Just in case you miss the frog songs that we hear in the warmer weather! (Actually there are no actual frog sounds included, but there are lots of songs about frogs.) You can find the music on this page of the IMSLP ..read more

Clara is a new way to navigate through the IMSLP. Give it a spin! You can sort and filter, search for works, and even listen to a sample (eventually this feature will work). It is both interesting and not interesting to see what the most popular pieces in the catalog are. No spoilers from me (and no surprises from the list ..read more

I have always loved maps. My love of maps began with this Ciacoma Cantelli da Vignola map of the Turkish Empire from 1679 that used to hang in the entryway of my childhood home. It has (somehow) followed me through my life. And now its image can "hang" on this page of this blog. (You can see a zoomable digital version of this map here.) When I was a child I used to make detailed maps of my neighborhood, showing the route that I would walk to school. My father had a map of Paris on the wall of his basement practice studio. I had absolutely no understanding of Paris (or the Turkish Empire of 1 ..read more

You can hear this music accompanying some of the final scenes of the 1922/23 silent film (one hundred years ago!) of Salomé that was produced, directed, choreographed, acted, and danced by Alla Nazimova through this link. You can find the score and parts on this page of the IMSLP. The piece, which is ten minutes long, can be played with or without the film ..read more

The other day I glanced in the mirror and, for the first time in my adult life, recognized the third-grade girl in this photo. The photo record for me is scarce. There might be half a dozen photos taken of me as a child, and most of them were school photos. I was told that my father "didn't believe in" taking photos, and my mother, who was photographed by her shutterbug father a great deal when she was a child, didn't object to my father's lack of interest. I like to imagine that my mother thought that she was sparing us some agony by only having baby portraits taken twice. It must have be ..read more

I'm delighted to announce that the viola transcription of my Advanced Violin Scale Studies is finally available from Mel Bay. I'm also totally thrilled that they have used a portrait of my 1952 Carl Becker viola for the cover. My father bought the instrument in Chicago while he was a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He told me that when he bought it they "wheeled out the old man," so that my father could meet the maker. It was the instrument that my father used to win the audition for principal viola of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, though the powers that were (then ..read more

I spent a great deal of time collaborating with Daniel Morganstern, the former principal cellist of the Lyric Opera of Chicago and the American Ballet Theatre, on these two-cello transcriptions of music from three of Verdi's operas. The first piece in this new publication from International Music Company is a wordless aria that serves as the prelude to the opera I masandieri. It is bel canto cello writing at its finest. In the second act of Rigoletto, the first  cello "sings" the part of the court jester, the title character of Verdi's opera, while the second cello accom ..read more

Published by International Music Company and available through this link ..read more

I noticed that people have been visiting a post that I made about the violinist/violist Mela Tenenbaum in February of 2021, and a quick google search found that she died very, very recently. She was buried this morning at the Beth Moses Cemetary in West Babylon, New York. Mela was a great musician and a great and generous human being. I feel so honored to have been phone friends with her during my days at the radio station. We suddenly lost touch in the early 2000s, and I was unable to find anything about her again until February of 2021. And now today I find out that she is no longer alive ..read more

I saw a great interview with Patrick Stewart last week. I believe it was part of a news broadcast, perhaps PBS, but I distinctly remember that he talked about feeling comfortable when he acted because he didn't have to be himself. He could be somebody else. As much as I love watching acting on stage and in movies, acting has never been something I was good enough at to feel truly comfortable doing. Standing on a stage wearing a costume has never shielded me from feeling like a person (me) standing on a stage wearing a costume, and trying to remember where on that stage I was supposed to be a ..read more