CMNC

April 2009
When I heard that clarinetist Anthony McGill, violinist Itzhak Perlman, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero were to play at President Obama’s inauguration on January 20, I naturally assumed they were going to do Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Messiaen wrote this strange, amazing piece while he was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II, first as a trio for fellow-prisoners clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, and cellist Etienne Pasquier, then as a quartet with himself at the piano. It had its premiere in Stalag VIII-A in Gorlitz, Germany on January 15, 1941, 68 years almost to the day before the inauguration.

I quickly realized that Messiaen’s piece was not going to work. It has eight movements, with titles like “The Abyss of Birds” and “Tangle of Rainbows, for the Angel who Announces the End of Time,” and takes almost an hour to play. I can’t think why it wasn’t performed at the inauguration in 2005, for which it would have been perfect, but for 2009 it just wasn’t quite right.

Instead, the group played a new piece by John Williams called Air and Simple Gifts, based on Joseph Brackett’s 19th century Shaker hymn. The hymn is very familiar from its setting in Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Williams says he chose it knowing that Copland is one of Obama’s favorite classical composers. We have a president with favorite classical composers! It only added to the thrill of the day that our community, the community of chamber music players, was so well represented at the inauguration. Not only were they four fantastic musicians, they were also beautifully diverse. There was an Asian French-American cellist, an African-American clarinetist (whose phrasing was for me the highlight of the piece), an Israeli-born violinist who gets around on crutches or an Amigo scooter, and a pianist from Venezuela whose gender holds up half the sky. And as always in music, the diversity was completely un-remarked-upon. No one cared. They were a chamber group, and that’s all that mattered.

During their performance, while they were reminding us that ‘tis a gift to be simple and a gift to be free (and yes, I know, due to the cold we weren’t hearing their actual sounds, but they were up there performing) the hour of noon quietly arrived, at which moment, as stipulated by the United States Constitution, Barak Obama became president. A tangle of icy wind, a different angel announcing the beginning of a new time. And we, through our duly chosen representatives Anthony, Itzhak, Gabriela, and YoYo, were there when it happened. Tis a gift to come down where you want to be.

January 2009
There is nothing about chamber music not covered by Virginia Albedi’s book of limericks, and here is my current favorite: The moment we’ve played our last line / All thoughts turn to cheeses and wine. / I can’t decide yet / about this quartet. / Do we meet to make music, or dine? Well, to make music, certainly. But if you recall a memorable chamber music session, you probably also recall the convivial period afterwards when, spiritually nourished by the great music you’d just played, your thoughts did indeed turn to the possibility of refreshments.

The connection of music with food is so close that I can scarcely imagine playing music with friends and not also sharing food with them. Chamber music is both intimate and strenuous. Afterwards it’s natural to want to spend some time together, restoring your strength and re-connecting with the real world. It’s like the old joke that your three favorite things are a martini before and a nap after, except, as a chamber musician of a certain age, I might say that my three favorite things are, just some water before, thanks, and afterward, a nice snack from Trader Joe’s.

All this is well known to the CMNC board, and we spend time before each workshop considering how we can best sit down and eat together. Providing lunch is a given, if only for scheduling, but we arrange Saturday night dinner for the sake of our souls. Each of us plays with, on average, 3.5 people per workshop day. If there is a master class, we share that time with 12.5 more. But we eat dinner with everybody, even those stubbornly preformed people whom we may never play with in this lifetime, but who have to become part of our group somehow. Eating together after playing—and somehow this works even if you haven’t actually played with everyone that day—transforms us from individuals who happen to have something in common, into a real community. When I come into the dining room on Saturday night and hear our lively, peaceful voices rising over a shared meal, it sounds to me the pure sound of a community being formed, or to put it another way, being fed. So there’s the answer: we meet to make music and dine. We have been doing this at CMNC for nearly twenty years now, and I hope we can continue for twenty more.

 
September 2008
The David Brookes Nametag

There are stick-on-your-shirt nametags with “Hi, my name is ______” printed on them in  red. There are high-tech nametags like the ones my husband gets at conferences, which beam your email address and web site URL to other nametags while the engineers wearing them gaze slightly away from each other, arms crossed on their chests. And then there are the David Brookes nametags we got at Humboldt this year! These beautiful objetswere commonly worn as pins or necklaces. The background was a light, bright green with red, and stood for what we felt together: green for the trees, green for our hopes, red for our joy. In the foreground David had boldly calligraphed our first names in a script called Bone. He wrote our other (less important) names in small, light capitals, and our instrument in bold caps at lower left. They were commissioned by the Humboldt workshop, and David made 300 of them, for the participants in all three weeks. Amazing! How many people do you know who have actually invented an art form? Speaking as one of his most avid collectors (I have been saving DB nametags for years), I feel now is a good time for a major retrospective—in these
pages, naturally. Thanks to everyone who sent nametags. I even included a dance card!

The sight of everyone at Humboldt—coaches and staff too—going about adorned with David’s art gave me a visual reminder of why I go back to chamber music workshops year after year. While doing those special Humboldt things (like clapping extra hard to bring my friends back for a second bow, or speculating about the coaches’ opinion of my playing based on my assignments), I was also happily aware of being in the place where I feel most at home and most fully myself. And why wouldn’t I? I was in one of the most beautiful places on earth, fully stocked with people I love and can share my favorite activity with, free of all responsibilities except those intrinsic to cello playing, and with my identity stripped down to the part of myself I care most about.

And for all that, doesn’t my David Brookes nametag say it all?

     
April 2008, by Tina Kun
This issue, particularly devoted to “how-to” articles, is my third and final one as editor. I took the editorship on for just a year, and will hand it back to Elizabeth Morrison at the fall issue.  It has been an interesting year for me, and I am grateful to the writers with whom I have had the opportunity to work. I would particularly like to thank the writers in this issue. Sue Fowle’s article on harmonics of the violin and viola is being reprinted (by much popular demand) from a 1998 issue. Ted Rust’s article “When and How to Lead” is being published simultaneously here and in Music for the Love of It.  I think you will find Jim Shallenberger’s tips on intonation inspiring and useful. Be sure to check the President’s Corner for a surprising announcement.
 Tina Kun

September 2007, by Tina Kun
This edition of The Chamber Musician is dedicated to the memory of Alex Zuckermann, a founder and first president of CMNC. His energy and enthusiasm for creating a community of amateur chamber musicians have inspired many volunteers to continue and expand his vision, leading to an ever-growing organization.

The sheer weight of work that CMNC volunteers have assumed has impressed me no end.  Keeping the books, doing the taxes (the last jobs I would take on!), creating systems to keep track of so many members, minding the myriad details that go into putting on a workshop, attending to the feelings of every single participant, keeping the whole effort coordinated - the list goes on and on.

Of course, volunteer jobs are always something of a luxury, and give us great rewards.  I have enjoyed all my stints in various places--using fancy equipment, consorting with interesting people, and contributing to the realization of a project I think is valuable (reverse order of importance). Nevertheless I surprised myself, raising my hand to take on this newsletter after the splendid editorship of Elizabeth Morrison. Her act is hard to follow.

CMNC has the most active, generous, capable board I have seen, and actually ALL of us who participate in CMNC workshops are volunteers in a sense.  We could stay home, playing music of our own choice with friends we know we get along with. Instead, we make the effort, and pony up the expense, to go out to play music we might not like with unknown companions. Every time we go to a workshop it is like going to a party where our job is to give everyone there a good time.  It usually works.

And Alex was the instigator. He brought people out—for both his passions, bicycling and music.  He gave us the impetus to get up and go out and do something ourselves.  Thank you, Alex.   

   
April 2007
A recent issue of TIME magazine had a cover story on the brain, and here’s what I found out. Research subjects who spent time practicing a piano exercise showed neuron growth in the part of the brain associated with hand movements. That’s not news, but wait, there’s more. People who did not physically practice, but who spent an equivalent amount of time each day thinking about the exercise, showed the same neuron growth as the people who had actually touched their instruments.

Finally, evidence that the think method works! So much for that pesky practicing! I was especially interested because I had recently spent six months unable to play, hoping desperately that I wasn’t losing all my neurons. The last thing I had worked on before my accident was Beethoven’s opus 131, and I spent a lot of time afterwards contemplating different ways of playing the difficult cello passage towards the end of the slow movement. Perhaps all that enforced think-method time had solved the difficulties of this passage? Alas, it hadn’t, but maybe I just hadn’t thought hard enough. I decided to try a new experiment. There are some measures in the fourth movement of the Dvorak piano quintet (the fugal passage at measures 234-7, if you must know) that I have long doubted I would play well in this lifetime. I sat down and stared at the measures, mentally practicing, for several hours.

I think it worked—at least, the passage now sounds great in my head. But that’s just the trouble. What good is the think method, if it only works when you’re thinking? Brahms may have wondered why he ever went to concerts when he could hear the best performance by paging through the score, but who else cares about mental perfection, or neurons growing like kudzu? I want to make sounds with my real hands on my real instrument. I guess I’d better leave the think method to people like Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine, who told Miss Bennet, “There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.” Maybe I will play that Dvorak passage someday—but something tells me I’m going to have to practice!                                                                                         

January 2007
At the October workshop I played with a friend who had recently become a member of a chamber music couple. As I enjoyed his euphoria, my mind wandered back to when I embarked on CM couplehood myself. It was not entirely without trepidation. Another friend had told me that she and her husband absolutely could not play together, as she hated his rhythm and he loathed her intonation. That was a little scary. I’d also heard of string quartets that had unraveled when couples in the quartet parted ways. The Manhattan Quartet used to be two married couples. Now it’s four guys. Hmm. And the Guarneri Quartet has stayed together, they say, by never traveling and rarely socializing together —it seems to be just too much togetherness. I wondered if it wouldn’t be better to be in a quartet with Ralph than a marriage, husbands being comparatively a dime a dozen next to first violins.

Still, I knew at least one marriage that had been glued together by a mutual passion for golf. Surely chamber music could do as well? So I took the plunge, and it was on to the development section. It turns out there are definitely pitfalls in playing music with a spouse, and I fell into most of them. My inner coach woke up and easily overcame my inner Nancy Reagan. I let nonmusical problems into the music room, and in an incident I still blush to recall, once drove Molly Banks from a Humboldt rehearsal in tears with my marital squabbling. I developed a cross-quartet glare that said, “Fine, play it your way for now, but just wait till I get you alone.” Fortunately Ralph has a forgiving nature, and I found the way out of most difficulties was to utter those three little words (“You’re right, dear,”) at least once in a while.

Finally getting the hang of playing while married, we found chamber music’s best, or most golf-like, qualities emerging. It keeps us on our toes with its absurdly challenging physical demands, provides marvelous opportunities for travel and socializing, and is most enjoyably done in small, cozy groups. Not only does it make incomparable glue for a marriage, if it were any more fun it would have to be illegal. Too bad it isn’t aerobic exercise! But I suppose there’s always golf...   

   
September 06
I love the summer workshops, especially Humboldt, where each year adds a new pearl to my memory string. My first time at Humboldt was in 1986, so this was my 20th anniversary year. 1989 was the year I met my future husband Ralph, on Tuesday of Week II. We were assigned Beethoven’s string quartet Opus 95, and as we always say, things quickly became serioso. Tuesday is group-picture day, so we have a photo of ourselves standing together on the very day we met, both looking as pleased as punch. That makes every Humboldt an anniversary for us.

But this year I hadn’t yet regained enough range of motion after an injury to my wrists to play. I went anyway, to keep Ralph company, and got a nametag from David Brookes that read “Cello-Tacet.” So how bad was it, being a non-player at a workshop? Actually not as bad as you might think. The experience of the daily concert was about the same, since you’re not playing for most of it anyway, and you’re definitely less nervous. It was still fun talking about the assignments, and this time, perhaps uniquely in my friends’ experience, it wasn’t all about me. It’s a total pleasure to be up there in the redwoods, and I had more time to appreciate them than usual. The party was still fun. The spiritual center of the week was at the Thursday concert, when coaches Terrie Baune, Carol Jacobson and Alan Geier played the slow movement of the Archduke Trio in memory of our dear friends Hubert Schwyzer, Ray Van der Veer, Mary Alice Mote, Jerry Noe and Rheta Goldberg. I am grateful I was there for that.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been better to be playing. Of course it would have. But chamber music is very big magic, with riches to spare even for a silent cello. I remember Mark Salzman, in Iron and Silk, telling of an essay by one of his Chinese students on “My Happiest Moment.” The essay describes a delicious meal of Beijing duck eaten by the student’s wife, and concludes, “even though I wasn’t there, it was my happiest moment.” This wasn’t quite my best workshop, but there’s a new pearl on my memory string after all. It’s an unusual one, an oddly shaped black pearl, perhaps, but it’s real. And I can’t help thinking—won’t next year’s look pretty beside it!

April 06
It’s impossible to think of CMNC without thinking of Rheta Goldberg. When she died suddenly on January 20th of this year, our entire community reeled with shock and sadness. One minute she was a living force among us, and then she was gone. People have said that she died as they would wish to—in the bosom of her family and friends, having just played chamber music, in good health to the end. Except that she died too soon—she was just 80, which seems like a young age to me now—this could even be true. But it doesn’t make it easier that she’s gone.

We board members had seen her five days earlier, when she had been an active participant in the Acceptance Meeting for the San José workshop. I remember her remarking, when someone seemed to be paying insufficient attention to her, that she must be on the official “do not listen to” list. This was quintessential Rheta, assertive and funny; it was also completely untrue. There was never anyone more firmly on the “always listen to” list. Every workshop director knows how Rheta would take your carefully contrived groups and run them through her amazing brain. Back they would come, with most groups tweaked a little and some changed beyond recognition. It could be a little unsettling, but you always had to admit it: her way was better. No, she was someone whose advice we always wanted, needed and respected.

It wasn’t just because she had a knack for putting together nice groups, either. It was more that the best quality of CMNC came straight from Rheta herself. One word for this quality is inclusion. Rheta valued good playing as much as the next person, but she valued musicality, generosity, warmth and joie de vivre more, and she found them everywhere. She reminded us over and over that a workshop isn’t just about playing with our friends, or with the best players we could upgrade ourselves to; it is about creating a wonderful musical experience for as many people as possible. Another word for it is heart. Without Rheta, we’ll have to remember for ourselves what she tried so hard to help us learn. Every workshop we come to with an open, generous heart will keep Rheta’s memory alive, and in this way, at least, we can keep her with us forever.

       
January 2006
If you’re someone for whom musical masterpieces are forever ruined once they are associated with silly words, you may want to stop reading right now, and who could blame you? I, for one, was a happier person before I knew that the opening of Beethoven’s violin concerto could be sung to the words, “Don’t play chess with your daughter; she knows more than you taught her.” This comes from a little book called From Bach to Verse by Josefa Heifetz (Jascha’s daughter, actually.) Heifetz’ verses are intended as mnemonic devices, and include the famous “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote and never finished,” as well as the rather useful “Most people rate Berlioz as great, but, surely, not fantastic.”

I was reminded of this book recently when I read, under the Chronicle headline “Playing music can be good for your brain, ” of a recent Stanford study showing that musical training improves the brain’s ability to process the spoken word. It seems that musicians’ brains can more easily distinguish between the rapidly changing sounds that are the key to understanding and using language. “What this study shows,” says researcher John Gabrieli, “is that there’s a specific aspect of language…that’s changed in the minds and brains of people with musical training.”

That explains a lot! Not just how chatty we CMNC’ers are, but also the confabulation many of us feel between music and words. Notes transmogrify into words and words into notes, and meaning and music float somewhere above them both. And if the words are sometimes a bit irreverent, well…I didn’t think less of Val Phillips after I found out that when he hears the viola-cello theme in the first movement of the Schumann piano quintet, he often thinks, “Why can’t violas play in tune, why do cellos wander?” It’s ineffably satisfying when words and music go together hand on bow. Think of the Flanders and Swann words to Mozart’s horn concerto K495, or the Annie Ross song Twisted, famously covered by Joni Mitchell, with hilarious words set to a Wardell Gray saxophone solo. Wonderful!

Heifetz fille represents, perhaps, the dark side here, and so I leave you with this. “I hate zucchini, veal scaloppini, cold fettuccini, Rossini, and Pachelbel.” Yes, it’s the overture to the Barber of Seville. And if you’re sorry now you read to the end, my apologies, but—you were warned!

   
September 2005
This summer workshop season was a memorable one for me. I didn’t get to my usual haunts, Humboldt and Ashland, and I missed them, but I went to a two-week workshop in Tuscany. Talk about complete bliss! The countryside, the food and wine, the excellent company, the music—I’m still savoring it all. This workshop is in its eighth year, and it’s had American coaches in the past, but this time we had coaching by two Italian musicians, cellist Vittorio Ceccanti and violinist Lucia Goretti. They gave us good coaching, like the kind we get at home but with a special Italian flavor, like the difference between delicious homemade vanilla ice cream and Fior di Latte gelato.

They seemed to actually breathe music; perhaps because when Italians use musical terms, they are speaking their native language. Tempo, tema, piano—these words sound so natural in their mouths. (And speaking of language, their English was better than perfect, it was flexible and charming. Lucia, explaining why she had to rush off after a coaching session, said that one of her students was playing a concerto that evening, adding, “I am emotiated.”) Vittorio talked constantly about the tema and reminded us often that whether you were playing the actual notes of the theme, or accompaniment notes, you were playing the tema. “This is the magic of music,” he said. “You play eighth notes, and yet you play the tema.” One of those simple remarks that change your playing forever.

When talking about dynamics, both coaches used the word “color” instead. If the music called for piano and we plowed on loudly, they would stop us and ask not for softer playing, but for a different color. We all loved that idea. At another point, Vittorio said, about the ebb and flow of a quartet, that the music went up and down “come Toscana.” With that the music merged with the beautiful landscape, and we saw that the Tuscan hills, in their turn, went up and down come la musica. So there it was: a perfect workshop.

     
April 2005
Being a CMNC Board member is almost as much fun as playing chamber music. I know, it sounds incredible, but listen. The spirit of chamber music hovers over all enterprises in which small groups, through a combination of individual and cooperative exertion, produce something complicated that no one person could have done separately. Our product—the three big chamber music parties we throw each year—is beyond cool. Even the meetings are enjoyable—brisk, foody, and with just enough conflict to keep us all awake.

I’m thinking about this right now because the board is going through some changes. My collection of back issues of The Chamber Musician reveals that while board membership has evolved over the past 17 years, the names of Rheta Goldberg, Bill Horne and Bob Nesbet appear very early on, and Merlyn Doleman’s pops up a few short years later. Now, among other changes, Rheta is stepping down as treasurer, a position she has held since 1991. She was my recruiter and mentor, and she constantly amazes me. The care she takes over workshop assignments is legendary. She not only remembers what everyone has played in every workshop, and with whom, and how good a time they had, she also uses her heart to put people and music together in new ways, so that each workshop goes beyond the one before. Luckily she’s staying on the board, because we really can’t do without her!

I started coming to CMNC when I still lived in Eureka, in the hope of finding new friends before I moved to the Bay area. It worked, and today the CMNC community is a big part of my life. When I joined the board in 2000 I did so in part because it was one of the few arenas where someone my age could be referred to without irony as “new blood.” And new blood is always needed. So, to those of you in your 40’s and 50’s who are attending workshops now, I just want to say this: When your work life gets a little calmer, and you have time for a great volunteer activity, the CMNC board is just waiting for you. The truth is, you’re going to love it!

      
January 2005
As I write, the October 2004 workshop at Hayward is less than three months in the past, but it seems like ages ago. So much has happened.  The tsunami, as natural disasters do, has divided time into “before” and “after,” and filled us all with sorrow. On a different scale, the Presidential election feels like a corner decisively turned, and it’s hard now to recall the lively sense of hope and possibility we felt way back in October.

Of course I realize that not every chamber musician shares the same political views. But our geographical designation alone (the NC in CMNC) almost guarantees that most of us sport a distinct bluish tint.  Even those of us with a more conservative outlook aren’t free of worries about our country’s direction. These shared feelings brought music and politics together for me in a new way when, shortly before the election, I attended a gathering organized by Katherine Bukstein and Carol Mukhopadhyay, informally dubbed “Strings for Swings.” Dozens of CMNC members and other local musicians spent an afternoon alternately playing chamber music and writing postcards to voters in swing states like Ohio. Not only was the sense of community amazing, the day also gave me a chance to see our lifestyle through new eyes. A couple of guys from the Kerry campaign came by to speak to us. As they opened door after door to find music groups happily playing away, they grew more and more mystified. One finally said, “Wait, who are you people, again?” “Oh, just some friends,” I said, secretly delighted by the remark—his surprise reminded me how uniquely lucky we are to have music and each other.

It was great, it was empowering, it wasn’t enough, and here we are facing four more years. But they will also be four more years of music. In Jack Gilbert’s poem A Brief for the Defense, the poet begins by invoking the sorrow that exists everywhere, but goes on to say that “We must have/ the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/ furnace of the world.” And indeed,  “We must admit there will be music despite everything.” And so there will be, and for that, as 2005 begins, I am completely grateful.

August 2004
The summer workshop season was a delight, as always.  I attended Humboldt and Ashland, and enjoyed playing old favorites (a day with Brahms Opus 25) and learning new ones (an exciting piano trio by Malcolm Arnold), reuniting with treasured friends and making new ones.  I returned feeling tip-top—and now science is here to explain why. 

Psychological Bulletin recently published a meta-analysis of 300 stress studies, which reveals that our bodies’ reaction to stress goes far beyond the simple fight-or-flight response.  Some stress, in fact, is decidedly healthy.  A short-term stress like giving a speech—something with a definite end and stakes that aren’t too high—actually mobilizes the body’s fast-acting immune response.  People who have just, let’s say, played a five-minute section of a quartet in front of their supportive peers have up to twice as many natural killer cells coursing through their system as do those poor souls who spent their vacation lying on the beach.  (If the stakes are too high—if we were to play in front of paying customers who might demand refunds, say—those cowardly killer cells would decrease.)  The far extreme of stress is the chronic, long-term variety, such as unemployment or, in some cases, employment; such stress has negative effects on the whole immune system.  So you see!  We have to go to chamber music workshops, if only to ward off the effects of our daily lives.  It’s for our health!

Now that I know how good for me chamber music is, I can’t help wondering how I managed for the 20 years when I wasn’t playing the cello.  In fact, when I interview new CMNC attendees I’m struck by how often a player reports just getting back into his or her instrument after 20, 30 and even 50 years.  How does that happen?  I decided to investigate, and have been amassing quite a collection of “resuming stories.”  Several appear in this issue, with more to come in the future.  My thanks to all who are participating in this project.  Now how about if we try billing our health insurance for the next CMNC workshop?

April 2004
I really enjoyed the recent CMNC workshop at San Jose. Saturday was terrific—well, it always is. That’s the big day for most of us, with coaching and then the Master Class, and more coaching, and then, if we’re still functional, freelancing in the evening. I went preformed this time, as one of my regular groups was preparing for a scary performance a few weeks later. Our coaching was enlivening, although I must say I sometimes wonder why we can’t coach ourselves. Don’t you pretty much know what the coach will say? Play more musically, more rhythmically, better in tune, and why not do something with the dynamics and phrasing! Why can’t we say those things to ourselves, or better yet, just do them? But no, we need a regular brush from their angel wings.

So Saturday was helpful and fun. And then came Sunday. I love Sundays! I always wonder why so many people choose “Saturday only,” when Sundays are so cool. Everyone shows up tired and relaxed. The recent coaching has people playing with extra care, so the groups are usually pretty “on.” Plus the repertoire is so amazing. Workshop directors reach deeper into the library for Sunday assignments, since it’s only for half a day, and some wild things get assigned. One advantage of being a CMC Board member is that if you see an interesting group being formed, you can try and worm your way in. At the pre-workshop meeting I saw that a Dohnanyi Sextet (piano, horn, clarinet and three strings) was being put together for Sunday morning, so I immediately attached myself to it, and got to play a truly thrilling piece. Why don’t all groups contain a French horn? They really should! Then in the afternoon I played Mozart and Beethoven with a wonderfully compatible group of strings. I was even rewarded with a limerick, from Melissa Wineman. She wrote, CMNC San Jose was a kick- / I even managed the parking schtick. / Shostakovich, Dodhanyi and …Porter? / My soul needed order! / A last dose of Beethoven did the trick!

And speaking of limericks, Tina Kun sent this charming one: Thanks for CMNC news. / There is much to delight and amuse. / Our music all ends / in a circle of friends-- / we get such a lot for our dues.  We do, and Sundays at the workshop are a big part of it. I hope to see you all Sunday at College of Marin!

November 2003
I would like to share with you an under discussed trait of our chamber music community: the penchant for expressing our feelings in limericks.  I can cite three examples, which is surely enough to establish any thesis.  The first is the Bennington workshop, in Vermont.  Bennington has a fully developed limerick culture—there’s even a book, with limericks going back decades.  (I wrote a couple when I attended, only to have them rejected from the end-of-workshop limerick fest on the grounds that they weren’t dirty enough.)  The second example is one of my groups which, at Michi Garrison’s instigation, creates limericks to commemorate our musical forays and mishaps.

The best example, though, is my third.  I possess a Xerox copy of a little book called The Well-Tempered Limerick, by Virginia C. Albedi.  This is a set of 141 limericks on string quartet playing, and every one is a gem.  Here are a few of my favorites.  This one is called “Quartetto Loquacio.” Some ladies decided for fun / To play Opus Eighteen, Number one. / But they talked and sipped sherry, / Became wondrous merry, / And never got past the first run.  Been there, done that!  Here’s “Our Second Violin’s Dilemma.”  This gigue sends me into a swoon / I’ll be fit for psychiatry soon. / To chose I am loath / But I cannot do both-- / Do I play it in time or in tune?  I know that feeling!  This one captures the essence of our avocation:  To listen is good, in a way, / But it’s better to join in the fray. / Musicians agree / They hear what they see, / The audience hears what they play. 

Albedi has taken the limerick, previously thought to be the merely clever haunt of the Man from Peru and the Lady from Niger, to unsuspected depths.  This one is called“Ars Longa.”  Who wrote these faint fingerings so? / Those commas where luftpausen go? / And who will read mine / When I’ve played my last line / And I too must lay down the bow?  Very poignant.  But imagine being in her group!  Her son added this limerick to the book: Because of her verse and her ear / The quartet played, cringing in fear / That they’d miss the repeats / Or fall off their seats / And hear of it year after year. My thanks for these delights to the Albedis, mère et fils.

August 2003
The summer chamber music workshop season is over for another year, boo hoo! Like many hard-core chamber musicians, I build my vacations around one workshop or another—Ashland, Chico, Bennington, ASTA. There isn’t one I haven’t enjoyed, but the one I love most is the grandmother of them all, Humboldt. This workshop, up on the cool, misty north coast, really is a grandma. Ashland, Chico and Bozeman are her children; Phebe Kimball, who started Ashland, tells of hauling the Humboldt music library up to Southern Oregon U. each summer until she developed a fine library of her own. Workshops like Santa Barbara, Grand Pacific and our own CMNC are her grandkids, started by people who couldn’t bear to wait all winter for Humboldt to roll around again.

Last year I didn’t make it to Humboldt, but this summer—their 45th—I did, and found a new director in place, Alan Geier, a former participant and coach. Humboldt was founded by two music professors at Humboldt State, Charles Fulkerson and Floyd Glende. They’d both retired by the time I got up there, though I had one treasured day of coaching from Charles years ago. For most of the time I’ve been going, the director has been Val Phillips, and his personality was close to the center of the experience. For one thing, he has the ability to listen, with evident enjoyment, to truly prodigious amounts of amateur chamber music. The quintessential Humboldt sight to me was Val sitting on the side of the stage, as he did during nearly every performance, gravely absorbing what had to be his hundredth Schumann piano quintet, slow movement. He seemed to know how to listen the way the angels do, not to our notes but to our music. If we wanted to learn this sweetest of all skills, well, it was there to be learned.

Val’s acts of (what else can I call it?) devotion are, I believe, one reason the atmosphere at Humboldt has always been so loving and supportive. Another reason is the Philosophy—a statement written by Floyd Glende that has been printed in every Tuesday program for nearly as long as Humboldt has been in existence. I have reprinted it on page 4, out of gratitude for the years of profound happiness it has given me.

Val retired as workshop director a few years ago, and there was a brief interregnum, but now, with Alan sitting attentively on the stage each day (yes!) listening to the performances, Humboldt looks good for 45 more years. As long as they’ll have me and I can hold a bow, I’ll be there.

April 2003
I have been almost haunted lately by a remark Burke Schuchmann made to my string quartet at a coaching session a few months ago.  He said that we would never sound like a quartet until we learned to “blend our sounds.”  I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, exactly what he meant.  As he worked with us, trying to get me to “play into” the violist’s sound and her to play into mine, I found I couldn’t reliably tell the difference between when we were doing it and when we weren’t, let alone do it.  This didn’t leave me with much possibility of improvement, yet the comment struck me as vital. I found myself thinking about it almost every time I played.  I even dreamed about it the other night.  In the dream, of course, I understood it perfectly; blending my sound impeccably with the other players, I became as one with my dream quartet.

This is the power that coaches have over us, at least at moments when some intersection of vulnerability and readiness lets us hear them.  Do they realize it, I wonder?  Workshop after workshop, they throw out comments about pitch and rhythm and dynamics and phrasing, only to see most of their advice bounce harmlessly off our carapaces.  Yet, despite our distractions and limitations, we are listening.  Bob Goldstein, in a recent President’s Corner, said that “We are a community of strivers, and we love our coaching.”  We do, and this is why.  Every once in a while some comment lodges deep inside us, and little by little, brings us closer to the music we play in our dreams.

January 2003
I know many chamber musicians who play in orchestras reluctantly or not at all.  There are also those of us who love orchestra playing, revel in loud, thrilling performances of Mahler symphonies, and would play Beethoven’s Opus 125 as happily as Opus 131.  I happen to be one of them.  I’ve often suffered withering glances from non-orchestra people who freely share their disdain for sawing or tooting away en masse and their distaste for that annoying baton waving in the foreground, usurping their right to self-expression. 

But really, what’s an orchestra but a super-large chamber group, where you can play and breathe with a hundred people at once?  I’ve always treasured a remark by Jorja Fleezanis that when she heard violin auditions for the San Francisco Symphony, she could always tell who knew what the horns were doing during the passage and who didn’t.  Certainly it can be tricky, from the depths of a string section, to know what’s going on in the fourth horn or the second oboe, but that’s what makes orchestra fun, and a great place to work on really, really active listening.

I got to compare chamber music and orchestra playing side by side when the orchestra I play in, the Redwood Symphony, performed Schoenberg’s orchestration of Brahms’ piano quartet, Opus 25.  A chamber group did the original version first, and then the orchestra played the enormous, note-for-note transcription.  The program said that Schoenberg did the orchestration because there were so many things he just couldn’t hear in the original.  A pianist friend responded indignantly that a good quartet should be able to show you everything in the piece, but perhaps Schoenberg meant that if you haven’t heard something played by the xylophone you haven’t heard it at all.  And in fact it was fascinating to hear Brahms’ astonishing harmonies colored by brass, winds and percussion.  So yes to orchestra!  Of course if I ever had to choose it would always be chamber music, but I’m so glad I don’t have to! 

September 2002
For most of us, summer is the season for weeklong chamber music workshops.  The question, “Where are you going this year?” has just a few well-defined answers, along the lines of: “I’m going to Humboldt and San Diego,” or “Chico, and I thought maybe I’d try Seattle.”  These are our “Mountains or seashore?” decisions, and we juggle our schedules to achieve the perfect combination of coaches and climate, format and friends.

I went to Ashland this summer.  Ashland has daily performances, similar to the CMNC Performance Samplers, at which you get to hear everyone play each day.  I didn’t appreciate quite how radical this format is until I went to a workshop in Bennington, Vermont a few years ago.  At Bennington you get your assignments months in advance, and spend three workshop days practicing each piece. Even then, only the very best groups are asked to perform.  A Bennington participant asked me whether it was true that at our West Coast workshops everyone performs every day, with only one day’s practice on the piece.  When I confirmed this he asked whether the performances weren’t rather…  Politeness made him pause, but I could supply some words myself.  Stressful?  Uneven?  Long? 

They can be all of that, but what he didn’t understand was the extraordinary intimacy they generate.  Every day for a week, we show each other our deepest fears and our wildest aspirations.  Val Phillips once said that we wear our egos on our sleeves.  We do, but we also wear our hearts and even our souls.  Admittedly, as amateur musicians our reach may e’er exceed our grasp, sometimes by quite a bit, but it’s also true that what we’re trying to do approaches the limits of human ability.  I figure playing chamber music well has to be up there with brain surgery—all right, it’s less risky, but it’s not easier.  Yet we amateurs give it a shot every workshop day, and the bond of sheer, amazed sympathy it creates among us is like nothing else.  No wonder I’m already thinking about next summer!  Let’s see, Ashland again for sure, and maybe San Diego…

May 2002
I have a photograph I love.  Taken at a workshop a few years back, it shows a cello quintet about to begin a performance.  The first violinist is a bright-eyed eleven-year-old girl, the second violinist a totally buffed twenty-year old African-American man, the violist a tall, middle-aged white guy, and the two cellists an attractive woman of about 40 and a stooped, sturdy-looking man in his 80’s.  The great part about this picture is the completely casual, unremarked-upon nature of its diversity.  No one cares!  They’re a chamber group, and that’s that.

It’s not that we don’t notice differences.  It’s just that we notice rather different things from the outside world.  In chamber music circles you’re appreciated not for what you have or do, but for whether you can hold on to the 16th notes or are willing to try the Shostakovich.  It’s not even necessarily the best or most experienced players who are most valued, though we appreciate skill and experience a lot.  What we really love is musical generosity and joie de vivre.  We value to the sky those people with whom we seem to play a notch better than we usually do, the ones who, merry as birdsong, always seem to recall that for us lucky amateurs, making music isn’t work, it’s play. 

January 2002
CMNC’s decision to include preformed groups in the workshops on the coached day is generally agreed to be a great success.  In each of the last four workshops a significant number of players have opted to be coached on a piece they have practiced in advance, in a group of their own choosing.  The coaches are enthusiastic about the idea, and it eases some of the tasks of the workshop director, too. 

It is also true that having preformed groups alters the feeling of the workshops in ways not easy to define.  This is something we continue to ponder.  As it happens, the October 2001 workshop was the first I attended in a preformed group.  My husband and I play regularly with a string quartet, and we decided we would benefit from working on a piece and being coached together.  It turned out to be a very good experience.  I loved spending a whole day with these dear people, and it was great to have Terrie Baune’s expert coaching on a piece I had studied at least enough to know where the hard parts were. 

At the same time I found I did miss the frisson of attending as an individual.  There is nothing quite like the feeling of waiting for the assignments to go up, knowing that you will soon be sharing moments of soul-baring intimacy with perfect strangers, and then, a little later in the day, presenting an under-prepared performance with these same strangers, now miraculously become friends.  It’s a little hard to explain to people who aren’t addicted to chamber music workshops, but there you have it—it’s an amazing high.  All I can say is, I’m glad CMNC provides us with so many different ways to have a great time. 

September 2001
The enormous tragedy of September 11, 2001 hangs over us all, and there are no words adequate to express the sorrow and loss we feel. Even music is inadequate, yet it does extend a fragile lifeline.

A piece by Bernard Holland in the New York Times on September 17th told of his experience of hearing a fragment of Brahms’ First Symphony as he surfed through TV news channels on that dreadful day. He wrote, “Music’s relation to good and evil is misunderstood, because at heart there is no relation at all…SS officers wept at the beauties of the Schubert C major Quintet. Dreadful men like Richard Wagner composed some of the most soul-stirring music ever written. Virtue has no lock on musical beauty. So how do we explain the shock of this interloping fragment of Brahms? It did not endorse good nor did it reject evil, but for a moment it fundamentally rearranged our minds…Heard in peaceful times, this fragment would have been one more reassurance that God is in his Heaven and everything below will be all right. What surrounded Brahms on that day, I am afraid, made its solace real but fleeting. Music is a form of protective gear against sudden violent death. It is thin and penetrable, but it may be all we have.”

Music and each other. Our community of musicians is like a second family. I certainly felt this as calls and emails flew between us on that Tuesday. We asked each other, are you all right? Are your loved ones safe? May they be so.

May 2001
Spring in northern California is a delight—a time to admire the daffodils and flowering cherry trees while planning our summer chamber music workshop schedule.  Should we go to Humboldt, Ashland, Chico, San Diego, ASTA, St. Martin’s, Stanford, San Anselmo, Mammoth Lakes…I suppose it’s not possible to go to all of them?  Dithering pleasurably over the possibilities, one need give hardly a thought to the Dow or Nasdaq.  Among the many charms of amateur chamber music is the fact that it’s so amazingly economical.  Today, in the Shar catalogue, I could buy all four volumes of Haydn string quartets for $203.25 plus shipping.  That’s eighty-three string quartets, at a cost of less than $2.50 a quartet, and each one contains enough treasure to last a lifetime.  I can only say, with apologies to Pearl Bailey, “Honey, I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor, and as long as I have chamber music, who cares?”

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