After four years and almost 500 entries, it’s time to say farewell to the readers of this blog.

As you may already know, The Palm Beach Post has offered buyouts to many of its staff members, and I’ve decided to accept that offer and move on to other things. I’m quite nervous about it, but also very excited: This will be a chance to get back to the music I’ve tried over the years to finish writing, and even to think about exploring other careers altogether.

For the time being, I’ll still be here in South Florida, and I plan to write about local classical music events for my own blog — which I plan to set up over the next couple days — and for another Website, so look for me on the Web if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read here.

I have been privileged to hear a great many fine afternoons and evenings of music over the past 10 years here at The Post, and it’s been a joy to get even more coverage of them into the paper, at least digitally, by means of this blog. The most important thing I’ve discovered is that this part of the country has a classical music community that is bigger and more active than I had thought. There are literally times at the height of the season in December through March that there are three or four good events on each weekend day, and sometimes I’ve found it necessary to get to a couple of them on the same day.

I’ve heard from a lot of fascinating people as I’ve done this blog, and I hope to keep hearing from them in the future, once I reestablish my Web presence.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for loving the music.

Here’s a young pianist named Kimball Gallagher playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata:

Here is the third and final installment in my March talk with composer Libby Larsen, who's in the middle of a two-year residency at Florida Atlantic University. We covered a lot of ground in the final moments of our interview, and this transcript has been edited for immaterial digressions (by me) and for the usual hesitations of natural speech.

It seems to me that composers such as Larsen are the kinds of writers who are well-oriented to their times and willing to reflect them in their art. It will be interesting to hear more of her music and see what she brings to the second year of her residency.

This section begins with her answering a follow-up question to the idea of a "Mobius curve" of energy between composer, performer and audience being vital to the music:

GTS:...Without that Mobius curve (you talked about earlier), has that stopped us from building an American repertory, an American canon?

Larsen: I think it has. It has. There's a lot of other reasons we don't have an American canon, but I think that lack of Mobius curve, as part of the compositional process, has been very inhibiting to those of us who would speak through sound.

GTS: So it sounds like what you're trying to do is to open things up a little bit, I'm going to write more, I'm going to write more stuff for all kinds of ensembles, whatever's around here, try to react more to what people actually are talking about and doing, and maybe we can get a more relevant American music.

Larsen: Or even get an idea that we have an American music that belongs to European instruments. Or maybe we don't.

GTS: What about (Louis Moreau) Gottschalk? ....There was a guy who was years ahead of his time...He had already done that mixing that we celebrate everybody 100 years later for doing.

Larsen: His music suffered in the buildup of the Germanic approach to studying music ...When I was composer in residence at the Minnesota Orchestra and we were planning a summer festival of American music, (pianist) John Browning was going to be coming in .... And I thought: John Browning!

GTS:The Barber concerto.

Larsen: Barber concerto! Great American pianist! I brought him some Gottschalk, and I asked him: Would you consider playing it? He threw it on the floor and stomped on it. He called it "trash."

GTS: Really?

Larsen: He did.

GTS: That surprises me.

Larsen:....Those kinds of experiences keep sending me back into the rhythms of our daily lives, because that's where we live. And so much fine music comes out of it.

GTS:..When I was listening to your music ....I don't know if you ever had an atonal phase.

Larsen: I decided not to in graduate school.

GTS: You must have been at graduate school in the '70s.

Larsen: I was.

GTS: That would have been a hard time to avoid being a Schoenberg, or a Webern.

Larsen: You had to be, if you wanted a job, if you wanted tenure. And that actually figured heavily in my decision not to join the faculty. ..It seemed to me anti-academic to insist on a specific language as a means to tenure.

..I just knew that while I loved to write 12-tone music, and (had) completely no problems mastering any of the methodology for creating music, that it seemed short-lived to me at the time.

GTS: ..I get a sense (from your music) of someone who embraces all these different kinds of music. Is that true?

Larsen: Yes, and I analyze them all, too, to see what makes them tick. Because the question is: Why that music? ... That's how I learned to love rap.

GTS: There's a rhythm thing.

Larsen: Completely. If you transcribe rap...

GTS: Like (Leos) Janacek used to do? Write down the voice patterns?

Larsen: Yes. Me, too. I do that, too. I transcribe voice all the time. And I transcribe rap, you know, in all of its layers. You have to work from the bottom up, so you can get to the foreground layer, which is the texted layer. And it's so beautiful, rhythmically beautiful...

It's a bard's art, that falls prey, as so often in all great art forms, falls prey to commodification. But it's a bard's art.

GTS: That's happened to it already.

Larsen: Absolutely. It's been commodified, and unfortunately, it's not much about the art form anymore than it is about the shock value, and lifestyles, and sales, and fashion lines, and merchandising.

GTS: Which rap artist do you like the best?

Larsen: My way in was through Nelly.

GTS: Other than the FAU stuff, what other stuff have you got going?

Larsen: I have two recordings coming out this year, and I'm really looking forward to it. One of my last opera, Every Man Jack....

GTS: Is that the Jack London thing?

Larsen: Yeah. And one of string chamber music, including the trio that's on the program tonight. And I'm working on a new opera which will premiere right before I'm here next year in April.

GTS: Who's doing it?

Larsen: The University of North Carolina.

GTS: What's the subject?

Larsen: Picnic, which for me is about the crossroads of military-style culture with spontaneous culture.

GTS: It's a neat play.

Larsen: I just love it. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and I've always loved the play, but when I approached it as an opera, I thought: why did it win the Pulitzer Prize, when it's so often produced just for its surface value?

So, Picnic, and then a couple of string quartets and several choral pieces. Plus a bassoon sonata.

GTS: Good for you. Bassoon players will be happy, because there aren't enough (sonatas).

Larsen: No, there aren't. I'm writing it for Ben Kamins, who's right now teaching at Rice, and he's just -- you know, I always try to find a master.

GTS: You learn from people like that.

Larsen: And they call you on the carpet right away. We really have a great partnership.

GTS:...Tchaikovsky would sit down at 9 o'clock, and say the Muse had better be ready .... Do you have a set time to write?

Larsen: It's not quite as regimented as that, just because the world's a different place, and I don't have a protected study, and hardly anybody does anymore.

I work very rigorously in my head all the time, and then I need a deadline, and I try to pressure-cook myself to the point of snatching decisions out of infinity. Because the deadline's there, and so I try to set my deadlines in ways that don't make the performers nuts.
.
GTS: Has the Website been helpful for you in terms of reaching people?

Larsen: Not in terms of reaching performers. It's still a person-to-person art form in the area I work in ... I am actually in the process of completely revamping my Website over the summer because what I am noticing is that my Website will be used by lots more performers once I have a stream of all the music that is there.

Because more and more performers want to hear a performance. And so, the Viola Sonata, they don't want a snippet, they want a referential performance.

GTS: And you're OK with that.

Larsen: Yeah. ..the challenges are technical challenges, to make the music available in ways that are essential now, but not ripoff-able.

GTS: ....My conviction has been over the past couple years that classical music is in better shape now than it was 30 years ago. You can hear everything now, instantaneously. And that makes a big difference.

Larsen: I've noticed the same thing. We're in really good shape. We're just not in very good shape in the orchestral, concert format. That's the one that's in trouble.

But opera is gangbusters, and chamber music is gangbusters, and choral music is fine, and art song is enjoying a huge rebirth.

GTS:..What's not to like? It's music.

Larsen: Yeah, it's wonderful.

Here's a short snippet from Larsen's opera, Every Man Jack, from a performance in California in 2006.

This year, I got to only three of the four Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival concerts, but it still satisfied my urge for good music inside as the blast furnace that is July and August in South Florida rolled on.

I missed the second concert, which contained music by Haydn, Paul Schoenfield, Telemann and Anton Reicha (his big Octet in E-flat, Op. 96).

Of the other three concerts, my favorite performances included the Beethoven Archduke Trio on Concert I, the Brahms G major String Quintet in Concert 4, and two pieces on Concert 3: A charming flute, clarinet and bassoon piece (Aria and Variations) by the composer and mountain climber Wawrzyniec Zulawski, and the La Revue de Cuisine of Martinu.

And just the other day, one of the group’s recordings — the Bullfighter’s Prayer of Joaquin Turina, featured on its Buried Treasure disc — could be heard on American Public Media. It sounded quite good, too.

By now, area audiences are very familiar with the names and faces of the musicians who take part in this modest festival, and they know they’ll get everything from canonical works to the rarest of rarities, along with a premiere or two.

Last season, I offered some suggestions for changes in the festival, primarily adding two more weeks, with different local artists as guests, and offering written program notes to go along with the oral notes everyone gives nowadays.

I still think those are good ideas and I reiterate those suggestions now. I think the local audience here has shown that they will support these concerts in good numbers — particularly at the height of summer — and offering some support and time for other performers to mix things up a bit could draw more interest from outside and establish in the wider classical world the idea that South Florida is a good place to find live performances of this music.

That said, I’m still happy that Karen Dixon, Michael Ellert and Michael Forte (left to right, at top of this post) have spent so much time and energy over the past 17 summers to put these concerts together, and I’m pleased once again to use this space to offer them a tip of my digital hat.

Here’s a recording from 1928 of Alfred Cortot, Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals in the first movement of the Archduke:

I haven’t seen too many commemorations of the Rimsky-Korsakov anniversary this year, but he deserves some of our time.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov died 100 years ago this past June at the age of 64, apparently from heart disease. He’s still best known for two pieces: The tone poem Scheherazade, and The Flight of the Bumblebee, which is from his opera Tsar Saltan.

Rimsky, as he is often familiarly called, spent the last part of his career composing opera, all of it steeped in Russian folklore. He seems to have never been happier as a creator than when he was writing about the legendary Russian past, and as the British historian Orlando Figes has written, the productions of his last six operas had a huge influence on people such as Serge Diaghilev. If you read his Principles of Orchestration (and I’ve lost my Dover copy somewhere, but it’s fascinating), most of the examples are drawn from his operatic work, and when I was reading the book 25 years or so ago, it was difficult to hear what he was talking about since there were so few recordings of his operas available.

Now things have changed for the better in that regard, and no doubt more people have gotten acquainted with this composer through Anna Netrebko’s Russian Album, which includes four Rimsky arias -- one each from Tsar Saltan and The Tsar’s Bride, and two from The Snow Maiden. They are exquisite in their own special way, full of beautiful colors and lovely melodies, and a kind of static delicacy that keeps these heroines remote but very attractive.

Here’s Anna Netrebko singing The Rose and the Nightingale, from The Tsar‘s Bride:

Rimsky had an unusual life. He was a professional Navy man for years (one of his ports of call during 1864-5 was New York; I don’t know whether he said anything in a letter home about the fact that there was a war on in the USA) even while working under Balakirev as one of the Mighty Handful composers.

But his greatest fame came later as a teacher. His pupils included Glazunov, Prokofiev and Stravinsky, and the latter’s skill at orchestration owes a lot to the older composer. In his Memories and Commentaries, Stravinsky remembered Rimsky this way:

Rimsky was a strict man, and a strict, though at the same time very patient, teacher. (He would say ‘ponimyete, ponimyete,’ ‘you understand,’ again and again throughout my lessons.) His knowledge was precise, and he was able to impart what he knew with great clarity.

He also was something of a reactionary, Stravinsky said, an anti-Tsarist politically who nonetheless refused to listen to new music from France and Germany (particularly Richard Strauss), and was utterly dismissive of Tchaikovsky.

All of which is interesting, but more important from posterity’s standpoint is that Rimsky worked tirelessly on behalf of other composers, most particularly Modest Mussorgsky, his fellow Balakirev acolyte. Rimsky comes in for a lot of abuse for the way he ironed out Mussorgsky’s writing in The Night on Bald Mountain, Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina, but without him, there’s little doubt that Mussorgsky would be far less a household name and concert favorite than he is today.

Without Rimsky, we might have had to wait for another enthusiast of a much later time to take a look through the scores and either present them as is, or with heavy editing . Nowadays, we celebrate the originality of Mussorgsky’s original conceptions, but they would never have been played by all those conservative conductors and orchestras of the 19th and 20th centuries if they hadn’t been edited along more traditional lines.

For that, and for his tireless service on behalf of Russian music, the world owes him a substantial debt, and it would be nice if his work got more frequent hearings in this centenary year of his passing.

There are several interesting Rimsky videos on YouTube, including a recording of his rarely heard Piano Concerto, played by Sviatoslav Richter in a recording from 1950. It’s worth checking out; still, here’s the opening of Scheherazade:

In Sue Mingus’ memoir (Tonight at Noon) of her husband, jazz great Charles Mingus, which I was browsing through the other day, she writes about a period in the bassist’s life when pipes were a key accessory:

Pipes were one of his many diversions in those days, smoking itself less a pleasure of the lungs then an enhancement of life through ritual and accumulation, one more outlet for creation and for art.

Although she means that he brought creative effort to his pipe and tobacco collection, it made me wonder whether it was important for him to have the pipes in order to write. The critical word here was “ritual.”

There’s something important about having just the right setting for creation, or indeed for practicing. I’m an old-fashioned person in some ways, and I like to write music with pencil and paper (it takes me longer that way if I want performances because I have to transfer everything to my Sibelius notation program; I tend to use it the way Balzac used his proofs — as another stage in the revision).

One of the reasons I like coffee shops is that fresh, strong coffee has the aroma of industry. That surely is one of its chief claims to permanence for our culture; I see these places as nifty little windows into the American working soul. Yes, the country’s hard at work, they say; stop by when we’ve got more time to talk.

And I enjoy taking time to make coffee at home not as a crutch to stay awake but as a partner in mulling over what I’m doing: Does that extra four bars I wrote as a transition between sections work? (Sip.) Nah. Not really. Better cross it out. (Sip, sip.) I think the final form of this movement is taking shape (Sip. Sluuuurp.) Hmm. Maybe not.

The point is that I need things to look and be a certain way in order to get into the full creative spirit. Wagner had to wear silk robes and work in a room with heavy drapes to keep a lot of the sunlight out, while Shostakovich could, and did, work in the middle of chaos like the German assault on Leningrad. I can crank out words and music in the middle of unpropitious circumstances if need be, but I prefer to have a work space and work environment that are creation-ready, and little totems nearby to help: Hot black coffee in an interesting mug, sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencils (HB2), cream-colored lined paper (I like Archives 18-stave orchestral book), my green-marble Waterman fountain pen nearby to ink things I’m going to keep.

I think these rituals are a good way of reinforcing the working space we find ourselves in; they spur us to the habits of mind we need to work.

Now that I think about it, I suppose this entry is nothing more than a gloss on a Billy Collins poem called The Best Cigarette (from his 1995 collection The Art of Drowning), which is about how Collins gave up smoking, and the things he misses about lighting up, the most important of which had to do with how it accompanied his work.

He’d get “something going in the typewriter,” then go to the kitchen for coffee and smoke a cigarette on the way back to his study. “Then I would be my own locomotive,” he writes, puffing away as he wrote. I like that image, but I need props to fill my boiler, and these I get from ritual arrangements of writing implements and liquid stimulants.

Anybody else have specific rituals they need to follow in order to be creative? Feel free to post away.

The Medici.tv Website offers up some more interesting material in this concert Tuesday night from the Verbier Festival in Verbier, Switzerland.

The pianist here is the 20-year-old Yuja Wang, a Beijing native now studying at the Curtis Institute with Gary Graffman. She’s got wonderful lightness of touch, sensitivity of line and exceptional accuracy, and a growing list of prestigious appearances.

I love that first Ligeti etude (Book I, No. 4) in this performance; she just kinds of winds up her left hand and lets it roll. It’s a great little piece, jazzy and smart, beautifully crafted and a joy to listen to. Wang’s clarity of technique is what makes this performance really work; it has to be super-clean like this to make the proper effect.

And the Liszt B minor Sonata might not be congenial to the taste of listeners who like an older style of drama and flash, but it’s rare that you hear this piece articulated so cleanly. I can hear every one of those individual octaves as she thunders down the keyboard in the middle of the piece.

And she’s able to turn off the stormclouds and pull way back for the tender middle section. This is what we call control, and it’s critical for pianists who want major careers; this is such a hard piece to play, and most of the time the sections of the work kind of slam into each other because it’s so difficult to secure the variety of attack you need.

But she can do it. And you can hear more of what I'm talking about in her reading of the Mendelssohn Midsummer Night's Dream scherzo, in a Rachmaninov arrangement. It's light but really strong at the same time, and again, delightful to listen to. And the Rachmaninov take on Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee gets all the old-fashioned showboat pianism it needs.

It’s a most impressive recital, and I could see where she could have a major career if she’s guided properly (there’s a rating on the top from members of the site, apparently; it’s only two stars out of six, which is nuts. Someone needs to calm down.)

The pieces on this program tend to favor display and showmanship; I’d love to hear her in something deeper. But in the main, this is artist who might very well develop into a huge presence on the piano scene.

Take a spin through this video and tell me what you think.

The eminent American composer Norman Dello Joio died last week at the age of 95 after a long and distinguished career, and with his passing goes another of his generation of writers whose compositional focus was primarily lyrical.

I interviewed Dello Joio for a couple hours about a dozen years ago, when he was visiting his condo in Indian River Shores. He had just recovered from a long stay in the hospital, and he was clearly still feeling the effects of it.

But he patiently answered all my questions, even though I’m sure I stayed for far too long, and he was gracious enough to revisit the story of his career, one he had no doubt told many, many times. (I don’t have the tape of the interview with me right now, or the article I wrote for The Stuart News, so the quotes I’ll give are from memory, but I feel sure they’re pretty close to verbatim.)

The turning point in his early compositional life was his period of study with the great Paul Hindemith at Yale and Tanglewood in the 1940s. He had been studying with Bernard Wagenaar, but Dello Joio said that Wagenaar was basically too nice to him. “He let you do whatever you wanted,” Dello Joio said.

Hindemith was much different. “Brutal,” Dello Joio said, upbraiding him for not knowing things such as the range of the oboe when orchestrating. But that tough taskmastering was exactly what Dello Joio needed, and the advice Hindemith gave him later provided the direction he followed the rest of his writing life.

The older composer told Dello Joio that his gift was essentially lyrical, and that it made no sense for him to ignore that; on the contrary, he should make as much as he could of it. “You don’t want to lose that,” Hindemith told him.

Dello Joio also talked about his work with Martha Graham, his experiences writing for television, his children (who include the equestrian Norman and the composer Justin), and his devotion to his craft. He was in his early 80s at that point and still writing — I got to interview him because he had been commissioned to write a new piece for the Atlantic Classical Orchestra. It was touching to hear him describe how worried he was during his illness that he was done composing, but found himself trying to write anyway, and — success.

“I said to myself, maybe I can still do something,” he said.

And he could.

He’s perhaps best-known for his choral music, but the piece I’ve heard the most over the past few years has been his Meditations on Ecclesiastes, which won the Pulitzer in 1957. It’s a lovely work, with advanced but not grinding harmonies, and in which Dello Joio’s instinct for the melodic line is foremost.

As I write, I’m listening to a disc of his Graham scores — Diversion of Angels, Seraphic Dialogues and Exaltation of Larks. These are fine pieces, too, particularly the Seraphic Dialogues, which draws on the symphony he drew from his music for The Triumph of St. Joan, one of two operas he wrote on the Joan of Arc story.

Dello Joio was a fine exponent of a mainstream American classical style, and his music is well worth searching out if you’re unfamiliar with it. I’m pleased that I had a chance to meet him, hear his stories, and get acquainted with his work.

Here’s his 1973 song, Come to Me, My Love, as done by a Missouri choir on YouTube (there are several other versions here, as well as a performance of his piano trio, piano music, and other pieces):

The criticism of the way we do classical music in this country is that we return time and again to the same composers, the same pieces, and we don’t open our minds to the new music today’s composers are writing.

I’d certainly like to see new music more frequently, but then again, it’s not as though we do such a great job of presenting the old, either. A good deal of music by the canonical composers simply never gets played or scheduled, and in many of those cases it doesn’t appear to be the music’s fault, although it may be that there are some details of instrumentation or duration that argue against presenting it.

Off the top of my head, there’s the Mendelssohn Symphony No. 2 (Lobgesang), which I find quite beautiful even if its devotion to Beethoven’s Ninth is plain; the two Prokofiev string quartets, the first of which I particularly like; the motets of Brahms (and his vocal music generally); the piano trio by Chopin. Numerous other examples could come to mind, but in the past couple days I’ve been listening to unfamiliar works by none other than Beethoven and wondering why they don’t get done.

If you surf over to the Beethoven Haus site and go to the digital archives section, you can hear short excerpts from many of his works, and review scans of the scores. And what’s been particularly enlightening to me is some of the vocal music with orchestra.

Here, for instance, is the Elegaic Song, Op. 118, for chorus and string quartet (or orchestra), which is sheer loveliness in Beethoven’s mature style (1814). There are the Bundeslied, for soloists, chorus and wind sextet, a bubbly, very Germanic piece; and the Opferlied, for soprano, chorus and orchestra, which starts with another moment of engaging Beethovenian solemnity.

Or how about Tremate, empi, tremate, Op. 117, for vocal trio and orchestra? Written in 1801 during a short period of study with Antonio Salieri, this is what Beethoven sounds like when he’s trying to write vocal music like, well, Salieri or Mozart. The excerpt here shows that Beethoven can write in a conventional way, but it’s still good stuff, and a choral concert with soloists in a piece like the Ninth, where there’s only 20 minutes or so of music all told, and much of it isn’t for the soloists, could use a piece like this as a way to get your money’s worth out of the singers.

I also enjoyed hearing part of the Fantasia, Op. 77, for piano, which wins all sorts of praise from Beethoven scholars for its drama and athleticism, but which I’ve never heard live, nor have I even heard anyone practice. The score looks like a bear, which probably explains a lot, though pianists play things as difficult as this all the time, and judging from what I can see in the score, it’s a more than worthy piece.

I'm not familiar with any of these pieces, and two or three of them I've never even heard of before.

Anyone have some pieces they can think of that are by major canonical composers that should be played but aren’t? Freshening the repertoire with Beethoven’s setting of Auld Lang Syne (it's No. 11 here) might not be the first thing we should do, and it won’t take the place of music from our own time that speaks to our concerns.

But a whole concert of unfamiliar Beethoven like these interesting choral pieces would be well worth doing, and shows that there are many riches in the canon that are right under our noses.

Here’s the second part of my talk last March with composer Libby Larsen, edited for digressions (mine) and the usual hesitations of speech we all use when engaged in conversation.

In this part of our talk, Larsen talks about a musical event to come on the Florida Atlantic University campus during the second part of her residency :

GTS: Dr. (Heather) Coltman mentioned that you were putting together a proposal for your second year and that you had some interesting things in mind.

Larsen: I said to the head of the school of arts last night at dinner that I think my job here is to put every student in touch with their own creative vigor as much as I possibly can. Their own creative vigor. And making assumptions that many of the kids who come here for performance have come through public school systems, and that is not about your own creative vigor. And so I said I’d like to see if with the music that we make next year we can practice both.

One: I’m going to write pieces for the ensembles as they are.

GTS: A Gebrauchmusik kind of thing.

Larsen: Yeah. I’m going to write a wind ensemble piece and a piece for chorus, but the chorus piece is going to have didgeridoo.

GTS: With Mr. (James) Cunningham.

Larsen: Right, with Mr. Cunningham. And then I’m going to write a piece for the strings of the orchestra, so we’ll have chorus, strings of the orchestra, wind ensemble piece, and then this chamber piece. So that will be a formal concert, the format that we practice.

And so, I approached the commercial music students and invited them to, between now and October, to create a 40- to 60-minute soundtrack for me. A flow track; whatever they want to do, but a flow track with sections.

GTS: With stuff.

Larsen: With stuff. And then I’ll come back October 1st … and I will explore that soundtrack with them, then I’m going to respond acoustically. I’m going then to write acoustic music with that flow track that involves all the kids from all the ensembles.

GTS: It’s like a commentary.

Larsen: Then, in April, all the kids from all the ensembles will go out onto the breezeway, and they’re going to line the area where the speakers from Owl Radio broadcast. And then Owl Radio has agreed that they will then broadcast the soundtrack and then we will do the beats, on the breezeway. And the pieces will be written in such a way that if you’re walking by and you want to join in, you can.

It’s not a Cage music circus, it’s much more like a drumming group experience, only with acoustic instruments. And also drums and electric pianos, and we’re just going to put everybody out there, you know, and make a piece that’s “we.”

GTS: That kind of reaching out to people and making music is very important to you.

Larsen: Yes, it is, it is. It’s as important as the concert hall experience. Because both are essential. It’s not an either/or proposition …. It feels like it should be either/or, and it’s just not.

GTS:…Are you trying to get to a more fluid kind of rhythm generally, not so much like a click track?

Larsen: Yeah, I am, and I’ll tell you - there are lots of reasons.

Now, when you practice African drumming, it is very precise, but the pulse is never articulated. Have you ever drummed in a drumming group?

GTS: Not really.

Larsen: It’s fascinating, because in true African drumming, the pulse is never articulated, it’s felt. And then there are always two polyrhythms going on at the same time, always, but all organized around a felt pulse. And that is the polar opposite of Western precision.

GTS: You sort of have to be in it, and then you are knowing what this other person is doing. There’s something really kind of mystical about that, something kind of weird, but it’s also very human. It’s something that’s real basic to the way we are as animals.

Larsen: I completely agree. And it wouldn’t matter, except that the culture of the music of America, that was coming out of American languages, is more and more and more pulse-based, and less and less metrically based.

…I’ve been working with, whenever I can get hold of one of them, working with music brain researchers. I just had a wonderful talk with Ed Large, here on campus, and I asked him about pulse: Is there ever a consensus about pulse? And of course without scientific data, there’s no definitive answer. But (one of) the few answers is that while there’s a sense of shared pulse, it’s never precise, because synchronicity is a brain activity.
 
And so, African drumming, you take your brain out of it.

GTS: I wanted to go back to (what you said earlier) about composers writing a lot. Are composers not writing enough now?

Larsen: They’re not writing enough.

GTS: Not enough different forms?

Larsen: Not enough different forms, and also really not getting an audience of like-minded intellect, meaning taking the music out to people who haven’t studied music but who are really smart, who love to think and listen to music, and that dialogue, that dialogue — there’s just not enough of it.

And it could happen. I think that’s why the young kids in the clubs, I think this is why this is growing so much.

It’s because the process is not complete, it’s not complete until it’s been in the air, and in the ears, and (in) the Mobius curve of energy between those who listen artfully and those who perform artfully. You know, that’s the creative process.

xxxxxx

There's a little more left of our interview, I think; I'll try to get that posted soon. In the meantime, here are some links on Larsen’s Web site with some of her audio files.

And here’s some African drumming from Ghana:

Listening on the way into work yesterday morning to the eminent sportswriter and novelist Frank Deford on NPR, I suddenly thought of Gabriel Faure.

DeFord’s piece was based on a new study that showed renowned athletes were more likely than the regular population to be left-handed, which raises interesting questions about genetic coding for sports ability and what other parts of the human schematic it might be linked to.

I don’t know offhand about the ratio of righties to lefties in the musical world, though my younger brother David is a southpaw, and he has both athletic and musical talent, while I, a right-hander, have some musical ability but almost none for sports.

This brings me to Faure, who despite the repertory status of some of his songs, chamber works, and of course, the Requiem, beloved of church choirs everywhere, is to me an underrated writer. All of the music I know of his is music of exceptional taste, craft and bold imagination, and I wish we heard it more often at concerts.

That’s particularly true of his piano music, which is heavily influenced by Chopin, but it uses Chopin as a stepping-off point and doesn’t slavishly imitate. His nocturnes and barcarolles (and there’s one of them, in E-flat, that I can’t recall precisely and for which I can’t find my score, that surely gave Stephen Sondheim for Send in the Clowns) are beautiful in a rarified, elegant way that is also elusive. It’s not immediately entrancing, perhaps, but repeated listening wins you over to its special kind of beauty.

I find these piano pieces quite difficult to play, but the reason isn’t obvious until I sit down and really try to work through them. The reason they’re so difficult is that Faure was ambidextrous, according to Grove, and that explains a lot.

Glenn Gould used to mock “right-hand music,” which describes a lot of 19th-century writing, with plenty of filigree and acrobatics in the right hand while the left thumps away and keeps time. But Faure’s music, rather like Bach’s, requires both hands to be equally strong and independent, and when you naturally favor one or the other, it’s going to be work to get the other one to play ball (to drag the sports metaphor back into this post). For Faure, it was all the same.

I feel sure that the way Faure wrote for the piano militates against hearing his piano works in recital, because it’s much too much work to get these pieces to sound right unless both hands are working equally well. It’s easier to get something that has more immediate appeal together than to spend a lot of time on Faure, and that’s unfortunate.

I speak as an infrequent practicer, of course; it may be that real pianists find Faure easier to get ready than I know, and the music doesn’t get much currency because of its somewhat remote character. Still, I think the hands have it.

Just thinking about this has made me eager to hear someone good play Faure in recital, and I’ll pore over the program lists looking for some in the next few weeks. If anyone knows of some, please post away.

Here’s Marc-Andre Hamelin playing Faure’s Third Barcarolle:

The debate about whether contemporary classical music is worth much of anything is joined again in the pages of The Guardian, with writer Joe Queenan arguing that he’s been listening to the stuff for 40 years and that it still hasn’t found its public, and Tom Service, on the other, arguing that there is a much larger audience for new music than Queenan thinks there is.

You can read Queenan here, Service here, and check out the blog postings to read some very sharp debate by a lot of interesting people weighing in on this topic.

I admit to having two dogs in this hunt. First, Queenan’s point about the absence of audience interest in some of the music appears is grounded in basic journalism: he’s just reporting here, folks. Anyone who’s been to a significant number of concerts over the years, as I have, has probably seen much of the same behavior and heard many of the same kinds of uncomprehending comments.

You can’t just dismiss that as being somehow anomalous. I’ve seen and heard precisely the same thing.

And there’s something to be said for the idea that plenty of composers today likely are poor melodist, and it’s melody that provides the first and most basic interaction with music that people have, even above rhythm.

It’s no accident that human beings in stable societies composed folksongs for themselves, not just to tell stories, but to fix a certain kind of auditory memory for themselves.

But tastes change, and there’s little question that today’s listeners now have access to every kind of music there is, not only through recordings of various kinds, but through easily used, flexible technology that lets almost anyone literally make his own kind of music. Our ears have a far richer menu of choices than our ancestors did, and our music reflects that.

I personally find much classical music written today unappealing on a visceral basis, but music of this kind takes a different kind of listening. And I get a good deal of enjoyment out of some music that I don’t particularly like listening to, if that makes any sense. It appeals to me for other reasons: a ferocious display of technique, perhaps, or maybe as the only possible response to a specific, usually tragic, extra musical event.

Still, it’s worthy stuff, and I always approach new pieces with a high degree of anticipation. I’ve heard plenty of interesting new music over the years, and I am a firm believer in the necessity of replenishing our repertoires with fresh music that speaks to our times. As I’ve said before, it may be that a composer will come along who can speak to us and make his or her message memorable for future generations.

I would lay odds that this writer would have to be someone who can create a compelling melody, though. I don’t mean someone who simply writes pop tunes by other names, either. What it would take is a crafter of a modern but powerful kind of melody that would hang in the head and perhaps even help its listeners confront difficult issues by doing so.

In any case, it’s a fascinating debate, and if you are at all interested in this topic, take a look at these columns and the multiple blog posts that followed. It’s exciting reading.

Over the weekend, I wrapped up a review of The Voice, a memoir by the German bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff. It’s a good read, and a fascinating life story about a very fine singer.

It also makes a compelling cultural document in that Quasthoff has many interesting things to say about his profession and the state of the world at large. Early on, he talks about his New York Philharmonic debut at Avery Fisher Hall, and he writes about what the audience was like:

What strikes me first is the complete absence of that solemn, respectful murmur that has been flowing around German stages since the days of Goethe and Schiller. Instead one enjoys the relaxed atmosphere, the matter-of-fact attitude with which the Americans have — yes, I will put it this way — made use of their cultural temples ….Personally, I view Homo Americanus’s habit of valuing the classical arts no higher than other forms of intelligent entertainment — whether film or basketball — as a true achievement of civilization. It does not harm the quality and professional appreciation of artists; rather, the opposite is true.

I think this is very wise, and on the mark. It may not have been as true 30 or so years ago (at least, I remember it as being much stiffer when I was a boy), but it certainly is more laid-back now.

I think this is one of the secrets of the survival of this music beyond the appeal of the pieces themselves. Most of the concerts I’ve been to in the past 15 years here have been familial, warm affairs in which part of the joy of the music comes in sitting with an audience that is happy to be there.

At the same time, true devotees of the music might find this kind of casualness bordering on disrespect. After all, if you don’t really appreciate what the performers are doing, how will you know that you’ve been in the presence of great art?

It could further be argued that what Quasthoff saw was not a uniformly demotic approach on the part of Citizen America, but rather a mass abdication of manners. People have essentially abandoned dressing up for concerts (I plead guilty, Your Honor), and only recently have I been to events where everyone has remembered to shut off his or her cellphone.

But I don’t think so. I think what Quasthoff saw is the result of decades of greater access to the music, which has demystified it and shown to the average music lover that music really is just music, and that the other accretions we used to have with it are remnants of a culture that is no longer operative. He’d have seen the same reverence he sees in Germany in the New York audiences of the late 19th century and on through the first six decades of the 20th.

Not now, though. And I think he’s right: It helps the music to live as “intelligent entertainment,” and not pedestal art. Human creative effort can’t survive deification for too long.

For this July Fourth, I haven’t had time to put together a playlist, but I am focusing on the work of William Grant Still (1895-1978).

Still has long been known as the dean of African-American classical composers, and his long career as an arranger and composer for popular and classical venues gave him a professional polish that allowed him to write well-crafted music of several different kinds. The folks at Afri-Classical.com have several samples of his music on their site, and while the samples are short, they demonstrate Still’s melodic gift, his directness of expression, and his thorough craftsmanship.

I’m listening now to his Second Symphony, premiered in 1937 by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It’s subtitled Song of a New Race, and was written as a follow-up to his First, subtitled Afro-American. That first symphony was designed to evoke American black life around the Civil War, but the Second “represents the American colored man of today,” according to Still’s program notes, which are excerpted in the Detroit Symphony’s 1993 recording (Chandos 9226) of the work. (The disc also contains William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony, also a fine piece, and Luther Henderson’s orchestration of Duke Ellington’s Harlem.)

The Second Symphony is slightly dated , sounding at times (particularly in the third movement) quite like a 1930s Hollywood score. But the bulk of the work has an elegant profile very much in the tradition of late Romantics such as Dvorak and Tchaikovsky, but with a very American language. He is more American here than Charles Ives is in his First Symphony, very much, indeed, like George Gershwin in his mixture of pop sensibility and received classical forms.

It’s a lovely work, only half an hour long, full of strong tunes and rich orchestral colors. But I can’t think of the last time I’ve encountered Still in the concert hall. The Gershwin orchestral pieces are constantly played, and perhaps his melodies are a bit more memorable, but that shouldn’t keep this composer from American concert stages.

Still’s Second deserves to be a standard repertory piece in American orchestras, and is just the sort of piece that should make up their bread and butter. There’s nothing wrong with playing the great Europeans to bring in the house, but there’s no good reason when compiling programs that conductors on the lookout for an accessible, attractive work to present should turn to something like the Mendelssohn Fourth instead of the Still.

Still wrote a large body of work that includes five symphonies and seven operas, along with instrumental pieces, songs and choral works. Every piece of his I’ve heard is instantly attractive, and well deserving of frequent performances. He trailblazed a path for other black American symphonic writers, but today that’s less important than that he was a fine American composer whose music should be far better-known than it is.

So today as we mark the Fourth, let’s spend some time listening to music by William Grant Still. It’s a way to know better our American musical heritage, which in the classical field is sorely, and unfairly, ignored.

Still dropping in this week on Medici.tv, I’ve taken a look at Peter Sellars’ production of Zaide, the “Turkish” singspiel from 1779-80 that Mozart never quite finished, probably because he got a commission not long after to write Idomeneo for the Munich Carnival season.

Ever since the score turned up in Mozart’s effects years after his death in 1791 and was published later under the name Zaide, lovers of the composer’s music have tried to mount the piece in one form or another. Right now, for instance, I’m listening to a recording of the work done in 2006 by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concentus Musicus Wien; it features Diana Damrau and Michael Schade, and has interpolated texts by Tobias Moretti.

The problem with Zaide is that its libretto is lost (though we have a good idea what it probably was), and it has no finale and no overture. Experts seem to be in general agreement that it would have had a Die Entfuhrung-style happy ending, in which the Ottoman sultan pardons his European prisoners and everyone lives happily ever after.

In the Harnoncourt concert-performance recording, the overture is the one-movement Symphony No. 26, K. 184, written when Mozart was 17, and the spoken dialogue is replaced by mini-essay passages by Moretti, much of it quite political and some of it rather funny. It’s an interesting approach, though I would prefer some actual new dialogue written in the spirit of the source material.

The Sellars production, mounted first in 2005 and now available for about a month at Medici.tv from this week’s performances at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, features Ekaterina Lekhina as the title character, is explicitly political. Sellars makes clear in a preparatory talk he gives for Medici audiences that he thinks Mozart was speaking out, Freemason-like, against slavery, and that this work is a daring piece of theater that was meant to make a provocative point.

The Sellars Zaide is set in a modern sweatshop, and opens with close-ups of exhausted faces as the overture — from Mozart’s incidental music for the play Thamos, King of Egypt (K. 345) — sets a moody, dark atmosphere (unlike the cheerful E-flat of the symphony used by Harnoncourt). An oud or something similar is used to extend the slaves’ chorus that opens the work, and Zaide rises from her cell in exhaustion to begin the aria Ruhe, sanft. I haven’t had the chance to see the rest of it, but I think it will be worth my time.

Sellars often goes over the top, but he’s the real deal as an artist, and he brings total commitment to everything he does, even if his interpretation of Mozart’s motive for writing Zaide is debatable.

The thing that interests me here is that Zaide is good enough even in fragmentary form to warrant continued attempts to bring it to life and keep its music current. Mozart probably meant to do something more with it at some point, which is why he kept the score and didn’t mine it for reuse elsewhere.

I’d like to see a production that uses a freshly written play, perhaps the symphony and the Thamos music as overture and entr’acte, and some of Mozart’s dance music to fill out the spectacle. K. 184 was used as incidental music by a contemporary theater troupe for whom Zaide might have been written, and it works wonderfully well on the Harnoncourt recording.

The finale would still remain the major problem. It can’t really end with the cliffhanger quartet with which the work ends now, but perhaps a new finale could be constructed out of another symphony (Alfred Einstein proposed using No. 32, in G, K. 318), with the singers singing the orchestral parts to appropriate words. Or something like that.

The music of Zaide isn’t as accomplished as that of Idomeneo or Die Entfuhrung, but those works were intended for different kinds of audiences. What impresses about Zaide, even unfinished, is the variety of Mozart’s writing, the expressivity of his melodies, and most importantly, the sheer sensitivity of emotion on stage that he’s able to mirror and supplement in the music.

It’s a very promising piece of work, and it’s easy to see why Mozart kept it with him for the rest of his life: he hit on something here as a musical dramatist that pointed the way toward his future.

The current issue of The American Scholar contains an informative essay on the life and music of Leroy Anderson, who would have turned 100 on Sunday.

Anderson, who died in 1975, is probably best-known today for Sleigh Ride, which is heard in any number of versions at Christmastime. It’s a period piece, but it has plenty of charm, an infectious melody with slightly bluesy, jazzy harmonies, and it has managed to stay fresh over the decades.

It wasn’t long ago that you could go to an orchestra concert with light music on the program, and see someone come out and play the solo part of The Typewriter, which is a fun little piece whose joke has been superseded by technology, unfortunately (though I suppose you could magnify the sound of a page opening on a computer screen instead of the bell and carriage return).

There were other pieces, too, that were once very popular, such as The Syncopated Clock, Trumpeter’s Lullaby, and Bugler’s Holiday, that I used to hear frequently 20 or so years ago, but not anymore. These were the kinds of works whose origins are deep in 19th-century band concert protocol, which required a decent selection of novelty pieces in which the symphonic culture so prevalent in orchestra halls was gently enlivened with popular music of the day or elaborate virtuoso takes on familiar folksongs.

In her piece for American Scholar, writer Janet Frank (a cellist with the National Symphony) makes a good case for Anderson as an American master of light music, and there’s little doubt that he was. I can’t think of another composer quite like him, except perhaps for John Philip Sousa, who was happy to write short, attractive pieces that would be instantly appealing for everyday audiences.

I agree, too, with Frank’s contention that it takes a great deal of skill to write these seemingly innocuous works and make them durable. Try it sometime and you’ll see how difficult it really is, and that’s because you need an exceptional combination of talents: Melodic appeal, thorough technique, and a sense of judgment that keeps the lightness to the fore without being cheap or embarrassing.

It’s sort of like listening to the work of a great storyteller, someone who makes sure all the details are in place and that they all get the right amount of attention. You might not notice it right away, but when you think back on the story, the flourishes come back: the hero of the story was wearing a green felt hat; no restaurants were open in the town after 3 a.m. except one; it had rained for 36 straight hours.

Anderson’s music is well-crafted enough for you to wonder why it is that more people don’t write pieces like this, because they fill a need for variety and liveliness that we often need at concerts. As I said, I think it’s because it’s too difficult for just anyone to pull off, and so if we get the chance this year to celebrate the work of Leroy Anderson, we should.

The American Scholar piece isn’t available online, but there are plenty of other good pieces in the current issue to check out, and it’s worth a trip over to the bookstore newsstand to get one. And YouTube has any number of videos of performances by ensembles everywhere of Anderson’s pieces.