Sublime Beethoven and Natural Beauty

One of our most popular Instagram videos. With Bonnie Thron, cello.

(Click on image to view)

Another former IG post that people seemed to enjoy.

Henriette Bosmans Sonata clip, Bonnie Thron, cello; Marilyn Banner art plus Cape Cod nature photos

Some Biographical Material

Mike Hummel wrote his 2007 American Studies doctoral thesis “Three American Artists at Midlife: Negotiating the Space Between Amateur and Professional Status”, using me as one of the “informants”. He interviewed me multiple times over 5 years and used transcripts of our conversations in his thesis. I find it really interesting to reflect back on what I had to say and how he interpreted it in the context of his research. These interviews lay out the trajectory of my professional life as a musician, whereas the recent memoir addresses almost exclusively my inner life. Here is the full document (by permission from Dr. Hummel).

Carl Banner, 1998

How I Overcame Stage Fright (somewhat ironic!)

I was an informant for Mike Hummel’s 2007 PhD thesis. This is an extract:

“As noted earlier, Carl was fiercely independent in his thinking about music, and because he had been living outside the musical “box” for so long, he had not had to accept limitations in terms of style and canon that others did to survive. Carl wanted back in, but on his own terms. He had his own ideas about music, forged initially during a decade of intense training in his youth, then slowly modified by influences and experiences both inside and outside the established classical musical world. A concert in Buffalo in his early twenties had been a pivotal experience:

MH: In terms of your musical education, when was the biggest part of your crisis? In your 20s? When did you become aware of the crisis?

CB: Well, I’ll tell you, the one critical memory. It was a series of events, really, but it was in Buffalo in late 1969 or early 1970. I was 21. I was performing in a fairly legitimate venue with a violinist from the Buffalo Symphony and he was a strait-laced Viennese. And we were playing some wonderful music but he played it absolutely cold. No emotion at all. And so, I was very…increasingly upset about it. And um, in those days, I was doing a lot of drugs and took mescaline, and uh…I thought for some reason I thought that I would take mescaline before the concert. And so, I got out there on the stage just as the drug was taking effect, and I felt like I’m playing something which is supposed to be music with this idiot, and the audience looked hostile to me, and I thought, ‘I don’t think so,’ and so I played one movement of the first piece and then I walked off the stage and told the people that I wasn’t feeling well and was going home. My friend, another musician, was backstage, was quite alarmed, and he said, ‘Look, why don’t you just take off your coat, because it’s hot.’ I was wearing a suit or a tux, I guess. So I went back out…he convinced me to go back out on the stage. By this time, I’m ‘tripping.’ So I said to myself ‘what do I have to lose, I’m gonna be absolutely there.’ So I played without…the concert completely full throttle out. The consequence was that I played real music, the violinist was completely beside the point, and the reviewer in the newspaper the next day commented on the contrast between the violinist’s “lack of depth of feeling” vs. the pianist’s “more impassioned playing, sometimes overpowering him.”

MH: Did you play with your Viennese “idiot” again?

CB: No, no. Fortunately, I never spoke with him again. But I learned something there that I really took to heart, which was that you could be way way out there and play music. Now for years after that I played most of my concerts stoned and it was only gradually that I realized that I had changed enough that I could risk going out on the stage straight.

MH: You could still get to the same place.

CB: Still get to the same place. It took awhile to convince myself that that would be the case, but it was like the crutch I didn’t need anymore. You know, I don’t tell this story to everybody. It’s not something I recommend. I don’t think that’s how you do it. It’s what helped me. It certainly calls into question artificial structures that you might have put together, and if those are in your way, you know, it gives you a handle on dismantling them.”

Saxophone Lieder rehearsal

Rhonda Buckley-Bishop, saxophone

I love playing German Lieder with Rhonda Buckley-Bishop! Here is a clip from our Schumann Liederkreis rehearsal last week: “In der Fremde”.

Practising at Home

I have been reviewing the Sonata Op. 1 by Alban Berg. I was supposed to perform it last year in P’town, but the gig fell through, and so I put it away. I pulled it out again a couple of days ago, and was struck with how much of a romantic work it is. I really like it! It is not yet ready to perform, but I get pleasure from listening to this rehearsal run-through from this afternoon.

I am also working on Bartok’s Suite Op. 14. I have posted a reading of the first movement, as well as a practise version of Fauré’s Prelude in F.

Playing Bach in Social Isolation

Thelma Stein (1910-2006)

Thelma Stein (1910-2006)

My aunt Thelma was a pianist and teacher who frequently performed in Washington DC in the 1940’s and 50’s. After about 1958, she no longer performed in public. When she died, she left dozens, maybe more than 100, of journals dating back to the 1920’s. These journals, with the exception of one of the earliest, whose pages were roughly torn out, had an extraordinarily limited content: they were a meticulous list of every piece of music that she had played each day, alone in her studio. She kept these journals, almost to the end of her life, as a kind of diary, completely incomprehensible to anybody but her.

When we emptied out her house, I took the journals home in several boxes, but seeing that they were pretty thoroughly uninteresting, I threw them out. Occasionally I would think to myself with some anxiety that I did not want to end up like aunt Thelma, a non-performing pianist needing to boost my self-esteem by counting up my private repertoire.

Like everybody else today, I am in “social isolation”, which means no rehearsals, no concerts, no audience. So it is down to the basement to rifle through my boxes of musical scores, looking for what I might want to play, just to soothe my soul, so to speak. I began with Brahms, a set of variations very dear to me, that Bonnie Thron had suggested could be arranged for string sextet. The next day it was Bach’s Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus I, somber, steady, otherworldly - dictated on his deathbed. I also had the idea to arrange a movement from the Brahms Requiem, after listening tearfully to the Kempe/Fischer-Dieskau/Grümmer recording. Yes, I guess I was shook up and depressed, like many others. I brought up box after box of scores, sifting through them, trying out which things fit my mood. Very moving were a set of Milhaud pieces written in 1944, The Household Muse, reflecting gratitude for daily life in a time of war. They included a piece called “Caring for the Sick”. Talk about resonant - I almost fell off the bench!

Today it was a Beethoven Allegro, sturdy, nonchalant, stoic, joyful. And then back to Bach, a prelude that I recall as the dark and foreboding theme music from an Alec Guinness spy series.

I write down the names of these pieces in my journal, and they reflect to me who I am, what I do, and how I feel. Ah, Thelma!

IF ANYBODY ASKS - Poem by Kay Lindsey

This poem was read by Kay Lindsey on February 22 at the Music of Black Composers concert at Ascension Church.

If Anybody Asks, Photomontage; Kay Lindsey poet, Trish Simonite, photographer, Carlos Chavez, printer

If Anybody Asks, Photomontage; Kay Lindsey poet, Trish Simonite, photographer, Carlos Chavez, printer

If Anybody Asks, by Kay Lindsey

If Anybody Asks, by Kay Lindsey