New Captist Angel and Other Matters

We welcome Mall Diva's cat, Sophy, into the pantheon of Captist Angels.
This statement ratified by the Cat Claw Clan and High Priestess Julia

In response to the preceding post about NSU's Young Artist Program director, Mr. Z., Karen wrote, "Mr. Z is pretty dreamy."
No offense to Mr. Z., but these photos can be deceiving, Karen. Note the soft focus. It was probably taken a few years ago, too. But go ahead and dream, if it makes you happy. I won't tell W. W., to whom he is attached.

Way cuter than Mr. Z.

Return of Weirsdo

Diamonelle doesn't need paparazzi.

I'm sorry to have been gone so long. The usual rush of lessons and orchestra rehearsals is upon us, and on top of that, my dream job has apparently fallen into my lap.
Last summer, when I was working at a nearby music camp, Mr. Z. was also working there. Mr. Z. had been given the task of transforming the preparatory program at NSU from students teaching lessons for peanuts to a full pre-professional program for promising young music students. The problem was that despite its fairly large size, Nearby City, GA, had few good students.
Why? Perhaps because its main industry, the military, is not known for pursuing classical music, or because the second most lucrative industry is medical, and doctors don't spend enough time with their families to get their kids to practice (just a guess, and, of course, an over-generalization). Or maybe the days of the wife bringing in a little income on the side by teaching music are history, since most households require two full incomes to get by. Certainly the young people I know who are freelancing in the area are understandably more interested in quick income from gigs than in the slow and uncertain money from teaching.
Whatever the case, no students were forthcoming. After watching and working with the six students I brought to the camp, interviewing me while seeming to chat over the course of the week, and observing the performance of the groups I was coaching on the camp recital, Mr. Z. hired me to work in his Young Artist Program, hoping I would be able to bring in some decent participants.
Fortunately, I was able to get seven kids and their parents to sign up, including J. and a visiting student who has been studying with a member of the faculty at Shanghai Conservatory. They and three cellos, including Mr. Z.'s 14-year-old daughter, meet every Saturday at NSU for an hour of chamber music, an hour of orchestra, and an hour of masterclass. The kids are getting to play for the world-renowned Mr. S. and W. W., among others.
Every week is very exciting for me. Being the only one on the faculty without an established career with a major ensemble, I was quite willing to work with the least advanced chamber group, but this is fun, since these are the students who will learn the most and come the farthest. Then I get to participate in the chamber orchestra, since they have no violas except staff, and it is interesting to watch how Mr. Z. works with the kids, which is a specialty of his. Finally, I get to watch the guest artists who do the master classes teach the kids whom I've prepared and the odd cellist.
But the most amazing part is that after Dr. Minnie Strator harassed me out of Very Red State for not raising my grades and lowering my standards, after years of most non-Asian parents in this town going to the teachers who made them and their lazy kids feel comfortable, instead of to me--after all that, now suddenly every week I am told what a great teacher I am by major musicians who need my expertise to keep this program afloat.
Oh yeah, and I get paid, too!
It is a bit of pressure, as two students need to be prepared to play in the masterclass nearly every week, and I need the parents to help with transportation. But the prestige, respect, and confidence more than compensate. The parents and kids have been very cooperative--imagine, they are all ready to go at 7 A. M. every Saturday! These families really understand and appreciate what an amazing opportunity this is. I'm pretty sure word will spread and others will begin to notice also.

Weirsdos Come Home

In response to Mall Diva's Christmas card in the last post, Karen writes, "Your daughter Sylvia is an awesome photographer, as well as one hellava graphic artist! Surely she could sell her Christmas card design to any number of snowless-state stationary stores on the numerous exits of Interstate-10."
Thanks a lot, Karen. We are gratified to see that Mayuko Fujino, a professional artist of our cyber-acquaintance, favorited it on Flickr. But when we took a bunch of these cards down to the local used book/coffee shop hot spot, the owner said Mall Diva needed to do fancy handwriting to make them saleable. Whatever. Mayuko Fujino's opinion means way more. I think Mall Diva undervalues her artistic talents. For her, art is just a hobby, but I sometimes think I shouldn't have distracted her from it with all the music stuff.
Anyway, here is a sketch Mall Diva made of her friends and her at Bowdoin International Music Festival, whence she returned the day after Toyplayer and I returned from points west. Enjoy.

Weirsdos Westward II: Happy Holidays

A Mall Diva Christmas card.

After Tulsa, Toyplayer and I headed up to Kansas City, where we played cards, Scrabble, charades, and hang man and watched THE INCREDIBLES, CARS, and WALL-E. Grandma Weirsdoer had never seen THE INCREDIBLES and CARS before, and she liked them a lot. We also took her some of Mall Diva's inimitable stationery, because we had noticed she had run out.
The visit was nicer than usual because Grandma Weirsdoer's roommate had stolen some meds and had to be hospitalized, so she was gone, and the roommate before her had left a DVD-player and TV, so we didn't have to be out in the big room with everybody as much. Also, they have moved the smokers farther away from the building, and I think they are taking fewer of them, so second-hand smoke is not as much of a problem as it used to be.
Our home away from home was the 54th Street Grill and Bar, where Toyplayer consumed many a Devil's Den Burger, and I enjoyed Boulevard beer and great salads.

Reader Response III: Bach to School

Note the original instruments (no chin rests on the violins and violas, no endpin on the cello, funny looking bows) and the Baroque pitch--lower than A=440, which is standard now.

In response to the preceding post, RBUD noted the similarity between Vivaldi and Bach: "I am just noticing how much Vivaldi sounds like Bach. Has anyone else ever noticed this? Is it just the instruments? Autumn sounds to me like it would be at home among the Brandenburg Concertos."
Bach's dates, 1685-1750, roughly correspond to the Baroque period, RBUD. Further, whereas many great composers are innovators, Bach was more of a culmination of all that came before. Thus you may well hear similarities between Bach and Vivaldi, Telemann, Corelli, and many other Baroque composers in Bach's music. (Handel, who was a contemporary of Bach, seems to me more distinctive.)
I am no musicologist, but I would say that on the whole Bach's use of harmony and counterpoint is more sophisticated than that of his predecessors. A particular weakness of Vivaldi and Telemann seems to me to be their use of sequences, that is the same pattern begun on consecutive notes, which can be very repetitious and predictable. In Vivaldi's defense, however, he often wrote for children, since he worked at a school for wealthy, illegitimate girls. Sequences are pedagogically useful because while each requires a distinctive set of finger movements, the ear can relate new sequences to the pattern, which allows students to check whether they are in tune or not. Sequences are also useful in teaching phrasing, as they are easily identifiable and should usually be played with crescendos or decrescendos.
weirsdo

Reader Response II: Back to Music School

In a late response to RBUD's lament regarding his knees in the autumn of life, I cited the poem that accompanies the first movement of Vivaldi's Autumn. I was reminded of this not only because the word that RBUD was redefining was "autumn," but because the scales in the first movement represent grape harvesters who have been sampling the finished product too heavily and keep falling down.
Karen then helpfully linked to two versions of Autumn on YouTube, the one above, with authentic Baroque instruments and a recorder soloist, and this one (just the first movement of the concerto), with modern instruments and Itzhak Perlman on the violin solo.

She wanted to know my thoughts on these.
Neither is my favorite, Karen. If I had to choose, I guess I would take the recorder version. The tempo is sprightly, and I like the feel the original instruments give to the sound; but Vivaldi wrote it for violin, and in my view a recorder just doesn't have the sophistication of tone that characterizes the violin in any age and makes people love it (not that there's nothing to love in recorders, and of course I may be biased).
I normally like and admire Itzhak Perlman, and I do not know whether or not he harbors the animosity toward period instruments and performance practices that have rendered his friend, Pinchas Zuckerman a scandal in the classical music realm and, I hear, prevented good students from winning in contemporary competitions. But this recording, with its logy tempo and rich vibrato, seems to me to substitute romantic anachronism for the purity and vitality that one can hear in the recorder version.
I had to look around a bit, but here is Gidon Kremer doing what I consider to be a good version on modern instruments, but with a sensitivity to Baroque performance practices.
Let me know what you think.

Reader Response I

People seemed interested in the Panamanian gold figures. I didn't think the link did them justice, so I picked out some more. I couldn't find my favorite frogs, though.



--weirsdo