Monster of the Steinway: Ives' "Concord"

by Carl Ellenberger

Essays Before Sonatas 
(program notes for our March 15 concert by Gilles Vonsattel)

Beethoven, Sonata “Moonlight” 
No. 13 in C# minor (op. 27, #2)

“Quasi una fantasia” means, though not in a simple and direct sense, “in the manner of an improvisation.” It also means that this work shares an important feature of fantasias by Mozart, Haydn, and others, an unpredictable number of sections that use different kinds of figuration patterns. The sections are played without pause. One result is to blur the impression that each movement is an autonomous whole with a full cadence at the end, and so it blurs the notion that individual movements are the main units of organization.... the first movement passes directly on to the second and the second to the third. 

The hypnotic first movement, a world classic from the day of its publication, seems like an immense slow improvisation. The Berlin critic and poet Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860) applied the label “Moonlight,” because the first movement suggested to him "a boat visiting, by moonlight, the primitive landscapes of Lake Lucerne." Above the notes of the opening Adagio Beethoven wrote that it should be “played with extreme delicacy.” The sonata progresses from the dreamlike C-sharp-minor Adagio sostenuto to the graceful D-flat Allegretto and on to the tragic and powerful Presto finale with crackling arpeggios and exploding fortissimo chords. The sonata-form Presto agitato finale completes the formal architecture of the cycle with enormous energy. The emotional crescendo of the three movements is unlike any other early Beethoven sonata, the percussive element being essential.

Rzewski, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues

When the Freedom Riders rode interstate buses into the segregated South during the 1960s, they were beaten and arrested in Winnsboro, SC. Lead Belly, the late Pete Seeger, and others sang the traditional blues song, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues. Rzewski reworked it for the piano. On January 20, 2014 the town of Winnsboro, called by residents, "the Charleston of the upcountry," "closed to honor Dr. Martin Luther King."

Frederic Rzewski (zheff-skee) began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton. His teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt. During a formative trip to Italy in 1960 he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola he began a career as a performer of new improvisatory piano music. Later he co-founded Musica Elettronica Viva that conceived music as a collective, collaborative process, with improvisation and live electronic instruments.


Ives, Concord Sonata

One of the most curious, wonderful things about the “Concord” Sonata is the obsessive assault it mounts on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Da-da-da-dum has become such an emblem, an audible logo, of classical music; the four notes express our whole tuxedoed, staid obsolescence, our desire to perpetuate ourselves. The sternness, the immediate minor-key attitude, the inescapable upbeat leading to downbeat, the timbre of the sustaining strings, full throttle... all of this captures perfectly the terminally uncool, that which in classical music takes itself too seriously, refuses to relax.

--Jeremy Denk, from the liner notes of his recording, Jeremy Denk plays Ives. I highly recommend it.

When Ives was a student at Yale in the eighteen-nineties, son of a Danbury CT bandmaster with an experimentalist streak, he knew that he wanted to devote his life to writing music, but he also knew that the kind of music he wanted to write would not be understood by most people. Prudently, he founded an honest, ethical, but highly profitable insurance company in New York City, ran it responsibly, treated his employees well, and became a multimillionaire. 

But Ives lived a double life. His other passion was writing music, not the traditional, “proper” Europhilic music he learned in composition classes. He knew very few listeners would like it, but was determined to write what he wanted regardless of its popular appeal. He wanted to “stretch ears.”

When Ives published the Concord in 1921, he accompanied it with a thirty-thousand word Essays Before a Sonata: 

"These prefatory essays were written by the composer for those who can't stand his music--and the music for those who can't stand his essays; to those who can't stand either, the whole is respectfully dedicated." 

"The following pages were written primarily as a preface or reason for the [writer's] second Pianoforte Sonata--"Concord, Mass., 1845,"--a group of four pieces, called a sonata for want of a more exact name, as the form, perhaps substance, does not justify it.... The whole is an attempt to present [one person's] impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over a half century ago.... The first and last movements do not aim to give any programs of the life or of any particular work of either Emerson or Thoreau but rather composite pictures or impressions. They are, however, so general in outline that, from some viewpoints, they may be as far from accepted impressions (from true conceptions, for that matter) as the valuation which they purport to be of the influence of the life, thought, and character of Emerson and Thoreau is inadequate.The four movements are, “impressionistic pictures of Emerson and Thoreau, a sketch of the Alcotts, and a Scherzo supposed to reflect a lighter quality which is often found in the fantastic side of Hawthorne.”

Only the most intrepid readers will continue on from this point. Warning: the music you will hear on March 15 comes from the same brain as the prose....

Emerson
It has seemed to the writer, that Emerson is greater--his identity more complete perhaps--in the realms of revelation--natural disclosure--than in those of poetry, philosophy, or prophecy. Though a great poet and prophet, he is greater, possibly, as an invader of the unknown,--America's deepest explorer of the spiritual immensities,--a seer painting his discoveries in masses and with any color that may lie at hand--cosmic, religious, human, even sensuous; a recorder, freely describing the inevitable struggle in the soul's uprise--perceiving from this inward source alone, that every "ultimate fact is only the first of a new series"; a discoverer, whose heart knows, with Voltaire, "that man seriously reflects when left alone," and would then discover, if he can, that "wondrous chain which links the heavens with earth--the world of beings subject to one law." In his reflections Emerson, unlike Plato, is not afraid to ride Arion's Dolphin, and to go wherever he is carried--to Parnassus or to "Musketaquid”....

Hawthorne  
The substance of Hawthorne is so dripping wet with the supernatural, the phantasmal, the mystical--so surcharged with adventures, from the deeper picturesque to the illusive fantastic, one unconsciously finds oneself thinking of him as a poet of greater imaginative impulse than Emerson or Thoreau. He was not a greater poet possibly than they--but a greater artist. Not only the character of his substance, but the care in his manner throws his workmanship, in contrast to theirs, into a kind of bas-relief. Like Poe he quite naturally and unconsciously reaches out over his subject to his reader. His mesmerism seeks to mesmerize us--beyond Zenobia's sister. But he is too great an artist to show his hand "in getting his audience," as Poe and Tschaikowsky occasionally do. His intellectual muscles are too strong to let him become over-influenced, as Ravel and Stravinsky seem to be by the morbidly fascinating--a kind of false beauty obtained by artistic monotony. However, we cannot but feel that he would weave his spell over us--as would the Grimms and Aesop. We feel as much under magic as the "Enchanted Frog." This is part of the artist's business....

The Alcotts  
If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he might now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's greatest talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was pained when his children of the earth were bad. Quite often the boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show how sin involved the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her story around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the moral sometimes browbeats the story....

Thoreau  

Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear "the Symphony." The rhythm of his prose, were there nothing else, would determine his value as a composer. He was divinely conscious of the enthusiasm of Nature, the emotion of her rhythms and the harmony of her solitude. In this consciousness he sang of the submission to Nature, the religion of contemplation, and the freedom of simplicity--a philosophy distinguishing between the complexity of Nature which teaches freedom, and the complexity of materialism which teaches slavery. In music, in poetry, in all art, the truth as one sees it must be given in terms which bear some proportion to the inspiration. In their greatest moments the inspiration of both Beethoven and Thoreau express profound truths and deep sentiment, but the intimate passion of it, the storm and stress of it, affected Beethoven in such a way that he could not but be ever showing it and Thoreau that he could not easily expose it. They were equally imbued with it, but with different results….

Go to Gretnamusic.org or call 717-361-1508 for tickets to the concert by pianist Gilles Vonsattel, Saturday March 15, 2014, 7:30 pm in Elizabethtown College's Leffler Center for the Performing Arts. Dinner buffet reservations are due on Monday before the concert.

Making Music May Delay Dementia

The act of playing a musical instrument calls upon multiple interconnected brain abilities. For example, balance, when I stand as I usually do to play the flute; vision, to interpret a printed language ('code') on a music stand; motor control, activation of a practiced and primed finely tuned system to receive and execute the instructions of the code; memory, to call up a Bach Sonata from its book shelf in the temporal lobe with a connection that sends instructions to the motor system; coordination, between tongue and both hands fitted precisely into a tempo and rhythm; deep-breathing and breath control, to last through an entire phrase; expression and emotion (phrasing, dynamics, style), layered on to the sounds to fit the character and 'message' of the composition; critical listening system to evaluate my own sounds--pitch, tone quality, fit into an ensemble, pace, tempo--in a feedback loop that makes instant corrections to all the functions mentioned above as needed; and so forth. All instruments demand similar and other abilities.

Whew! That is a major workout for the brain! And it's less expensive and (for me) more interesting than most 'cognitive exercises' I can purchase on the internet or pursue at a local AARP gathering or occupational therapy department. To cap it off, playing music with others is my favorite 'social activity.'

Researchers in 2003 followed older participants to study the relative contribution of various specific activities--like board games, puzzles, group discussions--for 5 years. Those participants who frequently played a musical instrument were less likely to have developed dementia compared to those who rarely played. This protective effect of playing music was stronger than that from the other activities. Physical activities (walking, swimming, etc) did not appear to confer any protective benefit in the development of dementia in this particular study. (They have in others.)

Another group of scientists in 2007 examined the beneficial effects piano lessons in old age. They compared naïve participants randomly allocated to an experimental group (6 months of intensive piano lessons) to a control group that did not have lessons. The experimental group received a half-hour lesson each week and was required to practice independently for a minimum of 3 hours each week. After this period of musical training, the piano players showed improvements on tests of working memory, perceptual speed, and motor skills, while the control group did not.

More recently (2010) researchers in this field concluded:

"To minimize the deleterious effects of aging on brain function, elderly individuals need to engage in demanding multisensory, cognitive, and motor activities on an intensive basis. Accordingly, a training program that is designed specifically to facilitate brain plasticity, or engage multiple brain regions (especially the frontal and prefrontal areas), may counteract some of the negative consequences underlying disuse associated with aging. One activity that has the potential to stimulate and preserve cognition is music making." (here, with a good review of this topic)

These observations even provide another argument for early music education. If you have ever played an instrument, it is far easer to take it up again, even when you are elderly, than it is to start cold for the first time in later life.

Alternative Medicine; Four Ways to Spot a Quack

by Carl Ellenberger MD

In my experience musicians turn more often than average to ‘alternative medicine' for help with problems, or just with hope to improve their health. The list includes the “Three ‘R’s,’” Reiki, Reflexology, Rolfing, and chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, vitamins and a zillion 'dietary supplements’ (and don't forget coffee enemas).

Reasons for this preference aren’t difficult to divine: medical ‘providers’ can be cold, rushed, clinical, and expensive; many musicians can’t afford health insurance (see Nov 16); health recommendations change often as science stumbles along a tortured path toward truths, offering complex answers to simple questions like, “Should I be taking Lipitor?” And finally, as imaginative people, musicians may be tempted by magical and exotic claims and practices.

A book I just finished can be a good earthbound guide: Do You Believe in Magic? (HarperCollins 2013) by Paul Offit, M.D., a skeptical mainstream medical authority at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Dr. Offit discusses the immense alternative medical industry.

He does not, as you might expect a mainstream academic to do, reject alternatives, but instead shows some can actually work, even as well as conventional medicine and surgery in certain situations. They work through the placebo response: a proportion of people with symptoms, pain or headache for example, will obtain relief from a sugar pill. Studies reliably show a success rate of around 30%, or higher, if the therapist is caring and convincing. The placebo response is not a product of trickery or deception; it accompanies actual physiological/chemical changes in the brain, such as production of endorphins, similar to changes evoked by other means like talk therapy and medications.

Acupuncture, for example, is one way of triggering the placebo response. It includes ritual, tradition ('proven over centuries'), positive expectations, value (cost), and perceived competence of a skilled practitioner exhaustively trained in an ‘ancient art.’ The needles don’t even have to puncture, just prick, so long as the patient experiences the other magical wonders. If the stage directions are followed and the performance goes well, acupuncture can generate a response in the brain and the patient may experience relief, albeit usually temporary. 

If you believe in them and their method, capable and caring practitioners of most alternative methods, chiropractors to reflexologists, can trigger your placebo response. Of course in the long term, the elephant in the room for all therapies is time; the body, given time, has remarkable power to heal itself. Back pain, for example, will naturally resolve in seven weeks in 85% of episodes, regardless of what happens during that time. Impatience may take us to a therapist who will, of course, accept the credit.

Such 'laying on the hands’ by the alternative industry may be what is missing in encounters with mainstream physicians, those who conduct an interview while typing and staring at a video terminal. Healthcare without the caring.

As in mainstream medicine, alternative practitioners include the incompetent and even charlatans. Bias may lead both to do what is good for their revenue in place of what serves the health of their patients. The number of unnecessary surgeries and drug prescriptions over the last century probably matches the scale of money spent on unproven therapies and supplements.

In sixteenth century Holland the word “kwakzalver” meant a pitchman who quacks like a duck while promoting salves and ointments. The word translated to English became “quack,” anyone who proffers false cures. One of Offit’s chapters, “When Alternative Medicine Becomes Quackery” lays out telltale signs.

Offit's first sign of quackery is a recommendation against conventional therapies that are helpful or even lifesaving. “Chinese herbal therapy for people with HIV looks much more promising” (than western medicine). That was published by Andrew Weil eight years after AZT had been shown to decrease HIV replication. 

One of my favorite medical laws is: “when you go to jiffy lube, you get an oil change and when you go to a [surgeon, chiropractor, etc] you get [whatever s/he has been trained to do]." If a chiropractor tells you that cracking your back will benefit your breast cancer as effectively as medical therapy, he’s a quack. Any practitioner who claims any of the above alternative methods will cure any life-threatening disease like cancer is a quack.

The second indicator of quackery is promotion of potentially harmful therapies without adequate warning. Before cracking your neck a chiropractor should disclose to you that such manipulation has caused strokes. I saw that happen in a child and similar cases appear in medical journals. 

All substances, whether ‘natural’ or ‘synthetic,’ ‘medication’ or ‘supplement’ (economic and political distinctions, not medical ones), have risks and can harm. (Calling a substance a 'dietary supplement' allows it escape the watchful eye of the FDA.) Acupuncture needles have been extracted from lungs and can spread infection.

A third quackery indicator is the draining of patients’ bank accounts. Alternative practitioners like Weil and Deepak Chopra are industries, now online, that peddle vitamins, herbs, supplements and proprietary ‘formulas’ as well as books that have made them and others like them (and TV evangelists) millionaires. The efficacy of most formulas are based on the claims of celebrities using their authority as graduates of the Today Show or Oprah.

Finally, the fourth way of crossing the line into quackery is by promoting magical thinking. Offit cites the example of useless titanium necklaces claimed to cause “longer lasting energy, less fatigue, shortened recovery time, and more relaxed muscles.” They are favored by baseball players, and are modern equivalents of copper bracelets to prevent arthritis. No evidence shows they channel electricity for health. (I'm tempted to put football helmets on the same list. They prevent lacerations of the scalp but not injuries to the brain.) Artists, I suppose are more prone to thinking in magical terms, energy fields, meridians, and astrology, than in the tedious, time-consuming and more complex universe of science.

Health Insurance for Musicians: 'Obamacare'

by Carl Ellenberger, MD

Like all other artists, musicians are among the Americans most likely to lack health insurance. A recent survey* disclosed that a whopping 55% of musicians don't have it. The majority of those (88%) say they can't afford it. Most of the uninsured are freelancers who, under the current system, would have to buy expensive individual policies. 

Those results suggested to the surveyors that artists "are exactly who the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") was designed to help" and stand to benefit most from because now they can shop for policies on the exchanges or find themselves eligible for Medicaid in their state and not be excluded by pre-existing problems or exorbitant cost. 

Unfortunately, musicians (and non-musicians) also say they are confused by new law, not surprising in view of the well-funded efforts aimed at confusing them. 

In my view, it would be good to try to clear the confusion sometime in the next several months. Despite its recent temporary notoriety, you could do worse than starting at https://www.healthcare.gov.

*The Future of Music Coalition

Edward MacDowell; the best composer you don't hear

One of our board members and Chair of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Elizabethtown College, E. Douglas Bomberger, has just published "MacDowell" a marvelous biography of the composer Edward MacDowell (Oxford Press, 2013).

MacDowell enjoyed what we might call rock-star celebrity (absent the income) around the turn of the 19th century. Although born in the US, he earned that reputation by writing and performing his works, mostly for the piano with or without orchestra, in France and Germany over 12 years. Partly because of this fame the president and trustees selected him to serve as the first Chair of Music at Columbia University in 1896. In accepting, MacDowell had a grand vision: 

“First, to teach music scientifically and technically, with a view to training musicians who shall be competent to teach and compose. Second, to treat music historically and aesthetically as an element of a liberal education." 

Like Robert Schumann and Hector Berlioz before him, MacDowell was also one of the greatest musician-writers about music. Some of his writing survives, including the notes for his introductory music class. You can download "Critical and Historical Essays" for free from iBooks.

"…in speaking of this art, one is seriously hampered by a certain difficulty in making oneself understood. To hear and enjoy music seems sufficient to many persons, and an investigation as to the causes of this enjoyment seems to them superfluous. And yet, unless the public comes into closer touch with the tone poet than that objective state which accepts with the ears what is intended for the spirit, which hears the sounds and is deaf to their import, unless the public can separate the physical pleasure of music from its ideal significance, our art, in my opinion, cannot stand on a sound basis."

Although recordings of his Piano concertos by Van Cliburn and Earl Wild gave his music a boost decades ago, his music deserves more hearing. I now take Edward MacDowell more seriously and suggest we all should. Douglas Bomberger's book is a good way to start. I downloaded To a Wild Rose from imslp and sat down to the keyboard for the first time in many years. I am also investigating the mysterious neurologic illness that ended MacDowell's life too early, at age 46.

Concert halls and peanuts in a boxcar; the question of scale

Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center seats 2738 people. When Bernard Labadie conducted the New York Philharmonic there in March for the Bach Variations Festival, critic Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim remarked in the NY Times:

"...Bach’s suites, with their gleaming trumpets, are at heart festive works of chamber music, and in this hall they came across as mild-mannered and diffident. The subtle sparkle and refined textures of the violin concertos didn’t stand a chance."

She went on to say that another problem was that a true "historically-informed performance" (HIP)* of music from Handel and Bach's era requires more than 'paring down' vibrato and 'a couple of rehearsals with a visiting conductor,' even when you are talking about the New York Philharmonic and a conductor with M. Labadie's prodigious abilities.

On October 14 in Leffler Performance Center, we intend to remedy those  problems!

Drey Schwanen

What we call a 'concert hall' made its first appearance in Bach's home town, Leipzig, but not until 30 years after his and Handel's deaths. In 1780, 'because of complaints about concert conditions and audience behavior in the tavern' (Drey Schwanen, left), the mayor and city council of Leipzig offered to renovate one story of the Gewandhaus (a building used by textile merchants and the city's arsenal) for the orchestra's use. They had room for 500 seats (below).

Alte Gewandhaus, 1781

Zimmermann's Coffee House

So, during their lives, most of Bach and Handel's works were performed in smaller places like taverns, coffee houses (especially Zimmermann's, left) and churches, places where 'acoustics' would have ranged all over the map but were generally less problematic because the spaces were small.

Talking simply about scale, the enclosed volume of most of these concert-hall precursors was certainly far smaller than that of Avery Fisher Hall, built to accommodate the largest number of paying patrons to hear a massive modern "symphonic" orchestra such as dreamed of in the 19th century by megalomaniacal composers like Berlioz and Scriabin. (The mystical Scriabin imagined concerts covering entire countries!)

Talking about both scale and acoustics, Musser Auditorium at Leffler Performing Arts Center at Elizabethtown College would seem to be just about right for the October concert of Les Violons du Roy, conductor Bernard Labadie, and mezzosoprano, Stephanie Blythe. We should hear the entire range of the "gleaming trumpets...and all the subtle sparkle and refined textures" of the program. For comparison, Musser, seating about 800, is close in size to the original Gewandhaus, and to the Leipzig Singakademie where Mendelssohn conducted the revival of Bach's St. Matthew Passion (1829), finally overcoming the formidable century-old challenge of the complexity of the score, multiple choruses, soloists and orchestras. 

Musser Auditorium at Leffler Performance Center

photo: Joel Fan

A Baroque orchestra is about the same size as a chamber orchestra. "Chamber," (or "Kammer") initially distinguished secular from religious music, a 'room' from a 'sanctuary,' and implied small scale and intimacy between players and listeners. Indeed, premieres of what has become the core of chamber music--by Schubert, Beethoven, the Schumanns, Brahms--often took place in rather crowded small spaces which listeners eye-to-eye with the players as many old drawings suggest. In churches, small orchestras were necessary to fit into the choir or chancel.

The October 14 concert will also eliminate the problem of large symphonic orchestral musicians playing in an unfamiliar 'baroquey' style. Les Violons do that every day. Far from the 'authentic' early music performances of yore -- the authenticity often a gimmick or a substitute for competency -- historically-informed performances bring this music to a life that you may have never experienced before. The genius of Bach and Handel, as with Mozart, Beethoven and other 'old masters,' is that their music speaks to us centuries later when brought to life by performers like you will hear on October 14. The result is as contemporary and exciting as Jay Z or Lady Gaga! (but perhaps out of kilter with our current "loud, violent, shouting" cultural moment -- see previous post below). 

Of course none of this matters to Stephanie Blythe. Her pianissimo can reach the back row of the Metropolitan Opera House, and no doubt even the back of Avery Fisher.

____

*If you have read this far, you might like to read the late Bruce Haynes' The End of Early Music; A period performer's history of music for the twenty-first century.

Quarterback or Concertmaster? A 'no-brainer!'

"...[football's] real advantage is that it’s louder, faster and more violent [than baseball] — which is to say, better in tune with our cultural moment. 'We are a shouting culture now….'" 

--"Is the Game Over?" Jonathan Mahler, New York Times, Sept 29

If we are we indeed experiencing a cultural change (a "moment?"), it starts in childhood. 

Football encourages, they say, team spirit, character, and self-confidence, but also starts a process that can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy ("CTE" will soon become a household acronym) and joint replacements.*

An orchestra or band can also foster those same qualities while respecting the brain and developing all its capabilities when it is most receptive (and at the same time most vulnerable to trauma).

*Stern, RA, et al, NEUROLOGY, Aug 21, 2013: "Consistent with earlier reports of boxers, our findings suggest that there may be 2 different clinical presentations of CTE, with one initially exhibiting behavioral or mood changes, and the other initially exhibiting cognitive impairment. The behavior/mood group demonstrated symptoms at a significantly younger age than the cognition group.... almost all subjects in the behavior/mood group demonstrated cognitive impairments at some point…." 

It's more than just occasional concussions. See here.

Addendum: New research suggests a relationship between head impact exposure, white matter integrity, and cognition over the course of a single football season, even in the absence of concussion, in a cohort of college athletes. Neurology 2014;82: 63-69.

Addendum: In a preliminary study comparing the brains of 50 college football players and 25 matched controls, researchers found that playing football was associated with reduced hippocampal volume on magnetic resonance imaging. (The hippocampus is where memory lives.--ed) Singh R, Meier TB, Kuplicki R, et al. Relationship of collegiate football experience and concussion with hippocampal volume and cognitive outcomes. JAMA. 2014; 311:(18):1883–1888.

Steinway v. Baldwin

It happens often. At the reception after a concert the pianist, quietly, confidentially, and as if the words were about to come as a revelation, says to me, "You ought to get a Steinway."

Yeah. Right!

Our Baldwin concert grand is at least 30 years old and has been the butt of harsh comments from dozens of pianists, especially when we get behind in maintenance. And that can be a challenge out here in the Gretna jungle. But we never fail to tune and tweak it right before a concert, even if there is only one short piano work on the program.

One problem is illustrated by what happens to a harpsichord, an all-wooden instrument lacking the iron frame of the modern piano. A few years ago we tried to keep it stable in a climate-controlled room until just minutes before a concert, then swiftly rushed it to the outdoor hall (in Dave's pickup), tuning it minutes before curtain time. To our horror, as it soaked up the humidity during the 2-hour performance, its pitch went up almost a half step and several keys refused to budge. (We were lucky that singers can transpose!) Now we move it into the Playhouse days ahead and allow it to soak all the dampness it can hold. Then we tune.

I can think of better ways that $125,000 could improve our music than by replacing a Baldwin with a Steinway, but that's a non-issue anyway because we will never face that luxurious choice. And we do have a brand new Steinway in Leffler Hall at Elizabethtown College that we use for our Monsters of the Steinway" series, resuming with Gilles Vonsattel on March 15.

In early years we rented pianos from a local piano dealer. Inexplicably on the second floor of a 19th C. building and overseen by an ancient and irascible proprietor, I thought the place must have branched off from the Wieck Piano Fabrik in Leipzig, but the pianos had mostly Japanese names. Legs punctured the rotting floors of the old Playhouse and felt came unglued from hammers at the most inopportune times. Then in 1982 we rented a majestic Baldwin from York because our schedule included Dave Brubeck at the beginning, Marian McPartland in the middle, and George Shearing at the end. I, and they, were quite happy with the instrument and the cost to buy it was only slightly more than a small BMW.

That was when the late great gastroenterologist Bob Dye served on our board. I can't even begin to imagine the conversation he had with one of his musically-inclined patients lying supine on his examining table, but the piano became ours. The Big Baldwin has served with distinction and has proud scars to prove it.

You may have noticed that pianos (now we must call them 'acoustic pianos') have lost more value than a 1959 Plymouth (or books and records). Most without a Steinway decal (OK, and maybe a few others like Bösendorfer and Fazioli) are worth roughly their weight in cement. Everyone is holding their breath to await the fate of Steinway, recently purchased by Steve Case, founder of Amazon. Well they should, in view of the story of how Baldwin left the stage. I read a version of the story by Richard Conniff in the current (Sept/Oct) Yale Alumni Magazine.

"Baldwin was a piano company that had transformed itself, by a series of acquisitions, into an insurance giant and Wall Street darling. When it announced its latest acquisition in the summer of 1982, Jim Chanos [Yale professor and investment analyst, subject of the article] got the job of figuring out if the proposed deal would be good [for his clients, i.e., investment titans]. 'And I started looking at this mess of a company and couldn't figure out how they were making money and what their disclosure forms were saying….'" 

 "Then one night…his phone rang…. [An anonymous caller] proceeded to point Chanos to public files of correspondence between Baldwin and state insurance regulators in Arkansas. Those files turned out to be a beginner's guide to financial shenanigans. The regulators had belatedly discovered, among other things, that Baldwin was improperly using insurance reserves to finance its acquisitions."

Four months later Arkansas seized the assets of Baldwin-United and Chanos became a financial detective (notorious or celebrated, depending on your viewpoint) who later uncovered scores of other financial shenanigans including those of Enron, Tyco, Worldcom, and the subprime mortgage mess.

See Wikipedia for a more comprehensive version of the Baldwin story, but the company, now a subsidiary of the Gibson Guitar Company, makes pianos, mostly uprights I suppose, in China (a country, according to Chanos, "on an economic treadmill to hell.")

I think I appreciate our old Baldwin even more. Now it's in hibernation until next summer. It's old but has low mileage. 

Summer 2013 Ends with Enescu

We still have the Elliott Carter Figment for Cello to look forward to, next Sunday evening. 

Oh yes! And the Enescu String Octet in C Major, Op. 7 played by the combined Momenta and Daedalus Quartets. Beethoven's "Harp" Quartet (my favorite) separates Carter and Enescu.

George Enescu, 1881 - 1955

You may never again in your lifetime have a chance to hear either the Carter or the Enescu, so please put this 'postscript' concert of our season prominently on your refrigerator door. Yes, I know, Gretna usually settles into wintry slumber after Labor Day. I guarantee that you will not have difficulty parking this Sunday evening before the 6:30 pre-concert opening performance by students Sean Brown, violinist, and Audrey Rutt, pianist. (N.B.: the Jigger Shop is closed for the season.) 

[Sunday, September 8, 7:30, Mt. Gretna Playhouse]

Looking down this page I see I have a little more space for a few mementos from our summer.

A happy Momenta and Charles Abramovic acknowledging a standing ovation after their stunning and thundering Elgar Piano Quintet.

Rehearsing the Boccherini Guitar Quintet, Allen Krantz and Momenta. Allen's re-premiered Piano Quartet (this time without Hurricane Irene in the background) commissioned by Paul and Irena Merluzzi, received a marvelous performance by Momenta and Abramovic.

The house behind the Playhouse built by John Cilley who also built the original Playhouse in 1894. The circular porch serves as box seat. (Inquire at the box office. If you pay enough, we'll cut down the rhododendrons.)

Postscript to Mar 5: "What (if anything) Ails Classical Music?"

My Mar 5 post has become the most popular post since I began this blog. 

The following is a more passionate answer to that question by James Brinton. It appeared recently on Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc* in response to a remark by Deborah Borda (LA Phil) about the decline of orchestra subscriptions.

'Within 20 years, the subscription rate will be down to 15 or 20 percent. It makes it a real challenge financially and artistically. This is an on-demand society now.’

Perhaps more blunt than I, Brinton responds: 

"Many assume, wrongly, that there is some defect in classical music causing this. It’s unpopular, old-fashioned, elitist, etc. None of that is true; classical music is timeless and accessible to anyone willing to give it a chance. In reality, classical is the victim of:

"1. A multi-billion dollar marketing effort on behalf of high ROI (return on investment) rock, pop, and hip-hop (most of which isn’t worth burning); capitalism at the expense of culture. If the same amounts were spent marketing classical, the problem would disappear." 

(I don't view this mainly as a marketing problem -- see Mar 5 -- but certainly more marketing could help immensely. But read on…. -ed.)

"2. More than half a century of declining educational standards and penny pinching which have gutted music education, music appreciation, and classical exposure–even as the pop marketers were capturing ever greater share of young minds." (Yes!)

"3. Self-absorbed, entitled, orchestra board members who feel that, because they contribute, they somehow own an orchestra (See Minnesota). This is coupled with a spreadsheet approach to culture; many of these people and the administrators they hire are chained to the idea of profit when, in fact, cultural institutions are non-profit organizations and demand a different managerial approach." 

(Those dangers emerge during some periods in some organizations. And 'profit' may be necessary when you are digging out of hole dug in previous years. -ed.)

"3a. These people also carry a CEO mindset into the fray in which employees are costs to be minimized, either in numbers or salary. They fail to understand that orchestral musicians ARE the art they think they are supporting, instead they consider them mere overhead. And because they know almost nothing about what it takes to become an orchestral musician, they undervalue their greatest resource." 

(But some orchestra musicians may not understand that it takes far more than good playing to get people in the seats and pay the bills. Like it isn't: "You play. They come." -ed.)

"4. A generation of culturally illiterate managers (See M. Henson) who have attempted to solve financial problems over the bodies of musicians rather than approaching them sanely. This is the managerial equivalent of saying, 'Kill the baby, then you won’t have to worry about day care.'” 

(Hmmm!? Maybe sometimes.  -ed.)

"5. A headlong charge, especially in the US, toward the lowest common denominator in terms of public art, culture, and education. Never an intellectual country, the US has become blatantly anti-intellectual in everything from its politics to its thinking about education (See Texas’ rejection of instruction in “critical thinking”)." 

(And 46% of Americans reject the science of evolution!)

"6. A generation of bureaucrats so drenched in pop that they lack almost all familiarity with, and respect for, classical music. Some of these people are so ill-informed that they can’t differentiate between hip-hop and classical music (See Germany’s Theresa Bauer versus the University of Music and Performing Arts, Mannheim*). Bureaucrats unable to appreciate culture should not administer state culture programs."

"All these things have to be addressed, and we have little time left to address them." 

(With Charles Rosen, I remain optimistic because so many children and young people still want to play classical music, despite all these obstacles. After the smoke clears, maybe not in my lifetime, 'classical music' will continue on, probably in many different ways. -ed.)

--James Brinton (my editorial comments in italics)

*Now see Mar 5: "What (if anything) Ails Classical Music? A Neurologic Diagnosis."

*Slipped Disc post on Deborah Borda

*The Minister for Science, Research and Art, Theresia Bauer (member of Parliament from the German Green Party) has proposed closing down the courses of study in orchestral music and the music education programs in Mannheim and Trossingen. (here)