CGF Newsletter 11: Dude, Where's My Score?

Hijacked scores, a treasure restored, and a takedown breakdown

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint (more of a fun fact, if/when you guess the composer): This famous composer celebrated his 19th birthday shortly before his death. Technically…

No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at classicalgabfest@gmail.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results

CGF Newsletter 10
Florence Price: Andante moderato (originally from String Quartet No. 2, now arranged as an independent string orchestra work)

Joey was the only one willing to stick his neck out on this one, and I’d say he did quite well, with a basket that included Gershwin, Still, and Ellington. Next stop on that train is Florence Price.

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

Lost...

A run-of-the-mill car theft in Boston has turned out to be a major loss for conductor Benjamin Zander. NBC Boston reports:

This all started on Nov. 5, when Philharmonic Conductor Benjamin Zander's car was stolen from in front of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Some of his belongings were located in Boston's Allston neighborhood, and after driving around, Piacentini located Zander's car.

The relief was short-lived — three well-marked scores, a reflection of Zander's decades as a conductor, were missing from the car.

"It is hours and hours and hours and decades of work that he has gone into, and of course it is really difficult to have it happen so close to the performance," said Elisabeth Christensen, managing director of the Philharmonic. "He has been preparing the orchestra for this performance since September with these scores, and now, we have just two more rehearsals before he has to perform and he is starting from scratch with these scores."

I will put aside my personal feelings about Benjamin Zander as a musician for the time and say that I really feel bad for anyone who’s had their car (or any personal items) stolen. My car and my apartment were both broken into when I lived in Chicago in the mid-aughts, and it’s no fun. Zander’s assistant is quoted later in the article saying “He doesn't care about the car, he wants those scores back,” and I’m right with him.

[When my apartment was broken into, the orchestral parts to my senior thesis composition were in a briefcase that, for some reason, I had also put a bunch of loose change into. Thankfully, the burglar dumped the sheet music and took the quarters. He may still be doing laundry this very day.]

But I do want to say a thing or two about this notion that Zander is now “starting from scratch” on these pieces. No he’s not. A conductor’s notations are certainly valuable, but they’re a reflection of one’s concentrated study, larger musical values, and experience in rehearsal. Those things don’t just evaporate because you have to look at a new piece of sheet music. In fact, my college conductor, Barbara Schubert, purposefully bought a new score for every concert she conducted so that she would be approaching the music fresh.

I personally think that’s extreme, and I value my scores. I’m just starting rehearsals now for Handel’s Messiah which is a work I conduct on an annual basis. I write myself a little note at the end of every year’s performances with instructions for next year, and while I find those valuable, I tend to remember what’s in the notes.

But anyway, if you took Ben Zander’s scores, please give them back.

... and Found

According to the English-language Polish news site The First News, a Stradivarius violin that went missing in 1944 has recently been recovered. Here’s the gist of the article, which is very good:

Owned only by a handful of people, previous custodians are thought to have included Charles Philippe Lafont (the chamber violinist to Tsar Alexander I) and the acclaimed luthier Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume. It was Vuillaume who sold it to Lauterbach, and in 1900 it was then sold to the Łódź-based industrialist Henryk Grohman.

When Grohman died in 1939, he reportedly bequeathed his entire estate to the Second Republic of Poland: this included not just his villa but also a collection of instruments that numbered a rare 1734 Guarneri violin and the Lauterbach Stradivarius.

Passed to the National Museum in Warsaw, steps were taken to safeguard it following the German occupation and it was stored, along with other high-value instruments, inside a sealed mahogany case behind a wall in the museum’s chapel.

Despite these precautions, the violin disappeared in 1944. However, the trail did not end there, and in 1948 an instrument matching its description was discovered by an American officer, Stefan P. Munsing, inside the Heinrichsthal home of SS major Theodor Blank. 

Ultimately, it never made this journey, a point confirmed by Polish authorities in 2008 when the Ministry of Culture began re-examining cases of stolen cultural works.

Now, as reported by Le Parisien, the 78-year-old mystery has been solved by Pascale Bernheim, a Frenchman specialising in Nazi-era provenance research and the recovery of looted instruments.

Will’s Tár Review, Reviewed 

I (Joey) recently visited the movie theatre for only the second time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, in order to watch Tár, which is basically required viewing for classical musicians these days. (The first time was for Top Gun: Maverick — there’s no accounting for my cousins’ taste.) I rather enjoyed the film, and I’m here to review Will’s Newsletter 8 Review, a “CGF on CGF” to mirror Lydia Tár’s in-movie autobiography, Tár on Tár. 

I went with two musician friends of mine from my school, who happen to be music theory Ph.D. students. I recommend all to watch it with a friend in music, as it makes the discussion afterward so much more fun. Although Will claims that the film cannot be can not judged “in any sort of good-bad paradigm,” I think it’s safe to say all three of us liked the movie! It was dramatic, it was artistic, and it had a higher level of classical music dramaturgy going for it than most media dealing with the subject.

Let me address a few of Will’s spicier points:

• That the movie is “both long (2’37”) and stuffed” 

No denying this. There were probably five or six significant dramatic threads to hold onto for the duration. Though to describe the “real estate deal subterfuged by an accordion performance” as a main plot point is a bit of stretch… more of a spoiler, if anything.

• That "what makes it hard for someone like me to watch this movie is that it’s constantly distracting classical music insiders with dialogue and scenarios that are clearly researched, but are just off enough that you’re constantly having to engage the movie at the level of “you wouldn’t say that” or “that wouldn’t happen that way” or “what the literal f*ck was that?”"

Yes, it wasn’t perfect in this regard. But it was miles ahead of almost any filmic competition that is as mainstream as this movie. (See last week’s trailer for the upcoming Joseph Boulogne biopic.)

• That he thinks “Cate Blanchett’s acting is bad.”

I can see why someone would say that. My take was that she was trying to do Lydia Tár as a character who speaks as if from a script in some situations - such people certainly exist, and seem to disproportionately populate the classical music world. I think Blanchett has proved that she is capable of nuanced performances!

• That it seems to him “too strange to exist.”

It is awesome that classical music would get such a stage in a movie like this, if unexpected. The extent to which they went into some of the dirty details of this world left me wondering what non-musicians would think — would they be bored because they didn’t have the requisite background? 

My biggest complaint about the movie was that some threads were left dangling. I wish a little bit more rounding of the edges had been done — why not go for the full three hours?

If you haven’t watched it yet, I highly recommend it. If you’re reading this newsletter, it will certainly keep your attention!

Classical Mixtape

Michael Abels, Isolation Variation
Hilary Hahn, violin

 The Grammy nominations for 2023 have been announced (nos. 82–89 in that link) and it’s the usual chaotic mess of miscategorization, undercategorization, and generally comparing things that have almost nothing to do with each other and that will be voted on by people who have no concept of this musical genre. (Though Joey will no doubt be happy to see that his girl Caroline Shaw’s album “Evergreen” was nominated for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.)

But as with even the most jumbled list of new albums, you’re bound to come across some stuff you like, and I really dug this single by Hilary Hahn of Michael Abels’ Isolation Variation. It’s just a great little piece!