dedicated Orientalia to the great Moscow Neo-Romantic composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943), who was then about forty, married to Natalia Satina, with two daughters.
The question “What is Jewish music?” has provoked more than a few essays, books, and late-night, booze-soaked BS sessions among Jewish (and non-Jewish) musicians, composers, and people who write about Jewish music. An inquiry that should seem to be pretty straightforward turns out to be quite elusive, begging the question, do Irish musicians have such a hard time defining Irish music? What about Greeks? Persians? Chinese?
Shocking moments in music that, like an earthquake, changed the contour of the landscape for all future musical enterprise (Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, minimalism, John Cage, French aesthetic challenging German hegemony, the infusion of jazz and Latin vernacular into the classical stage, etc.) and often scandalized the public with their emergence.
Raise your hand if you know that 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in New York, as well as the 150th anniversary of the birth of Amy Beach, the first acclaimed American composer. Do I see any hands? Certainly you did not see mine. If I ever came across the name “Amy Beach,” I probably thought it was a strip of sand somewhere on the Jersey shore.
Being a participant in Close Encounters performances was a sublime experience for this old actress. It is a rare and happy circumstance to be asked to narrate a piece to music or around music and I was a lucky designate. What joy!