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Violin Blogs2012 Violinist.com Tournament Final Round: Beethoven vs. Sibelius By Laurie NilesMarch 30, 2012 12:14 It was a very close race, the semi-final between the Tchaikovsky and the Sibelius Concertos, but the Sibelius won by three votes! Now we enter the final round, in which either the Beethoven or the Sibelius will be voted the winner of our Violin Concerto Tournament. (We will not call either "the Best" or "Our Favorite" concerto -- because we do love them all. But this has been a fun way to get talking about concertos!) By the way, of all those who submitted brackets, we have two people who are in the running to win that cool V.com totebag, depending on the outcome of this vote. Steven Juarez, with 23 points, is the winner if the Sibelius prevails. Michael Bechtel, with 22 points, gets the prize if the Beethoven wins. So in the spirit of this tournament, which concerto do you like better and why? Which do you want to win the tournament? Please vote, and share your thoughts and post your favorite recordings (I'll go in and make them "live" if you don't know how to hyperlink or embed video): Beethoven Violin Concerto vs. Sibelius Violin Concerto
Tweet Update on the O'Connor Method and Interview with Mark O'Connor By Laurie NilesMarch 30, 2012 10:53 Violinist Mark O'Connor seems to be everywhere -- on Facebook, on Twitter, promoting his compositions, touring, posting videos old and new. But I'd argue that one of the most important things he's doing these days is rather more academic and quiet: writing a history of American violin music, in the form of his O'Connor Method. "I kind of started this whole concept when I began my camps 20 years ago," said Mark, an award-winning fiddler and composer who lives in New York. "I had the idea for an American string school and method, and the camps really embodied that, with the idea of having classical music being taught alongside of jazz violin, folk fiddling and world music." He has planned 10 books for what he calls his "New American School of String Playing," and just last month he released Book 3 in the series. (All of the O'Connor Method books, written for violin, viola, cello and orchestra, are available through Shar Music in Ann Arbor.) His new recording, American Classics, consists of all the songs in his new Book 3. Since the release of his first two books in 2009, Mark and long-time Suzuki teacher Pamela Wiley have conducted about two dozen teacher training seminars throughout the United States and Canada, introducing the O'Connor Method to about 350 teachers (listed on this page) from 40 states in the U.S., with a handful from Canada, Brazil, Finland, Germany, Korea, and Trinidad. (I took the class in 2010 and wrote about it here.) This year his String Camp in Berklee, which has long been a camp for adult players and professionals to go for cross-genre education, also will offer tracks for O'Connor Method students ages of 5 to 13, as well as teacher training. Also, he's holding a special O'Connor Method Camp (July 30-Aug. 3) in Charleston, S.C. especially for children who are studying the method and for teachers who wish to train in the first three books. What of the books? Certainly American folk music and art music deserves a bold place in both violin repertoire and pedagogy. But can this kind of method can stand alone, without its European roots? Does it really need to? Mark has called his method a "cultural correction" to the Suzuki method, but frankly, they could work pretty well together. I don't think I exaggerate when I say Mark's books are works of art; they include a graded progression of American music of all genres: fiddle music, Mexican music, Canadian music, Native American music, classical, blues, rock 'n' roll, ragtime, African American spiritual music, tunes by O'Connor himself, and more. The pages are filled with color photos and illustrations, and the books come with recordings of Mark playing the pieces, as well as piano tracks. The books also include detailed histories of every piece, with eye-opening revelations about the violin's prominent place in the history of America. "I've been a bit of a musicologist, really, since I was a a kid," Mark said. "I've always been interested in the stories; this is one of the reasons why the stories are in the books. The history of the music is actually part of the method. The importance of American music has been downplayed in academic circles and I think part of the reason is because we actually don't know much about it. It's hard to play it up when you don't know much about it." As for the future books, "Book 4 will be a more advanced version of Book 3, which will bring it to high-intermediate and maybe beginning advanced," Mark said. "Book 5 through 10 will be advanced books with a lot of repertoire." Starting with Book 5, the repertoire will include materials not arranged by Mark. "I'm going to bring in complete pieces and complete repertoire -- everything from Stephane Grappelli transcriptions to Maud Powell pieces to Jascha Heifetz's Gershwin adaptations to the Barber Violin Concerto. It will be a complete American String Method." It's an exciting prospect, the idea of assembling together some of America's finest music written for the violin, across many genres. It also opens the opportunity for teaching new skills on the violin (improvisation, an American musical dialect), as well as helping teach the skills we all need to know (positions, string crossings, good tone, bow strokes), using different music and coming at it from a different angle. For example: jazz and improvisation. How do you teach that? Mark says you start with the blues, the spiritual, hoedown and ragtime, "and you'll find all of those foundational styles in Book 1 or 2, as well as in Book 3," Mark said. "In acquiring the technique to play jazz, one must acquire the language of the music. So Book 3 reveals that for the first time, which is very exciting because of course, jazz is a more complex musical style." Here's the first "real" jazz piece introduced in the O'Connor Method, "Lazy River," a 1930 tune by "Hoagy" Carmichael. ("Hoagy" Carmichael, "Lazy River," 1930) "I chose 'Lazy River' because it's a very slow-tempo jazz, swing piece," Mark said. "It almost sounds like it's slowed down for a student, but it's not. The tempo is natural to the piece of music, and therefore the slow tempo is going to be friendly to learn how to play jazz for the first time, to a student, but not feel like they're having to slow the whole thing down and be less-than. This is actually the way the music goes." It's the kind of tune that can introduce a student to the idea of "swinging" the beat. "The beauty about swing is that it's individual -- everybody swings different," Mark said. "You can swing it a little bit, you can swing it a lot, and it's all okay. It's just how each student wants to interpret the music." What's swing? "The name of the style 'Ragtime' is actually derived from a term called 'Ragged time,'" Mark said. "It was an African-American musical terminology from the early 1800s. Rather than playing straight eighth notes, you start playing them raggedly, meaning one would be longer and the other short." Another ongoing lesson has to do with the nature of improvisation, that it occurs within a framework. "If you went up to a violin player and you said, 'Improvisation,' their head would come apart," Mark said. "They would think that they would have to improvise every single note, every single measure -- from scratch. But No jazz musician thinks like that. No blue grass musician thinks like that." The first song in Book 3, the "Rubber Dolly Rag" is structured in such a way that certain anchor notes are clear, and some simple improvisation can be inserted around those. As for those skills that every violinist needs to learn, Mark has incorporated pieces to help with that as well. "A lot of the techniques that are in Book 3 are still about learning how to play the violin better," O'Connor said. "The big technical acquisition for Book 3 is going to be shifting to second position and third position." For that, "I chose two pieces that inherently go into second position and third position naturally and organically, and repeatedly, within the phrase." The music he uses to introduce third position is a fiddle tune called Grey Eagle, which, as he explains in extensive notes in the book, was a favorite tune of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, who played the violin himself. "Grey Eagle is the very piece that I learned how to shift into third position," Mark said. "So this is really the method I used." Here is a version of that tune (the one in the book is simplified for a level-three student): The shifting even comes with a nice, big slide, and "the slide itself is a part of the music, so you don't have to go, oh gee, it's unfortunate that I have to do this sliding," Mark said. "They can actually take their time with it, they don't have to worry about making it a quick gliss, and they can find their pitch that way, too." Mark presents Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" to introduce second position, and it works in a similar way: the shift comes repeatedly in the melody - six times in the "A" section. "It's a very natural motion, to go back and forth and get the feeling of shifting, and the musicality of it, until hopefully it becomes second nature," Mark said. "And it's such a strong melody, that's the other thing. When the student is enduring learning these technical feats, they're actually liking the music they're playing. Once they've got the shifting done, they've got the tune, so they can play it, they can entertain somebody with 'The Entertainer'!" Whether these pieces will work as planned, remains to be seen. My own students have played music from these books, with mixed results, mostly because many of them need something more advanced that does not yet exist in this method. They've enjoyed learning to enhance a song with slides, to improvise, to swing a rhythm. One of them can't stop playing "Florida Blues," from Book 2. Of course, I'm not trying to make her stop! They've learned the music quickly, but as teachers know: learning some pieces and learning to play are two different things. Learning to play involves a great breadth. My most fiddle-hungry student, a regular improviser who also needed some extra work in second position, tried "The Entertainer" but found it so repetitive that she politely asked to get back to the Vivaldi concerto and Wolfahrt. I imagine that Mark's upper books will give her more of a challenge. But it seems to me that she, and many others, will be interested in both Bach and Barber, in both Vivaldi and Grappelli. Shinichi Suzuki had thousands of children playing at a very high level before teachers starting begging him to share his ideas. Even then, he would not call his philosophy a "method." His method was a means to an end, not an end itself. So I hope we keep an eye on the prize. Certainly American music, with all its rich history and unique components, should be part of the picture. But it's a big picture. I love the idea of the O'Connor Method, but time will be the real test of where it belongs and how it helps best, when it comes to teaching the violin and helping students become fluent in music and their own cultures.
Tweet Music and MoviesBy Joshua IyerMarch 30, 2012 08:58 It is my latest (and probably only, so far, at least) philosophy that "music tells half the story." When you watch a movie, you might get so into the plot and characters that you forget all about the music, and how the music is a character of its own. Think about it; a scene in which a character dies (like during The Hunger Games or in Harry Potter) would not be as sad if there was no beautiful violin solo with the other orchestral strings backing it with D minor chords, right? A scene in which an action battle is occuring (like in Star Wars) would not be as cool without the epic, loud, and intense backing of the music. A film's soundtrack is extremely important in a song. That's why I'm excited for our orchestra concert - it's music from the movies. Silent movies, back in the old days, depended entirely on music, for there were no voiceovers, sound effects, or nearly anything else to back up the music. It's usually a piano solo, but there probably were orchestras playing as well. "Music tells half the story." That's my latest philosophy.
Tweet 'T'elemann Viola Concerto By Mendy SmithMarch 29, 2012 19:17 It was the very first concerto I ever learned to play. I vaguely remember playing it for an audition (though I did not realize it at the time) for the Sewanee Summer Music Festival back in, ummmm... the last century. When my teacher suggested it as my next piece to study, my first thought was "really? A child's concerto?" My second thought was "maybe this time around I can really do it justice". After nodding my agreement, she pulled out her old faded, well used copy and began playing. I hummed along for a few measures and before I knew it, I was playing along with her, barely glancing at the page. How is it possible that after (garble garble) years I still have that piece memorized? This should be easy, right? Then a third thought occurred to me... simple does not mean easy...
Tweet 2012 Violinist.com Tournament, Round 3, Day 2: Sibelius vs. Tchaikovsky By Laurie NilesMarch 29, 2012 10:04 It's the last day before the final round in our Violin Concerto Tournament, and today we decide which concerto will go up against the Beethoven Concerto. Will it be the Sibelius or the Tchaikovsky? This is a actually a pretty tough contest: two very lyrical, popular pieces, both by composers who were a bit less absolutist than, say, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach or Mozart. While they are both well-crafted, they are more emotional than intellectual. Which will it be? Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto vs. Sibelius Violin Concerto Benjamin Beilman's plays the first movement of the Sibelius during the final round of the "Montreal International Musical Competition": Josh Bell plays the first movement of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto like it's an old friend, nailing every thing along the way (2010 performance, with the? Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Sakari Oramo conducting the Gala Concert during the Nobel Prize Ceremonies):
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