Shostakovich: the SOVIET Composer Art, politics, and current events make problematic bedfellows, but they are a Ménage à trois that cannot be avoided when talking about Dmitri Shostakovich and his music. Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975, a few weeks shy of his 69th birthday. Shostakovich’s compositional career corresponded exactly with the history of the Soviet Union from 1917-1975. He began attending the St. Petersburg (Petrograd) Conservatory at the very end of the Tsarist era; he graduated and began his career during Lenin’s rule (the early 1920’s); he knew Stalin and was nearly purged twice, in 1936 and 1948; he survived the siege of Leningrad, kowtowed to Khrushchev, and died while Brezhnev was in power. Among the reasons Shostakovich managed to survive was that he was considered by the powers that were to be a yurodivy, a village idiot, a holy fool who protests in the name of humanity and not in the name of political change. In truth, he was a coward and a hero and everything in between. He saw his friends purged and killed; he was eyewitness to Stalin’s horrific “five year plans” as well […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 85
“It” Benjamin Britten was born in 1913, on November 22: the feast day of St. Cecelia, Patron Saint of Music. Britten’s birth date pleased his mother Edith no end. Britten’s childhood friend Basil Reed recalled that: “[Britten’s mother was] determined that he should be a great musician. Quite often we would talk about the three B’s – Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms – and the fourth “B” was [to be] Britten.” His mother’s ambitions aside, Britten grew up in what he called “a very ordinary middle-class family” in Lowestoft, an East Anglian town on the North Sea 110 miles north east of London. Britten began piano lessons at seven. At the age of eight, he was enrolled in South Lodge Preparatory School just down the hill from his family home. The headmaster of the South Lodge School was a math teacher named Thomas Sewell, a Cambridge graduate and World War One veteran then in his mid-thirties. If you were good at math – as was Britten – you had no problems with Sewell. But if your math skills were not up to snuff, well, Sewell spared not the rod. In a 1971 interview, Britten recalled: “I can remember – I think […]
Continue ReadingOn Sunday, March 17 a piece of mine for violin and piano will receive its rather long-awaited premiere under the auspices of “Sounds New” at 3 p.m., at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley at 1 Lawson Road, Kensington. It should be a blast. My program reads as follows: South Bay Angle (A Twisted Tango) 1991/2011 Titles can, like mold-scum atop month-old cottage cheese, take on a life of their own. South Bay Angle was originally composed in 1991 during an Astor Piazzolla-inspired fit of tango-madness. While a more appropriate title for the piece would have been something on the lines of “I Can Do That!” or “This Gringo’s Token Tango”, circumstances conspired in another titular direction. The piece was originally intended for performance on a program produced by Composers, Inc., a new-music collective in which I was (and remain) an artistic director. Composers Inc. was then in its seventh season. In those days when newspapers still mattered, Composers, Inc. sought to receive as many print reviews as possible. To that end, the organization invited Paul Hertelendy, who was then the music critic for the San Jose Mercury News, to cover its concerts. He said he would do so provided […]
Continue ReadingSuggestion number three for getting and keeping our kids interested in music: movies and videos. We are visual creatures, and while I am generally not in favor of increasing screen time in our children’s lives, there are some movies and videos that are worth watching. (FYI: I am not in any way an authority on this stuff and won’t pretend to be. My suggestions are merely those of a parent attempting to achieve a measure of peace in his house while doing his best to educate his kids without reducing their brains to blackcurrant jelly. Any and all comments/suggestions/burnt offerings from cyberville are invited and indeed, eagerly awaited.) For littler ones, I would heartily recommend such movies as “Beethoven Lives Upstairs”, “Mr. Bach Comes to Call”, Disney’s “Peter and the Wolf” and “Fantasia 2000”. We’re not looking for historical truth here; just exposure. The great movie musicals are also wonderfully entertaining. For younger kids I would recommend the usual suspects: “The Wizard of Oz” (although the Wicked Witch of the West might be a bit scary for kids under 6), “Mary Poppins”, “Annie”, “The Music Man”, Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, “The Lion King”, and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”. (For personal […]
Continue ReadingSuggestion number two for getting and keeping our kids interested in music: dance, conduct, and even play along with the music. A few preliminary observations. We perceive music by listening to it. We listen with our ears. Based on such obvious truisms, it was seem that the act of perceiving music involves only one of our senses, that being the sense of hearing. Of course, this is not at all true. In truth, listening to music – like making music – can (and I believe should) be a full-contact activity. I would suggest that the more physically engaged we are while listening to music, the more whole-bodied and intense the musical experience becomes. For example. Whenever possible, I follow along with a score while I listen to music. Of course this isn’t for everyone, because not everyone can read a score. But I would tell you that for me, the visual reinforcement of what I am hearing intensifies the experience and detail of my listening by an order of magnitude. The same is true of a live performance, during which we WATCH the performers. Their actions and body language remind us that they are physically MAKING music, and our visual […]
Continue ReadingSuggestion number one for how to get and keep our kids interested in music: play a variety of music at home and in the car. As if you really needed me to tell you that. If we leave musical selection entirely up to the kids, it’ll be Raffi and Miley Cyrus until they are ten, and then whatever music they choose to blast through the privacy of their ear buds until they leave home at 18 (if they ever leave at all). It is incumbent upon us as adults to see that a variety of music is shared, both at home and in the car (yes, this will require some serious negotiation, but it can be done). I believe that variety is the key; that whatever we insist on playing, it represent a variety of concert, world, folk, jazz, and rock music. Along with listening to a VARIETY of music TOGETHER, there are two further standout issues here. One has to do with variety without subjectivity and the other has to do with setting a parental example. Avoiding subjectivity. If we – as adults – can avoid being subjective about the music we choose to play, our kids will stand […]
Continue ReadingI am just naïve enough to believe that almost all music is accessible – on some level or another – to almost all people. Obviously I’ve hedged, because some musical genres – Extreme Gangsta Rap and White Power Rock/Nazi Punk, for example – are best avoided by most feeling human beings. But to the point: the great bulk of our planet’s music – from Blues and Jazz to Zydeco and Blue Grass to North Indian Raga, Indonesian Gamelan, West African drumming, and Bhutanese mountain trumpeting (to name but a very few) – is of enduring beauty and quality and has something real and powerful to offer every one of us. The evidence of the immediate appeal of most music to most people is the reaction of children to music. It is my experience that until children become overtly self-conscious about themselves and begin to subjectively discriminate between things (somewhere between ages 6 and 9), there are no more musical creatures on the planet. They will sing without inhibition at the drop of a hat and will dance to pretty much anything with a joy and abandon that the rest of us can only marvel at. They do not know “good […]
Continue ReadingIt has always seemed to me that there are two essentially different kinds of music. The first is what we might call “generational music”: the contemporary music we hear and sing and play while we’re growing up – music that represents our childhood; our innocence; our coming of age; our sexual awakening; our friends and our first loves and first heartbreaks. For me, that music – the music that can still transport me back to places otherwise forgotten – includes Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Beatles; Jimi Hendrix; Simon and Garfunkel; Led Zeppelin; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; Chicago; and Blood, Sweat and Tears. What this means is that every generation of younguns will have its own music. Our job as parents/adults is not to denigrate our children’s music (which can only prove to our kids that we are the doddering old fools they already believe us to be) but rather, to SUPPLEMENT their listening with the other kind of music, meaning EVERYTHING ELSE. By “everything else” I really do mean “everything else.” Tomorrow, let’s talk turkey about what constitutes “everything else”.
Continue ReadingIn my previous entry I promised to hold forth on a subject of concern to many (if not most) of the visitors to this page, and that is how to get (and keep) our kids interested in concert music. Rather than dive right into the subject, I have been seized by the need to set the stage, to offer an “overture” in preparation of what (I hope) will be an extended discussion. Bear with me; we have as much time to discuss this stuff as we want. It has become something of a national pastime in the United States to bemoan the state of music education in the public schools. I regret, in particular, the demise of band and choral programs, programs that didn’t just teach kids how to play instruments and sing but, much more important, how to contribute (musically) to a larger community, the whole a thousand times greater than the sum of its parts. Having said that, I do not miss – not for a moment – the sorts of “music appreciation” classes I was subjected to as a child. If my experience in the public schools of Willingboro, New Jersey in the 1960’s is in any […]
Continue ReadingMy six year-old daughter Lillian is going to start piano lessons next week. Lily has been asking for lessons for a couple of years, but I am not a believer in starting kids too young, and to my mind four years old was way too young. (To my mind, no matter how good the teacher, a lesson is a lesson, and lessons demand responsibility, discipline, and practice. The vast majority of us will be responsibility-free exactly once in our lives: from birth through the age of six. Let kids be kids, I say. Responsibility, discipline, and practice – like gray hair, bad eyesight, and lousy knees – will all come in time, whether we want them or not.) Frankly, six is even a bit on the young side for me, but given, one, Lily’s ongoing interest in the piano (she “plays” all the time); two, we have two nice grands in the house (one of them a Steinway D); three, she hears the pianos being played all the time; and four, I’ve found her the right teacher (or so I think), well, I guess it’s time to start her up. For the first year or two I’m not going to […]
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