Reviewing Richmond

We have lived in Richmond seven years now and are preparing to move in a month.

Interestingly, I have had several musical opportunities that are helping me to review the work I've done here.

Last week, I was invited back to Collegiate School, a private school where I taught for several years when we first came to town, to provide a yearly evaluation for a number of the piano students. It was an inspiring day filled with bright young people. There were two brothers with great attitudes who played a ragtime duet from memory. There were several students who had not studied more than two or three years who were making great strides and had prepared lots of repertoire. And there was a brilliant student who really grasped and conveyed the exact character of the accents in the classical era work she was playing. That really impressed me. I also enjoyed lunch with my former boss in the fine cafeteria where I used to eat (including the giant bowl of graham crackers that's always available for an easy dessert.)

On the weekend, I accompanied a senior recital at Collegiate which brought back more memories of student recitals, playing for baccalaureate, and gigs across state. One such gig was accompanying a senior in a scholarship competition in Bristol which was a very long drive, especially after the competition.


This Sunday, I had the opportunity to play for Pentecost Sunday service at Grace Baptist Church. Kathy and I were members there for a couple of years. The congregation is very open to creativity and the arts. I played Chopin Revolutionary Etude for the prelude as the piece seems firey and windy - appropriate qualities for Pentecost. Accompanying the congregational singing for the service also gave me an opportunity to encapsulate much of what I have come to view as relevant to the art of hymn playing while living in Richmond in a final service with that church community. This involves some (hopeful tasteful) text painting, a sense of tension and release following both the text and musical sense of the phrases, ideas about tempo change between verses relating to the text, ideas about the relationship of the pianist and the congregation regarding tempo (sometimes I follow, sometimes I push), and the possibility of binding together numerous musical events in a service by incorporating textures or figurations in the hymn accompaniments that appear in the other service music.

Finally, tonight at choir rehearsal we worked on Ken Medema's "To This Altar" which I first learned at Woodland Heights Baptist Church during the last several years with Kathy leading our choir. It's a very moving piece that touches me everytime we rehearse it. Medema describes it in this way:

"It is about bringing our life problems to God's altar for healing."

The text is broad yet somehow specific (maybe I'm saying that it is deeply thought out and felt, and thus has deeply human and universal application.) Whatever my day's experience is, it finds a healing and warming context in this worshipful anthem.

Competition Advice

I'm entering a competition with a singer friend this fall. It has been years since I've entered a competition. Last time, I learned all I needed to know through mail and phone calls. Today, most of the information is available on-line.

There is at least one drawback in our current, seemingly convenient situation. The design of some websites, as in the case of this competition, can make it hard to find out everything you need to know. Ironically, it seems like a lot of energy was put into getting all the information onto this website, only the information a participant needs to know is spread throughout the site instead of being in a single participant-friendly location and format. I've returned to the site again and again to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Thus, my advice to anyone entering a competition in this day and age: you might need to visit multiple pages of a site to get all the information you need. Don't assume you've got it all. Look thoroughly and don't hesitate to e-mail questions to the appropriate folks.

Gottschalk and Gershwin

This week I had the fun of performing excerpts from several Gottschalk works for a documentary on Cuban jazz that should be completed in November. Gottschalk travelled in Cuba and wrote some works that contain quintessential rhythms that have come to be associated with jazz and permeate much of the music we hear today.

In addition to practicing the excerpts, my preparation also included finding shoes and cuff links that looked like something Gottschalk might have worn.

I coached the excerpts with Dr. Mike Davison, one of my colleagues at UR who is an expert regarding Cuban jazz. He suggested that I play more percussively as Cuban music is very percussion-oriented. At the same time, Gottschalk was a 19th century parlor pianist known for his polish and charm. It's interesting to conjecture what type of performance would have amounted to flamboyance , exoticism, and visceral appeal in that world of poetry and highly melodic music.

Sometimes we classical musicians assume that a jazz influence is somehow a sign of primal and raw expression. But I think the composers who incorporated touches of jazz into their concert music were viewing jazz as modern, sophisticated, and suave as often as they were viewing it as being expressively primal or raw. I wonder if some unexamined, inherited prejudice may be at play that robs us of recognizing a wider range of expressiveness in this music.

Last night we went to Richmond Ballet's performance of George Balanchine's Who Cares? based on the music of George Gershwin and premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1970 . The ballet injects the rhetoric and forms of a traditional ballet with the jazzy flirtatiousness and glitz of a 1920's Broadway show -
a prime example of the neoclassical impulse.

Change of Address

This little announcement may be important to those of you who read this blog periodically. I'm thinking of changing its name and address to hulinmusic.blogspot.com.

If you look for the blog in a few weeks and can't find it, try that address.