Happy Birthday Joseph Haydn!

On this day in 1732, Franz Joseph Haydn was born in the little village of Rohrau, near Vienna.

Info about Haydn on the City of Vienna website.....

Calendar of Events North of the Monterey Area

Not classical music exclusively, but a wonderful entertainment guide for people in the Gilroy/Morgan Hill/San Juan Bautista area. Published by Paul and Sylvia Myrvold.

Out & About Magazine is a resource guide, aimed at helping established residents and newcomers to the area get the most out of their time without spending too much time in their cars.

Articles in Out & About Magazine are written by local residents. All the columnists either work or participate in the activity they write about. Out & About Magazine does not do profiles of businesses or people, except for restaurant or theatre reviews.

Current columns running on a monthly basis include:

Film (Paul Myrvold), Running (Bill Flodberg), Walking Woman (Rosemary Rideout), Cycling (Curt Hentschke), Music (Alex Myrvold), Theatre (Paul Myrvold) and Pets (Friends of the San Martin Animal Shelter). They also have a monthly Kids Calendar, What’s Up at Gavilan College and Community Events Calendar as well as 2 or 3 special features and programs to events like the Home, Garden and Gourmet Show.

In the fall they publish their yearly Restaurant Guide which is distributed to the hotels and motels in the area throughout the entire year. March, April and May are the annual Camps feature and the Home, Garden and Gourmet Show is in May and September. They always have a big feature for the California Rodeo in Salinas and a guide to 4th of July activities. Columns in the Spring include articles on Elder Care and Careers.

Visit their website...

Great Musicians on Sound, Spirit, and Heart

Beautiful thoughts, collected by David Gordon

Music is truly love itself, the purest, most ethereal language of the emotions, embodying all their changing colors in every variety of shading and nuance.
- Carl Maria von Weber

The goods of this world are most dear to me, but much dearer are peace of mind and my own honor.
- Claudio Monteverdi

The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self.
Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played.
The tone does not come out of the chord itself,
but rather, through the touch of the musician.
I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.
- Hildegard of Bingen

That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy.
- Gustav Mahler

Our music, whose eternal being is forever bound up in its temporal sounds, is not merely an art, enriching beyond measure our cultural life, but also a message from higher worlds, raising and urging us on by its reminders of our own eternal origins.
- Bruno Walter

Music, being identical with Heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones: it's a condition of eternity.
- Gustav Holst

Healing happens between the notes. I had to allow the space and not be afraid, and to know that things happen in space. You have to let the space settle. If you let go, you transcend and experience the stillness, and that is the healing. One ingredient of health is rest. Activity comes from inactivity. The basis of sound is silence. Stillness is basic to health.
- Paul Horn

We are living in a world where the individual must learn to command the raw materials of expression. He must not be dependent all the time on the ready-made, the finished product. It's the transferring, the changing of the raw into what is the expression of your own self - the whole joy and satisfaction and frustration of life is built into this.
- Yehudi Menuhin

I shall go forth, against all sorts of things, towards bright, strong and righteous aims, towards a genuine art that loves mankind, lives with his joys, his grief and his sufferings.
- Modest Mussorgsky

We are one of the leaves of the tree. The tree is all of humanity. We cannot live without the other leaves of the tree. We need intelligence, and when there is intelligence, there is love.
- Pablo Casals

Music can be all things to all persons. It is like a great dynamic sun in the center of a solar system which sends out its rays and inspiration in every direction.... Music makes us feel that the heavens open and a divine voice calls. Something in our souls responds and understands.
- Leopold Stokowski

Almost unconsciously, the very old memory of a ringing of bells came to me when, in evening during my childhood, this sound wafted across from the west, from a village called Gadirac. Musing on this, I began to dream. But it would be difficult to describe this vagueness in words. Isn't it often that an exterior event fills us with these kinds of thoughts, so imprecise that in reality they are not thoughts but something in which we take pleasure. Perhaps the desire for things that do not exist. And that is really the domain of music.
- Gabriel Faure

Every second we live is a new and unique moment of the universe, a moment that never was before and never will be again. And what do we teach our children in school? We teach them that two and two make four and that Paris is the capital of France. We should say to each of them, "Do you know who you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In the millions of years that have passed, there has never been another child like you."
- Pablo Casals

It seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence - an excitable body which a sudden change can throw from the best into the worst state. Patience I must now choose for my guide, and I have done so. Divine One, thou lookest into my inmost soul, thou knowest it, thou knowest that love of man and desire to do good live therein.
- Beethoven

Music possesses much richer means of expression and it is a more subtle medium for translating the 1000 shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.
- Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky

I believe in a passionately strong feeling for the poetry of life - for the beautiful, the mysterious, the romantic, the ecstatic - the loveliness of Nature, the lovability of people, everything that excites us, everything that starts our imagination working, LAUGHTER, gaiety, strength, heroism, love, tenderness, every time we see - however dimly - the godlike that is in everyone - and want to kneel in reverence.
- Leopold Stokowski

To strip human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make divine things human and human things divine: to reach the heart of every noble thought...
- Pablo Casals, speaking of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach

I stand face to face with the Eternal Energy from which all life flows, and I draw upon that infinite power. To contact this Eternal Energy, I must conform to certain laws, two of the most important being SOLITUDE and CONCENTRATION. A composer must sit in the silence and wait for the direction from a force that is superior to the intellect.
- Max Bruch

More collections like this on the SpiritSound website....

Health and Consequences: the unethical audience member

By RANDY COHEN
NY Times Magazine, Sunday Sept 6

"Making disruptive noises at a concert is certainly rude, but if you are sitting close enough to distract the performers, does it rise to unethical?"

Read more....

Vocal Vibrato: teachable?

Q. Why do some people’s singing voices have more vibrato than others?

Q. Can it be taught?

Answers: 1. It happens, and 2. Yes.

Brief article from the NY Times

Read more....

Happy Birthday

August 28, 1913

Richard Tucker, [Reuben Ticker], born in Brooklyn, New York, Tenor, New York Met Opera

Article about Richard Tucker on Wikipedia

Review of Soles4Orphans benefit concert

The amazing Paulina Nguyen, 17, a senior at Santa Catalina School and a piano pupil of Carmel pianist Barbara Ruzicka, created a benefit concert at the Church of the Wayfarer in Carmel on August 23 featuring some of the finest young student musicians on the Monterey Peninsula.

We are lucky to have fine young people like Paulina in our community.

Follow this link to read Lyn Bronson's review of this great event.

http://www.peninsulareviews.com/

Even Better Booklist

Since its founding in 1935, the Carmel Bach Festival has always presented its music within a context of ideas and discussions. The development of all the arts in the 18th century mirrors and parallels the social, cultural and political developments of that century, and by placing the music into the continuum of human existence we can deepen our connection to it.

One of my happiest duties at the Carmel Bach Festival is researching and presenting the pre-concert lectures. In my informal talks I try to evoke a stronger sense of context and create a deeper understanding the human being who wrote the notes. What were the circumstances in which he lived and worked, who was he a person, and what brought about the creation of the music?

A few weeks ago I posted a short list of books that I used during the 2009 Bach Festival. Here is a longer list!

Download David's 3-Page Bibliography in pdf format

This downloadable 3-page pdf document lists 23 books that have been helpful to me in recent years and also books I’m currently using to prepare for the 2010 Festival. I must emphasize that this is a very personal list. It is by definition not broad in scope, and is primarily related to recent and upcoming repertoire at the Carmel Bach Festival. These are books which in recent years have helped me find a human connection to the personalities who created the music, and to the cultural, historical, and social context in which they lived and worked.

~ David Gordon

2009 Bach Festival Reading List

by David Gordon

The 2009 Carmel Bach Festival is over! It was an exhausting and deeply satisfying experience. Great audiences, responsive and appreciative. An ensemble working hard, and overtime.

I do lots of different things at the Carmel Bach Festival (most of us do), but this summer my principal activities included 1) twelve Festival lectures, 2) writing and narrating the “Haydn Seek!” concert, 3) translating and reading the Vivaldi sonnets on the Thursday concert, and 4) creating more than 600 new supertitle slides (for Haydn’s Creation, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Brahms’ Nänie, Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42, the “Haydn Seek!” concert, and Best of the Fest).

Lots of people asked me about a reading list. Here are some of the books that helped me this summer!

UPDATE AUGUST 18: since an expanded version of this list is now available for download as a pdf document, I have removed some of the details from this post.

Click this link to download the 3-page pdf bibliography.

IN PRINT Patronize your local bookseller!

The New Grove Haydn
by Jens Peter Larson
WW Norton, New York, 1983

Haydn: The Creation
by Nicholas Temperley
Cambridge University Press, 1991

Haydn Chronicle and Works
Volume III: Haydn in England 1791-1795
H. C. Robbins Landon
Indiana University Press, 1976

The Cambridge Companion to Haydn
by Caryl Clark (Editor)
Cambridge University Press, 2005, 340 pages

Four Seasons, The: A Novel of Vivaldi's Venice
by Laurel Corona
Voice Press, 2008, 400 pages

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons and Other Concertos, Op. 8
by Paul Everett
Cambridge University Press, 1996

OUT OF PRINT BUT AVAILABLE ONLINE

The Girl in Rose
Peter Hobday
Orion Books, London, 2004

A Social History of Music: Middle Ages to Beethoven
Music and Society: since 1815
Henry Raynor
Taplinger Publishing, New York, 1976

London Life in the Eighteenth Century
M. Dorothy George
Harper, New York, 1964

INTERNET RESOURCES

The Collected Correspondence and London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn
A selection of Haydn letters
200 Anniversary of Haydn’s Death
Blog and assorted Links
The Website of Beethoven-Haus, Bonn
Coming soon: suggested reading for the 2010 Carmel Bach Festival!

New Mozart Works Discovered

by Barbara Rose Shuler

Yesterday’s Best of the Fest brought the festival to a dazzling close, as usual, with Bruno’s charming, humorous, knowledgeable and deep-spirited narrative. More about that in the next blog but here is a newsflash of interest that appeared in my e-box from my friend Ger under the title Not Quite Bach.

“No doubt these early Mozartean fragments will be presented as soon as possible in our musically eager and sophisticated region--perhaps even a Bach Festival offering with David Breitman performing. The article comes from the Associated Press:

Researchers unveil Mozart piano pieces in Austria

SALZBURG, Austria – Mozart's momentous legacy grew still larger Sunday as researchers unveiled two piano pieces recently identified as childhood creations by the revered composer.

The works — an extensive concerto movement and a fragmentary prelude — are part of "Nannerl's Music Book," a well-known manuscript that contains the Austrian master's earliest compositions, the International Mozarteum Foundation revealed while presenting the pieces in Mozart's native Salzburg.

"We have here the first orchestral movement by the young Mozart — even though the orchestral parts are missing — and therefore it's an extremely important missing link in our understanding of Mozart's development as a young composer," Mozarteum's research leader, Ulrich Leisinger, said.

Mozart, who was born in 1756, began playing the keyboard at age 3 and composing at 5. By the time he died of rheumatic fever on Dec. 5, 1791, he had written more than 600 pieces.

Leisinger said Mozart likely wrote the two newly attributed pieces when he was 7 or 8 years old, with his father, Leopold, transcribing the notes as his son played them at the keyboard.

A series of analyses confirmed the writing as Leopold's, and at the time Mozart was not yet versed in musical notation. But Leopold himself was ruled out as the author of the pieces based on stylistic scrutiny, the Mozarteum said in a statement.

"There are obvious discrepancies between the technical virtuosity and a certain lack of compositional experience," it said.

At Sunday's presentation at the Mozart residence, Austrian musician Florian Birsak, an expert on early keyboard music, played the two pieces on the maestro's own fortepiano for a throng of reporters, photographers and camera crews.

Both works were identified as part of a larger investigation of the foundation's Mozart-related materials, including letters, documents and more than 100 music manuscripts — some in the hand of the composer, others transcribed by contemporaries.

While "Nannerl's Music Book" has been in the foundation's hands for more than a century, the pieces were considered anonymous creations until Leisinger and his team took a closer look.

"These two pieces struck us because they were so extravagant," Leisinger said, adding that the two works share a number of similarities but that the prelude — believed to have been written after the concerto movement — was "much more refined."

"One could almost get the impression that Leopold said to his son, 'look, you've written this crazy concerto movement, try to do it better, a little bit more concise,' and as a result we ended up with this prelude-like movement," he said.

Posthumous discoveries of Mozart pieces are rare but not unheard of.

In September, Leisinger announced that a French library had found a previously unknown piece handwritten by Mozart.

That work, described as the preliminary draft of a musical composition, was found in Nantes, in western France, as library staff members went through its archives. Leisinger said the library contacted his foundation for help authenticating the work.

The latest finds add "important details" to what we know about the young Mozart's work, said Christoph Wolff, professor of music history at Harvard University, who is also director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig, Germany.

"The Salzburg discovery offers significant insight into the earliest accomplishments of Mozart," Wolff said in an e-mail to The Associated Press.

The Salzburg-based foundation, established in 1880 and a prime source for Mozart-related matters, seeks to preserve the composer's heritage and find new approaches for analyzing him.”

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Barbara Rose Shuler writes Intermezzo, which chronicles classical music, in the Monterey Herald's Go! Magazine each week. She can be contacted at wordways@comcast.net.
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