Sunday Musings

I know I have just not been posting as often as I used to, but I have a variety of exciting excuses I'm sure you would like to hear! In the early years of the blog I would often post more than once a day. I had more of an educational urge then and I suppose I equated my blog audience to a group of potential students. This comes from teaching music in one way or another for two or three decades.

This reminds me of the one time I think I ever impressed my father! The only problem I ever had with my parents was that they, due to their educational and cultural limitations, could never appreciate to any extent my musical activities. Even if I played a high-profile concert, they had to struggle to see why it was worthy in any way. But once, my father was impressed. When I was quite early in my career, still an undergraduate music student, I got a job teaching an adult education guitar class once a week. It was out in a remote suburb so the first time I taught the class, my father drove me out there and hung around during the class. It was a big challenge: a huge number of aspiring guitarists showed up with their horrible old, untuned guitars. Of the hour-long class, I swear it took me the first half hour just to get all those guitars sort-of in tune. The school board expected maybe twenty to show up, but we had sixty students that first night--they split them up afterwards. So, sixty guitar-players, what do you do? I taught them the simplified chords to a simple Bob Dylan song, I don't remember which. So, by the end of the hour, I had them all singing and playing. Together. My father was amazed and couldn't imagine how I had managed to do that.

But I am not in an educational mode so much any more. Sorry! To be honest, while I was pretty good at it, I never really enjoyed teaching that much. Few of the students are talented to a significant extent, so you spend most of your career trapped in a small room with people who aren't very good! I remember the great violinist Paul Kling telling me a story once. He was a child prodigy, broadcast playing concertos on Vienna radio when he was nine years old. After a wonderful career touring with the Brahms concerto under Karajan and concert-master in Vienna, Louisville (Kentucky) and Tokyo, he was chair of the music department in Victoria, BC, Canada. Once an American violin student auditioned to enter the program and rather aggressively asked why she should study at this obscure Canadian school instead of a big American one (Paul had previously headed the string program at the Indiana University music school). Paul's answer: "Well, I have been fooling everyone for fifty years or so, I guess I can fool you too!"

I'm not sure I am running out of things to say, though that is always a possibility. This is the 3,175th post, after all! But what is true is that more of my energies are directed to composing than blogging. I also notice that since I have taken up journaling, one of my three new hobbies of sketching, fountain pens and journaling, I notice that these activities also take time away from the blog. Finally, it is hard to find new topics other than the ones that have been so thoroughly discussed: the current dire state of classical music (made direr by the plague), the incursions of political thought into the aesthetic realm, the state of popular culture, and the theory and practice of music itself.

Mind you, I have a number of projects left unfinished. I left everyone hanging after analyzing the first half of the first movement of the Symphony No. 5 of Shostakovich and I have not finished my series of posts on Sofia Gubaidulina and Luigo Nono among others. So there are things to do there.

If anyone has any suggestions for future posts, please share!

It seems as if the big guitar festival this year was in Koblenz and they just posted a number of videos of concerts from the festival. The one that really caught my attention was a terrific performance by Marcin Dylla who played as his second to last piece, that wonderful serenade by Sofia Gubaidulina. He starts with the Lute Suite No. 1 by Bach: