The Challenges of Playing Music Together Online

This week I've been spending a good bit of time watching video tutorials about how to make online rehearsals or multi-player performance videos possible. I can send you some links, if you'd like.  You've probably seen them in the past few weeks, musicians playing TOGETHER, on screen, in the age of social distancing. And you would not be alone in thinking . . . let's do that, that looks like fun! And, on top of that, it would get us back to playing together as an ensemble.

Yes, it would be great!

But . . .  :(

The truth is that those folks are NOT playing or singing together in REAL TIME.

The problem that everyone faces when confronting the challenge of playing music together over the internet - whether it be two people playing a duet, three singers singing a song together, or a whole chorus or orchestra playing as an ensemble - is that it takes time for one person's electronic sound to reach another person (or persons).

WARNING: reading past this point may cause your eyes to glaze over. Good luck!

Even traveling at the speed of light through glass (your internet communications travel via infra-red “light”, the wavelength used over long distance optic fiber, at 200,000 km/sec, the speed of light through glass). However, on the way, the data also has to pass through a variety of supporting network components, such as network routers and optical transceivers, which slows down the average speed a bit. This slowing down is called latency. Signals that travel through optical network cables at this speed add roughly 3 milliseconds of latency for every 588 km traveled. And thus, the fastest that audio can circle the globe is in about 200 milliseconds.

Here's a real world example. Major League Baseball hitters talk about the speed of trying to watch a fastball from the moment it leaves the pitcher's hand until it crosses the plate. It actually happens too fast to react in real time. Hitters instead look for movement, which allows them to predict where the ball will go. It takes about 300–400ms for the ball to arrive at the plate, roughly the same amount of time it takes to blink an eye, and batters have about 150ms to react before it’s too late to even swing the bat.

According to mathematician and physicist Philippe Kahn, we still have one main challenge that prevents musicians from being able to achieve a real-time experience: Einstein’s relativity theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Here's how Kahn puts it, "No matter how efficient the network and equipment, latency is unavoidable. Therefore the problem of real-time remote music performance comes down to “What is the acceptable latency?” My personal opinion is that a consistent 10ms is a minimum to serve all musical styles. The less the better. But there is always going to be some latency. You can’t beat Einstein and the laws of physics, except in science fiction books where we travel in time, which is a lot of fun!"

The speed of light has about 5ms latency over a distance of 1500km. A network connection, under perfect conditions, cannot go faster than this. Unfortunately, most of us don’t have perfect network connections. We’re stuck with network traffic and trying to balance fluctuations from multiple musicians trying to connect with varied latencies. Achieving a real-time feel online won’t work for music despite our brain’s ability to learn how to compensate and predict. **

So . . . HELLO OUT THERE! ARE YOU STILL AWAKE? Close your eyes for a second before you call it quits. We're almost done!

With all that in mind, I'm trying to formulate a way that we can meet together online and do some collaborative rehearsing, and maybe even some sharing of music that we have been working on with all this "spare time" many of us have on our hands!

But that's for another post. For the moment, let's enjoy some music that we could play online without any fears of latency . . . a piece written for solo instrument - and NOT for piano! Here's a wonderful performance of Telemann's Fantasia in A minor for solo flute (a piece that I enjoyed playing in my youth when flute was my instrument of choice). Enjoy.

Telemann: Fantasia No. 2 in A Minor (Aisling Agnew, baroque flute)

** much of this is thanks to Caleb Dolister's Why can’t musicians jam with each other online without latency or other issues? Thank you, Mr. Dolister!

Originals and Re-thinkings . . .

The PCO has played various arrangements I've made of works originally written for piano, organ, string quartet, etc. The harmony, rhythm and musical structure of the original is still there, but the music is somehow transformed in the listeners (and performers) ears to something new, and hopefully beautiful. Using Ed's post about Bach's St. John Passion as a diving off point, here are a number of versions of Astor Piazzolla's Libertango - his original version, and some arrangements, especially the one for solo marimba featuring Anne-Julie Caron. Sit back and enjoy!

To find out more about one of Argentina's most gifted and original composer/performers, check out Astor Piazzolla at the Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music.


Astor Piazzolla: Libertango

Libertango -  Anne-Julie Caron, marimba (arranged by E. Sammut)

Libertango - Swingle Singers

Libertango - Russian Philharmonic - Moscow City Symphony

Libertango - 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Libertango - Yo Yo Ma and company

Libertango - 40 FINGERS

Wondrous Beyond Knowledge

Here's a guest post by PCO first violinist Ed Mooney. Thanks, Ed for generously sharing your thoughts!


Xylophone! Castanets! Drums! You hear these prominently in a new Bach St. John’s Passion performed and videoed a week ago in the midst of our own passion — deep and profound suffering, mixed with joy.  Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Watch and listen here  Bachfest - Leipzig

The xylophone, castanets, and drums are yet to begin. The evangelist will slide easily from singing to speech.  Harsh death-delivering words can’t arrive in a sweet tenor voice.

There’s room for endless innovation in interpreting Bach’s scores (which are nearly devoid of helpful performance advice). And it’s a prerogative of performers to discover new ways. I admit I squirmed at first — then slowly got to like its daring. By the end it seemed right. The xylophone, castanets, and drums — innovations in delivery of the Bach — were harsh, disturbing at first — it’s just not done in performances of Bach Passions.

On second thought, the Biblical account is not a “beautiful story” to be replicated in “beautiful music.” But standard performances of the Passions convey the clash and clamor of the Crucifixion without xylophone, castanets, and drums. Why does an initial encounter with these noise makers seem untoward? Well, as my listening walked on with this new performance, I became more and more accepting, approving, excited and convinced. The new shifted from shocking or puzzling to stunned and transforming wonder.

As my teaching career drew to a close, I spent more and more time writing about the need to encourage open, unexpected response from students. I needed to undermine the commonplace assumption that the task of education (in the humanities) is to get to an objective answer to the question “What is this text (or portrait or poem) about?” At the deepest level there is no single correct answer to what’s going on in a poem or sonata. That’s an invitation.  It’s good news, not the bad news,  that in open-ended interpretation it’s all subjective, there’s no right or wrong, anything goes.
We are all beginners here, listeners, teachers, students, no matter how much we already know, no matter how many times — even over decades — we’ve crisscrossed the fields.

We travel beyond the edges of knowledge — happily, fearfully, amazed — lost in fields of wonder.

The Magic of Making Music with Others

As our social distancing continues, it's a perfect time to think about what makes playing music with others so special. The act of playing music can bring us to a very magical place, whether we are making music in the privacy of our own homes or in a sold out concert hall. Those who have had the privilege of playing chamber music (duets, trios, quartets and even larger groups) know the joy of creating something that is much more than the sum of its parts . . . it's a uniquely satisfying artistic experience. And we who are lucky enough to take part in the music making of the Portland Community Orchestra can attest to the fact that those types of experiences are not only for professionals or virtuosos!

That magic of making music together is clearly displayed in a piece I love dearly, and which features three of my favorite instruments - Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1915). In 1914, Debussy was encouraged by his publisher to compose a cycle of six sonatas for various instruments. Debussy explained in a letter that the cycle of sonatas would feature “different combinations [of instruments], with the last sonata combining the previously used instruments.” Unfortunately, only three of the six sonatas were completed at the time of Debussy’s death in 1918 - the Sonata for Cello and Piano (1915), the Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp (1915), and the Sonata for Violin and Piano (1917). All gorgeous examples of chamber music - true conversations among equals.

Here's a beautiful performance of the first movement of Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp, featuring members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Enjoy!

The Lark Ascending

Ralph Vaughan Williams originally composed his The Lark Ascending in 1914 for violin and piano. He put the score aside when he enlisted in the army in 1914, serving as an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps, after the outbreak of World War I. When he returned home in 1919, he came back to the score and orchestrated it; the work now (in the words of Phillip Huscher) "a touching souvenir of a time gone by."

Vaughan Williams prefaced his score with these lines from George Meredith’s poem of the same name:

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
’Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aërial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

Here are two beautiful performances of The Lark Ascending, a video featuring the incomparable Hillary Hahn, and a recording of the work (one of my favorites) featuring violinist Pinkas Zuckerman. A good way to unwind into the weekend.

The Lark Ascending with violinist Pinkas Zuckerman

The Joy of Music

I couldn't resist sharing this wonderful clip from the Marx Brothers' The Big Store. Besides the crazy humor and sight gags, Chico and Harpo were amazing musicians who loved to share their joy of music!

According to Groucho Marx, Chico never practiced the pieces he played. Instead, before performances he soaked his fingers in hot water. I guess that's really warming up before playing!

Baroque Brass

A while back, when I was working on the Overture and Dead March from Handel's Samson (which the PCO performed on our March 7th concert) some questions arose about the range of the horns and trumpets that Handel used in his original score. The horn parts (written for Horns in G, since the score is in G major; modern French Horns are in the key of F) go up to (what looks like) the stratospheric(!) C above the treble clef. For modern horns in F, the F at the top of the treble clef is at the edge of its range. In the Dead March (in the key of D major) the horns AND trumpets go up to the D two ledger lines above the treble clef! I was quite confused, to say the least. So I asked around, spoke to some people in the know, and did the other thing I usually do when I am stumped about something . . . I GOOGLED IT!!! After reading up on what I could find [by the way, the horns sound lower than written, and the trumpets sound exactly as written], I checked out YouTube and found these wonderful videos by the amazing Alison Balsom. I now have such respect for those early brass players!

Introducing the Baroque Trumpet

Sound the Trumpet (Royal Music of Purcell & Handel)

Johann Svendsen: Romanze for Violin and Orchestra, op. 26

Here's a walk down memory lane for PCO players. It was such a joy to have the wonderful violinist Anne McKee play this piece with us! Here's a lovely performance of Svendsen's gem with Terje Tønnesen, violin soloist and leader of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra.

Svendsen's Romanze for Violin and Orchestra, op. 26 is his most performed and widely published work. According to an anecdote, his Norwegian publisher, Carl Warmuth, himself an amateur violinist, had asked Svendsen to compose a piece for violin and orchestra. Svendsen could not find the time for this until one day in 1881 his pupils happened to miss their lessons. Taking the opportunity, Svendsen spent the afternoon and evening composing and orchestrating the whole Romanze. The following morning he presented it to Warmuth, who was very excited. Not for the first time, Svendsen failed to see the economic promise of a piece and sold all the rights for a modest price. The Romanze is yet another fine example of Svendsen’s profound knowledge of the orchestral instruments. The work’s solo part is fully playable by the amateur, yet presents proper challenges for the world-class violinist. It is one of the last works that Svendsen wrote during his years as an active composer. In 1883 he took up the post of conductor at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Throughout the nearly three decades that remained to him he was engaged in a career as a celebrated conductor, completing only a few occasional works - notes by Morten Christophersen, from Svendsen: Orchestral Works, Volume 1 (Chandos 10693)

Beethoven's Fifth

Caroline Loupe passed along this wonderful animation featuring the Beethoven's 5th Symphony and some sledders having a great deal of fun! I can't believe I've never seen it before. If you haven't, it's well worth the 4 1/2 minutes! And a BIG THANK YOU to DoodleChaos!

Mozart Symphonies

Well, I've been spending part of my down time digging through the symphonies of Mozart, pondering the question: How many symphonies did Mozart write? And, of course, most people go with the simple answer - 41. But even that simple answer is full of holes:

 -  the symphony called "No. 2" was NOT written by Wolfgang Amadeus, but (probably) by his father, Leopold Mozart
 - the symphony called "No. 3" was definitely written by Carl Friedrich Abel. In 1764 Mozart made a copy of Abel's Symphony in Eb, op. 7, no. 6 and substituted two clarinets for the 2 oboes in the original score
 - and lastly, the symphony called "No. 37" is actually Michael Haydn's (Franz Joseph Haydn's brother!) Symphony No. 25 in G major. Mozart liked the work so much that he copied the work out for himself, adding an Adagio maestoso introduction to it and adjusting the orchestration in places

So, then, Mozart wrote 38 symphonies, right? Well . . . no. In fact, he probably wrote 68 symphonies. Yes, 68! Thereabout, give or take a few here and there. Scholars are still arguing about this to the present day; writing dissertations, articles and whole books on the subject. What else do you do if you're a Mozart scholar?!

What it mainly comes down to is the sifting through of early manuscripts that aren't in Mozart's handwriting and trying to decide which ones are actually by Mozart and which ones are works that someone wanted you to THINK were by Mozart but were composed by someone else (oh, those marketers and advertisers, even back then). Sometimes it's very hard to tell. There are also a number of works by Mozart which are listed in a catalogue of manuscripts held by the famous German publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, but those manuscripts are now lost. And finally, there are also a number of works which Mozart originally composed for other purposes and then rearranged for use as symphonies.

So, how do we get to 68, you say?

In a nutshell, here we go:

K. Anh. 223/K. 19a, F major (1765)
Symphony, K. 32, D major (1766)
K.Anh. 221/K. 45a, G major (1766), sometimes called “Old Lambach”
Symphony, K. Anh. 222/19b, C major (1767?) - LOST
"No. 55", K. Anh. 214/45b, Bb major (1768)
Symphony, K. 100/62a, D major (1769) - from the Cassation, K. 100/62a
K3. Anh. 215/66c, D major - LOST
K3.  Anh. 217/66d, Bb major - LOST
K3. Anh. 218/66e, Bb major - LOST
K3. Anh. 223/Anh.C 11.07, D major - LOST (but also possibly not by Mozart)
K3. Anh. 223/Anh.C 11.08, F major - LOST (but also possibly not by Mozart)
"No. 43", K. 76/42a, F major (177?) - very well may NOT be by Mozart
"No. 44", K. 81/73l, D major (1770) - possibly by Leopold Mozart
"No. 47", K. 97/73m, D major (1770)
"No. 45", K. 95/73n, D major (1770)
Overture, K. 87, D major (1770) - the Overture to Mitridate, re di Ponto
"No. 54", Anh. 216/K. 74g, Bb major (1771) - possibly not by Mozart
"No. 42", K. 75, F major (1771)
"No. 48", K. 111+120, D major - the Overture to Ascanio, plus an added movement (K. 120)
"No. 46", K. 96/111b, C major (1771)
Overture, K. 118, D minor (1771) - the Overture to La Betulia liberata
Overture, K. 135, D major (1772) - the Overture to Lucio Silla
"No. 50", K. 161+141a, D major (1772) - the Overture to Il sogno di Scipione, plus an added mvt (141a)
Symphony, K. 185/167a, D major - from the Serenade, K. 185
Symphony, K. 203/189b, D major - from the Serenade, K. 203
No. 51, K.196+121 D major (1774-75) - the Overture to La finta giardiniera, plus an added mvt (K. 121)
No. 52, K. 208+102, C major (1775) - the Overture to Il re pastore, plus and added mvt (K. 102)
Symphony, K. 204, D major (1775) - from the Serenade, K. 204
Symphony, K. 250, D major (1776) - from the Serenade, K. 250
Symphony, K. 320, D major (1779) - from the Serenade, K. 320

The ones listed in red are definitely by Mozart. Some of the others are most likely by Mozart, but since the original manuscripts are missing or were destroyed in WW II, they get dumped into the "questionable/doubtful/spurious" pile. These are the ones that the scholars get to fight over! But us music lover can just enjoy them . . . or yawn and say BORING. Though, in my opinion, there are very few that fit into that last category. I believe you can find ALL of these on YouTube, so you can decide with your own ears whether you like them or not.

And with that I'll leave you with this wonderful performance of the Symphony in F major, K. 75 (from 1771 - composed by the 15 year old Mozart), performed by the Basil Chamber Orchestra. The slow (third) movement is particularly beautiful. Enjoy!

Welcome!

Here we go! I thought I would try this approach to connect with all of you wonderful PCO members as we keep our distance, and continue to foster the lovely community of musicians and music lovers that has grown over the last three years.

A big thanks to those who have been sending out musical posts this past week (yes, YOU Debra!), to challenge our ears to see if we can pick the 10 million dollar violin . . .

I went for #5, so I was pretty close :)

On a related theme, here's a wonderful little short (less than an hour) documentary about famed violinist Itzhak Perlman. An amazing musician . . .  and a down to earth human being. Enjoy the film, and share your thoughts!

Itzhak Perlman: I know I played every note (1978)

Here's a list of the music that Itzhak Perlman performs:
Bazzini: La ronde des lutins
Sarasate: Zigeunerweisen [excerpts]
Bach: Gavotte en Rondeau, from Partita in E major, BWV 1006
Beethoven: Piano Trio, op. 70, no. 2 - Allegretto ma non troppo
Joplin: Ragtime Dance
Bach: Prelude, from Partita in E major, BWV 1006
Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 10, op. 96 [with Vladimir Ashkenazy]
Wieniawski: Caprice in A minor [with Pinchas Zukerman]
Vivaldi: Excerpt from The Four Season [at Aspen Music Festival]
Bizet/Sarasate: Carmen Fantasy [Aspen masterclass with teenage Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg]
Vieuxtemps: Violin Concerto No. 5 [Aspen masterclass with Chou Liang Lin]
Bach: Partita in E major, BWV 1006