Charitable Libertarians

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

Like music, “philanthropy” distinguishes humans from other species. Aeschylus coined the word in Prometheus Bound (460 BC). Known for his intelligence, Prometheus “loved” (phil) “humanity" (anthropy). He gave fire (civilization) to the earliest humans who had no culture (and he paid dearly for giving it). With this gift humans became distinguished from other animals by their power to complete their own creation through education and culture. “Philanthropy” is thus, “love of what it is to be human.” 

By the first century BC philanthrôpía was translated into Latin as humanitas, and was understood to be the core of liberal education: the study of humanity, or simply "the humanities," in which the study of music was a part (one of the four sciences of the quadrivium). During the Middle Ages philanthrôpía was superseded by caritas (charity), selfless love, necessary to achieve personal salvation. The Renaissance revived the classical humanitas and it flourished through the 18th century as a central value of the Enlightenment.

In our time “philanthropy” and “charity” tend be used interchangeably, though not everyone would agree. A discussion of the differences -- too long for this post -- might include a definition of “philanthropy” as “good deeds, usually brought about by a monetary gift” or (Wikipedia): "private initiatives, for public good, focusing on quality of life." One definition of “charity” might be, “help for those in need” or (Wikipedia): "relieving the pains of social problems." Such a discussion might necessarily cite the Internal Revenue codes, especially 501(c)3 & 4.

The discussion might also take a wild (right) turn as well. Jane Mayer wrote about the philanthropic Koch brothers, Charles and David (Covert Operations, New Yorker, 2010):

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against...Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program....“

But wait! The Koch family foundations, among them the Charles G. Koch Charitable (sic) Foundation and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, have also generously (albeit on a smaller scale) supported arts, education, and medical research, including the New York State Theater in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (now called the David H. Koch Theater), American Ballet Theater, PBS, the Smithsonian Institution, Deerfield Academy, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At their annual strategy meeting last week at an undisclosed hotel near my winter home in Palm Springs I doubt they discussed arts, education or medical research. I don't know for sure because the hotel was heavily guarded.

I have no idea of the reasons for all the Koch's 'philanthropic' impulses. But the reason I started all this in the first place was to examine what my thoughts might be if a Koch-like opportunity should present to us. I haven't reached a conclusion so I am glad it almost certainly won’t.

We do, of course, appeal to foundations and corporations to help us bridge “the gap” between ticket revenues and expenses. Most arts organizations, including those above, have that gap too, at least since the Esterhazy family disappeared. 

We like to think that bringing people together with musicians and music in rural Pennsylvania is philanthropic, humanitas. Like education and culture, music is indeed a gift to humanity. But it is only a matter of time until we will need a climate-controlled new indoor hall now that CO2 levels have reached 400 parts per million. Glue in violins will soften and pads fall out of oboes in the humid summer heat. Try playing the flute with sweat dripping off your face! 

Maybe our new hall should be Koch Hall.

Our 38th Summer Season opens on July 3 with violinist Sarah Chang.

Flex Tickets are available: 717.361.1508; gretnamusic.org

Mentors, Embezzlers, Musician's Dystonia

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

Every musician can thank at least one mentor who inspired him or her to become a musician. Mine was John Stavash. He played many instruments, the flute, piccolo, clarinet, oboe, saxophone, violin, and probably others around greater Cleveland as a freelancer in orchestras, shows, community bands, weddings, and by financial necessity, wherever and whenever he was asked. 

"Mr. Stavash," as we called him, was the guy who walked into school classrooms all over town lugging a pile of band instruments to perhaps catch the interest of some of the students, and eventually maybe to rent or sell to their parents so their kids could join the band. He was usually late, in a rumpled brown suit and tie, stocky, almost bear-like, but humble and soft-spoken. Although of recent middle-European descent he spoke perfect unaccented English. 

John was also the go-to guy for many of the Cleveland Orchestra players when their instruments needed repair, probably often on an urgent basis because George Szell had no mercy for a wind player with a leaking key (as one painfully learned--and then threw all three parts of his disassembled oboe at Szell, much as an Iraqi reporter more recently threw both shoes at another George. That's also the musical equivalent of a browbeaten junior surgeon zapping the forehead of the senior surgeon with a Bovie electrocautery knife.)

Once a week at 4:30-5:00 Mr. Stavash would arrive at my house for the 4 pm 'half-hour' lesson, leaving only a few minutes before dinner. That was for several years before he established his studio. By then I could drive myself to lessons and they would be kept closer to a schedule. Educator's Music in Lakewood is still run by John's son, "Little John," a clarinetist, and Carol, his daughter, a flutist. One memory that stands out from the repair shop in the back (where I learned how to repair a flute) is of a huge barrel of cyanide (or so I was told). That served as a very efficient way to rid silver flutes of all traces of tarnish, which seemed to infect mine with regularity. I'm willing to bet that barrel no longer exists.

I never knew how John learned about music or how to play all those instruments--I don't think he attended a conservatory. But to my good fortune, unrecognized by me of course at the time, John possessed all the right instincts about wind playing, especially the production of tone and breathing, but also about how to make printed notes into music. (My deficiencies in the latter category probably frustrated him, and indeed, took more decades to develop.) 

Also unrecognized by me at the time, one reason he was such a good flute teacher was that his daughter, Carol, a year ahead of me in school, was also a flutist, a better one than I. He handed both of us off to orchestra players during our last years of high school. Before Carol left for the University of Michigan we served as a flute section for several orchestras around town.

Years later John walked into my office in the Neurology Department at Cleveland's University Hospitals. He thought he might have Parkinson's Disease. He had developed difficulty controlling the 3rd and 4th fingers of his left hand, only when playing the piccolo, as he still did in the Lakewood Community Band in the park each summer. I found no signs of Parkinson's Disease and reassured him of that. In 1981 the diagnosis of 'musician's dystonia' was not often recognized, much as it wasn't in the era of Robert Schumann or even a century later in the time of Leon Fleischer and Gary Graffman. (more about that in a future post) So I wasn't much help to John. 

Nevertheless, as he was leaving, he slipped a flute to me in the waiting room, a conventional Haynes plateau model and asked me to try it. The instrument turned out to be astonishingly good, far better for me than the Powell French model I had been using, so I 'borrowed' it for several years until John needed it back for his granddaughter.

Then, bereft of such a wonderful instrument, I searched in the usual places for a replacement. In an astonishing coincidence, I found an almost identical Haynes flute for private sale only several blocks away from where I lived. As I tried it and offered to buy it in the living room of the seller's apartment, I asked him if he knew John Stavash. Yes, he said--and then abruptly announced that the flute was no longer for sale.

Perplexed, I mentioned this event to John. The seller, it turned out, was his former employee at Educator's Music. It had taken the FBI years to determine that he was part of an international embezzlement ring that had diverted dozens of instruments in shipment before they reached the store. John had not pressed charges so the employee, a student, was still at large. The flute I wanted had not been among the stolen instruments.

I sent my wife back to his house and, using her name, she bought the flute, the one that I have now played for 30 years. My mother at age 86 dragged John, age 82, from Cleveland to Gretna to hear me play a Quantz concerto on it to open our inaugural season at Elizabethtown College. That performance brought both of them to tears.

In a future post, I will summarize what we now know, and don't, about musician's dystonia, a surprisingly common problem among classical players.

Generations

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

I talked with a teenager about music. Not a typical teenager but one in a third generation of a musical family: grandfather an orchestra conductor, father on the board of the local symphony. 

Soon to be a high school grad, teenager had passed the "magic age" at which musical taste is determined according to musical psychologist Daniel Levitin:

Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life. Musical tastes become a badge of identity in social contexts framed by pop culture.

(That observation held true for me: I invaded my father's collection of 12-inch 78-rpm records at about that age.)

Teenager intends to become an audio engineer, so he got an earful about loud music. (See "Treasure Your Hearing, October 8) Teenager sagely responded: "Your generation" is accustomed to music in small spaces (the drawing room?) played (by historical necessity) on 'acoustic' (old) instruments. Music of his generation has evolved with modern technology (read electrical amplification) into a 'greater dynamic range' (read loud), all intending to mean, I assume, more advanced and better suited for our time.

My brain whirred: what about intimacy, silence, and (horrors!) pianissimo? But I soon decided I couldn't begin to summon the eloquence of André Aciman:

Chamber music makes you just as you are and with whatever you’ve got the center of everything. It reminds you of yourself. In fact, it makes you not think of yourself, because the act of thinking about something, even if it’s about yourself, distracts you from being with yourself. Chamber music brings you into a state of perfect congruence with yourself of harmony, where, if there’s a thought, it’s not how beautiful this is, but something like perfect gratitude. It is after all what we feel when a miracle happens: we don’t sit and ponder how miracles happen; we are simply grateful that they do. And with that gratitude comes love. Saint Augustine’s definition of love is the most beautiful: I am grateful that you exist. That’s good enough. Chamber music is intimate not just because it takes place in small spaces with few players. It is intimate because it is direct. It is intimate because there is absolutely nothing, save standing in a holy place, where you can be closer to those things that are timeless, to God, to yourself.   

I re-discovered Saturday night that also applies to a large degree to a concert in Walt Disney Hall by the exquisite LA Philharmonic. It certainly does to our concerts (at least the 'acoustic' ones) that will resume in July in the Mt. Gretna Playhouse.

Obviously, this is not just generational.

Remembering Jerry

Carl Ellenberger, MD

Audience members of a certain age may remember Jerry Bramblett during our first 10 years. I met Jerry at the Interlochen Center for the Arts (then “National Music Camp”) because in high school he was a flutist as well as a pianist. We competed against each other in weekly “tryouts and challenges” for top seats in the orchestra. In his senior year he won the concerto competition playing the Flute Concerto by Jacques Ibert. A year later I won too playing the same piece because he coached me and accompanied me in the audition. (He had prepared for his audition by playing with a piano accompaniment he recorded himself.)

Jerry left Yale just as I arrived for medical school. He went to Columbia to get a Ph.D. in Statistics, but mainly to study the piano--in secret because his scholarship said “statistics.” We played flute and piano music every third weekend in his aunt’s studio apartment over the Cliffmore Bar on Second Avenue, dined at a restaurant recommended in New York on $5 a Day, and then repaired to an off-Broadway play.

Between and after my visits to New York we corresponded. Some would call Jerry a “polymath” who excelled in a variety of pursuits, actually just about any he put his mind to, including languages, statistics, cooking--a fusion of his mother’s southern style and French--and music. I still read his letters. 

Russian class at Columbia

Ah, the delights of fluency in the foreign tongues! I now have six cases at my disposal and 30 or so exciting verbs to boot. I am still bothered a bit about the niceties of the language, as when, the other day, I missed the endings of four consecutive adjectives and left poor Mrs. Berryman in tears, but am trying to develop an ambiguous grunt which will pass for any ending. My efforts at the blackboard are thoroughly professional, however, and I am beginning to receive threatening notes from the less gifted members of the class. I am worried about Mrs. Berryman; she is ill nowadays. Yesterday, as I was struggling erroneously through “That fine summer day I took a walk in the woods with my beloved dog” she got dizzy and had to sit down.

Apartment on West End Avenue

I am sitting on the floor of my new pad. The kitchen alone sleeps four. 

Visit to apartment by a former professor at Yale

We brought the festivities to a close the next morning with breakfast and a reading (complete) of the Handel flute sonatas. The latter was a trifle bizarre, insofar as the harpsichord had not been tuned for 2 weeks, Janet had never been exposed to the treacheries of said instrument, and I had not touched the flute since Interlochen, but it was fun, and I noticed afterwards that I had no hangover and have not made any errors in propositional case endings since. 

Visit to a friend

We stopped by the medical school to visit a friend of David’s who is in the psychiatric institute there. A tragic, but rather romantic case: the son of one of David’s teachers at Harvard Med School who flunked out of Harvard his freshman year and promptly went mad. I explained probability theory to him. 

My girl friend spoke of entering a convent 

As for her convent-ional leanings, I think a well fashioned julep (made from the small, darker leaves) to be the handiest and most pleasant of disuaders. 

Anticipation of fine meal

I must away and prepare a sauce duxelles aux champignons for supper. If it is any good, I will put some in an envelope and send it to you.  

It is essential that the champagne be cold, and I recoil at the embarrassment and risk of nursing decanters of chilled spirits aboard the New Haven coaches.

Curbside consultation

When you get a chance, please send me the musical remedies for the following: (1) blister on palm from hanging curtains, (2) sunburn on left shoulder blade from asymmetric exposure, (3) small pimple under navel, source unknown, (4) hangover, from next Sunday’s picnic. 

New job

My first real challenge as a professor of Statistics comes this Sunday, when I shall play host to the statisticians barbecue and beer-blast. Fortunately, this will require no greater efforts than preparing the fields for softball and volleyball, and gathering a few tomatoes and apples, in which activities I will have the assistance of David, who is coming up for the weekend, so I will be able to establish myself as the perfect host. How well I shall do the next morning at my first lecture I shall not venture to guess.

Review of his own concert

No doubt I played badly, but I think, with occasional inspiration. The audience was large and vapid, but happily sprinkled with wine beforehand and during and kept its distance, more or less. 

His piano

I especially envy your perfectly tempered Steinway. Mine, alas, as a result of a recent tuning by Rockville, Conn.’s most distinguished tuner, a complete nut, has developed a rather evil temper, refusing to enter the keys of A-flat and E major, to which I occasionally have recourse.

On pets

I appreciate your offer of a kitten, but my enthusiasm for animal companionship has dimmed somewhat since I kept a colleague’s part-beagle for a few days while he was at a convention. The beast was advertised to be newspaper trained but sadly did not seem able to distinguish between the New York Times and a scatter rug, much less between a Steinway leg and a fireplug. I was a wreck before the week was out. Recently I had been eyeing as a possible pet a rather pleasant-looking green snake named Freddy, but accidentally ran over him with the power mower last Monday. And I can’t work up to much enthusiasm for the two rabbits in the yard, since I suspect that they are the ones who have been getting into the basil.

Jerry passed away in 1995 leaving a small delegation of devoted friends and piano students who studied with him at Mansfield University and the University of Wisconsin. (He had remained a statistics prof at the University of Connecticut for only three years -- while he got a degree in Music.) Any of them out there?

Doctors in the House

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

The tragic onstage collapse and eventual death of oboist Bill Bennett after playing the long opening passage of the Strauss Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony came as a shock to everyone. A doctor from the audience jumped onto the stage. Any doctor would have done the same, though the anachronistic, "Is there a doctor in the house?" has become just a laugh line for comedians since the advent of 911. 

Once recalling John Delancie's fateful knock in 1945 on the door of a villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the foot of the Zugspitze Mountain (see Memoir: Ted Kramers, Dec 11), the Concerto from now on will mostly remind us of the tragic event in Davies Hall. Oboists will have second thoughts about climbing that mountain, needlessly, because an underlying medical cause, like an aneurysm, not the concerto, undoubtedly brought down Bill Bennett. For me, remembering Bill will recall my experience as a "doctor in the house," in the Gretna Playhouse over the past 38 years.

Calmly settling in for a concert one summer evening I knew what to expect as soon as I noticed the usher walking deliberately into the audience during the opening Haydn String Quartet. He entered from the side, walked purposefully across the front of the hall, then headed up the aisle toward my seat. “Please come with me,” he whispered. I followed him as he retraced his steps, all heads in the audience turning, momentarily distracted from the music.

Although there were other physicians in the audience, many of my friends or acquaintances, I was the one the ushers always headed for. As “Founder” of the festival, everyone knew that usually “the doctor is in.” Over years of summer concerts, I had come to recognize, and dread, the deliberate somber approach the usher made tonight.

Three sides of our hall are open to the summer cottages arrayed along narrow tree-lined lanes that wind around the back of the theater. Some porches are so close they can serve as box seats — the exact intention of their 19th-century builders. But sounds travel both ways; motorbikes, barking dogs, and even baby strollers often disrupt the music. The emergency siren is by far the worst distraction; it wails three times whenever someone dials 911, each blast seeming interminable during a quiet slow movement. The siren sounded that night as I followed the usher across the adjacent park toward the steps of the 100-year-old wooden Chautauqua Hall of Philosophy, and the victim.

The audience for classical music is graying, some say, and, theoretically, at least, brings to concerts a greater risk of medical events. Some need assistance to transfer into wheelchairs or walkers from cars driven right to the entrance. Others arrive with even more elaborate medical equipment. Most walk slowly, arm in arm, up the slight incline to the entrance in the back. As I watch them pass by, I wonder who will be next. They like older classical music—from the 18th and 19th centuries—especially if played by young musicians. But these older generations prefer jazz by older artists, like the traditional jazz band that has aged 37 years since their first appearance in our concerts.

Fortunately, all of these performers, including dozens of septua- and octogenarians, have come and gone over the years without incident. I did have to repair Lionel Hampton’s vibraphone when a pedal fell off but never had to resuscitate Lionel Hampton. Stephane Grappelli (“Hot Club de France”) brilliantly made it through his concert at age 77 with the help of a bottle of Chivas Regal—stipulated in his contract—and left the stage unassisted to raucous cheers and standing applause. Skitch Henderson’s stories of working with most of the famous musicians of the past century proved as prodigious as his ability at the piano. Cleo Laine seemed just another grandmotherly "lady of a certain age" until bathed in stage light and transformed into a lovely alluring woman with an angelic voice.

I am always amazed by how music, hardwired into the brain during the first decades of life, stays there until the end. Onstage, in their universe, all great performers can seem ageless. The singer Joe Williams (“Every Day I Have the Blues”) died at age 80 while walking home from a hospital room that gave him the blues, but not until 3 years after a warm and lively performance on our stage.

I myself came close to disaster onstage on two occasions. Once, after imbibing at a pre-concert reception, my blood pressure dropped during a Prokofiev Sonata to the point where I lost vision for about 30 seconds. Fortunately, the rest of my brain continued to function, I remained standing and playing, and vision returned. Another time after an excessive dose of propranolol (used ill-advisedly by performers to allay "stage nerves" -- you can't play the flute with a dry "cotton mouth") the only casualty was the Ibert Flute Concerto. I remained standing and playing badly throughout.

Our audience has been less fortunate. As I headed for the Hall of Philosophy, memories of earlier urgent summons ran through my head. One August evening, heeding the call, I stepped out from the dimly lighted hall into total darkness. In my haste to reach a woman who had fallen outside, I forgot about the stone culvert that for over 100 years had directed water around the hall rather than into it as it flowed down the side of our modest mountain. My first step was not the 9 inches I expected, but four feet to the bottom of the ditch. As my extended right foot finally struck stone, a loud crack accompanied my astonishment. As I continued my fall, my right shoulder struck the side of the culvert. I diagnosed the comminuted fracture of my right humerus before painfully arising, but only after my first step detected the torn Achilles tendon. The fallen woman went home; I went to the hospital.

Another time an elderly woman fainted in the third row and the musicians stopped playing. I positioned her flat in the aisle. As she awakened, I learned from her husband that she had “fainted at concerts before.” The siren sounded as I helped her walk up the aisle to the back entrance of the hall. The first emergency vehicles arrived, sirens screaming and lights flashing. The rescuers brusquely elbowed me aside, announcing, “Stand back! EMT!” All five vehicles idled (why do they bring a fire engine?), motors running and lights flashing under the overhanging roof of the hall, as the embarrassed victim, fully recovered and sitting on the steps of the ambulance, completed the necessary insurance forms. Exhaust from the vehicles slowly filled the hall. My request to move them was “interference with a rescue,” a charge dismissed only after a thorough month-long investigation and a warning from the local constable.

I usually did not summon the wit of a friend, paged during a concert by the Philadelphia Orchestra. “What time is my appointment tomorrow, doc?” “You’ll have to find another neurologist,” he replied, “I just retired.” And then Jack retired.

A crowd was gathering in the twilight as I approached tonight’s victim. He was a robust middle-aged man dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. He appeared dusky and apneic, his mouth and sightless eyes open, a knee brace on his right leg. Again I was asked by an EMT to stand back, this time from a fruitless resuscitation effort. The chest pumping was far too gentle, but I knew he had been asystolic for more than 5 minutes. One after another screaming and flashing vehicles arrived, their occupants bursting out carrying cases of equipment in both hands. “Anyone know who he is?” they asked. No one responded. I felt helpless, sad, and even a little guilty because I was too late, not participating, or even wanted.

My guilt increased as I deserted the scene and walked back to the theater and the warm elegant sounds of the slow movement of the Haydn quartet, punctuated by still more sirens arriving. After the end of the allegro, I asked the musicians to pause until the sirens stopped. A violinist took the opportunity to talk to the audience, all still oblivious to the drama outside, about the F Major Quartet and why it had begun so loudly and abruptly: it was to command the attention of Haydn’s chattering aristocratic audience, he revealed.

Our audience, who had tittered as each siren joined the music, didn’t grasp the meaning of the ultimate eerie silence: rescue efforts had failed and none of the ambulances raced for the hospital. When the music began again, I couldn’t enjoy Haydn’s stylish, graceful humor, usually still vital after 200 years. The Charles Ives quartet was more unsettling to me than the composer, as always, deliberately intended it to be. The lyrical melodic strains of the final Dvorak quartet, although warm and soothing, didn’t fit at all as an impromptu requiem.

The next day’s newspaper identified the victim as a mathematics professor at a nearby college and father of three young children who had just finished his weekly pick-up basketball game. His wife and children had watched the game but were already on the road home when, after visiting the local ice cream parlor with his fellow players, their husband and father collapsed and died.

A 'Monster' of the Chickering

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

As our last "Monsters of the (Elizabethtown) Steinway" concert for this season approached (the legendary Emanuel Ax, Tuesday, March 19), my thoughts turned to pianists. Franz Liszt may not be the appropriate pianist to contemplate for this concert--perhaps an antithesis of Ax--but he was considered a musical 'monster' by some contemporaries. (Actually, our "monster" label applies to the repertoire, the Pathetique on this concert, not the player.)

“Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.”

So said the Hungarian, Liszt, the 19th Century’s greatest piano virtuoso and arguably the greatest who ever walked the planet. Even his contemporaries mispronounced his name (list, not the Victor-Borgean “Schlitz”). Bathed in controversy ever since his birth in 1811, Liszt earned the contempt of Robert and Clara Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms, who accused him (and his son-in-law, Richard Wagner) of vulgar showmanship (“a smasher of pianos”) contrary to their view that music should be played only for its own sake. (They never heard Liberace.) But they were awestruck by, perhaps jealous of, his ability and would probably agree that Liszt could make his Chickering (a gift) do just as much as anyone (except maybe Marc-André Hamelin) will ever be able to do on any piano, even a modern Steinway. And most might agree with Charles Rosen:

“The harmonics can be banal, the melodies almost nonexistent…” In some of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, there is “zero degree of musical invention if we insist that invention must consist of melody, rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint. Nevertheless, played with a certain elegance, these are both dazzling and enchanting. The real invention concerns texture, density, tone color, and intensity—the various noises that can be made with a piano—and it is startlingly original. The piano was taught to make new sounds. These sounds often did not conform to an ideal of beauty, either Classical or Romantic, but they enlarged the meaning of music, made possible new modes of expression. On a much larger scale, Liszt did for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. Listeners were impressed not only with the beauty of Paganini’s tone quality but also with its occasional ugliness and brutality, with the way he literally attacked his instrument for such dramatic effect. Liszt made a new range of dramatic piano sound possible, and in so doing thoroughly overhauled the technique of keyboard playing.”

Liszt exploited not only virtuosity but also a satanic public image and a Gothic taste for the macabre with all its paraphernalia--dances of death, etc. He was also a virtuoso conductor, doing more than anyone else of his time (except maybe Berlioz) to create the modern image of the orchestra conductor as an international star. He invented the symphonic “tone poem” (like Les Préludes) and was the first composer to write atonal (at least “harmonically audacious”) music foreshadowing Debussy and Schoenberg.

Liszt also acquired an international rock star-like reputation for erotic conquest, cultivating the image of a Don Juan. He used dazzling “transcendental” (his word) virtuosity as a representation of sexual domination, and women fought over his snuff-box and pieces of his handkerchief. His piano fantasy, Reminiscences of Don Giovanni, could be considered a self-portrait, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was autobiographical. 

Although he had fathered three children by age 25, Liszt finally wanted to marry after retiring from the concert stage at age 35 at the peak of his performing career. To his chagrin, the Vatican revoked its sanction of the divorce of his intended, Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt became an abbé, albeit an urbane and composing abbé who could marry anyone else if he wished--but never did during the remainder of his 75 years.

In the first great age of pianistic virtuosity, Liszt was a scrupulous editor of works of other composers—and also borrower of their themes. In a nod to the Baroque era, he said, “A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own,” an initiative indispensable for first-rate performing as well as composing. Thus, no two performances, based on 'a few useful instructions'” in the score were ever expected to be the same, no two interpretations of a score’s written directives were ever meant to sound the same—not if performers employed ideas of their own to allow “the emotions to radiate and shine in their own character."

Most of Liszt’s piano works that have remained in repertoire and gave Liszt his stature -- more than a few indescribably beautiful --come from before 1850, even though, according to Rosen, “…the musical material is either invented by someone else or, with some very significant exceptions, it is shoddy and tired, likely to grate on the nerves of any musician of delicate sensibility.” 

After 1850 Liszt’s compositions became more refined and, in later years, more austere. These last years were devoted above all too short piano pieces and to religious music. The well-known Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, (the one of 19 most used in old Disney animated cartoons), comes from the earlier period. 

My apologies to the artist. I have had copies of these drawings for over 40 years and long ago forgot their origin. Anyone know?

Listen to the last of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes by Valentina Lisitsa.

Listen to La Campanella by Valentina Lisitsa and watch them build a Bösendorer piano. 

What (if anything) Ails Classical Music? A Neurologic Diagnosis

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

I went to a concert by the Gryphon Trio at "International Classical Concerts of the Desert." They played three chestnuts beautifully--Haydn, Dvorak, Beethoven--no doubt for the umpteenth time, on a raised platform in a ballroom attached to the Rancho Mirage Public Library slightly smaller than a basketball court. It was a 'classical' classical concert: two classical works -- intermission -- final classical work, lacking only the contemporary piece often sandwiched between the chestnuts. 

An attentive and enthusiastic audience filled all 300 chairs. At intermission I strolled around and identified only five people who appeared younger than age 60. Three may have been shepherded by a grandparent. Men wore coats and ties; women evening dresses, at 4 PM, here in a mecca for well-to-do retirees and golfing winter vacationers. 

Looking over grey heads in audiences, anxious observers for centuries have predicted the demise of classical music along with its listeners. Data from the NEA confirms that the classical music audience is indeed older and has been diminishing in size over the past few decades. Although death hasn't occurred, such predictions have intensified along with speculations about the pathogenesis of the terminal illness which may never have seemed more likely than it does now. Orchestras, dance, and opera companies have gone bankrupt; corporate, foundation, governmental, and individual patronage and concert attendance has plummeted; classical radio has almost disappeared (hooray for KUSC!); large record companies have turned to other music as the lifespan of the CD nears its end; schools have dropped music education; and so on. It was frightening to hear someone say the other day: "We don't know whether anyone will be listening to Beethoven 50 years from now." (For the record, I think it's more likely humanity will destroy itself first.)

Adam Gopnik wrote about music and his kids (Music To Your Ears, New Yorker, Jan 28): 

"It isn't a question of classical tastes against pop; it's a question of small forms heard in motion against large forms heard with solemn intent.... They snatch at music as we snatched at movies, filling our heads with plural images." 

Young generations rarely hear music sitting down and they rarely, as Linus in Peanuts confided decades ago to an incredulous Lucy, "just listen to it" (Brahms). They dance to it, sing to it, drive to it, jog to it. Sitting quietly for hours looking at 70 musicians bowing, blowing, plucking and pounding just isn't a pleasure they seek, especially those with little listening experience and attention spans shortened by TV and digital devices. A classical concert may be like incuriously staring for hours at a Cezanne canvas in a museum knowing little about art, history, or impressionism. (Gustavo Dudamel said last Friday that's how Monet showed him how to conduct Debussy's La Mer.)

Classical music, of course, is available in amazing abundance in the 'cloud.' You can mix movements of symphonies and sonatas with Sugababes and Boyzone into a random shuffle on your iPod for playing on your commute, your morning run, or in your bathroom, providing wall-to-wall 24/7 background on which to play out daily life. No solemn intent involved. An anonymous violinist can serve an identical Chaconne to millions of casual listeners, cost-effective and free while they rack up miles on a treadmill.

Speculation abounds as to the reason(s) for this change: the fast pace of modern life, the growth and evolution of alternative electronic entertainment, expensive tickets; inconvenience of traveling to concerts; an idea that classical music requires education and refined taste that, like for fine food and wine, requires years of experience; or that classical concerts intimidate the uninitiated, keeping them from concerts because they don't know the rules and regulations. We are accused of snobbery, of believing that only classical music is real music,  that we worship the "permanent collection," and ignore music of the present. We hear that younger generations reject the snooty formal affairs with old arrogant musicians in full evening dress.  

Undoubtedly, there is some truth and validity to all of the above, in varying proportions depending where, geographically and demographically you are talking about. People on the West Coast, for example, may be puzzled by all the fuss. Just try to get a ticket to hear the LA Phil in Walt Disney Hall! Meanwhile the Minnesota Orchestra is on the verge of collapse, other orchestras no longer exist. Emanuel Ax (Gretna Music, March 19) will play to about 400 people in Elizabethtown PA just weeks after playing to thousands in Berlin. Cultural life in the US may be condensing around islands of vibrancy separated by a vast wasteland inhabited mostly by the '99 percent' where all the 'fine arts' are low in priority and struggle to survive. The NEA data shows relatively small average declines but in many places the declines have reached extreme levels. 

Most of these thoughts are packaged into the word "classical" so we try to minimize its use. Most are in the minds of those who do attend classical music concerts; others probably don't have them. "Classical," of course, also connotes a sense of history, another concept often lost in the surge of 'progress' or daily scramble to pay the mortgage. 

Reassurance (speculative as is some of the above) came from the late pianist and scholar Charles Rosen. He felt that the future of classical music is assured so long as enough young musicians want to play it. Judging by the amazing rise in the level of performance over the years since my education, increasing competition among students for positions at conservatories, not just in the US but in Asia, South America, Europe, and even the Middle East, indicates to me that there is no shortage of young players entering the pipeline leading to artistry. Probably more good pianists play today than played throughout allof history.

The problems lie in the declining interest in (or in biz-speak, "market demand" for) the work of classical performing artists.

Nevertheless, we may be making a mistake to view this simply as a marketing challenge. Instead it may be a cultural change driven by multiple determinants. President Obama's State of the Union speech hinted at one. Based on accumulating evidence he drew a clear connection between what children do in their first decade of life--the earlier, the better--and what they can do and who they are as adults. Inherent in this connection is the concept of brain "plasticity" and "critical" and "sensitive" periods in child development.

Brain plasticity refers to gain and loss of brain abilities. Practice that improves performance on a musical instrument is a perfect illustration of plasticity, as is any kind of learning. Recently we have learned that acquisition of brain abilities is accompanied by actual anatomic, physiologic, and chemical changes that we can observe and measure in several ways, microscopic and macroscopic. Of course abilities must be maintained by regular use; otherwise they may be lost; plasticity in that opposite (losing abilities) direction is generally called "atrophy." 

A good example of detectable changes in the brain is the growth in size of the corpus callosum--the large cable connecting (see it crossing in the right image) the right and left hemispheres--in pianists who practice. If they start practicing before the age of 7 years, their corpus callosums become larger. "Bulking up" the corpus callosum by using it for the enormous degree of coordination -- "sensorimotor synchronization" --  between the two brain hemispheres required to play a Schubert Sonata, causes it to enlarge like muscles of a weight lifter; the enlargement is greatest if the practice starts before the age of seven years.

sliced front to back                    sliced side to side

That plasticity varies during the course of every individual's lifetime has been known for some time. In general it is greater when we are younger and declines with aging. But during our first decades of life we pass through critical and sensitive periods of plasticity for the acquisition of various abilities. For example, if a child does not use both eyes together because she was born with strabismus ('crossed' eyes) that are not straightened by about the age of 6, then she can never develop brain capacity for binocular stereoscopic (3D) vision, the most acute kind of depth perception. The critical period for acquiring that ability begins at birth and ends completely in the middle of the first decade of life. 

For acquisition of other abilities the first decade also has sensitive periods, as illustrated by the corpus callosum observation. These abilities, like language, can be gained to some degree at any age, but are more readily developed if they are acquired during the sensitive period. That reality has always been obvious to musicians, educators and scientists. You can't hope to become a concert pianist or olympic tennis star if you first sit down at the keyboard or walk onto a court at the age of 12, for example. That is too late. Now there is evidence (so far only in mice) that a switch gradually suppresses plasticity after adolescence, a protein called the "NoGo Receptor," (NgR1) in order to stabilize or "hardwire" the brain for life.

After the sensitive period ends you can certainly learn to play the piano or to play tennis, but you cannot become a pro. Language has a sensitive period that begins at birth, or very shortly after, and lasts for years, indefinitely tapering off in the second or third decade; some believe that humans take longer to fully develop (take longer to reach adulthood) than other species because of that long sensitive period for language. I would argue that that the same applies to music. Language and music are two abilities unique to the human species. Educators say "read to your kids." Perhaps they should say, "Read to and sing with your kids."

To a degree that remains to be clarified plasticity may be transferrable from one skill to another. For example, disciplined and guided practice on the piano may improve ability to acquire other skills, say ability in mathematics or language, or just improve general intelligence. (See "Learning Music Makes Kids Smarter" Oct 11, 2012, and this) Not all players in the student orchestras of Venezuela's El Sistema become musicians, but they are more likely to succeed in other fields than their non-musical peers. 

Both music and language education can start early, say at age 2-3 (compare that with education in philosophy or statistics that can't). Language is learned through conversations and reading with parents. Similarly musical training can begin with rhythm and simple songs and dances. There are few better illustrations of success-rewarding-effort than practicing a musical instrument. Think of a Suzuki class. An added benefit is that musical training can put very young children into cooperative and productive social contact. (We can suspect that most members of the current House of Representatives never played in the school band.)

Another advantage of very early education is suggested by other recent observations: the earlier and higher the quality of that early education, the longer the individual is likely to continue education--through college or graduate and professional schools and beyond. That observation may explain data from the NEA: the chance of an adult being in an audience for a classical music concert increases with the duration of that person's education. With a graduate-school education you are nine times more likely to be found at a concert (or in a museum) than with only a high school diploma. The naive explanation for that observation, that you must be highly educated to appreciate classical music, has little support. But another explanation may apply: if you associate with educated peers, they are more likely to go to, or take you to, a classical music concert than to a Justin Bieber Tour.

Knowing the brain's development schedule can help a student plan his life. If you start on the piano or tennis court when you are 6 years old, you might--if you have all the other requisite abilities, and sacrifice your teenage years to as many as 10,000 hours of guided practice--become a pro by the age of 20. That leaves the rest of your life for study of other things, to become a scientist, doctor, teacher, or judge, an Albert Schweitzer, for example. Learning to master the clarinet can equip you later to more easily acquire other knowledge and skills. 

You can't follow that schedule in reverse. Late-starting tennis players and pianists are forever amateurs, playing for their own enjoyment, rarely for ticket buyers. There is a difference between one child who starts to play the piano at age 5-6 and practices, and another who decides to imitate what s/he hears on an iPod at age 13.

Musical ability on one hand and understanding and appreciating complex music on the other, two closely-related brain abilities, are learned, and best learned when you are very young and your brain is most "sensitive" to that task. I am never surprised to learn from a member of our audience that s/he played in the school band or sang in a choir.

The reality that music education has been jettisoned by uninformed and cash-poor school boards gives me little hope that current and future generations will acquire what is necessary to understand classical music written in any era, including yesterday. If children continue to be denied opportunities during critical and sensitive periods of their lives to learn basic musical skills, gaining a life-long love of music will be increasingly unlikely as they get older. Indeed, learning anything might be more difficult.

Nevertheless, an amazing number of the very young somehow seem to discover a passion for music in time. Perhaps that number will even increase in the YouTube era as chance discoveries by web-surfing three-year-olds lead to, "Mommy I want a violin!" But considering the trends in our culture, they may have to play for each other when they become adults.

Addendum: David Hahn, songwriter and former Broadway conductor looks  at one part of the elephant: The 4,000 musicians in 51 major orchestras, 2% of all musicians in the US, are paid far too much for what the market will bear, largely because of the efforts of their union, the American Federation of Musicians. See Solving the Symphony Crisis for his suggested solutions.

Addendum 2: Listen to the brilliant and eloquent commencement address by flutist Claire Chase. Is this a map to the future?

Monsters of the Steinway, Pt 2: Joel Fan

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

Don't miss our next performance on the "Monsters" series by Joel Fan, pianist, on Saturday, February 23, 2013, 7:30 PM at Leffler Performance Center at Elizabethtown College. The final performance for this season by Emanuel Ax will be on Tuesday, March 19 at 8:00 PM. Go here for tickets or call: 717-361-1508. Follow links below to hear pre-concert performances of the program and to learn more about the Hammerklavier Sonata than you have ever known.

Alexander Scriabin, Sonata No. 5, Op. 53 in F Sharp Major

Born in Russia in 1872 Alexander Scriabin started out as a prodigy pianist, studying as a boy with the renowned Moscow pedagogue Nikolai Zverev, a despotic force in the Russian piano world whose other star pupil was Sergei Rachmaninov, Scriabin’s distant cousin. At one point they both lived in Zverev’s home with some other piano students. Scriabin and Rachmaninov were in classes together at the Moscow Conservatory and competed for the large piano prizes upon graduation. A hand “injury” (possibly “musicians’ dystonia”) supposedly while over-practicing the Don Juan Fantasie of Liszt, may have helped turn Scriabin toward composition.

He began composing "...very much in the style of Chopin, and ended it on the brink of madness, composing wild music of the future." --Ruth Laredo.  Scriabin considered himself to be a messianic figure. Near the end of his life (in 1915) he planned a mammoth work, the Mysterium, to commemorate the conflagration that was gripping all of Europe at the time, the “Great” War (WW I), which he thought would purge mankind and usher in a glorious new era of mystical wonder. The performance was to take place in a half-temple to be built in India. Bells suspended from clouds would summon the spectators from all over the world. A reflecting pool of water would complete the divinity of the half-circle stage. Spectators would sit in tiers across the water. Scriabin would be seated at the piano, surrounded by hosts of instrumentalists, singers, and dancers. Costumed speakers reciting text in processions and parades would form part of the action along with the dancers, whose choreography would include eye motions and touches of the hands in conjunction with odors of both pleasant perfume and acrid smoke. Pillars of incense would form part of the scenery. A light show, bathing the cast and audience in changing effects. It’s amazing how accurately he anticipated halftime at the Superbowl! (most of this paragraph came from pianosociety.com)

Scriabin was said to have "visions." ("No one knows whether Scriabin's music would have been the same had he not been possessed by his visions." --Vladimir Askenazy) Indications are that these included “synesthesia,” a rare tendency to conflate sensory stimuli, as described by the contemporary pianist, Hélène Grimaud: especially in concert, "colors can come unbidden, each connected to a particular key. C minor is black. D minor is blue. E-flat major is 'very bright—something similar to sunlight . . . and sometimes switching to green.'” (See Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks.) 

But Scriabin himself reported an even stronger stimulus:  ". . . the creative act is inextricably linked to the sexual act.  I definitely know that the creative urge in myself has all the signs of a a sexual stimulation with me . . . And note, please, that the creative artist is square in the middle of this -- the weaker he is in the sexual area, the weaker is his art."

Scriabin composed the 5th Sonata in a feverish burst of creative activity immediately after the completion of his popular orchestral work, Symphonic Poem of Ecstasy. The Sonata echoes the orgiastic, prismatic, and highly perfumed sound-world Scriabin evoked in the Poem, and in fact, as an introduction to this sonata, Scriabin attached a portion from the text of the Poem of Ecstasy: 

"I summon you to life, secret yearnings!
You who have been drowned in the dark depths
Of the creative spirit, you timorous 

Embryos of life, it is to you that I bring daring"


There are a million ways to play this very difficult sonata and almost as many recorded versions. Pianists argue over which performer dropped the most notes as well as how freely to play the printed score. One devotee of Scriabin's music, the pianist and conductor Vladimir Askenazy said: "Although one cannot say that without understanding his philosophy one cannot understand his music, one penetrates deeper into his music, if one studies what compelled Scriabin.  One cannot separate the man-as-philosopher from the composer of such beautiful music.  His music has a unique idealism.  It has its own laws and its own meaning.  His workmanship was nearly always impeccable.  He continues to be a fascinating and controversial figure in musical history, and a man about whom opinions will always differ."

You might start to listen with an early recording (1960?) by Vladimir Sofroniski who married one of Scriabin's daughters and concertized in Russia (where he lived and taught) and Europe on Scriabin's Becker piano. Alexander Scriabin plays (in 1910) his own Etude Op.8 No.12 here. He died before completing the Mysterium, at age 43 of septicemia extending from a sore on his lip.  

Sergei Rachmaninov, Sonata No. 2, Op. 32 in B-Flat minor

Unlike his Russian contemporaries, Scriabin, Stravinsky (b. 1882), and later Shostakovich (b. 1908), Serge Rachmaninov (1873 -- 1943) felt that he could not lift his works out of the 19th Century: “I feel like a ghost wandering in the world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing, and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today (1939), but it will not come to me.” He might have agreed with Sibelius: “Not everyone can be an innovating genius." As did other leading composers of the early twentieth century--Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, among others--he eventually settled in the United States (mostly in California). Rachmaninov’s new home was on North Elm Drive, in the center of the Los Angeles movie colony.

Despite being stuck in the previous century Rachmaninov’s works, most highly Romantic, still speak to 20th century listeners and beyond, partly because Rachmaninov had his own distinctive voice--you can recognize it immediately when you turn on your car radio--and also because his works thrive when the performer overcomes the astounding technical challenges to allow the themes to fully blossom. As increasingly facile pianists emerge from our current highly competitive conservatory environment, they look to such technical challenges (like “Rach 3” the concerto) to display the talents achieved by a lifetime (so far, short) of practice.

Rachmaninov’s 'full industrial strength' piano concerti are beloved by millions, and performed and recorded often by leading pianists including Horowitz, Earl Wild, Marc-André Hamlin, and many others, and many of their themes have found new homes in films, love songs, church anthems, and even television commercials. 

When Rachmaninov played solo concerts, audiences couldn’t get enough of his Prélude in C-sharp minor so he resisted including it on concerts. His other 'smaller works' are now less often heard: the Preludes, the Etudes, the Moments Musicaux. They mark him as the last of the colorful Russian masters of the late 19th century, with their characteristic gift for long and broad melodies imbued with a resigned melancholy which is never long absent. The songs are at last being recognized to be among Russia's best. In his later years, his style grew more subtle, as can be heard in the Paganini Rhapsody, the Corelli Variations, the last set of songs, and the Symphonic Dances. His operas failed to hold the stage because of deficits in their librettos, but recordings have enabled their splendid music to be appreciated. The four Piano Concerti are an ineradicable part of the romantic repertory, and the symphonies, though still overshadowed by the piano works, have gained in popularity. His masterpiece, according to some, is The Bells, which fuses and unifies all his powers.
In 1915, the year of Scriabin's death Rachmaninov made a memorial tour of Russia playing only Scriabin's music to acknowledge Scriabin's genius. Plenty of recordings of Rachmaninov playing his own music are still available.

Sonata no. 2 is a pyrotechnical tour de force full of lush and beautiful Rachmaninovian themes. Here is a performance by Marc-André Hamelin. 


Ludwig van Beethoven, Hammerklavier Sonata, No 29, Op. 106

Known as the Große Sonate für das Hammerklavier, or more simply as the Hammerklavier, this sonata is widely considered to be one of the most important works of the composer's third period and among the greatest piano sonatas. It is widely considered Beethoven's single most challenging composition for the piano, and it remains one of the most challenging solo works in the classical piano repertoire.

Dedicated to his patron, the Archduke Rudolf, Beethoven wrote the sonata between the summer of 1817 and late autumn of 1818, towards the end of a fallow period in his career. It represents the spectacular emergence of many of the themes that were to recur in his late period, the reinvention of traditional forms, such as sonata form; a brusque humor (humor? in Beethoven?); and a return to pre-classical compositional traditions, including an exploration of modal harmony and reinventions of the fugue within classical forms.

The Hammerklavier also set a precedent for the length of solo compositions (performances typically take about 45 minutes). While orchestral works such as symphonies and concerti had movements of 15 or even 20 minutes, few single movements in solo literature had a span such as the Hammerklavier's Adagio sostenuto.

The sonata's name comes from Beethoven's later practice of using German rather than Italian words for musical terminology. (Hammerklavier literally means "hammer-keyboard", and is still today the German name for the fortepiano, the predecessor of the modern pianoforte without its metal frame.) It comes from the title page of the work, "Große Sonate für das Hammerklavier", which means "Grand sonata for the fortepiano". The more sedate Sonata No. 28 in A, Op. 101 has the same description, but the epithet has come to apply to the Sonata No. 29 only. The work also makes extensive use of the una corda pedal, with Beethoven giving for his time unusually detailed instructions when to use it. (Thanks, Wikipedia for most of the above.)

As Sarah Palin might say, “there's Walmarts and Walmarts of stuff out there” about Beethoven and his Hammerklavier Sonata, almost all by writers more knowledgeable than I. And if you have made your way through half of the prose above, your eyes may have already glazed over. So for relief I refer you to the hilarious (but fictitious) interview by Jeremy Denk, not entirely devoid of heuristic value. For a pre-concert preview of the Hammerklavier here is a live performance by Jeremy.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Music

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

Reading Jon Meacham's marvelous Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power I noted references to Jefferson's love of music and found my way back to Thomas Jefferson and Music by Helen Cripe (University Press of Virginia, 1974) and then to Jefferson Himself, a volume entirely of Jefferson's own words edited by Bernard Mayo, 1942, to expand on the subject.

Jefferson indeed loved music ("Music is the favorite passion of my soul...") and especially enjoyed playing the violin and singing with his sister Jane when he was young. Later he encouraged his family to play and study music as part of his quest to provide them a broad education like his own (and to develop "resources against ennui").

To his daughter Patsy:

With respect to the distribution of your time, the following is what I should approve:  From 8 to 10, practice music.....

Jefferson acquired several violins, all lost now, harpsichords and pianos, and a glass armonica, a bizarre instrument using glasses filled with water invented by Benjamin Franklin. (Mozart wrote a quintet for it.) It isn't clear that Jefferson understood that studying and playing music can have the strong impact on the brain and learning in general as we know now (Learning Music makes Kids Smarter, Oct 11) but he did realize that the ability to play and appreciate music, like the other arts, could enrich one's life. The Jefferson family's huge collection of music, the Monticello Music Collection stored in the Alderman Library in Charlottesville, ranges far and wide in style and origin.

Many visitors to Jefferson's home at Monticello remarked about the wonderful evenings with good food and wine, sophisticated conversation, and musical performances, usually including Jefferson himself. One wonders how good a violinist he was. Many contemporaries extolled his musicality, for their own various purposes. The most reliable critic was probably granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge:

With regard to Mr. Jefferson's skill on the violin....Mr. Randall's idea that he became "one of the best violinists of his day" is a little extreme. My grandfather would, I believe, have disclaimed it. When we remember that the violin is a most difficult instrument, and that great proficiency in the management of it requires the labor of a life--that sixteen hours out of twenty-four have sometimes been devoted to it, we see at once that the time given to music by Mr. Jefferson could never have accomplished more than a gentlemanly proficiency. No amateur violinist could hope to equal a professor. Mr. Jefferson [They still call him "Mr. Jefferson" in Charlottesville] played I believe very well indeed, but not so well as to stand a comparison with many other persons especially such as he must have met with abroad."

And indeed Jefferson must have heard a lot of good music in Paris. Mozart's opera, The Marriage of Figaro, premiered during his five years there. Regarding music in Paris: "...[music] particularly is an enjoyment the deprivation of which with us cannot be calculated. I am almost ready to say it is the only thing which from my heart I envy them (Parisians)...." 

But his earlier rhapsodizing, "Music...is the favorite passion of my soul" continues: "and fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism... In a country like [Italy], music is cultivated and practiced by every class of men, I suppose there might be found persons of these trades who could perform on the French horn, clarinet, or hautboy, and bassoon, so that one might have a band [at Monticello, perhaps]... Sobriety and good nature would be desirable parts of their characters."  Sobriety and good nature being well-known traits of musicians, of course.

Some observers have suggested that "deplorable state of barbarism" was also a little too extreme as a way to characterize American music in Jefferson's lifetime. (Others point out that he may not have listened to music his 600 slaves might have made.) But consider the following announcement of an event in Williamsburg--when Jefferson was surely there--from Thomas Jefferson and Music. It calls to my mind some suggestions for what Gretna Music could present in place of arcane chamber music to build our audience.

By Permission of his excellency, the governor, for the entertainment of the curious: On Friday the 14th of this Instant April will be exhibited, at the theater in Williamsburg, by Peter Gardiner, a curious set of figures, richly dressed, four feet high, which shall appear upon the stage as if alive; to which will be added a tragedy called Babes in the Wood: also a curious view of waterworks, representing the sea, with all manner of sea monsters sporting upon the waves. Likewise fireworks, together with the taking of the Havannah, with shops, forts, and batteries, continually firing, until victory crowns the conquest; to which will be added a curious field of battle, containing the Dutch, French, Prussian, and English forces, which shall regularly march and perform the different exercises to great perfection. The performer will lay his head on one chair and his feet on another, and suffer a large rock of 300 weight to be broke on his breast with a sledge hammer. Tickets to be had at the Raleigh Tavern...."

 (You can't find it on YouTube.)