When I was a graduate student I had the opportunity to study with a wonderful composer (and teacher) named Olly Wilson. A piece of advice Olly gave his students (myself included) was to listen to and thus immerse yourself in whatever instrumental combination you were composing for in order to get (and keep) the “sound” of that ensemble in your ear. It was good advice, but for me, only up to a point. Yes, in preparation for beginning a project, I like to do a little such listening. But once I’ve started writing, there is no chance and no way am I going to listen to another composer’s music for a like ensemble. Here’s why. I am presently working on a trio for violin, ‘cello, and piano. I began writing in early March and am presently about halfway through the first draft. Listening to recordings or live performances of other piano trios at this point can only do two things: distract or induce despair. Regarding distraction: I’ve got to let my musical materials go where they want to go. That means focusing with narcissistic intensity on my materials and my materials only. To hear – and worse, be influenced – […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 84
On November 13, 2012, a piece of mine entitled Rarefied Air was performed at Old First Church in San Francisco under the auspices of Composers, Inc. That performance – which featured Rob Bailis on clarinet, Michael Nicholas on violin, and Hadley McCarroll on piano – is now up on YouTube and thus available for your listening/viewing pleasure. Rarefied Air For B-flat Clarinet, Violin and Piano (1999) I. Liftoff II. Creatures of the Night III. Fresh Aria IV. Crystal Set Rarefied Air was originally written for the ensemble Strata. “Strata”, according to my Webster’s Collegiate, means “layers lain atop one another. . . regions of the atmosphere that are analogous to the strata of the earth.” “Rarefied” air is that thin, clear, high layer of air lying at the top of the lower atmosphere, also known as the “stratosphere”. This bit of atmospheric esoterica is meant to explain the inspiration for “Rarefied Air”. Movement I, “Liftoff” displays immediately the three basic registral strata of the piece: an explosive and densely chromatic low level (the “ground”), an intervening and rather more lyric middle level (up in the “air”), and a brittle and brilliant upper level (the “Strata-sphere”, as it were). The music […]
Continue ReadingA composer’s most prized possessions are his/her autograph manuscripts: complete scores notated in pencil or ink. (We pause to rue the passing of such hand-written manuscripts. As a new generation of composers notates music using computer programs, the art of music calligraphy will go the way of the hand-copied illuminated manuscript, and technology will claim another victory over an ancient craft. But worse, we – as students and lovers of music – will lose an irreplaceable resource: hand-copied manuscripts, from which we can learn an amazing amount about composers, their music, their personalities, and their creative processes. In the same way a graphologist – a handwriting analyst – “reads” someone’s handwriting for insights into his personality, so we can “read” a music manuscript for insights into a composer and the piece itself. Absent such manuscripts, we will be so much the poorer.) Autograph manuscripts are unique in that there is only one “final, autograph manuscript” of any given piece. In the days before photocopy machines, composers guarded their unpublished manuscripts with maternal ferocity, storing them in safes and vaults. Because of everything it embodies, the greatest gift a composer can bestow is the gift of a manuscript. A composer will […]
Continue ReadingThe third installment of our Berlin Ring cycle – Siegfried – took place on Sunday, April 7 (by total coincidence, “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”). The curtain was particularly early that day – 4 PM – presumably to allow everyone to get home for a workday on the morrow. It would appear that everyone was aware of the early curtain time except the Canadian singer Lance Ryan, who was scheduled to sing Siegfried. I heard Lance Ryan sing the role of Siegfried in this exact production at La Scala in Milan in November of 2012. He was brilliant, and the La Scala audience – no easy sell when it comes to Wagner – gave him an appropriate ovation. There were no such ovations for Mr. Ryan on Sunday, April 7, at least not at first, as he apparently thought the show was to begin at 6 PM. So it was that twenty minutes before curtain time there was no Siegfried in the house. We – the audience – calmly took our seats, unaware of the panic going on backstage. With the clock thus ticking, Daniel Barenboim made a phone call to the young Austrian tenor Andreas Schager who had, a few […]
Continue ReadingThe permanent home of the Berlin State Theater (the “Staatsoper”) is a magnificent, traditionally arrayed 1300-seat theater on the Unter den Linden, Berlin’s equivalent to Paris’ Champs Elysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. The theater has been closed for renovations since 2010, and will likely remain closed until 2015. Thus, performances have been transferred across town to the Schiller Theater, a considerably smaller and more modern theater (with big, cushy, movie theater-like seats set – like Wagner’s own theater in Bayreuth – at a fairly steep pitch). It was a fabulous place to see and hear The Ring. We sat in row six, and the sound in this small, wood-paneled theater was truly awesome. The huge orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim was kidney-rattlingly brilliant, and offered up pretty much the best stretch of orchestral playing I have ever heard. The singers were likewise wonderful, from top-to-bottom. To single out just a few: René Pape was a brooding and intense Wotan; the ageless (57 year-old) Waltraud Meier sang Sieglinde; and the Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin played Brünnhilde. And what a Brünnhilde she was! Diva Theorin is as big as a Schloss: with a front-end like twin locomotives, arms and back like […]
Continue ReadingSafely (and warmly) ensconced back in northern California, I will offer over the next few days a report of what was, by any measure, an extraordinary Ring cycle in Berlin. I would begin with the bad news. The supertitles were all in German! Arghh!!! Of all the nerve! Granted, I’ll be the first to admit that here in the U.S. of A., opera supertitles are provided only in English. But then, the operas being performed are not in English, so at least such American supertitles do indeed offer a translation from one language to another. But no such translations were made available in Berlin (and I am told this is standard-operating procedure across Germany where supertitles, if they are provided at all, are always in German); either you speak/read German or you are seriously out of luck. Now. The Ring-o-philes among us might claim that any Ring-o-holic should be familiar enough with the story as to not require the sort of translational crutch supertitles provide. Yes, yes: without intending to sound overly defensive, I would I concede that I am familiar with the story of The Ring. And yes, yes: my German is passable, sort of. But still, the fact […]
Continue ReadingI’m off to Berlin tomorrow to escort a group and attend Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle at the Staatsoper, to be conducted by the ageless Daniel Barenboim. In the spirit of “spreading the informational joy” for all who might be interested, I’ve posted two more excerpts from my The Great Courses survey “The Music of Richard Wagner”: portions of Lectures 18 and 19:The Ring, Parts 2 and 3. That we will be hearing the Ring conducted by an Argentinian/Israeli Jew in Berlin is a fact so extraordinary that we must consider it for a moment. More than any other place on the planet, Berlin was the Valhalla of the twentieth century: a place of would-be gods who were put to the torch thanks to their own deranged cruelty and arrogance. We’ll be attending the Ring just a few hundred yards away from the site of Hitler’s Bunker, where he stage-managed his own “Gotterdammerung”/self-immolation as the Russians closed in during late April of 1945 and where many of Wagner’s hand-written manuscripts burned along with the Nazi leadership (an extraordinary story that I’ll save for a future posting). I had the opportunity to spend over six weeks in Berlin over the course of […]
Continue ReadingSuggestion number nine for getting and keeping our kids interested in music: acquire a piano. The medium-to-long-term denizens of his site have heard this particular song before, though I will repeat it, because like any good tune, repetition breeds familiarity and perhaps even affection, and I need us all to like what I’m about to propose. Acquire a piano. Yes. Some personal background. When I walk into someone’s house, there are two things that are guaranteed to make me feel immediately at home: a piano and books. Admittedly (if painfully), books are an increasing rarity, so perhaps I should be satisfied with a Kindle in every corner. But a piano; well, that’s another story. The presence of a piano in a house tells a story: a story of striving forward through lessons; of house-hold music making; of sonic joys and alternative realities; of a pianistic repertoire endless and sublime. That’s what the presence of a piano says about a home, and it’s as sexy as Sophia Loren in latex. Speaking of the pianos: it doesn’t have to be a 10’2” Fazioli” F308 (list price around 200k); nor even my personal piano of choice, a New York Steinway “D” (at 8’ […]
Continue ReadingIn honor of Richard Wagner’s 200th birthday (which falls on May 22), and in anticipation of my upcoming trip to Berlin to hear the Berlin Staatsoper and Daniel Barenboim perform The Ring (about which I will blog endlessly once on site), I offer a twelve minute introduction/teaser on the Ring Cycle drawn from Lecture 17 of my Great Courses survey, “The Music of Richard Wagner”. Say what you want about Wagner – certainly, everybody else has – the man was a hellaciously great composer with a vision unique in the history of Western music. Any way you look at it, Wagner’s four evening extravaganza that is The Ring is the single most audacious creative accomplishment since the Creation itself, which, as Wagner would have happily pointed out, took six days to carry off. Many of us would deny ourselves the revelatory experience of Wagner’s art due to bladder-busting length of his works and the fact that he was, by pretty much every estimation, an awful person. Yes, Richard Wagner was capable of being a repulsive, sometimes even hateful human being. As was Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and John Belushi. Does that mean we must deny ourselves the pleasures of the […]
Continue ReadingSuggestion number four for getting and keeping our kids interested in music (FYI, suggestions numbers one through three were posted, respectively, on February 21, 24, and 25): introduce them to the unparalleled joy of live music, an experience is increasingly undervalued in our YouTubeocracy. The issue of consuming music “live” brings up two ginormous issues. One of them has to do with the tribal nature of our species, and the other has to do with the role of an audience in a live performance. I wax for a moment.. When home video tape recorders appeared back in the late 1970s, the movie industry screamed bloody murder, claiming that the technology spelled the end of the movie theater. Well, here we are, 35 years later, and there’s still no sign that movie theaters are about to go the way of dial up. Why? Part of it has to do with the visceral power of watching a movie on a large screen. But there’s another reason as well, and that has to do with the nature of the group experience. Yes, I will admit that the cretin sitting behind me chomping on his popcorn and the imbecile sitting in front of me […]
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