Greg Stepanich

Farewell, friends and music lovers

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:

Libby Larsen, finale: 'Snatching decisions out of infinity'

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?

...The play is just brilliant. It's so brilliant. It's about everything. It's about everything that was going on post World War II, right at that point in time, and mostly jazz is where I'm coming through with the music. It's moving away from Louis Armstrong style into Miles Davis, which I love.....

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.
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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.

Chamber festival solid in 17th season

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:

The Rimsky centenary: More music, please

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:

Rituals essential to creativity

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.