WMV Music Web Log

I just gave away two books on aesthetics - I had had enough of them. However, it must have jogged my thinking. One of the books is an attempt at a Christian basis for aesthetics. Very tedious! And some foolish attempts to define "bad" or anti-social, or anti-Christian art. However, I do agree with some parts of it.

All the various artistic enterprises base themselves on a spiritual stance, which is the foundation of the relevant aesthetics. That is, aesthetics talks essentially about the relation between art and spirituality.

Two relevant (approximate) quotes: "You ask if it is good music. I answer, good for what?" (Pete Seeger). "It may be the devil or it may be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody" (Bob Dylan). You can see this worked out obviously in any aesthetic sphere. Good to make money, good to advance a career, good to sell something, good to avoid offense, good to pander to the corporations, to the owning class, to the middle class, to the working class, or to the poor.

Or good to encounter the depths of the human circumstance, to share some love with our brothers and sisters on the planet. Or to stand up for the human species and testify about what is truly good about us. Or to reflect seriously on what it is we really are, before we all redissolve into stardust. My own aesthetic is fundamentally religious - I want to be shook to my core. Aristotle quite agreed!

One more thing: I don't think you can have it both ways.

Labels: aesthetics, spirituality

More translations, in preparation for our May 20 concert, with mezzo soprano Karyn Friedman














Von ewiger Liebe (poem by Josef Wenzig) Brahms, Op. 43#1:

Forever Eternal

Twilight and darkness in forest and field
Evening already quiets the world
Few cottage lights, no chimney smoke
Even the lark has become silent.

A youth leads his maiden away from the village,
They pass by the willows, so serious, talking.

Said the youth to the maiden:
“Shame and disgrace from people who talk, if that is your fear,
Let us part quickly, like the way that we met.
Part like the rain, part like the wind, like the force of our meeting.”

Said the maiden, the maiden she said:
“Our love is sacred, we shall part never!
Firm as the rock and strong as iron,
Our love stronger still!
Iron and steel, they melt in a forge.
Love, our love: who can change?
Iron and steel, they perish in time.
Our love, our love is eternal forever!”

Two Songs for voice, viola, and piano, Op. 91:

Still Longing (Gestillte Sehnsucht, Friedrich Rückert)

How solemnly the forest stands
Bathed in golden evening light!
The birds are singing softly in quiet breeze.

What is it they whisper, the birds and the air?
They whisper the world to sleep.

But you, my desires, my heart’s endless longings
When do you rest, when sleep?

By the whispering wind, by gentle bird song,
My wishes, desires,
When do you rest, when sleep?

When fevered dreams no longer draw my soul
Toward golden distances
When my eye no longer dwells on distant stars,

Then the whispering wind and gentle birdsong,
Along with my longings, will give my life rest.


Cradlesong (after Lope de Vega, by emanuel Geibel)

[Text of old song, not sung, but played by viola:
Joseph, dear one, Joseph mine,
Help me rock the child divine
Heaven will reward your toil
For God, the Son of Virgin
Mary, Mary.]

You who hover in treetops,
You holy angels, in night and wind,
Protect my child, my child who sleeps!

You palms of Bethlehem in riotous wind
How can you blow so angry today?
Be still! Hush,
Nod branches softly, grow quiet.
My child is sleeping!
His hurt softens and melts as he sleeps.

Grim cold blows around us,
With what shall I blanket his limbs?
You angels who fly on the wind
Quiet the branches!
My child is sleeping.

(Translations by Carl Banner)

Labels: geistliches wiegenlied, von ewiger liebe

"Serious", encaustic painting by Marilyn Banner
To me, this painting is like an icon. It shows a little girl who loves the sound of the violin with all her heart, and feels privileged to have and play one.













More translations: Three poems by Klaus Groth, set by Brahms in his Op. 105 songs.

Wie Melodien (As if Melodies)

It is as if melodies drift gently into my mind like blooming flowers, filling me with their fragrance.
I try to capture them in words, but they blow away like mist, like breath.
Only a trace of their scent clings to the rhyme, coaxed from dry buds by tears.

Immer leiser (Ever Lighter)

My sleep is ever lighter
And grief lies over me
Like a trembling veil

In dreams you call outside my door
No one opens for you
And I awake crying, crying.

Yes, I must die.
And you will kiss another
When I am clay.

Before May breezes waft
And the thrush sings in the woods
If you would see me
Come soon, come soon!


Im Kirchhöfe (In the churchyard)

On storm-driven rainy day
I wandered among forgotten graves,
Weathered stones and crosses
Faded wreaths, illegible names

On storm-driven rainy day
One word froze on every grave: "Was"

As stormy dead the coffins slept
Dripping from every grave another word: "Healed"

Labels: Brahms Op. 105, Groth, Wie Melodien

I have posted mp3s from a November 16, 2002 performance of Schumann's Dichterliebe and a February 13, 2005 performance of Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben. Scott Williamson was the tenor in Dichterliebe, and Karyn Friedman the mezzo in Frauenliebe. I was inspired to revise my translations of the Heine poems set in Dichterliebe. Interestingly, Dylan seems to have borrowed one of them, so I borrowed a couple of his lines back for the translation. Here are my new translations:

Dichterliebe - Poet's Love
Poems of Heinrich Heine (translation by Carl Banner)

1. In the lovely month of May
When all buds burst open,
Love sprouted in my heart.

In the lovely month of May
When all birds sing
I confessed my longing and desire.

2. Bouquets of flowers spring from my tears
My sighs are a choir of nightingales.
If you care about me, little one, all the flowers are yours,
And under your window you will hear the nightingales.

3. The rose, the lily, the sun, the dove,
I loved them once in joyous love.
But I love no more; I love alone the fine, the divine, the most refined.
She herself, the font of love, is rose, and lily, and sun, and dove.

4. When I look into your eyes,
Pain and sorrow melt away;
And when I kiss your lips,
I am whole again.
When I lie on your breast,
I am overcome with joy;
But when you say, "I love you!"
I weep bitterly.

5. I will dip my soul in the bell of the lily;
The lily will ring and breathe out my beloved's song.
The song will vibrate and tremble just like the kiss from her lips,
That she gave me once, in a wonderfully sweet hour.

6. Reflected in the waters of holy Rhein,
Its great cathedral and the city of Köln.
In the church there is a holy icon on golden leather,
which has been a star of comfort in the wilderness of my life.
Flowers and angels hover around the image of our Lady:
Her eyes, her lips, her cheeks: they are yours exactly!

7. I bear no resentment
Even though my heart breaks,
My lost forever love,
I bear no grudge.
Even though you sparkle like a diamond,
No light enters the night of your soul.
I realize this at last.

I bear no resentment
Even though my heart breaks.
I saw you in a dream
And saw the night around your heart
And saw the snake that consumes it
I saw, my love, how miserable you are.
So I bear no grudge.

8. If the little flowers knew
How deeply my heart is wounded,
They would weep with me to heal my pain.
And if the nightingale only knew
How sad and sick I am,
She would sing to comfort me.
If the twinkling stars knew my distress,
They would speak kindly to me.
They couldn't possibly know…
There is only one who knows my pain;
And she herself, even she, she has torn my heart in two.

9. There is fluting and fiddling
Trumpets blaring
She's dancing her wedding dance
My former beloved.

There is ringing and booming
Drumming and blowing
In between, if you listen, you can hear
The sobbing and moaning
Of little angels.

10. When I hear the song that once she sang,
My heart jumps from my chest with wild pain.
Dark passion drives me into the mountains
Where my terrible grief melts into tears.

11. A youth loves a girl
who loves another boy;
but he loves another, and marries.
Out of spite, the poor girl picks up with the first guy who comes along.
And the boy, of course he feels just awful.
Yes, it's an old story, but it always stays fresh.
And if it happens to you, watch out!
It will surely break your heart.

12. As I walked out in the mystic garden, on a hot summer day, hot summer lawn
The flowers were whispering and talking, but I alone was dumb.
The flowers whispered together, and looked at me tenderly:
"Don't be too angry with our sister, thou pale, sad human man."

13. I wept in my dream,
You were in your grave.
I woke up, tears streaming down my cheeks.
I wept in my dream,
I dreamed that you had left me.
I woke up weeping.
I wept in a dream,
I dreamed that you were good to me.
I woke up in a flood of tears.

14. All night in dreams I see you;
You smile and greet me.
I cry loudly, throwing myself at your lovely feet.
But you are melancholy and shake your blonde hair.
From your eyes drop tears like pearls.
You whisper a secret word, and you give me a wreath of cypress.
I awake: but the wreath is gone, and I have forgotten the word.

15. From ancient fairy tales
we are beckoned with white hand,
with tinkling songs about the land
where precious flowers bloom
against golden sunsets, scenting the evening with bridal countenance.
Full green trees sing ancient melodies,
The breezes are blowing secrets
Among the bird songs twittering;
Cloudy images rise from the earth
To dance an airy dance
With that amazing chorus;
Blue flames sparkle on each leaf and twig,
And red lights dash about in wild, crazy circles.
Rushing springs break out of marble cliffs,
Which make dazzling reflections in the brooks.
Ah, if only I could go there,
Refresh my heart from pain,
Be free and blissful in that land of joy!
I see it oft in dreams,
But with the morning sun,
It vanishes like a bubble.

16. Those old rancid songs,
Those spoiled and angry dreams,
Let's finally bury them once and for all!
Get me a HUGE coffin -
(It will have to hold a lot!
But I won't say what, just yet).
Big - like the great keg of Heidelberg!
And then get a catafalque with thick wooden planks,
As heavy as the bridge at Mainz.
And get me twelve strong giants,
Like Christopher in the Köln cathedral.
Those giants will bear the coffin away
And sink it in the sea;
(For such a coffin needs a vast grave).
Do you want to know why the coffin must be so large?
Because it will have to hold all of my grief and love.

Labels: Schumann Dichterliebe

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a Chelsea café (Café Bergamote, to be precise) with Marilyn. Ah, New York! The cappuccino was perfect. I said to Marilyn, "I would like to start a piano trio", and we both noticed that the fellow next to us practically jumped out of his seat. I guess that I am not the only one who would like to start a piano trio! But it is unlikely that the same scene would occur in a DC Starbucks. Most people here seem to think a piano trio is three pianos ("doesn't that get a little competitive?").

Why a piano trio? I had a trio when I was 12, The Stratford Trio, named after our house on Stratford Avenue in St. Louis. David Lang, the wonderful violinist/music teacher put it together for us at school. Martha Velick played cello (she was later to be my first love), Phil Grossman, the son of St. Louis Symphony violinist Izzie Grossman, played violin. We performed at University City High School before a crowd of at least 1000 - the first movements of Mozart Bb and Mendelssohn d minor trios. We even got reviewed: the school newspaper did a parody, I think comparing us to monkeys - I was grindingly resentful for years.

I love the trio repertoire - the great Brahms B major (and C), Schubert Bb, Beethoven "Archduke", Dvorak's "Dumky", the passionate Smetana, the gorgeous Fauré... Then there are Shostakovich, Schumann F, 7 Mozarts, dozens by Haydn, the Eb Schubert, more by Beethoven, Dvorak, Brahms, Schumann. Neglected masterpieces by Amy Beach, Charles Ives, Rebecca Clarke, George Walker, Bohuslav Martinu.

A trio has both schmaltz and power - the strings provide lyric capability and the piano can do rhythm, emphasis and contrast.

But it also has challenges: strings and piano do not communicate well, and there are built in occasions for resentment. There is the intonation problem: all piano notes are out of tune as far as strings are concerned; they have spent a gazillion hours worrying about intonation issues, and it is mostly irrelevant with piano. Strings know what a bow arm does, but no one has ever suggested to them that they look at a pianist's fingers to get closer ensemble. They have been trained to treat the pianist as a kind of obedient pony - he follows them, not the other way around. The piano is potentially louder than most string instruments, and strings are very paranoid about being drowned out. In my meeker years, I once played a concert with the music rack on top of a closed piano lid with a thick blanket laid over it at the insistence of my colleagues, who were trying to get the balance "right".

The pianist cannot play as fast as the strings, in general. They have a single line, and he has as many as four independent voices simultaneously. There is no disputing that piano parts are simply harder to learn and play than the string parts. Yet, the pianist is often regarded as retarded, incompetent, or lazy when he can't quite keep up.

So basically, string players' attitude is, would this piano jerk just leave us the heck alone! We understand each other, and the piano just causes trouble.

But why would the strings bother to play trios, if the medium is so annoying to them? This is a complex question. One would think that their first choice would be string quartet, the most perfect of classical ensembles, and indeed it is. However, the opportunities for obsessive perfectionism then become overwhelming, and most professional strings wistfully leave string quartets to the full time ensembles. Although they are perfectly content to perform a (piano) trio on two rehearsals, they claim to need at least half a dozen rehearsals to perform a string quartet.

It is a little like gender differences - there is often a communication gap.

What to do? It is a problem, since I love the sound of the trio ensemble so much. What do other pianists do about it? I haven't really done any research, but my impression is that we pianists often turn back in frustration to the solo repertoire.

From a pianist's point of view, I think working in a piano trio calls for a combination of hard-assed insistence on considerate behavior from our colleagues and zero tolerance for the typical string misbehaviors, since after all, we are outnumbered two to one.

Labels: Piano Trios

Marilyn Banner writes:

When I was at VCCA this time I went “empty”. I had no ideas, but took all my encaustic supplies. I decided, in Ram Das’ words, to “be here now.”

It wasn’t hard. The Blue Ridge mountains greeted me in the distance daily. The boxwood trees spoke their ancient language. The cows hung out. The horses asked for apples and to be petted. The sky was everywhere. I was surrounded by 22 other people who spend their lives creating. I didn’t need anything else.

So I took my new wooden panels and layered them with beeswax and encaustic medium.
I photographed the land with my digital camera. I had no printer, but I did sketches from the photos by looking at that little window on the back of the camera. I began to “copy” my sketches onto the panels.

For 3 weeks I tried to get a lot of paintings to “work.” Visual artists know what that means. I have high standards, but my paintings either looked like someone else could have painted them, or like someone was forcing the paint to make something “look like something,” but it didn’t fit right on the panel, or FEEL right. I kept working, revising, overworking.

After 3 weeks something happened: I let go of all my need to “get it right.” I just gave up, and let whatever I had actually taken into me, come out. I remembered a book I had read 40 years ago in art school, “The Chinese on the Art of Painting,” where the author described someone understanding or integrating the landscape, or the bamboo, or the mountain, in a profound way.

That’s what I was doing, finally, after 3 weeks. I had “become” the mountains and the land. Or they had “become” a part of me. I hardly kept my eyes open when I worked. Something on a deeper level was happening. I worked in an altered state for the last few days, heat gun in one hand, brush full of encaustic paint in the other. Maybe you can see that here in the work.

Last night (I have been back in DC for a month) I went to my basement stash of old meaningful books, found that book immediately, and opened it to the exact part that my art teacher in the 60’s, David Lund, had guided me to. He loved the painters of the Sung Dynasty.

Here is a quotation from the book:
“Su Shih wrote, “There are men who possess Tao and possess art; others who possess Tao but have not art, although the things take form in their hearts, they do not take form under their hands.”
The spiritual inspiration alone, however pure and deep it may be, is not enough to transform a man into an artist; he must also know how to work, how to make the hand co-operate with the mind, he must possess the power of visualizing his pictures mentally, nay, of becoming the very motifs that he paints. Yu-k’o was, according to Su Shih’s poetical expression, transformed into the bamboos that he painted, and “when Han Kan painted horses, he truly was a horse.” Also other great masters like Wang Wei, Wu Tao-tzu, and Li Lung-mien are praised for their complete self-identification with the things that they did with their brush. When Li Po’shih stayed in the mountains he did not pay attention to one thing only but his spirit joined in with ten thousand things and the mind penetrated every kind of workmanship.”

Aside from the fact that they were only talking about male masters, I think this concept is “where it’s at” for painting, and maybe not just nature.

Labels: VCCA

When I was a young man in NY, I would meet artists who would say to me, you are not an artist, because you only play other people's music. A composer is an artist, but not you. Even from older folks, who should have known better. I thought this is not fair, because, after all, I suffer like an artist!

The suffering of artists - is just like that of other people, only slightly different. Someone might say, oh I am untalented and stupid, and that is suffering. I will earn money and raise a family and watch the ball game or cook dinner. An artist says, oh I am untalented and stupid, and I am compelled by some inner urge to create something which might be awful and make me ashamed and embarrassed. (And probably won't earn me any money, but that is another blog).

So, all artists that I know encounter this demon, the same one we all encounter but some manage to avoid, maybe by unfortunate collusion, that says we are worthless and have nothing to say or lack the capacity to carry out whatever it is that we wish to do. Just when you think you have a handle on it: see, I can prove that I'm good, I did this or that to demonstrate it, then it gets really bad, like a general conspiracy between inner and outer forces to strangle the creative impulse. So, artists devise ways to hide what they do even from themselves, so as not to attract the evil eye.

Labels: suffering of artists

Betty Hauck, violist. Betty is a musician's musician - my ideal for a chamber music player. She doesn't often grab the spotlight, but when she is a member of a group, the whole ensemble not only sounds better, but feels better.


I wish she lived in DC, but she comes down from New Hampshire (and now Boston) 2 or 3 times a year. Ben Redwine and Betty Hauck and I will perform at the Ratner Museum on March 26. We can't do the program I originally had planned, due to insufficient rehearsal time. (I had in mind the Leo Smit Trio, Francaix Trio, and premiere of Blair Goins' new trio). Oh well, but it will be a beautiful program of Brahms, Mozart, Poulenc, and Rebecca Clarke.

Betty will be back on May 20 to perform with Karyn Friedman, Sally McLain, and me! We will do the great Brahms and Loeffler songs for mezzo, viola, and piano, and Sally and Betty will play Mozart's gorgeous violin/viola G major duet. I have asked Sally to play Brahms Sonata in A Op. 100 with me - something I really look forward to.

Labels: Betty Hauck, violist

Elizabeth Kluegel, soprano, and Beth Graham, french horn. We are performing a program together that includes the famous Schubert "Auf dem Strom", as well as lesser known works for soprano, horn, and piano, like Arnold Cooke's "Nocturnes". It is very good that we have managed to schedule four (!) performances of this concert. Upcoming: Monday March 10 at 10:30 am at the Lombardi Cancer Center, and Sunday March 16 at 7:30 at Galilee Church in Pasadena MD. MP3s of the Schubert and Cooke are posted from the February 24 concert at Rock Spring Church.

I also perform the Brahms f minor Sonata on this program, at least the half of it with which the 20 year old Johannes introduced himself to the Schumanns in 1853. I am pleased with this: I finally feel like I know what I am doing with this piece. Maybe I will play the whole thing on a later program, but it is more than 45 minutes long altogether. On the other hand, it is all good music, so why not?

Allegro maestoso, and Andante espressivo, from Feb. 24.

Labels: beth graham, elizabeth kluegel