August 2007

Op. 1, No. 1

"I think I found my first blog," I told Robert, lifting a paper from the large bin of old high school and college refuse that I was trying to sort through. The three pages of dot-matrix print, attached with a paper clip, were punched with holes for a three-ring binder and slightly discolored by time. I'd marked the assignment "self feature," something I'd written for a journalism class at Indiana University, in 1990.

I'm Sure You Will

"Have a seat, Laura," Elliott Galkin said without looking up.

I tripped over the chairs cluttered around the table in the spacious meeting room as I made my way towards him. This 10-minute interview would tell him whether or not I should be accepted into the graduate program for music criticism at the Peabody Conservatory of Music.

Galkin sat calmly. He did not look much like the strong, handsome, middle-aged man pictured in the brochure I had received two months before. No, he was a shriveled old man who looked like a bullfrog.

Nevertheless, I was intimidated. Galkin's list of accomplishments was overwhelming. He had founded the Music Critics Association. He had written a book about this century's most prominent symphony conductors. He had founded the only graduate program in music criticism in the United States. He was an expert in his field. Now he was going to read my essay.

I pulled up a seat. Galkin shuffled through the manila folders in front of him, looking for the one with my name on it. He found it at the bottom of the pile. As he pulled out the essay that I had written, I was suddenly aware of my lack of wisdom and authority.

My accomplishments didn't quite compare with his. All I could remember at this critical moment was that I had worked at Disney World the previous summer and at McDonald's the summer before that.

Sure, I knew a little about music. I had played the violin for as long as I could remember. At Northwestern University I studied music. I devised an undergraduate program in music criticism so that I could learn to write about it. But this man knew more.

My essay was about Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Cliché. Galkin had probably heard the piece five hundred times before I was even born. I wanted to grab my paper back and say, "No, really, it's nothing. Never mind," and run out the door. But I couldn't turn back now.

He leafed through the pages of my essay. He nodded, shook his head, furrowed his brow and occasionally said, "Hmmm." I sat on the edge of my chair, paralyzed. Every muscle in my body was tense.

"What do you mean by 'magnificent simplicity?'" he asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I, umm...well," I responded. I was mute.

"And what note is that pedal tone in the last movement?" he asked. "Do you have perfect pitch?"

"Well, uh, not exactly," I said. "Is it a C?"

"Mmmmm," he said, shaking his little bald head.

I began to feel thoroughly stupid and miserable. I had to fight the tears that threatened to betray my distress. Then my temper flared up.

"Maybe I don't have perfect pitch and I don't know everything I should, but I want people to hear about music," I said, gaining courage with each word. "I know I can do this. I am here because I want to learn about music criticism. Isn't that what this program is for?"

Galkin finally looked into my eyes.

"That's the best thing you've said all day," he said.

"And I will work hard," I said, and I meant it. This was a deal. I would not let this man down.

"I'm sure you will," he smiled, "Goodbye."

Two weeks later I received my letter of acceptance. Three weeks later Elliott Galkin passed away. I didn't enter his graduate program, but I haven't forgotten my promise to him.

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A late summer revelation

When I was a small child, my mom and dad, with the best intentions, took my worn, over-loved Raggedy Ann to...."the beauty parlor." Whenever she got rather ragged, in fact, she would go to the beauty parlor and come back looking "good as NEW..." This happened on a regular basis.

Since the age of about four, I've wondered about the dolly beauty parlor. I've harbored a strong suspicion that no such thing actually exists, that my parents were, in fact, stashing away the old Raggedy and giving me a new one.

I now humbly must recognize that the dolly beauty parlor DOES indeed exist. It's at The Grove mall in LA, and it's called, "American Girl Place." I went there with my daughter and her two dolls. They got their hair done. Check it out, I took pictures. Dolls DO get their hair done.

They also really do have tea parties.

It's a truly strange world, but at least now something does make more sense to me. Mom and Dad, I'm sorry I doubted the dolly beauty parlor.

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Michael McLean Finds His Element

Sometimes Los Angeles violinist, teacher and composer Michael McLean wishes he could go back to that childhood moment, when he first heard Mozart's 40th Symphony.

"It was like a bolt of lightning, straight from Zeus," said McLean, whose new violin concerto, Elements, was recorded last year by violinist Brian Lewis and the London Symphony. "I knew I was a musician; I knew I was a composer."

I spoke with him at the Colburn School in LA, where he teaches.

Until that moment when he heard Mozart, the music McLean had heard as a child in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Mich., had not caught his attention. His older brother listened to Kiss and Destroyer; his older sister's tastes included Rod Stewart and Elton John.

One day while rummaging through his parents' record collection, he found, buried beneath the Mamas and the Papas and Simon and Garfunkel, a Time/Life collection of classical music his father had purchased. Curious, he looked through the contents: Bach Brandenburg, Handel Water Music, Mozart 40th Symphony, Beethoven 3rd Symphony, Schubert "Unfinished" Symphony and more. He decided to pop Mozart 40 onto the turntable.

"I put that on, and it was a huge spiritual awakening for me," said McLean. “I listened to that record hundreds of times. I wish I could go back to that moment: really experiencing what that music was about, with no intellectual filter."

In a way, Mozart was McLean's first composition teacher. At age seven, McLean started composing at the piano. When he was 11, he bought himself the score for Mozart's string quartets at Borders Books in Ann Arbor. Though he could barely read music at the time, he taught himself viola clef and studied functional harmony and sonata form so that he could delve into the music of Mozart.

"I would study the exposition of one of the quartets, then I would write the development," McLean said. When he was finished writing a development, he would go back and see how Mozart had written it. "It was always a crushing blow!" McLean laughed.

He remembers taking an eight-week family trip across the country, driving from Michigan to California in a van. He took his violin, and the score for the Mozart quartets.

"That started a lifelong obsession of studying scores." said McLean, who is a self-proclaimed "Dover score-oholic."

His mother joked, "Michael, you are 11 already and you haven't written a symphony yet!"

That didn't last for long: in junior high school, McLean wrote a string symphony, a string quartet and two violin sonatas.

McLean studied composition at Northwestern University's School of Music in the 1980s, a time when atonal music and serialism still dominated academia, and the predominant feeling was that traditional tonality had run its course. It was no longer possible to say something new without crushing old idioms; being "derivative" was seriously out of style.

"It was a weird time to study music," McLean said. "New music had to be..." McLean demonstrated on the piano: BANG, boom, all over the keyboard.

"There was such a disconnect between music and human feeling," McLean said of that time period in music. " It left a lot of the audience, and musicians behind, in the dust."

"Thank God for the minimalists, and composers like Arvo Pärt, who broke the mold" and started to change what was set in place by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples.

Pärt's spiritual minimalism "was accessible, very profound music that reached me in a way that some of the new music of the 60s did not," McLean said. What did all this mean for a young composer whose primary inspiration was the genius of Mozart?

"Compositionally, I wandered," McLean said. "Eventually, my eclectic tastes began to pull things off the shelf."

For example: Tangos. Once out of college, McLean arranged and wrote more than a dozen tangos, and eventually he wanted to record them all. It was for this project that McLean called upon University of Texas Violin Professor and Juilliard graduate Brian Lewis. The two had met at a Suzuki workshop at Texas Christian University in 1997. Lewis also is the son of well-known Suzuki teacher Alice Joy Lewis of Ottawa.

McLean remembers Lewis playing the Wieniawski Concerto; "He played brilliantly," McLean said. McLean knew that Lewis was the perfect person to record the tangos he'd been composing and arranging.

In 1997, Lewis and McLean, along with Barbara Barber and Kate Stevens, recorded Care to Tango?, featuring 14 of McLean's arrangements and original compositions. This project cemented McLean and Lewis's friendship. If anyone can both understand the intellectual underpinnings and find the fun in a piece of music, it's Lewis.

"We were listening to these takes" of the tango recordings, McLean said, laughing, "and he would grab a throw off the couch and a lamp shade and start dancing around the living room!"

At the time, Lewis was just starting to practice the Bernstein Serenade, which is the piece paired with McLean's "Elements" on the recent CD.

"We just clicked, musically," McLean said. "It really got me wanting to write him a piece."

In fact, McLean wrote the first movement of "Elements," "Earth," later in 1997, then put it aside. Several years later, Lewis commissioned McLean to write a Suite for Violin and Piano for the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Ottawa Suzuki Institute by his mother, Alice Joy Lewis.

Both McLean and Lewis were teaching at Sound Encounters, during which McLean stayed at the Lewis family house, sitting on the porch late at night and talking about music and sonorities. When Lewis actually asked McLean if he could write him violin concerto, McLean told him that he'd already started; the first movement was sitting in a drawer.

In 2000, Lewis and McLean signed a commission contract during a break at the Suzuki workshop in Minnesota, where they were both teaching. McLean went back to Dallas and began with the rest of "Elements," with movements based on the concepts of Earth, Fire, Air and Water.

McLean had been reading works by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and "all of these things coalesced with this piece," he said. Every few months, Brian would fly in from New York to read through the score and offer his thoughts.

"We didn't change a lot of notes – I wrote pretty idiomatically because I'm a violinist," McLean said. At the same time, Lewis's playing was a major influence.

"Brian's playing was a big inspiration to me," McLean said. "I could see him playing the gestures as I was writing."

For example, in the movement, "Fire," Lewis told him to make it as difficult as he wanted to. How hard is it? "It's (Suzuki) Book 35!" McLean laughed. "He basically got what he asked for."

As Lewis told me at the Starling-Delay Symposium in New York earlier this year, "there are certain parts of this piece that are very, very challenging."

Lewis said that when he first read "Fire," he asked McLean, "How to you play this?" and McLean responded, "I can't play it, I wrote it for you!"

The first movement, "Earth," draws its inspiration from story of Genesis, with the violin as a kind of "Adam" figure. McLean also acknowledges "there is a little Sam Barber in the first movement."

Much of the "Air" movement is in f minor, "way in the upper ranges of the violin. You get such a covered, misty sound there, but it isn't idiomatic for the violin," McLean said. "It paints a picture. We get this cloud structure, this antiphonal effect. It's just a very ethereal effect, with these internal canons happening throughout."

McLean also included some of those modern composing techniques he studied in school; but with his own stamp. For example, he put a 12-tone row in the movement "Air."

"It's a 12-tone row; it just happens to be over some beautiful chords," Lewis said.

"The joke was composing a 12-tone row in the most lush, beautiful way," McLean said.

And the movement "Water" makes use of minimalism to portray the flow of water.

"It starts with drops of rain that turn into torrents of water," Lewis said.

Also, water, in the context of Jungian psychology, is the symbol of the subconscious. The "development" of the movement is meant to portray subtitled dreams, McLean said. "This is where, in the hero's journey, we go into the underworld, or into the dark recesses of our pysche," McLean said. In this section, McLean wrote a dance, or rhumba, which "is that arrival point to the underworld."

McLean finished the piece in 2004, revising it with the help of his University of Southern California film scoring teacher, David Spear.

What happened next comes straight out of Composer Fantasy Storybook Land: McLean's piece was recorded by Brian Lewis, on a Stradivarius, with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Lewis was offered the opportunity to record the Bernstein "Serenade" with the LSO. When he was asked what he'd like to pair it with, he told them that he had a work he felt was "stunningly beautiful" and would make the perfect pairing: McLean's "Elements."

"It's almost as if this was destined for it to be recorded," Lewis said. "Michael never heard it played until we recorded it with the LSO in Abbey Road Studio."

Lewis, left, and McLean at Abbey Road.

"I remember standing on the podium, thinking, we're not in Kansas anymore," said Lewis, who played the "Artot" Strad for the recording session. "Here I am, playing the 1728 Artot Strad , with the London Symphony and Hugh Wolff, playing a piece commissioned for me, recording in Abbey Studio. I'm standing where the Beatles stood!"

Lewis took off his shoes and recorded in stocking feet.

"It was truly a life-changing experience – this is my first recording with orchestra," Lewis said. "To be able to have your first major recording with orchestra to be in that environment was very special."

As for "Elements," Lewis has found that "people have a really direct emotional reaction to it."

"Michael writes so beautifully for the violin -- composition is very ingrained in him," Lewis said. "The music is honest and real. "

"Those are the types of composers one cherishes deeply."

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