I will admit to being a baseball fan. However, to be honest, I am no longer a fan of attending baseball games. Don’t get me wrong; I used to love going to games, where I was happy to submerge myself into the Zen of things baseball: the slowing of time; the sudden spurts of activity; the seemingly endless metaphors between the action on the field and real life. But that was before two things happened. The first was becoming a father and the second was getting older. One at a time. To my now jaded mind, the only way to attend a baseball game is to go with fellow fans. Moments of high performance can be appreciatively shared with a nod and a smile; the contemplative quiet called for during an extended dual between a pitcher and batter can be savored; the sudden explosive action of a great play in the field or a home run can be properly cheered and appreciated. None of this is possible when attending a baseball game with a small child or worse, small children. They are almost immediately bored. They are hungry, all the time. They need to use the potty at the most […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Patreon – Page 25
This is my 21st Dr. Bob Prescribes (“DBP”), a post I began on August 6 of last year (that would be 2018). Up to now, each of these DBP posts has recommended (“prescribed”) something musical. Atypically, today’s prescription has nothing to do with music per se. However, the thought process that lead to offer up this recommendation did indeed begin on a musical note; it is a thought process I will share with you in a moment. But first, a preliminary moan-and-groan. Generally speaking, I prefer not to receive books as gifts and only rarely will I give a book as a gift. Here’s why. I have always considered the giving and receiving of books to be a temporal mugging. If I give someone a CD, it can be listened to whole or in part in a car, at home, wherever. You do not necessarily need to give that CD 100% of your attention while listening to it, and even if you do, the maximum amount of time a CD can suck from your life is 79 minutes. But a book? A 391-page novel – like the one recommended here – can, depending upon the individual reader, take days, weeks, […]
Continue ReadingIf you are among those who just said “Dave who?”, THIS IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! I am about to offer up a gift more lasting, more aesthetically pleasing and more spiritually enlightening than any you have likely received during this “season of getting”. That gift? The pianism of Dave McKenna. Indulge me some first-person info. Along with untold millions of others of my generation, as a little shaver I took piano lessons. By the time I was thirteen I could play a handful of Beethoven Sonatas, Bach’s Two and Three-Part Inventions, some Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, etc., etc. But: with my puberty entering hyperdrive, I became bored with the “classics”, and while I spent a good bit of time writing my own, primarily rock ‘n’ roll flavored ditties, I stopped practicing the piano (and my parents subsequently cut off the lessons). And then I was hit by a bolt of musical lightning, my epiphany, a life changer: at the age of 14, I discovered jazz. Here was a music with all the rhythmic intensity of rock ‘n’ roll but magnified – to my ear, a gazillion fold – by the polyrhythmic magic that is swing. I was gob-smacked by its […]
Continue ReadingOh my. This was going to be a straightforward review of my favorite recording of one of my favorite orchestral works, Gustav Holst’s The Planets. However, having done my research I have come face to face with an issue and an attendant moral dilemma that has caused me to question whether (or not) I should have recommended this recording and, having done so, by what justification. Gustav Holst Gustavus Theodore von Holst was born on September 21, 1874 and died on May 25, 1934, four months short of his sixtieth birthday. Despite his dauntingly Teutonic name, he was an Englishman through and through: born in Cheltenham and educated at the Royal College of Music in London, where he lived most of his life and where he died. The biographical substance of Holst’s life can be outlined with shocking ease. A small, frail, short-sighted and asthmatic child, he had to abandon his ambition to be a professional pianist due to neural inflammation in his right arm. Instead, he became a composition student of Charles Stanford at London’s Royal Academy. He failed to win a scholarship and was, according to Stanford: “hardworking but not at all brilliant.” After graduating he took a […]
Continue ReadingYou’re going to thank me for this It was Wednesday, September 18, 2002 (I didn’t remember that date; I looked it up). I was stuck in the car, driving somewhere. (Generally but accurately speaking, when you’re driving anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, you are very like stuck in the car, meaning stuck in traffic.) In those days before GPS and Waze and Google Maps and such, the only way to find out what the traffic was like was to turn on the car radio and listen to your local all-news station. Of course, by the time you actually heard that traffic report, you were likely already caught in traffic or were about to be. Since there are few things more maddening then being stuck in traffic and then being told via the airwaves that hey, guess what?, you’re stuck in traffic, I did what I always did under such circumstances, and that was tune in our local NPR affiliate, KQED. All Things Considered was on the air. The stories aired that afternoon described a depressing litany of the world’s problems at the time, and included stories on the Congressional hearings on Iraq; school vouchers in Maine; pre-September 11 […]
Continue ReadingWe ponder – for a bit – the nature of hobbies: those avocational pursuits that run the gamut from harmless amusement to life-dominating passions. I will confess up front that I am a collector, and so I’ve got a certain insight into this hobby-thing that a non-collector/non-hobbyist will not have. My first wife, bless her, was a non-collector, which is, I think, one of the primary reasons why she numbers as having been my “first” wife. She couldn’t understand my “materialistic” desire – neigh, my passion – for acquisition. Indeed, she saw no distinction between collecting, accumulating, and hoarding. (FYI, according to yours truly, “accumulating” is the act of merely acquiring objects without theme, rhyme, or reason. Hoarding is the indiscriminate accumulation of objects, to the degree that the hoard itself – the stockpile, the mass – is the point of the assemblage rather than the particular objects within the assemblage. “Collecting” is a very different sort of thing. Collecting is the selective acquisition of like objects, chosen, researched, and arranged in such a way as to describe some sort of narrative.) To my mind, collecting is an attempt to give structure and shape to the chaos that surrounds us; […]
Continue ReadingIn this week’s “Dr. Bob Prescribes” I mentioned that I spent a good portion of the first week of October in Phoenix with The Phoenix Symphony, there to record 22 video program notes for this season. I thought it might amuse you to see some photos and videos that document the process: the set, the crew, and the nearly finished product. First: a proper hats off to Renaissance man and jack-of-all-trades Jeff Hunsinger. Jeff is the General Manager (boss man) of The Phoenix Symphony, and as General Manager he runs the show: he tends to the musicians (talk about potentially herding cats!), hires the soloists, negotiates the contracts, schedules performances and rehearsals, oversees the programming, provides a safe haven (and for all I know, provides full-body massages) for his music director/principal conductor Tito Muñoz; manages the other departments like marketing, development, and outreach, etc. etc. etc. On top of this, he’s a father of two and the husband of the symphony’s principal cellist. And yes: he’s also my executive producer, director, camera operator, chief video and sound editor, gaffer (lighting electrician), and sound engineer. Somehow, Jeff found the time to rent the video/audio/lighting/digital recording equipment; set it up in the […]
Continue ReadingI’ve been working with The Phoenix Symphony (TPS) for two seasons. Last season, I wrote and recorded eight video program notes (which were made available on the symphony’s YouTube Channel as well as on my Facebook page) and presented three lectures in association with the TPS’s Chamber Concert Series. This season my role has expanded. I will deliver self-standing lectures on Mozart and Schubert; I will join TPS music director Maestro Tito Muñoz on stage for two subscription concerts, and two weeks ago I recorded 22 video program notes for the 2018-19 season. It took me all of August and a good bit of September to research and write those notes, which together run about 24,000 words. I can say with all due modestly that as of today, no one knows TPS’s 2018-19 concert season better than I do. Among the great pleasures of such an assignment is learning about and listening to works I did not know beforehand: music by such living composers as Timo Andres, Jessie Montgomery, Anna Clyne and Michael Hersch. Thanks to writing these previews, I got to know (and fall in love with) Florence B. Price’s Symphony No. 1 (which I wrote about a couple […]
Continue ReadingPatreon Patron, Mr. Franklin, asks: “Dr. B – how about a post/lecture discussion about WHY certain composers or genres chose specific major or minor keys. To state the obvious, the intervals between the pitches in all major keys are the same whether the tonic is C or Ab. Why choose one over the other? Thanks.” This is an excellent question, one I am asked rather frequently. I would take this opportunity, then, to go on the record with response. To my mind, there are – different issues here: tuning systems; pitch levels; and the nature and physical demands of different musical instruments. Tuning Systems Ron Franklin correctly observes that in the equal tempered tuning system that is standard today, the intervals in all the major (and minor) keys are exactly the same. However, despite its adoption here and there during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, equal temperament did not become the gold standard, default tuning system in Europe until the mid-nineteenth century. The “system” that existed to that time was something called “well temperament”, which in fact is not a single tuning but rather, an umbrella term for various tunings in which certain keys were rendered incrementally brighter […]
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