Having a free week this summer was a rare commodity, but that’s just what enabled my wife and me to take a trip to Long Island and visit her family. It was exactly what a vacation should be: non-productive. Needless to say, I did enjoy learning some of the basics of banjo-music from Emily’s brother, Randy. We even wrote a tune called (I think) “Moonshine Under the Moonlight.” Not too shabby, but I’ll spare you the details for now.
In the midst of this time, however, I did keep up on my reading of posts on music around the net. Here’s a few “found objects” that I thought worth sharing.
“In playing for contemporary composers, I’ve always felt that the ones I respected were not inflexible about what you did to their music. They permitted a certain degree of freedom. I’ve found that the lesser composers were the ones who insisted, no, I said mezzo piano and that’s not my conception of mezzo piano. I think the great composers believe their work will endure even if one does not adhere to the exact indications of the music.”
Isidore Cohen (quoted in Nicholas Delbanco, The Beaux Arts Trio: A Portrait)
Engraving is a production step that went from the individual to the pros and is now creeping back to the responsibility of the composer.
Early-music composers had quite possibly the most difficult job: engrave each piece AND develop a system with which to notate. It wasn’t until around at least 800 that music began to be notated in any systematic way and it was a long time (about another 800 years) before the modern system became fairly well developed.
Around 1500, shortly after Gutenberg developed a movable type printing system, music engraving became the job of professionals. Notation was more or less becoming standardized and composers were more easily able to produce multiple copies of a piece of music by handing it over to an engraver.
About three years ago, when my then-future-wife was just moving to Akron in preparation for graduate studies, her grandmother said that some distant relatives happened to live in northeast Ohio. Over the course of the next two years, she—and subsequently we—became great friends with these “cousins” (actually a much more complicated relationship, but this is how we refer to it for simplicity).
Last night we had the pleasure of visiting with them and taking in a concert at the Copley Bandstand. It was a fun night of big band music, courtesy of Swing Machine. Great memories of playing second tenor in a big band came rushing back to my mind as I listened to charts such as Basie’s “April in Paris.”