Classical Stiffs

When did classical music become so stodgy?

Back in the day (aka the middle ages), every musician was also a composer. Or, to put it another way, there were no composers. Musicians improvised a lot of their own stuff, or they learned melodies by listening to other musicians, and then in their own performances, they improvised around them. At the time, there was no really accurate way of notating music, anyway, so they had no real choice.

As time went on, music notation became more and more exact. In the Baroque, music was written down and the composer became more important, but there was still a lot, from ornamentation to instrumentation of operatic accompaniments, left up to the performer or conductor. By the time you get to the romantic era, composers dictate pretty much everything, and even the cadenza, that moment in a concerto when the soloist is supposed to show what he or she can improvise, becomes something either dictated by the composer or copied from some other musician who wrote it down in the past.

In the 20th century, certain composers rebelled against this idea and wrote aleatoric music. That means, music where some element(s) are left up to chance or up to the performer. But, let's face it, who actually likes to perform or listen to aleatoric music? Very few people.

Whereas in the Middle Ages, music was something that only existed while you were actually performing it or hearing it, now it has become something to be archived, catalogued, saved, and copied. Over and over and over again. A good performer is considered to be someone who can achieve the same result every time they play a piece of music. Add to that the fact that we all now have recordings of the greatest artists in all their studio-generated perfection, one performance captured forever by the miracles of modern technology.

As musicians, we're crushed under the weight of our own musical history.

What I mean is, that as a violinist, I'm SUPPOSED to play Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Mendelssohn: their concertos, their unaccompanied works, their symphonies, their string quartets...and all of this to the level of a CD performance. We end up spending our entire lives striving for technical perfection and trying to cram one more 150-year-old piece of music into our fingers and our brain and we forget how to create.

We don't learn to improvise, we don't learn to compose, we forget that the goal of all of this is to express and communicate. In Paris, I had a student who is an art teacher. She once said that she was surprised by how being a musician was so different from being an artist. She said that, as an artist, she sometimes would copy other people's work as a sort of study, to perfect a certain technique, but that no one would consider that to be an end in itself. Whereas that's mostly what a musician does. Render someone else's music audible.

What if we still didn't have the ability to record music, either on paper or as sound waves? What if we were forced to learn it only with our ears? What if it was acceptable, even expected, that each and every musician would create their own music at every performance?

Now, don't get me wrong. Humanity would be the poorer if Beethoven's symphonies had been lost at the time of Beethoven's death. It's amazing that we can still play his symphonies today. But how do we get back that spark of spontaneity?

How do I get back that spark of spontaneity?

There are other traditions, jazz and folk music specifically, where some of this sort of practice has survived. I guess the only answer I have right now is to turn to these other musics and try and learn from them.

Sometimes this all seems very exciting to me, and sometimes it frustrates and discourages me. It's all part of the adventure, right?

New Word

So, the last 2 days, Alina has been running around the house saying something like, "Brrr-DA" or "Boo-DA." After racking my brain to try and figure out if that means something, this is what I've come up with:

Buddha.

Could it be that my daughter is already interested in philosophy and world religions at her tender age?

Perhaps. Or maybe she's asking for a boudin.

Holding hands

I love it now that Alina is walking very well and we can go for walks around Melle. I love holding her hand and walking next to her. Most often, she wraps her little pudgy fingers around my index finger, and I envelope her hand with my remaining fingers. This is most convenient because she sometimes stumbles and, in that case, her grip isn't always strong enough to keep her from falling, but mine is. So, if she stumbles and starts to fall, I (usually) catch her because she is not only holding onto me, but I'm holding onto her much more completely and firmly.

This is a lot like me and God.

As I'm advancing through life, I know He's at my side, and I do my best to keep holding tightly to His hand, knowing all the while that I'll never get my hand completely around His hand. I'll never be able to grasp the totality of even one little part of God, so I must be content holding onto the equivalent of His finger. I toddle confidently along until I stumble, and realize with horror that my own grip is not strong enough on His finger to keep me from falling. But the beauty of it all is that, even if my grip is weak, His is strong, and He has my hand held tightly in His own so that I will never fall.

Mama

Today, two different times, I pointed to myself and said, "Alina, who am I?" and she answered, "Mama." Woo-hoo!

Dancing Queen

Pictures from the City of Lights

Here are some pictures from our trip to Paris:

Constance and Charlotte with Alina

Alina coming down the slide

A good-bye kiss (yes, kissing is how we say good-bye in France!)

Leaving the City of Lights

We just got back from 3 days in Paris. Thomas was there for the bi-annual 3-day business meeting of our national denomination, and Alina and I just went along for the ride. We stayed with a Franco-American couple (she's American from Indiana, he's French from Brittany) who have 2 girls, the youngest of which is Alina's age. We had a really good time. In the evenings, we hung out with our hosts and watched the girls go crazy. In the daytime, Alina and I went music store shopping and saw a couple of friends. We had great weather, which just made everything even better.

The most interesting thing about this trip for me is that it was the first time Alina and I have been back since we moved in February of 2007. Which meant that I've had plenty of time to get unused to Paris, and Alina was basically discovering things for the first time. From the moment we stepped off the train, you could tell that she was thinking something along the lines of, "Oh my, where did all these people come from? I've never seen so many people before in my life!" Which was probably a thought she had almost continually for 3 days. I had forgotten what it's like. There are people everywhere all the time. Paris is crawling with people. It's also crawling with pigeons. Alina is still much in her animal phase, and she was very excited whenever she saw a pigeon. Of course, we have tons of birds in our yard all the time, but she could get much closer to these birds. She loved it.

There are also lots more cool playgrounds in Paris than in Melle. We spent quite a bit of time in parks, though Alina has yet to be convinced that it's preferable to climb up the stairs in order to go down the slide again, as opposed to climbing directly back up the slide. Quite often, though, Alina would leave the slides and seesaws and hordes of other kids, and go to the edge of the playground, where a low fence always separates you from the actual green, growing things. She would try to pick a flower, or point out a bush to me, and you could tell that she didn't quite understand why she couldn't go in among all those green things like at home.

For some reason, she was fascinated by the big, round, green containers where you're supposed to throw your glass bottles to be recycled. Go figure. On the other hand, the metro and elevators make her scream. People thought I was crazy when Alina was born and I refused to buy a stroller, but I would like to confirm that having a stroller in the metro is every bit as inconvenient as I imagined it to be. Thank goodness for the kind people that often helped me carry it up and down the many flights of stairs, but it still seems preferable to me to avoid the whole thing all together.

All in all, it was an enjoyable trip. Honestly, though, the best part was coming home. This evening, Alina ran around our yard and picked flowers, we ate dinner in our enormous kitchen, and I just stepped out the door just now and smelled that sweet, late-spring evening tree-and-grass smell.

I wouldn't move back.