Music School Video

Someone put my students and me on YouTube! To see a couple of renaissance pieces we played in a concert in June, click here.

Bubbles

I've felt recently like I've been operating in a bubble. Or, in a vacuum, if you prefer. I think this happens a lot to mothers of toddlers. I feel like personally, spiritually, and musically, I've been trying to grow and go forward, but without very much in the way of outside input.

On a spiritual level, Thomas and I often feel somewhat isolated. Our church could use a good revival, along with an infusion of new people. We don't really know many people who are geographically close with whom we could also develop spiritual closeness. For me, this is linked to the fact that I'm still in the process of developing the close friendships I'd like to have here. Friendship-building takes time anywhere, but maybe more time in France than in America.

Musically speaking, I'm putting out a lot, in terms of teaching, but I'm not getting much input. I'm not currently taking lessons myself, nor do I have anyone, group or individual, to make music with. I can be motivated to practice all on my own, but I'm afraid that lately I've been kind of stagnating. I need someone else's perspective, and the added possibilities that another instrument and set of hands would add to my music.

I shared these frustrations with Thomas this week, and prayed about them.

Last night, we had a family over for dinner who are members of the Assemblies of God church in Niort. We may have some doctrinal differences, but they're the first people I've talked to in a long time who actually talk about God as if He were real and doing things in their lives. What's more, they're interested, since their church is kind of far away, in having a sort of prayer/Bible study/sharing group a bit closer to home. Like, in our living room, for example.

Tonight was the Fête de la Musique. Every June 21, on the shortest night of the year, France suspends its anti-noise laws and anyone who wants to can play music out in the street as late as they want. We know a couple who is really into Medieval music, and they, with another girl were playing music in a small park here. We went to hear them and the first thing they said was, "Where's your violin?" Thomas went home and got it and came back, and we played. The girl who was with them plays a small harp and is very good. I played some traditional sorts of Irish and American pieces that I could remember, she made up an accompaniment, and Alain and his wife joined in on the drum and tambourine. It was really fun, and the girl and I exchanged numbers to maybe get together and play more later.

Thanks, God.

More Alina

Alina loves hats!

I didn't force her into this. Honest!

The Calling

Tonight, we received confirmation of Thomas's calling to be a pastor.

We discovered that a sewer line is backed up and leaking sewage into our yard. In pastor's families, this only would ever happen on a Saturday night or a Sunday morning, right?

Apparently, we fit the criterion.

Meanwhile, back in Melle...

Here is Alina with her new trike in our kitchen...Oh, my, who combed her hair? (Or, maybe, who forgot to comb her hair?)
And here she is in front of our church on one of the few truly warm days we've had.

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.