The Concert Hall as a Civic Icon

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“Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.” -Wolfgang von Goethe [typography font=”Cantarell” size=”28″ size_format=”px”]A Living Room for the City[/typography] This month marks the tenth anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall, the gleaming, iconic home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, designed by Frank Gehry. The hall is more than a monument to a world class orchestra in the middle of a world class city. It’s a reminder that, like …

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We’ll Paint You a Rainbow

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Last March, cellist Lynn Harrell and a host of fellow all star musicians, including John Williams and Jessye Norman, released a special recording called We’ll Paint You a Rainbow. The recording raises money for the HEARTbeats Foundation, a project Harrell and his wife founded in 2010. The Foundation’s noble goal is to bring the transformative power of music to disadvantaged children throughout the world. The joyful reaction of these children in Nepal is …

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Verdi’s 200th Birthday

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Today marks the 200th birthday of the great Italian opera composer, Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi wrote dramatically powerful operas such as Aida, Otello, Un Ballo in Maschera and Rigoletto.  Here is the Overture to La forza del destino performed by Riccardo Muti and the Vienna Philharmonic. What moods and dramatic situations are suggested by the music? How does Verdi convey these emotions? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thxOV5_YCh4 The greatness of Verdi is a simple thing. Solitary by nature, he found a way of speaking …

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Mozart and Salieri

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What is it about the greatest music that keeps us coming back? Mozart’s music, written in an era of powdered wigs and aristocracy, speaks to us as powerfully today as when it was written over 250 years ago. It embodies a universal reality which transcends fashion and style. Meanwhile, Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), a respected contemporary of Mozart, is now little more than a historical curiosity. You may remember this scene from the 1984 movie, Amadeus …

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Remembering Douglas Lowry

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As an alumnus of the Eastman School of Music, I was saddened to hear that Eastman’s Dean Emeritus, Douglas Lowry passed away yesterday. I never met Lowry, but I knew that he was a respected composer. He served as Dean from 2007 up until last week and presided over several significant building projects at Eastman. These included a renovated Eastman Theatre and a brand new wing containing a state of the art recital hall. …

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Spiegel im Spiegel

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You may have seen New Beginnings, the short film released by New York City Ballet on September 12. It features a moving performance on the 57th floor terrace of 4 World Trade Center at dawn and is intended to be “a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and a tribute to the future of the city that New York City Ballet calls home.” The music is Spiegel im Spiegel (mirror in the mirror), …

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Practicing is Problem Solving

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Take a moment and think about your last practice session. Did you take time to imagine how you wanted the music to sound before you started playing? How attentively were you listening to yourself? Did you stay mentally alert? What did you do when you encountered a musical or technical hurdle? It’s easy to fall into the trap of playing through a difficult passage slowly until you “get it right.” This is …

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