Hardymusings

NEW POST!

2012-01-30T13:08:00.004-05:00

This is a new post just so I can say I have something up here of more recent origin than 2010.

Discovering Joseph Lamb's ragtime

2010-06-21T18:29:00.002-04:00

I've been listening to Joseph Lamb's rags and gaining an appreciation for his great music. I've always played Scott Joplin's rags to the exclusion of all others, so I missed both Lamb and the other of the so-called "big three" of ragtime, James Scott. I'll be getting to him a little later, I suspect. Joseph Lamb's rags tend to be a bit more introspective than Joplin's, I'd say. His phrasing is different, but greatly influenced by Joplin, and he's very lyrical. Of course, Joplin could be tender and lyrical too...I'm thinking of "Solace" and "Bethena," to name just two that come to mind.

Here's some info on Lamb:

And here's a fine performance by Morton Gunnar Larsen of Joseph Lamb's "Alaskan Rag."

Daily Music June 3, 2010

2010-06-03T12:04:00.000-04:00

Music for Concert Band

2010-05-24T22:23:00.002-04:00

Granados Masquerade for Concert Band by Glenn Hardy. This is the third movement of my Carnival for Band. Perhaps a little too weird for the conservative band world.

Three Preludes by George Gershwin

2010-05-24T10:28:00.002-04:00

Three Preludes by George Gershwin

performed by Dr. Linda Mazich Govel

Gershwin was a man ahead of his time. I would love to have heard him improvise.

Happy Birthday Dad...

2010-05-06T11:08:00.004-04:00

He got me playing boogie-woogie when I was 11 or 12. He'd be 98 today if he were still here. Thanks Pop!

Ponchartrain Boogie by Glenn Hardy

From my album Ofay Blues

Schoenberg or Ives?

2010-05-05T13:19:00.005-04:00

Which will it be? "What? You mean I have to choose?" Well, not exactly. The choice has already been made for you. The verdict is in, and the winner is (was)… Arnold S. by a furlong or three! Can we even imagine what might have happened if old Charlie had edged him out in the stretch? Hmmmm… maybe Bartok would have been shown a little more respect by our esteemed academicians, prior to his dying in poverty? Perhaps Copland and Stravinsky wouldn't have felt pressured to abandon, or at least, tweak, their native styles in a futile effort to conform to the prevailing wind of Viennese Modernism? Oh, the mind wanders. Ok, well, this one does, anyway.

Now, don't get me wrong. I know that Charles Ives is Connecticut's State Composer. (I think I just heard a low (atonal) groan emanating from the Ives plot in Danbury's Wooster Cemetery.) And I know Ives has been properly lionized by virtually all of our fine academic institutions (the same ones that dumped on him during his lifetime.) And, of course, I know that our most perspicacious writers and critics have been singing the praises of dear old Mr. Ives, at least since the sixties. Yes, all this is true. Ives died in 1954, and we all know that hindsight is 20-20. "He was ahead of his time!" True, but he was not, as Leonard Bernstein declared, essentially an autodidact.

We, as Americans, were, and continue to be, profoundly insecure about exactly who and what we really are, culturally. So, naturally, we recoiled from a guy who had the temerity to put church hymns into his symphonies! How much easier it was for the musical "elite" to accept Mr. Schoenberg, the genius from Vienna, who had devised a really cool system for the writing of music, the like of which Charles Ives simply improvised at his piano.

"Oh no," said the big bad wolves at the conservatories, improvisation is OUT in the modern age. Well, maybe it's OK for those jazz guys. And HYMNS, for heaven's (or Marx's) sake, were never "in" to begin with. So, even though Ives had graduated from Yale, after studying with the composer, Horatio Parker, (who did his best to purge from Ives all that was truly unique and American,) he was still marginalized by the academic community (AKA "classical music" in America) and relegated to the rank of a charming, curmudgeonly curious loose cannon in the otherwise Modernist "classical" music world of the 20th century. Were it not for Bernstein and a handful of other musicians of note, Ives might well be forgotten today.

He was never favored by the newly enfranchised corporate academic world, which had, essentially, assumed (and continues to maintain) the custodianship of what the marketing geniuses labeled, "classical music." This is the same corporate world that, today, has everyone convinced that they need to have a college degree in order to function in "this ever-increasingly complex time in which we live." (low, atonal groan…)

Think about it. Ives is cool now because he's dead, and because we realize the brilliance of what he was doing in his time. But we need to be more vigilant about corporate influences in our own time. Especially, with regard to the influence on our thinking, from which all action springs. As the primary function of schools has shifted from education to job training, fewer and fewer students learn to think for themselves. Of course, in college they still read a few of the old Greek guys, and maybe a little Kant or Hegel here and there, (if they're not business majors.) But the damage has already been done in the lower schools, which are busy churning out both teachers and students who are not encouraged to question the underpinnings of the very system in which they find themselves. Though appearing to be vastly different in purpose, the corporate production of commodities called degrees or credentials, and those called weapons or automobiles, is based on the same principle: promotion of corporate interests, whatever the costs. Think it's just a coincidence that EVERYONE needs a college degree these days? Who does that benefit? Once you step into this system and feed at the trough, there is precious little incentive to step out of it. Aside from the larger implications in our lives, I submit that this does not now, as it did not, in Ives' time, auger well for the creative arts.

MayDay Music History

2010-05-01T16:17:00.009-04:00

Hines 57 by Glenn Hardy

Earl "Fatha" Hines (1903-1983) was a hero of mine. It was primarily his music I listened to as I was beginning to make my own move past ragtime and into jazz. Around 1975-76, I had been studying and playing Scott Joplin's rags, along with my own interpretations of Jelly Roll Morton's and James P. Johnson's ragtime jazz. While both of these composer/pianists represented a quantum leap into what would become jazz, they were both still rooted in the ragtime style of the turn of the 20th century. I should also mention Eubie Blake, a ragtime composer from Baltimore, born in 1883. He's sometimes mentioned as a northern (read: New York) counterpart to Joplin, who was born in Texarkana, Texas c.1867. More on Blake later.

Hines, from Pittsburgh, was also well-grounded in ragtime, but, being a comparative "young'un" to these other guys, he was more open to new ideas in the musical wind of the times. He was a contemporary of Fats Waller (1904-1943.) Hines is sometimes referred to as the "first modern jazz pianist." [_{citation needed}] After a tremendous career as a pianist and bandleader, spanning from the mid 1920's to about 1950, he kind of faded away, playing in a quasi "Dixieland" style with various small groups around the San Francisco bay area. He had a resurgence beginning in 1964, as Americans (and Europeans) were rediscovering musicians who had thought their careers were finished.

To make a long story short, (Oh, so he really DOES have a point!) in 1981 I was privileged to hear a concert in Berkeley, California, in which Eubie Blake played the first half, and Hines the second, along with a few duets. I was so moved, that I went backstage to meet them. I found them both sitting together on a small couch, each laughing and drinking Dairy Queen milkshakes! That's not what they drank in the old days. I got their autographs. They both died in 1983.

I have included here a piece I wrote as a tribute to Earl Hines, titled "Hines 57."

Daily Music April 30, 2010

2010-04-30T10:54:00.001-04:00

a little pick-me-up from my album, "3 days in may."

5-3-07c 2:41

On Improvisation...

2010-04-29T20:09:00.006-04:00

In the course of playing and teaching piano, I often encounter people who took piano lessons as children, but who are afraid that they will never be able to get to the point where they can pick up where they left off. I also meet people who are very clear about not wanting their present piano study to resemble that of their childhood. In addition, some of my students are young people who are looking for a different approach to playing the piano. In none of these cases do I attempt to offer a new or instant system that promises any kind of instrumental mastery with less work or practice time than would have been required in the old days.

What I do suggest to those who are not interested exclusively in the traditional classical repertoire, is that they consider learning to improvise at the piano to some degree. There is a tremendous resistance to this idea in our musical culture, particularly among pianists. Virtually none of us who had traditional piano lessons were taught how to improvise or trust our ears. It seems like such a tall order to take responsibility for two hands playing separate original musical ideas simultaneously. Well, without some prior experience, it can be daunting in the beginning. In fact, for some students, what is needed might be described as almost a form of therapy rather than piano lessons. Consider that the traditional way of learning and playing the piano involves three major senses: sight, touch, and hearing. In fact, sight does double-duty in that it is used to first of all locate the hands over the keys, and secondly, to decipher the little black dots on the page in the process of rendering this notation into sound. Now if you suddenly remove the little black dots from the picture, you have deprived sight of its primary role in this process, and you have removed from one quarter to one third of the sensory activity commonly associated with playing the piano. That can be disconcerting. Of course the eyes are still used to see the keys, but ask George Shearing or Stevie Wonder how important that is. Other scary issues that arise when you improvise involve confidence and trust. How much confidence do you have in yourself, and to what extent will you trust your instincts? How much control are you willing to surrender?

I'm not suggesting that dealing with these issues eliminates the need for understanding chord theory, or other specific disciplines associated with improvisation, but there are books about those things, and a good teacher can help the student address them. Coming to terms with one's own self-image and fears however, is a more difficult subject to pursue from a book, and there is no patented approach for a teacher to help the student in handling this.

If you're going to improvise music, you should do it without fear of sounding foolish, and without fear of seeming foolish because you are going against what everybody you know thinks about playing music. Bear in mind that improvisation has been marginalized, if not completely ridiculed, in academic music circles for at least the past one hundred years. You would not have even heard the word improvisation in a university music department or conservatory until these institutions were finally forced to admit jazz studies into the curriculum sometime beginning in the 1960s. Still, there was no mention of classical musicians learning to improvise as they did from about the 15th century through the 19th century. As an aura of sacredness began to surround the music of the "great composers," the idea of altering any of their written notes began to seem heretical. It is most interesting and important for the student to realize that there was a time period of considerable duration in which ALL musicians were expected to be able to make up their own music, or at least improvise using someone else's music as a starting point. Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt all would have expected musicians to "interpret" their music in ways which would probably shock us today. Keyboardists who could not improvise in the style of their time, had no chance of a professional career. So it was really a requirement back then.

I once audited a piano master class with Emanuel Ax, and during a period for questions I asked him if he ever improvised, either in performance or when he was alone. He reacted with a mixture of shock and a little hostility, saying, "Oh, God no. I wasn't trained for that!" Not wanting to seem contrary, I refrained from asking my next question, which would have been, "Yeah, but didn't you ever even WANT to?"

There are certainly many styles of music available to us today. Why not begin exploring the possibilities of improvising your own music in one of the styles of our time? Talk to your teacher(s). Find a teacher who is willing to help you. Check out Music For People. Or just begin to let yourself go while you practice. Close your eyes, listen to how chords sound. How do they make you feel? And don't worry about mistakes! And if you get brave enough, turn on a recorder of some kind. You might even find you actually like what you hear.

Daily Music April 29,2010

2010-04-29T13:50:00.002-04:00

Greetings one and all:

Here's my version of an old Jelly Roll Morton tune called "Jungle Blues." Recorded on a beautiful 7 foot Yamaha in 2006.

From my album "Blue Shades."

Jungle Blues by Jelly Roll Morton

testing the bloggggggg...

2010-04-28T23:02:00.000-04:00

OK, maybe this thing is actually working,