SCORE!

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Thanks to a link provided by Patricia Mitchell, I’ve been downloading lots of public-domain scores from the International Music Score Library Project. It’s not entirely easy to fish out specific things, like pieces for cello and piano, because of inconsistent titling and organizing (which is what happens when you have more than one enthusiastic person involved in an uploading project). Not all the scans are as readable as one might wish, and some of the ensemble works are available only in full score, not parts. And, of course, we’re talking about old editions of a lot of things, which may lack corrections and useful fingerings. But still, this could turn into a tremendous resource.

MY OTHER CAR IS A CELLO

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Harry, my cello teacher, sent me a link to an interview with his old teacher, George Neikrug, who spent some time talking about one of his old teachers, Demetrius Dounis. Most of Neikrug’s comments fall in line with what Harry has been telling me for two years, including this:

Dounis believed that technique is essentially based on "evenness," the goal being to give the impression that everything is on the same string. One should be able to get the same vibrato with every finger in any position on any string, the same tone with the bow on every string, and to make unnoticed string changes. Any deviation from this evenness would then be for musical reasons, not due to technical deficiencies.

    That’s all well and good, except that I still have trouble getting the same sound from the same finger at the same position on the same string every time. Sometimes I feel that I shouldn’t be wasting my time working when I really need to be practicing the cello. At least I’ve gotten to the point at which I can have some pretty decent moments during some of my practice sessions (note the liberal use of qualifiers). All I have to do is figure out how to do that consistently. Harry is great at getting me in shape during the course of a lesson; it’s a matter of remembering to apply all the techniques and advice simultaneously when I’m not under professional supervision.
    Why is it that we can get a license to drive after just a few months of supervised practice, yet it takes us so much longer to be turned loose with a musical instrument? Yeah, driving makes fewer simultaneous demands on our attention, and doesn’t require such refined motor skills. Still, a car is much more dangerous than a cello (but watch out for that endpin!). If there were cosmic balance, we’d achieve instrumental facility within half a year, but we wouldn’t be on our own behind the wheel without a decade of hard preparation.

WINNERS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Jimmy Boegle, esteemed editor of the Tucson Weekly, offers this response to my rant against journalism competitions:

    I agree with most of the points you make in your anti-journalism-contest blog screed. I also agreed with most of it when it was in Media Watch long ago.
    You’re right that most readers don’t care about them. You’re right that in some categories, there are very few entries. (Look at the award I personally picked up in the Arizona Press Club contest: a third place for education writing! In the medium-newspaper category! Out of nine entries! Whoo-hoo—I barely made the top third!) You’re right that some publications enter a lot of stuff just to see what catches a judge's eye, which confirms yet another of your points, that the judging can often times be, well, insane or ignorant (my exact words, not yours).
    Despite my agreements with these points, however, I still have the Weekly submitting healthy amounts of entries for the contests that make sense for us. I’ve even been known to publicly chastise rogue arts editors for not helping me decide what to enter.
    Here are three reasons why:
    1. It’s part of the game you have to play in the journalism world. When I was in Las Vegas, I worked for a newspaper that employed one of the best photographers in the state. He felt much like you do about contests, and didn’t enter any of his pics one year for the Nevada Press Association contest. Well, our biggest competitor’s photogs did—and they ended up winning a bunch of awards, largely because only, like, four newspapers were in our circulation category. Then they made a major public deal about their awards haul. This pissed off our photographer. He entered the next year, and he got the awards he deserved—meaning, just as importantly, our competitor did not.
    2. Interesting trends can emerge that expose a sliver of truth. You illustrated this well by pointing out how few writing awards the Star won in the AP contest. Not to toot the Weekly’s horn … OK, I lie, to PRECISELY toot our horn, I think it says something that every year, our small-staffed, under-budgeted newspaper wins awards against the big boys in the state in the Arizona Press Club. Of the 18 awards we won this year, 10 of them—including five first-place honors—were in all-publications categories. By winning all-publications first-place awards in film criticism, music criticism and arts criticism, it shows the strength of the back of our book. Margaret Regan’s four first-place awards (two in all-publications categories), in the context of her always winning awards like this, offer proof of her talent. (The same can be said for Danehy, Banks, Nintzel, etc.)
    3. These awards give our writers much-appreciated and well-deserved kudos. This reason is, by far, the biggest reason why I take the time to enter our writers in these awards. Journalists tend to be an overworked and underpaid lot, and I KNOW that, for example, these Arizona Press Club awards truly meant something to most of the winners. That means a lot to me.
    So, that’s my two (maybe even three) cents. And that’s why I’ll keep entering these contests on behalf of the Weekly.

BOOK AUTHORS: THE DEFENSIVE LINE

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    A magazine asked me to write a Mstislav Rostropovich retrospective upon the cellist’s death, so I’ve been interviewing a number of cellists who knew him. I’d also hoped to talk to pianist Lambert Orkis, who performed with Rostropovich for 12 years (today, he’s most closely associated with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter). But yesterday I got word through a intermediary that Orkis doesn’t want to give any more interviews now because 1) he’s tired of being misquoted and, no doubt more importantly, 2) he’s thinking about writing a book about his work with Rostropovich, and is saving up anecdotes for that project. It should be an interesting volume if Orkis follows through. And I’m sure that once it’s published, he’ll be much more forthcoming with interviews in the interest of publicity.
    Meanwhile, Norman “Chicken Little” Lebrecht is in a snit because Don Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer does not buy Lebrecht’s theory that the classical CD industry is dead. Lebecht tolls the death knell because the major labels have pretty much imploded (due to 15 years of corporate stupidity, I might add, not because of the rise of downloading). Lebrecht ignores the abundant evidence that the death of the classical CD is greatly exaggerated, dismissing the hundreds of new releases by smaller labels as “non-commercial vanity products.” Well, that’s an interesting way to support a dubious assertion: Declare inconvenient facts to be irrelevant. But what really annoys Lebrecht about Rosenberg is this: “The facts of decline are laid out in my book, which has not yet been reviewed in Cleveland, and there can be no excuse for such wilful myopia.” What an arrogant ass.

'SOAR' WINNERS

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    You know there’s not much going on in local theater when I start previewing heartwarming productions written by children, from whom I usually keep a safe distance:

    Writers sweat over every precious word, but once their work is picked up for production, that original sweat gets wrung out of the adaptation. Have you ever heard of a writer who was completely happy with the way his or her work was adapted to stage or screen?
    "It turned out a lot better than I thought it would," allows Tucsonan Cade Cothrom of a stage version of a story he co-wrote with Edgar Herrera. From a writer, that's an enthusiastic endorsement. And certainly it acknowledges the difficulties of adapting this particular story. Says Edgar, "It's about an evil tomato that wants to rule the world. In the end, someone makes him into ketchup."
    Edgar is a 9-year-old student at Corbett Elementary; Cade is 10. Their tale of pure--or is that puréed?--evil is one of the highlights of the Stories That Soar! show May 18 at the UA's Stevie Eller Dance Theatre. Edgar and Cade are two of the 200 Tucson students whose work has been adapted this year by Stories That Soar!, and Friday's event is a family-oriented showcase of the best recent efforts.

    The rest of the article lies here, in the latest Tucson Weekly.

MOZART EFFECT REVISITED

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Here's something that was floating around the Internet a couple of years ago; I got it from a colleague, tucked it away into an obscure folder, and just now rediscovered it. For your amusement:

    A new report now says that the Mozart effect is a fraud. For you hip urban professionals: no, playing Mozart for your designer baby will not improve his IQ or help him get into that exclusive preschool. He'll just have to be admitted to Harvard some other way.
    Of course, we're all better off for listening to Mozart purely for the pleasure of it. However, one wonders that if playing Mozart sonatas for little Hillary or Jason could boost their intelligence, what would happen if other composers were played in their developmental time?

LISZT EFFECT: Child speaks rapidly and extravagantly, but never really says anything important.

BRUCKNER EFFECT: Child speaks very slowly and repeats himself frequently. Gains reputation for profundity.

WAGNER EFFECT: Child becomes a megalomaniac. May eventually marry his sister.

MAHLER EFFECT: Child continually screams—at great length and volume—that he's dying.

SCHOENBERG EFFECT: Child never repeats a word until he's used all the other words in his vocabulary. Sometimes talks backwards. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child blames them for
their inability to understand him.

BABBITT EFFECT: Child gibbers nonsense all the time. Eventually, people stop listening to him. Child doesn't care because all his playmates think he's cool.

IVES EFFECT: the child develops a remarkable ability to carry on several separate conversations at once.

GLASS EFFECT: the child tends to repeat himself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

STRAVINSKY EFFECT: the child is prone to savage, guttural and profane outbursts that often lead to
fighting and pandemonium in the preschool.

BRAHMS EFFECT: the child is able to speak beautifully as long as his sentences contain a multiple of three words (3, 6, 9, 12, etc.). However, his sentences containing 4 or 8 words are strangely uninspired.

THE CAGE EFFECT: Child says nothing for 4 min. 33 sec. Preferred by 9 out of 10 classroom teachers.