“If music be the food of love, play on!” So spake Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night of 1602. Taking our cue from the good Duke (to say nothing for his creator, the extraordinary Billy S.), I would observe that since this site is about music, it must also then be about love (and food, about which we will deal another day). Having broached the subject of love, I would beg your indulgence for the second time this summer as I wax personal. On Saturday, September 21st – 85 days after my eldest daughter Rachel tied the knot – it was my turn: I married a magnificent woman named Nanci Tucker at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California. Thus does the period my widowhood end, to which I say good freakin’ riddance. Nanci is tackling a tough gig. Having moved out of her condo/loft in a hipper-than-hip south-of-Market San Francisco location, she has moved into my (now officially OUR) house in the hills of Oakland, here to deal with the demands of a husband and two young children (to say nothing for the evil commute back across San Francisco Bay to her place of work not far from the Pacific […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Uncategorized – Page 4
Among the top pick-up lines of my generation was the irksome “what’s your sign?”. I myself never used the line because one, I was too embarrassed to do so and two, I never gave much credence to the whole astrology trip, even as an ice-breaker. If you ask me (which you didn’t, but then you are reading this post), our actual birthdates are much less significant than the dates on which we were conceived. Now please, I am not venturing into the social/religious/emotional minefield of “when” life begins (although I would invoke the joke that has a priest declare that life begins at conception, a reverend assert that life begins at birth, and a rabbi proclaim that “life begins when the kids go to college and the dog is DEAD!”). Rather, I’m merely pointing out that if the heavens truly affect our spirits and reproductive urges and fluids, then conception (and the physical activity that leads to such) seems much more likely to be affected by unseen gravitational tides than the rather more straightforward, contraction-dominated acts of labor and birth. I will gladly acknowledge the advantages of celebrating “birthdays” rather than “days of conception”. First (and we’re all adults here, […]
Continue ReadingI began blogging about a year-and-a-half ago. I was working with a publicist at the time that in turn worked with a vast number of sites. She would suggest topics to me and then place the blog with a subject-appropriate site. By far the majority of these pieces were “top ten” style pieces written for parenting sites: “the ten best pieces of music with which to put your child to sleep”; “the ten best ways to get your child interested in concert music”; “the ten best cocktails to drink while listening to your child practice the violin”, and so forth. However, my great early ambition as a blogger was to be published in the Huffington Post. Ah, Huff Post: edgy, hip and happening. And then there’s Arianna Stassinopoulos herself: smart, chic, articulate, beautiful; a published biographer (Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso), author and columnist; a liberal democrat turned conservative who married republican California congressman Michael Huffington and then swung back to the left after her divorce in ’97; media entrepreneur; and candidate for Governor of California in 2003. (During a campaign debate, Arnold Schwarzenegger famously but incorrectly told her: “Your personal income tax have the biggest loophole. I can drive […]
Continue ReadingA friend sent me the video below of a “child prodigy” with a request that I “comment”. Here goes. I would begin with a rhetorical question: is there anything more tiresome, more irksome than a “child prodigy”? Prodigies: they stand as a reminder of our own mediocrity, and if we could, we’d squash ‘em like the bugs they are. Honestly, is there a story that gives us more pleasure than that of the “prodigy” who crashes and burns when the realities of life kick in during late adolescence? Hah hah hah. Hah. Ho. I’d observe that the rarest prodigy is the creative prodigy. You know, it’s one thing to repeat words that have been put into your mouth or play music written by others; it’s another thing entirely to actually write those words or compose that music yourself. To be able to do that, you need real life experience and half-a-lifetime of accumulated technical skills. We are still waiting for the first “great” fifteen year-old novelist. And while it is entirely true that Wolfgang Mozart, Frédéric Chopin, and Alexander Scriabin all composed some first-rate music before they were sixteen, the fact remains that their early music was derivative, meaning that […]
Continue ReadingA birthday greeting and appreciation to my father – Alvin R. Greenberg – who turned 88 today. More than anyone else, it is my dad who is responsible for my career in music, a fact that at one time might have given him some cause for regret but which, at this point, provides more pleasure than pain. My father’s mother – my grandmother – was an excellent pianist who graduated from the New York Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) with a degree in piano in 1916. She went on to teach three generations of piano students in the borough of Queens, where my father grew up. Of all the hundreds (thousands?) of students she trained, perhaps her greatest hopes were for her son (my father) who – so she hoped – would someday take his place among the pantheon of great pianists. To that end he was subjected to just the sort of Tiger Mommy practice-at-all-costs discipline that makes the more sensitive among us cringe: hours of enforced technical exercises and practice; recitals in high-end New York venues; never mind being a kid and going outside to play (“Play? You want to play? Play Chopin – that’s […]
Continue Reading“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 ReadingToday I ran out of luck. After twenty years of recording courses and never having so much as a sniffle, I woke up this morning with the grandmother of all head colds. I got through the day thanks to the indulgence of my incredible crew, enough Sudafed to start a meth lab, and about 10 mugs of hot tea. Thankfully, it is not a throat/chest cold and thus my voice has not been unduly affected; otherwise I’d be road kill. Once I get through tomorrow I’ll have the weekend to rest up, and by Monday I will be – knock on wood – as fit as a Strad. Even under the best of circumstances, making a course is a challenge. It’s a series of non-stop, extremely intense, ten-hour days, split evenly between time in front of the cameras and studying for the next lecture. One of the things that makes this type of course difficult is that each lecture is a self-standing entity, which means changing gears – different music, different composers, different historical eras, etc. – from lecture to lecture. Pre-lecture preparation requires not just focusing on what comes next, but flushing the brain clear of what you’ve just […]
Continue ReadingWe will begin a full recording schedule tomorrow (Thursday). Preliminaries today: making friends with the piano, technical rehearsal, catching up with colleagues and crew. One of the things that makes this course special is that instead of using pre-recorded musical examples, our musical examples will be custom-recorded by three professional concert pianists. Thus, we will not only hear the music but we’ll be able to watch the pianists play as well. I don’t know about you, but when I go to a concert featuring a piano, I always want to sit on the left side of the auditorium so I can watch the pianist’s hands. The issue is more than just watching – with amazement – flying fingers. Like an actor’s body language, the manner in which a pianist “addresses” the keyboard will tell us much about the nature of the music being performed. Bach and Mozart require a pianist to stay centered on the keyboard, with hands close to the keys and elbows in. Chopin’s music demands an almost balletic grace from hand and arm, whereas Liszt’s music – which often seems to cover the entire keyboard at once – will, at such moments, require movements more often seen […]
Continue ReadingIn 1999, The Teaching Company/Great Courses began using teleprompters. Up to that point, all the instructors had worked from notes, as we do in the classroom. The result was – as it always is when one works from outline – uneven: grammar can slip, ideas are repeated, the speaker resorts to “um”, and “anyway”, and “the truth of the matter is” and a thousand other delaying strategies while he/she searches for a word or idea. If you’re having a good day, the ideas and jokes come on their own and you simply chat with the cameras. If you’re having a bad day, the fight-or-flee instinct kicks in big time. In the classroom or lecture hall, a bad day isn’t all that bad; you take lots of questions from the students, allow yourself some tangential excursions, talk some sports, whatever. One cannot take such liberties when creating hard copy, which follows us around for the rest of our lives. The teleprompters changed EVERYTHING, mostly for the better. Prep time increased by an order of magnitude because everything had to be scripted in advance. My upcoming “23 Greatest Solo Piano Works” (23GSPW) course runs about 120,000 words in length (24 lectures at […]
Continue ReadingBartók’s String Quartet No. 6 was written in early 1939, at a very dark time in his personal life and in history. Some background. Adolf Hitler came to power when he was appointed German Chancellor – the head of the government – on January 30, 1933. The fools that arranged Hitler’s appointment did so because they thought he could be controlled. Things didn’t work out that way. By August of 1934, Hitler had outlawed all opposition political parties and assumed the mantle of the German presidency and Supreme Commander of the armed forces. There would be no stopping him and his twisted regime until his death eleven years later, in April of 1945. Béla Bartók – pianist, composer, Hungarian patriot and a resident of the Hungarian capitol of Budapest – observed the rise of Nazism with undisguised revulsion. When the Nazi’s marched into and occupied Austria in March of 1938, Bartók suspected that it was only a matter of time before Hungary was occupied as well. He wrote to his friend and patron, Paul Sacher: “There is the imminent danger that Hungary will also surrender to this system of robbery and murder. How I could then continue to live or […]
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