Yesterday evening, I attended a Manhattan School of Music alumni gathering at the home of its current President, Jim Gandre. In the thirty six years since I was a graduate student there, I’ve been in the building only once before – for a memorial service for one of my most influential teachers. MSM is a place which for me holds the fondest of memories. Music has always been the foundation of my sanity – and I owe to MSM that entire aspect of my internal life. The training I had there is what allowed me to become a composer. The brilliant teachers I studied with enabled me to decipher the mysterious and wonderful code that gives great music its power and meaning.
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Last evening, at the Pandolfis Consort’s concert, the outstanding music of the evening for me was the violin sonata by Georg Muffat – a masterpiece. Exquisitely played by violinist Ingrid Rohrmoser.
Scheduled for release on the Innova label in the summer of 2017, Stanley Grill’s new CD will present three string quartets – American Landscapes, Lonely Voices and the title track, At the Center of All Things – all performed by the Diderot Quartet.
This afternoon, I read through Poulenc’s delightful Sonata for Piano Four Hands with my friend Karen. It was composed in 1919, in the midst of a world war, but the music is simply charming and light from start to finish. It reminded me that the world events that invade our lives, and seem so overwhelming at the time, pass away – but great art lives on and survives when the painful events of the day have long faded from memory. Poulenc was wise to not let the war influence his writing, but to let in the muses of delight as if nothing else existed.
I like to dream, but without belief, that writing beautiful music is one action I can take in opposition to war, to create sounds that will influence people’s psyche and encourage thoughts of peace. Of course, if music had any possibility of achieving such a goal, war would have ceased to exist after Bach created the B minor mass! So, for the rest of today, instead of veterans, I’m going to think about Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and the Dalai Lama, and hear in my mind glorious music that celebrates peace.
This year, on September 11th, I was in Philadelphia, under a beautiful clear blue sky – painfully reminiscent of the sky over New York in 2001 that shone in such stark contrast to the horrible events unfolding beneath it. The earth is usually such an exquisite miracle, but the acts of men – they are another story. While history proves that human nature is capable of every sort of horror, I nevertheless find it incomprehensible that any person could become so twisted inside as to even think of committing such atrocities for any reason, let alone over what, at bottom, are simply differences of political opinion.
I seek refuge and solace in the logic and beauty of music – a creation of man that says “NO” to all of that.