Let’s Get Together

The town where I live is not huge. It qualifies as a city only in the rhetoric of our elected officials. Even so, we have a thriving Art Association. Local painters, photographers, and jewelry makers have banded together for many years to put on shows and workshops.

It’s a curious fact that we have no equivalent for composers of music.

A web search reveals a few organizations for composers in San Francisco and the Inner East Bay. But as I get older, I’m far less inclined to want to hop in the car, drive for an hour, hunt for a parking place, and walk back to my car after dark in a strange neighborhood. Sorry, sports fans, but that’s how it is. If it’s within 20 minutes of my house, I’m happy. Anything further afield is a chore. If I never have to drive to San Francisco again as long as I live, I’ll be very happy.

So why isn’t there a group of active composers here in town?

I put it down mainly to the difference in media. This plays out at both the beginning and the end of the artistic process.

Painting — or at least, representational painting, and trust me, that’s most of what you’ll see at a show of the Livermore Art Association — is an art form in which your eye can be trusted to tell you, quite intuitively, whether you’re doing a decent job. If you try to paint a cat and it comes out looking like

Whip It Out

Back in the early ’70s I played in two or three bands. Did a lot of gigging, made a little money, had a bunch of neat experiences. Both of the bands that I was most involved with were composed of people I had gone to high school with. That made it easier to put things together, I’m sure.

In the late ’70s I was working for a fledgling music magazine called Keyboard, and I had a look around in the South Bay to see if I could find a band to play with. No luck. I answered a few classified ads, but what I encountered were either wannabe’s — people who had a desire to play, but were variously clue-impaired — or gigging bands who were doing commercial music of a type that I didn’t care for.

So I bought a synthesizer and an 8-track reel-to-reel, and got into electronic music. That was when I started writing science fiction too, come to think of it.

Lately I’ve been thinking I’d like to play some live music again — something besides the local community orchestra. So forgive me while I think out loud for a minute.

What I’m finding is that the scene is pretty much what I remember from 35 years ago. Today I was scouting through the musicians’ classifieds on craigslist. My favorite ad so far

Picture Yourself Playing Cello

My new book for beginning cellists is due to arrive in bookstores at the beginning of April. Here’s a low-tech home-brew video in which I talk about the book:

The book is written mostly for folks who are new to cello playing. It’s packed with photos, a fact that I forgot to mention in the video. If you’re struggling with the first stages of learning to play the cello, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the book!

Starting from Scratch

Now and then I get a call from an adult who has conceived a desire to play the cello. Because I teach, I’m always happy to help them get started. But I’ve learned to give them a gentle warning up front.

What I tell them is this: I’ve had several adult students who started as beginners, stuck with it for several years, and made very considerable progress. But I’ve also seen several who started taking lessons but soon gave it up. I’m sure the main reason is because learning to play the cello turned out to be more of a challenge than they were prepared for.

When I get that initial call, I usually suggest that if the prospective student doesn’t already have a cello, they should find a nearby store that does monthly rentals with a rent-to-own option. A decent cello is expensive, and there’s no point in laying out a pile of cash until you’re sure you’re going to want to stick with it.

How expensive? Depends on what you mean by “decent.” I usually try to find good things to say about a student’s cello, but if you’re spending less than $2,500, you’re not going to enjoy playing as much, because the cello is simply not going to produce the kind of warm tone that probably inspired you to want to start taking lessons.

Once they’ve started lessons, I usually tell them this: When you watch a good cellist, he or she makes it look easy. Yo-Yo Ma is inspiring to watch, because he can do anything on the cello and make it look easy and natural. But in fact, the use of the arms, hands, and fingers is not

I Sing the Cello Electric

For the past year or so, my electric cello has been languishing, in its case in the closet, surrounded by its amp and other accessories. Yesterday I had an impulse to get it out and start using it again.

In spite of the obvious major similarities, it’s a very different instrument from the acoustic! And not just visually, but as an instrument. Visually, it’s a plank. There’s no body. And the headstock is a flying-V design, with all of the tuning gears on one side. They’re black — very classy — but yet it’s clear at a glance that we’ve left the Italian Renaissance far behind.

It’s a five-string cello, with a high E string. I once phoned Ifshin Violins in El Cerrito and said, “I need to buy a cello E string,” and the person said, “There’s no such thing as a cello E string.” Ah, but they were wrong. You can also buy a low F string, if you want to play in the bass register. My cello came with a second nut, grooved for the lower string set (F-C-G-D-A), but after trying it out for an hour I decided

A Joyful Noise

Community orchestras are a wonderful thing … sort of. Last night I played a concert with the Silicon Valley Symphony. Tonight we’re repeating the program. It’s a good orchestra, capable of tackling fairly challenging repertoire and bringing it home. But I see both the plusses and the minuses.

Playing in such an orchestra is enjoyable first and foremost because it gives you a chance (indeed, an obligation) to sit in a chair and pay close attention to a complex piece by Brahms or Beethoven for 25 or 30 minutes at a stretch. Being in the audience just isn’t the same: In the audience, your mind can wander. At least, mine does. And an audience member is unlikely to sit through the same pieces week after week, becoming more closely acquainted with them.

There’s some satisfaction in being able to do a good job. Also, the orchestras provide a welcome outlet for soloists who are very capable but are not quite ready to play a concerto with the San Francisco Symphony, and may never be.

On the other side of the coin are two issues.

First, playing in a symphony is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a creative activity. Someone hands you a stack of paper with little dots on every sheet, and your job is to wiggle your fingers in ways that match the dots. Years of training are required, so the activity is a little more sophisticated than being a ditch digger, but if it took years of training to be a ditch digger, the two would be quite comparable with respect to the scope one has for personal expression or meaning.

Beyond that, even the best community orchestras are not, in my experience, able to do truly fine performances. There are always rough edges. Someone in the bass section can be relied on to jump in early during a rest. The violins’ intonation is likely to be quite shaky during fast passages. French horn entrances are hit-or-miss. Once in a while, the conductor may even drop a beat; it’s rare, but it happens.

So the upshot is, I drive down to rehearsal on the freeway, week after week, in order to perform what is essentially a mechanical activity, for which I don’t get paid, and after the concert I find myself saying, “Well, that wasnt too bad.”

I’m not a candidate for a better orchestra. I make a few little mistakes from time to time too. I’m where I’m supposed to be. I just wish it was more satisfying.

Three’s Company

An inspiring concert tonight — the Tilden Trio onstage at the Bankhead in Livermore. They played Beethoven’s Op. 1, No. 3, the Dvorak F minor trio, and … well, apparently there was a chaotic scene last night at some hotel in San Francisco, where they played at a gala honoring Michael Tilson Thomas. The violinist’s sheet music for the third trio piece got lost. So they substituted a virtuosic violin/cello duo by Bohuslav Martinu. Wow!

Sometimes I think all I want to do is play, listen to, and compose music. Why bother doing anything else? I now have a keen desire to rush out and buy several CDs of music by Martinu. On the other hand, I have a box set of CDs containing all 14 Shostakovich string quartets, and when was the last time I listened to them? Heck, I have a couple of hundred LPs and a functioning turntable, and I can’t remember the last time I played an LP at all, other than to let one of my students hear Pablo Casals playing Bach.

I’m strictly an amateur pianist, but I keep at it. Over the last few years I’ve learned several Haydn piano sonatas. But when I don’t play a piece for a while, it falls apart. One of my goals for this winter is to expand my repertoire by relearning a bunch of piano music that I’ve learned and then set aside. Right now I’m working on the Haydn C# minor sonata. And lots of Bach. And Clementi, who was amazing.

The wonderful thing about playing the piano is that there’s an endless supply of great music that you can play by yourself, in your living room. I enjoy playing the cello too, but the cello is not

Book Report

Details coming soon. Right now we’re nailing down a few details in the contract, but it appears this fall I’ll be writing a book on cello technique. For beginners. To be brought out by a major publisher of instructional books.

I’m certainly not the World’s Foremost Authority on cello playing, although I did have good teachers (notably Laszlo Varga). Mostly, I was in the right place at the right time. The idea came from the publisher’s acquisitions editor, in fact, and I had sense enough to say, “Yes, please.” They were swayed by the fact that I’m a writer, and that I have plenty of practical experience from teaching beginners.

It’s an interesting project. I’ll need to take lots of photos. (Taking photos of your own hands … there’s a challenge.) Also shoot video for the DVD. The inclusion of a DVD with the book is going to be a huge plus. There are many aspects of cello technique

Me, Myself, and I

I’ve always loved pop tunes — everything from Christmas carols to “Walk like an Egyptian.” It’s all good.

A couple of years ago I started thinking I’d like to do a solo cello set with some of these great tunes. Record new arrangements in my studio, using synthesizers, take a P.A. system into a club or wherever, and play the melodies on cello over pre-recorded backing tracks.

I did quite a lot of work on the recordings. “Lady in Red,” for instance. I never cared for it when I heard it on the radio, but it is an awesome cello solo. I basically have the entire set on my hard drive, ready to go. But as I got close to being ready to look for gigs (this was back in 2008), I started feeling

Goats in the Machine

I have a talented cello student, a sophomore in high school, who on his own initiative found and started learning Mark Summer’s “Julie-O.” Summer is the cellist with the Turtle Island String Quartet, and “Julie-O” is his big unaccompanied solo spot. (If you’re curious, there’s a video of him playing it on YouTube.) It’s quite a fine piece, in a loose and jazzy way.

Yesterday one of my Facebook friends turned me on to the Avant-Garde Project, a downloadable collection of rare recordings (mostly from LPs, I believe) of important avant-garde music from the ’70s and ’80s. So I started grabbing a few files. They’re in .flac format, but Audacity (a free, cross-platform audio editor) loads and plays .flac files.

Right now I’m listening to Morton Subotnick’s “Axolotl,” a 17-minute piece for cello and what Subotnick terms “ghost electronics” — circuitry that makes no sound on its own, but instead processes the sound of an acoustic instrument.

Would I suggest to my student that he track down and learn “Axolotl”? Or even download and check out the recording? No, I would not. I hope he never hears it, but if he does, I’m pretty sure he’ll roll his eyes or crack up.

In 17 minutes of music, “Axolotl” has perhaps 30 seconds of sonority that are not actively obnoxious. For the rest — what on Earth could possibly possess someone to think that this repulsive mess was worth composing, much less recording or performing? I think a brain tumor would probably be needed.

There is no melody or theme. There is no harmonic movement. There is no meter. There is no formal structure. The primary contribution of the electronic “ghost score” is to add a jittery tremolo that turns the tone of the cello into a sad and annoying mess. The cellist in the recording (most likely Joel Krosnick, who commissioned “Axolotl”) flails away at his instrument, producing plenty of scrapes and squeaks. He also grunts now and again. Or perhaps that was the record producer leaning over the wastebasket.

Allen Ginsberg said, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” He wrote that in 1955, 25 years before the composition of “Axolotl,” but he might have been talking about Subotnick.

In fairness, though, “Axolotl” was premiered in a concert hall at the Library of Congress, so I think we have to admit that Subotnick was far from alone in being starving hysterical naked. This sort of music was, and remains, highly regarded in certain circles.

I’m entirely at a loss to understand why.