05 Sunday Oct 2014
Sometimes the road takes a turn.
I have wanted to update you on what needs to be a short fermata in my blog posts. New readers have joined from Uruguay, Kenya and Iraq bringing my stories to over 90 countries. I know you enjoy these posts and gratified beyond belief.
Don’t worry, there are many more stories on the way this Autumn.
But if you remember, Jan and I returned to the Berkshires this summer for a family wedding.
23 Tuesday Sep 2014
Tags
Dream/Window, Ichiro Nodaira, Kent Nagano, Kyoto, Los Angeles International New Music Festival, Mari Kodama, Momo Kodama, Nguyen Thien Dao, Saiho-ji Temple, San Francisco, Tetsuji Honna, Toshio Hosokawa, Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra
At Saiho-ji Temple in Kyoto.
“With all the changes in the world, the world never changes.” Toru Takemitsu
As Autumn begins, I’ve been thinking of Japan, our friends here in California and over the Pacific in Japan. Though I’m at home in Pasadena, I’ve wanted to share with you a tour that Jan and I experienced in 2013 at Saiho-ji Temple in Kyoto, I hope a good introduction to our reunion with friends in San Francisco a few weeks ago as I’ll toggle locations in this post.
Home to hundreds of varieties of moss, Saiho-ji was the favorite Zen garden of Toru Takemitsu and inspired his Dream/Window of 1985. Let’s have a look….
17 Wednesday Sep 2014
Tags
Africa, Asia, Auer Chocolates, California, Caribbean, Central America, Europe, Latin Grammy, Los Angeles International New Music Festival, Mezcal, Middle East, North America, Song Hong Chamber Ensemble of Hanoi, South America, Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, Travel
Thanks to my global readers!
Today is the first anniversary of my LA International New Music Festival blog. What a rewarding journey thus far – I’m making a great meal tonight to celebrate, as your encouraging readership is the best surprise imaginable!
88 countries around the globe. 5300 readers for 49 posts. 20 countries from Asia, 16 from the Americas (North, Central and South), 31 from Europe, 8 from Africa, and 5 from the Middle East. But let’s not stop there. God bless the island countries of Planet Earth for adding 8 more locations from Mayotte to Jamaica, Cape Verde to Mauritius. I should have started this sooner!
A big THANK YOU to all my readers!
12 Friday Sep 2014
Posted in Austria, Food, Uncategorized, Vienna
Tags
Arnold Schoenberg, Cafe Demel, Cafe Landtmann, E. Randol Schoenberg, Gustav Klimt, Hollywood Exiles, Leonard Bernstein, Roland Berger, Solti Ring Cycle, The Seccession Building, The Woman in Gold, Vienna, Vienna Philharmonic
The Seccession in Vienna.
To the Time, Its Art. To the Art, Its Freedom.
My home of Hollywood was the exiled haven of a legendary list of emigres, my mom serving many of them at 20th Century Fox or Chasen’s. Older teachers and colleagues spoke rapturously of working with Otto Klemperer and Bruno Walter when they were with the Los Angeles Philharmonic or Columbia Symphony. That meant discovering Mahler would not be far away. Lotte Lehmann was at the Music Academy in Santa Barbara. Erich Wolfgang Korngold invents the film score here, his violinist granddaughter Katie living down the street from our house in Eagle Rock. Alma Mahler lives with Franz Werfel in Beverly Hills. Schoenberg is friends with Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and his entire family are now great friends. And a very young Zubin Mehta was leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic, recording Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Varese and William Kraft, so the name Hans Swarowsky was in the air.
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (I could stop right there but it wouldn’t be honest) Schubert, Brahms, the Strauss Family, Bruckner, Wolf, Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern. The strongest list of local composers on Planet Earth. The Viennese feel they own this music so in September of 1977 I set out to find out their secrets.
29 Friday Aug 2014
Tags
Arnold Schoenberg, Bayreuth Festival, Bertolt Brecht, Chasen's Restaurant, Georg Eisler, Hanns Eisler, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Leonard Stein, Otto Klemperer, Patrice Chereau, Pierre Boulez, Roland Berger, Vienna Philharmonic
A gorgeous Viennese spring day.
“Am I boring you?”
I was 22 years old in September of 1977. I had dreamed and worked and worked and dreamed of studying music in Vienna. At the time I played the French horn, which I retired in 1998 to devote myself to conducting. But for 25 years or more the horn was my voice, my love, my sound. And the person who had the greatest sound in the world was in Vienna, Roland Berger of the Vienna Philharmonic. All that money washing dishes in my parents’ restaurant was beginning to pay off.
However as I now look back, one man took me under his wing, guided me, encouraged me, talked to me, questioned me. And I know that I learned as much, if not more, from renowned Austrian painter Georg Eisler than any musical mentor I would encounter. His father, composer Hanns Eisler, was nominated for two Academy Awards in the 1940s. Somewhat more ominously, Hanns was the prime target of Richard Nixon and the House Un-American Activities Committee, known as HUAC.
“Am I boring you?”
16 Wednesday Jul 2014
Tags
Bruce Weigl, Cambodia, Carlos Chavez, David Letterman, Elliott Carter, Gabriela Ortiz, Grammy Awards, John Cage, LA International New Music Festival, Mineko Grimmer, Nieuw Ensemble, Song Hong Ensemble, Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, Unsuk Chin, Vietnam War, Vu Nhat Tan, William Kraft
East meets West in Los Angeles as violist Do Huong Tra My of Hanoi tries Cafecito Organico at the Hollywood Farmers Market.
David Letterman, the revered American comic who has been keeping us up late at night for over 30 years here in the United States, revealed the two components of a good joke. To be funny the joke has to be 1) Obvious and 2) Stupid. Say all the words right and you can cue laughter.
If you are already one of my 4500 blog readers in 80 countries, you know I don’t see my LA International New Music Festival as an independent endeavor. So many ideas go into artistic decisions that adopting a single viewpoint is at the least annoying and at the worst dishonest. My thoughts and plots for the 2015 Festival continue apace, but for this post I thought I’d create an exposition of idea and concept behind the next installment.
18 Wednesday Jun 2014
Tags
Asia Barong in Great Barrington, Bali, Berkshires, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Indonesian Gamelan, John Cage, Lake Buel, Longhua Temple, Ludwig van Beethoven, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Route 7 in Massachusetts, Wat Chalong
Longhua Temple in Shanghai.
“The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
I like surprises. The opening motto for this post is from Henry David Thoreau’s The Pond in Winter. Sorry, but none of us are as hip as we think we are. I keep urging people to get over themselves and not be indifferent to traditions. Beethoven and Emerson were big fans of the Bhagavad Gita long before the 60s and the Beat Generation.
I’ve spent a lot of time going in and out of Asia since 2002. Multiple trips to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Laos, China and Taiwan, twelve if I’m bothering to count. I’m sure to be back as soon as possible to experience India, Indonesia, Bali, Singapore and Penang, Kuala Lumpur.
Jan and I’ve been hooked by the food and philosophy, the complicated history (I love a good story and just trying to sort out the Soong Sisters is a historical page turner), the music and the landscape, the medical ideas and body use disciplines of yoga and Thai massage, the poetry and the I-ching and Tao Te Ching, but most of all the people, which now means old friends.
People aren’t their governments and Planet Earth is full of wonderful humans. Language barriers? Here’s a tip – smiles don’t need translations or apps.
14 Saturday Jun 2014
Posted in Composers, Contemporary Music, Food, John Cage, Southwest Chamber Music, Travel, Uncategorized, Vietnam
Tags
Ascending Dragon, Barry Lyndon, Berkshires, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nejaimes Liquor Store, New England, New Marlborough, Oliver Knussen, Song Hong Ensemble, Stanley Kubrick, The Last of the Mohicans, The Old Inn on the Green, Vu Nhat Tan
Twilight fog in New England at The Old Inn on the Green in New Marlborough.
There is an unescapable magic in the New England countryside of the Berkshire Hills in Western Massachusetts. The legendary fall foliage, the evanescent green of spring, the fireflies of summer, the winter white snow fall.
And this post is a story for my many curious and interested readers in over 80 countries around the globe. America is a complicated country, with huge frustrations, a complicated historical legacy concocted from British, French and Spanish colonial interests, and often maddening contradictions. There’s nothing like a good meal and a good book to help you start to understand a people and their country.
Do yourself a favor and make a reservation at The Old Inn on the Green.
11 Wednesday Jun 2014
Tags
Berkshires, Betty Freeman, Eikando Temple, Henry David Thoreau, John Cage, Kyoto, Lake Buel, MItsuyo Matsumoto, Quartets by John Cage, Red Fox Music Camp, Seiji Ozawa, Tanglewood
A path in the Berkshire woods near Lake Buel.
I awoke yesterday morning to the sound of soft rainfall on the leaves and trees. The birds were an amazingly diverse choir, tweeting and humming and cooing and singing me out of sleep into emerging daylight.
The Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts are a locus for my life. They provide a genuine home for American musicians at Tanglewood in Lenox, where in 1979 I met my wife Jan. Her mother was born in Pittsfield in 1928 and her grandparents are buried there. Her aunt and uncle still live in New Marlborough, her old Cousin Andrew is a farmer in Sandisfield and young Cousin Rebecca is getting married on Saturday in Great Barrington.
But as I heard the rain fall softly I remembered, with birds and rainfall my soundscape as I awoke, music by John Cage inspired by the old colonial composers and Henry David Thoreau.
31 Saturday May 2014
Tags
American Music, Berkshires, Boston Symphony, Brooklyn Bridge, Charles Ives, Charles Wuorinen, Elliott Carter, Gloria Cheng, Hollywood Boulevard, John De Keyser, Leonard Bernstein, New York City, Tanglewood, When Pigs Fly Farm
The Housatonic at Stockbridge.
Maybe I was fated to fall in love in the Berkshires…
Let me flashback to a hot summer afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard in 1968. The bookstores, record shops, head joints, Indian restaurants, foot traffic and motorcycle gangs of Hell’s Angels were prodigious. I’d been inspired hearing The Fourth of July on a CBS Young Persons concert with Leonard Bernstein. Who was this American composer, Charles Ives? Our “Emerson, Twain and Thoreau all rolled into one” as Bernstein had described him.
John Kirkpatrick had recorded the Concord Sonata and I had gobbled it up like a piece of pumpkin pie when I saw the record at an old Hollywood Boulevard legend, Phil Harris Records. No bar lines? No meter? Fists on the piano? Forget the Mahler revival underway, my passion revolved around this American composer from Danbury, Connecticut. Next door to Phil Harris Records was a legendary music shop, our Doblinger’s or Patelson’s, owned by John de Keyser. Oversized scores of Boulez’s Pli selon pli and Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion were in the window display enticing me to enter.
I looked in awe at an item on the shelf. There was the great white whale of American music, The Concord Sonata by Charles Ives.
Sound Travels with Jeff von der Schmidt 