Sometimes, we think way too much about beginnings. They’re important to keep in mind, but if you spend too much time considering how you’ll start, perhaps you never will. Beginnings can be planned with lots of careful intention, or happen by accident. And for the writers of the Music Beat at The Michigan Daily, the soundtrack to these beginnings is an important part of how we process them.
Can you remember the first song you listened to this year? Can you remember how you felt, what it meant to you? Perhaps it was music playing as a house or club full of people cheered and kissed and drank as the clock switched over into a new morning. Maybe it was a song you heard on Jan. 3, when you got into the car for the first time in a sleepy, cozy week. Was it an electrifying start? Was it something that made your blood move three ticks faster, made you wish you could run into the new year faster than the seconds move? Or was it a song that holds its own host of memories, that reminds you of the past, as you moved into 2023? What sounds are you holding close to your chest, as we’re asked to prepare ourselves for a new phase of life while the winter days don’t feel palpably changed? Here are some contributions from Daily Arts’s Music writers who have spent time asking themselves the same questions.
“Auld Lang Syne” (traditional, lyrics by Robert Burns)
For those of us that hang out with our parents on New Year’s Eve, “Auld Lang Syne” is ubiquitous. In media, as in the cultural consciousness, the song is synonymous with New Year’s and its lilting melody is immediately recognizable across countless different renditions. Take, for example, the iconic New Year’s Eve scene from “When Harry Met Sally.” Over the tender opening chords of “Auld Lang Syne,” the two confess their love for each other at long last. Speaking for all of us who have ever tried to look up the lyrics, Harry (Billy Crystal, “Here There”) complains, “What does this song mean? My whole life I don’t know what this song means.”
“Auld Lang Syne” is a Scots phrase that translates idiomatically to “days gone by” or “old times.” The song’s origins can be traced back to Scottish poet Robert Burns, who first transcribed it in 1788 and described it as “an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print.” Burns’ version is partially his own composition and partially borrowed and the song’s melody is similarly cobbled together.
In some sense, this collaborative nature of “Auld Lang Syne” is still with us today. A Google search for “Auld Lang Syne” yields about 800,000 videos, by artists ranging from Mariah Carey to Julie Andrews to a guy playing the bagpipes in his living room. But what about it is so far-reaching? New Year’s celebrations and holiday music are so culturally specific and yet, “Auld Lang Syne” has been translated into innumerable languages and performed all over the world. The feeling it creates is beyond words, a combination of the simple, sentimental melody and the wistfulness baked into our cultural associations with it. On a holiday whose purpose is to mark time’s incessant march forward, there is a deep sense of nostalgia in returning every year to a song that reverently looks back. Though its lyrics are confusing even to English speakers like Harry, on some indescribable level, “Auld Lang Syne” makes sense to us. “Anyway,” as Sally (Meg Ryan, “Top Gun: Maverick”) tells Harry, “it’s about old friends.”
Daily Arts Writer Nina Smith can be reached at ninsmith@umich.edu.
“New Year’s Day” by U2
Christmas music is great, for the most part, but it has a suffocating effect on music consumption that usually evinces itself by the time Christmas Day rolls around. Only once radio stations and supermarkets stop playing “Last Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas is You” does it become possible to appreciate that there is a holiday with an associated genre of music so vast. It encompasses Baudrillard’s Four Stages of Simulacra, from the haunting medieval chants written for Christmas Day Mass to some guy on the internet attempting to approximate the syllables of Nat King Cole’s “Christmas Song” to viral acclaim. For a few short weeks in December, the signs which once pointed to a reality of a deeply faithful and reverent society become that reality, revealing the true universality that unites humanity far more than any religion.
And then, almost immediately, comes a holiday without a millennium’s worth of liturgical and vernacular music, and that unifying force goes back into hibernation: New Year’s Day. For what it’s worth, New Year’s Day is widely associated with one song, “Auld Lang Syne,” which is more than can be said for most holidays. But even though New Year’s Day doesn’t have an associated genre of music, there are a few notable songs about the holiday, like U2’s 1983 single “New Year’s Day.” Admittedly, the song isn’t really about New Year’s Day in the conventional sense — the lyrics refer to the Polish Solidarity movement of the early ’80s. But the song’s energetic groove, fiery guitar solo and optimistic refrain (“I will be with you again”) make it a great song to begin any year by listening to.
Senior Arts Editor Jack Moeser can be reached at jmoeser@umich.edu.
“Wonder” by Lomelda
This might not technically be the first song I listened to in 2023, but it’s the first one I have a clear memory of listening to. I was on the flight back to Michigan, and just as the plane touched down, the song rumbled and shifted, the sweet noises of guitar, drums and bass like a bag of sounds being shaken together. “You’ve got a lot / Give it your all,” Lomelda (aka Hannah Read) repeats, making sure the words and feeling start pounding along your veins. We continued taxiing over the runway, hitting patches and bumps as the song collected itself into a movement of passion. It’s a track that finds its strength in emotional repetition, its instruments shakily building until the guitar and Read’s voice release themselves together, leaving you with no choice but to move with this explosion in some way … or sit quietly in a too-tight economy seat and let your body shudder with the movements of the plane. I had physically returned from the sky into Michigan and the song felt like a shaky attempt at fortification, preparing me to move on to the year where a lot will change in my life. That was the last flight that I will take into Michigan to return to school and I’m glad “Wonder” accompanied it.
Daily Arts Writer Rosa Sofia Kaminski can be reached at fiakamin@umich.edu.
“All in bloom” by Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden
With the arrival of the New Year comes the copious amount of lists of great things from the Old Year. I was looking at one such list from a friend of mine, when I noticed they had put a record by Kate NV they had discovered that I really enjoyed. I reached out to them to mention this and they pointed me to another item on the list that I wasn’t familiar with. “All in bloom” by Ellen Arkbro & Johan Graden was, for all intents and purposes, quite a meditative start to the New Year. Solemn, pensive chord strokes delicately knit a background for Arkbro’s morose voicing. A quiet chorus of horns then harmonizes and weaves into this background. That’s truly all that happens in the track, and yet the feeling that one is left with is nothing less than utter captivation. But there’s more than just that: “All in bloom” depicts an ode to possibility, a catalog of all the doors left open and ones thought to be permanently closed. Of course, if one were to take the position of interpreter, what does it mean that this was the first song I heard in 2023? Maybe it means that even in circumstances whose exterior seems hopeless, perhaps especially those that feel hopeless, the interior is still under constant development, opportunities continuously opening. Underneath the stagnation of a barren tree lies a beautiful chaos in bloom.
Daily Arts Writer Andrew Gadbois can be reached at gadband@umich.edu.
“Back That Azz Up” by JUVENILE, Lil Wayne, and Mannie Fresh
A bombastic start to my 2023, “Back That Azz Up” is a classic song in the New Orleans bounce canon and it definitely brings the heat. The brazenly sexual lyrics, the chaotic disarray of handclaps, 808s and sharp hi-hats, the slapdash record scratches and JUVENILE’s sloppily-produced multi-layered vocals give this song a gait similar to a drunk person stumbling onto a dance floor, completely disoriented yet invigorated. It’s a mess, but it’s all in good fun — any listener could glean that JUVENILE, Lil Wayne and Mannie Fresh were having a blast making this track. After all, some girl’s ass was so fat that they felt inspired to make one of the biggest club bangers of the late ’90s in an effort to persuade her to “back that azz up.” For a party track, it does exactly what it needs to do.
Daily Arts Writer Zachary Taglia can be reached at ztaglia@umich.edu.
The Winnipeg New Music Festival is back with a bang this week as it offers its first full lineup of nightly concerts since January 2020.
The annual celebration of contemporary music and culture has been a shadow of its former self during the global pandemic; offered as a much shorter, all-digital event in 2022, and cancelled outright in 2021 as COVID-19 continued to pummel the world.
“I’m thrilled and relieved,” Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra composer-in-residence Haralabos (Harry) Stafylakis shares over the phone from his New York City home. He co-curates the WNMF with WSO music director and WNMF artistic director Daniel Raiskin.
The Winnipeg New Music Festival returns with its first full lineup of nightly concerts since January 2020. (Supplied)
“I’ve been dreading the possibility that some new wave or variants (of COVID-19) would throw this all into disarray again, however with every day that passes, the relief grows. I’ve realized we’re doing this. This is really happening.”
New music buffs will be treated to six diverse concerts, each evening including a lively panel discussion, a post-show Q-and-A session and after-party, as well as additional satellite events peppered throughout the week.
Ancestral Tales (WNMF1 or the first concert) provides the first taste of this year’s distinguished guest composer, with award-winning Finnish artist Kalevi Aho’s Winnipeg Fanfare commissioned by Raiskin to trumpet the WSO’s celebratory 75th anniversary season. The evening also poignantly pays tribute to the late Bramwell Tovey with his Sky Chase, with the former WSO music director who died last July, having co-founded the festival with composer Glenn Buhr in 1992.
It also notably includes the world premiere of Stafylakis’s Piano Concerto No. 1: Mythos, a deeply personal, five-movement work rooted in his own cultural heritage being performed by American pianist Jenny Lin.
“As a Greek kid growing up in a Greek household and going to Greek school, all that mythology and storytelling so deeply embedded within our cultural history has been integral to both my intellectual and emotional life,” the Montreal-born composer reveals of his sweeping, highly “cinematic” work originally slated for the ill-fated 2020 WNMF.
“I also come from a mixed musical background, studying classical piano in my early years before later becoming a metal musician and songwriter. When I was starting to imagine my life outside of the metal world… it was actually the piano that played a central role. This piece is about connecting to my past, both musically as well as through my exploration of my culture and my family,” he explains.
Returning to the Winnipeg New Music Festival tradition of taking concerts to unusual settings, co-curators Harabalos Stafylakis (left) and Daniel Raiskin have planned two performances at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada. (Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press)
The bill also features the local debut of Red Sky Performance, hailed for its contemporary Indigenous programming featuring dance, theatre, music and media, with founder/choreographer Sandra Laronde’s Adizokan. The interdisciplinary work created in collaboration with Manitoba-born composer Elliot Britton will be performed by a quartet of dancers, the WSO, and Nunavut throat-boxer Nelson Tagoona, who merges traditional throat singing with funky, streetwise beat-boxing techniques.
More than 30 years old, the WNMF is known for taking the road less travelled by venturing into unique “off-site” locales, including the basement of the former downtown Bay department store, the Sport Manitoba athletic complex, and even once taking a dunk into the Pan-Am Pool in 2016. This year, it’s taking the show on the road to the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada, with the first of two programs, Music for Airports, (WNMF2) held in the hangar replete with looming aircraft flanking the stage area.
“When I saw the place, I immediately saw this is where we need to do this. It has a lot of ambience, it’s very meaningful and creates a lot of curiosity,” the Amsterdam-based Raiskin, no stranger to airports and planes, told the Free Press last October. “Aviation on a physical level connects people and elevates them to the skies. Music connects people and lifts their spirits into the skies… in times when people are at their lowest.”
Highlights abound, including Brian Eno’s Music for Airports, as well as virtuoso Dutch bassoonist Bram van Sambeek in Anaesthesia: Pulling Teeth and excerpts from Michael Oesterle’s Parlour Games, commissioned by WSO principal players, bassist Meredith Johnson and cellist Yuri Hooker.
“It’s an ingenious collection of 12 short aural vignettes and puzzles, a jewel box of intriguing delights that he intends to be reshuffled and arranged anew at every performance,” Hooker states in an email. “The musical material is not only accessible — it is filled with a longing and joy that is positively invigorating!”
Dutch bassoonist Bram van Sambeek pays tribute to late Metallica bassist Cliff Burton in Anaesthesia: Pulling Teeth. (Supplied)
Fan favourite Damascus-born composer/clarinettist Kinan Azmeh also hits the stage as part of WNMF2 before headlining two nights later at the same venue, Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand (WNMF3), as a white-hot combustion of classical, jazz, and traditional Syrian musical influences.
Dialogues (WNMF 4) returns to the Centennial Concert Hall, exploring the synergistic relationship between soloist, conductor orchestra and composer, featuring an array of soloists as well as the local debut of SHHH!! Ensemble.
The festival wraps up with Symphonic Motion (WNMF5), with the Canadian premiere of Aho’s Symphonic Dances, channeling the “primordial elements and primal dance across epic orchestral soundscapes.” Other highlights include Giya Kancheli’s contemplative Nu.Mu.Zu. (I don’t know), as well as Victoria Poleva’s Nova, an explosive fanfare penned in response to the war in Ukraine as a “full-throated cry of anguish and solidarity” with its people.
For those who can’t wait until the official launch this weekend, a free concert Showcase: Launchpad blasts off Thursday night at 7:30 p.m. (tickets must be reserved in advance), featuring six emerging Canadian composers chosen to participate in in this year’s annual WNMF Composers Institute currently in full swing, and the brainchild of Stafylakis in 2016. The program also includes the three top prizewinners for the Canadian Music Centre Prairie Region Emerging Composer Competition in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the former two finally given their turn to shine.
Needless to say, the composer is bursting with excitement as the festival prepares for lift-off, eager to welcome the throngs of fans expected to return to the hall after hunkering down in front of their home computer screens last year.
“I’m looking forward to reconnecting with everyone in person again, and couldn’t be happier we’re doing this,” Stafylakis says. “The Winnipeg New Music Festival is back.”
The not-so-quiet SHHH!! Ensemble, pianist Edana Higham and percussionist Zac Pulak, perform Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Machines, Mannequins, and Monsters at WNMF 4: Dialogues. (Supplied)
For more information on events and to purchase passes or tickets, visit: wnmf.ca.
Holly.harris@shaw.ca
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Editor’s note: Thought leader Grace Ueng is CEO of Savvy Growth, a noted leadership coaching and management consultancy, like WRALTechwire, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Grace writes a regular column on Happiness & Leadership for us. Grace’s core offerings are one-on-one coaching for CEOs and their leadership teams, and conducting strategic reviews for companies at a critical juncture. A TED speaker, she is hired to facilitate team building retreats and lead HappinessWorks programs for companies and campuses.
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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Many recognize Juilliard as the premiere performing arts educator, attracting students who are the world’s most talented musical prodigies, future Oscar winners and prima ballerinas.
I grew up with an older sister, Vivian, who showed exceptional talent in piano for as long as I can remember. Every performance I attended, I was asked, “Do you play piano too?” I didn’t think I was as naturally gifted, so quit after a few years and started a little tutoring business and pursued school leadership roles instead. She, on the other hand, matriculated to Juilliard where she earned two musical arts degrees and served on the faculty of its highly selective pre-college program.
But did you realize Juilliard is also an emerging leader in business education?
In the last year, I’ve gone full circle and recently had an a-ha that business leaders could benefit from taking courses at Juilliard or at least from a Juillard trained musician. As many of you know, last year, after emerging from my depressive episode with my launch column on Leadership & Happiness, I restarted my piano studies, after a four decade hiatus, to honor the memory of my mother, my first teacher.
My Juilliard trained teacher harnesses my intrinsic motivation
I selected Teddy Robie, who graduated with two degrees from Juilliard, as my teacher. I have a new openness to learning that I didn’t have as a girl, so I am progressing faster. Every lesson, I take away something new. I am taking lessons because I want to, not because anyone is making me or society expects it. I’ve experienced the distinct difference in outcomes between being intrinsically versus extrinsically motivated.
In my last column, I reflected on how having your team set their own goals versus setting for them as critical to achieving difficult targets. How can you inspire them to set goals that feed into meeting yours as well as the company’s overall forecasts?
Take a lesson from my piano teacher.
Why are violists the brunt of so many jokes?
A few months ago, Teddy suggested I read the book, Declassified, his Juilliard classmate, Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch just had published. One of my goals for 2023 is to read more books, so I ordered a copy and read it cover to cover in just a few sittings. Highly humorous and revealing, Arianna gives an insider view of Juilliard and the pressure cooker life of preparing for a career as a concertizing musician at the highest echelons. She ends her memoir with a joke about violists and how “dumb” they are. Since my niece, who is both smart and sweet, is a talented violist, I took offense and asked my sister just why there are so many violist jokes.
Violist with the renowned Juilliard String Quartet
The Viola: the Inner Voice Tying the Music together
A few days later, I asked Teddy the same question. He had already seen Arianna post that same violist joke on her Instagram feed. He laughed and said that the violists he knows are actually the opposite, very smart. And they take the jokes in stride, because they know the truth and that the ribbing is in jest. He explained the importance of violists. Like my son who plays electric bass, while they aren’t in the spotlight like the concertmaster or the lead guitarist, they both play important roles in creating a musical group’s success. The violist is the inner voice that plays the critical role of tying all the musical voices together.
Like Middle Management!
I thought – Ah! This is akin to middle management in corporations. While they don’t get the spotlight like the executive team, they oversee the day to day and operationalize the CEO’s strategy. This reminded me of the learning and development workshops I’ve been asked to do for emerging leaders or middle management. While most of my work over the last two decades (my firm is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year) has been geared toward the C-level, I’ve been asked in recent years to modify that material to apply to the critical middle, since they often get forgotten, but are the core that holds a company together. Just as the viola’s role in a musical ensemble is to accentuate the melody and strengthen the overall beauty of the piece.
Bach’s complex compositions: akin to today’s organizations
I mentioned in How the art of listening can apply well beyond music, into our work culture, that the concert pianist, Lang Lang, is the muse for my music. I am now studying Bach’s Goldberg Variations, an album that Lang recently recorded. On first listening, I thought the composition was a little boring, even shallow. How could these variations have been something that Lang Lang studied deeply for 15 years before recording? My sister said that I likely hadn’t listened far enough, as the music is very complex. She was right, I was reacting to the opening, the Aria, followed by just the first few of the thirty variations. I jumped to a conclusion too quickly, without listening to more of Bach’s composition. I stopped too soon.
Teddy then told me that in total, the Goldberg Variations are one of the most complicated pieces to learn. He explained that Bach composed contrapuntal music, often polyphonic with many voices, and encouraged me to listen to the variations performed by a trio of violin, viola, and cello versus by a solo pianist. So I put aside Lang Lang’s album, and then experienced an a-ha in listening to the trio and hearing its three individual voices. Then and only then did I realize the richness and depth of the Aria and how important the viola is in holding the inner voice between the cello and violin. I now have more respect and curiosity for Bach’s masterpiece. I’m intrinsically motivated to study further.
Juilliard String Quartet, The Juilliard School, Wednesday, May 4, 2022. Credit Photo: Erin Baiano
Just as Bach’s compositions offer complexity in their multiple voices, today’s workforces are also. A leader who listens to just a few of their people, versus a statistically significant sampling representing the entire workforce, will miss important themes completely.
Listen to all Voices to Reach the Miracle Goal
This week, I am conducting a retreat for a leadership team and will be utilizing Appreciative Inquiry (AI). Researched and developed by David Cooperrider, professor of social entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve, AI has been used globally as a change management tool for over three decades. It consists of a 4-D cycle: discovery (what gives life & appreciating), dream (what might be & envisioning), design (how can it be & co-constructing), and destiny (what will be & sustaining).
I want to make sure that each of the team members is heard and that each recognizes the strengths that they bring to the team. Instead of focusing on all the challenges and problems that have shaken their morale, I want them to think back to work situations in which they performed their best and to visualize a future where they have achieved the very aggressive revenue goals that are now set before them. How will each use their strengths to orchestrate this “miracle?” How can they move from being extrinsically to intrinsically motivated? How can their boss and investor’s goals become their goals too?
Instead of focusing on problems and what is not working, I hope to get them to focus on experiences that have worked in the past, strengths of team members and what they can accomplish synergistically.
They can then design the envisioned future of success… together.
About Grace Ueng
Grace is CEO of Savvy Growth, a leadership coaching and management consultancy founded in 2003. Her great passion to help leaders and the companies they run achieve their fullest potential combined with her empathy and ability to help leaders figure out their “why” are what clients value most.
Companies hire her firm for leadership coaching and strategy consulting as well as to facilitate HappinessWorks programs, infusing the happiness advantage into corporate culture, leading to higher productivity and results.
A marketing strategist, Grace held leadership roles at five high growth technology ventures that successfully exited through acquisition or IPO. She started her career at Bain & Company and then worked in brand management at Clorox and General Mills. She earned her undergraduate degree from MIT and MBA from Harvard Business School.
Grace and her partner, Rich Chleboski, accomplished cleantech veteran, develop and implement strategies to support the growth of impact-focused companies and then coach their leaders in carrying out their strategic plans. Their expertise spans all phases of the business from evaluation through growth and liquidity.
Alan “Weaver” Copeland, a longtime Cedar Ridge resident and a gifted vocalist, pianist, composer, and arranger for jazz giants like Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Frank Sinatra and other stars, died Dec. 28 at Sonora Senior Living at age 96, friends and family said.
Copeland moved to Cedar Ridge in the 1980s, began mentoring new generations of musicians, and he and his Now You Hazz Jazz bandmates continued performing in recent years at Emberz in downtown Sonora. His Grammy-winning career spanned decades in Los Angeles, where he was born in October 1926.
He was so respected in the jazz community, among other professional musicians, and in the entertainment industry, that his passing has been covered by The Hollywood Reporter and republished online by Billboard.
Friends and musicians who jammed with Copeland in Tuolumne County and his stepdaughter in Truckee described Copeland as a consummate musician-composer, a patient, generous, low-key teacher, and an upbeat personality who often said, “Hope for the best and forget the rest.”
“I’m a musicholic and he’s an arranger, and his music, I was like wow,” Keith Evans, 58, a member of Now You Hazz Jazz who recorded a compact disc, “Tranquillo Trio,” with Copeland, said Thursday in a phone interview. “I used to go to his house at Cedar Ridge and care for him. We’d play music several times a week. It was always about the music.”
Evans, who teaches jazz at Columbia College, said Copeland was a friend, father, and mentor to him. Evans took his acoustic guitar along when he visited Copeland in recent weeks.
“I was with Weaver the moment he died at Sonora Senior Living off Highway 108,” Evans said. “He’d been there I think for two months.”
One week, they did Christmas carols and Copeland sang “Silver Bells.” The next week, Evans went to Sonora Senior Living and a nurse told Evans that Copeland was not like he was the week before.
“She said he’s fading, he’s going, he was not necessarily coherent,” Evans said. “His eye was barely open and he was watching me. I played the music, ‘Tranquillo,’ and then his mentor Henry Mancini’s ‘Dreamsville.’ I said ‘Weaver we’re going to take ’em on like a storm.’ He used to say that before we jammed. His eye didn’t follow me. I went to his bedside. And then I played ‘What a Wonderful World,’ recorded by Louis Armstrong, then ‘Blue and Green’ by Bill Evans. It was such a beautiful, peaceful piece, and that’s what sent him out. I’m sure he went down the hallway with me. That last gasp was his last. It was surreal.”
Copeland left Los Angeles in the 1980s and he’d been in Cedar Ridge for 40 years. Copeland’s late wife, Mahmu Pearl, died in 2009. Sheila Ross, Pearl’s daughter and Copeland’s stepdaughter, lives in Truckee.
Ross used to perform with Now You Hazz Jazz at Emberz, and her father, Adam Ross, helped Copeland arrange and record the 1968 Grammy-winning mashup of the “Mission Impossible” theme with the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” by The Alan Copeland Singers.
Copeland was also nominated for a Grammy in 1966 for “Basie Swingin’, Voices Singin’ ” by The Alan Copeland Singers with Count Basie.
“He was born Oct. 6, 1926, in Los Angeles, born and raised in Hollywood,” Sheila Ross said Thursday in a phone interview.
Sheila Ross recalled spending time at Copeland’s cabin above Sonora and the music.
“Listening to his beautiful chords, sitting at his piano next to him up in Cedar Ridge,” she said. “He loved it there so much, the view was amazing, and the guys would come and set up in the living room and we would jam. We played a lot of jazz standards, mostly his own original music. He’d give us the sheet music and we learned to play it. We called him ‘The Taskmaster.’ ”
Laurie and Bob Lehmann, former Sonora residents who now live in the Sacramento area, were close friends and music collaborators with Copeland for more than 10 years. They curate a website for Now You Hazz Jazz that features a bossa nova song Copeland wrote as tribute to his time in Baja California Sur, “Mulegé Day,” about the tiny seaside town of Mulegé on the Gulf of California.
“The Havana Supper Club in Cabo, he used to play there,” Ross said.
Bob Lehmann, 67, a career Cal Fire firefighter who put his love of jazz on hold for decades, lived in Sonora from 1973 until last summer. He learned drums when he was 6 years old and had a professional jazz saxophonist as his band teacher at San Rafael High in the late 1960s, but he couldn’t pursue jazz once he completed a firefighting AA at Columbia College.
Once he retired from Cal Fire, after 32 years, as a battalion chief in Angels Camp, he was able to jam at length with local musicians. About 10 years ago, he was invited to Copeland’s cabin in Cedar Ridge. It was an invitation to jam, so Bob Lehmann took a small drum kit with him.
“It’s a little cabin on the furthest road on the very edge of Cedar Ridge, where the forest takes off,” Bob Lehmann said. “It faced west over the canyon, and the back door faced east. He wrote a song about it, “The Sun at the End of the Road,” from when he walked to his mailbox one late afternoon, probably five years ago.”
Meeting Copeland and listening to him play, Bob Lehmann said, he knew he was with a great musician from the start.
“He was the real deal,” Bob Lehmann said. “He could sing and play and write charts and score music. He would write stuff right on the spot while we jammed. He’d write the chords the way he wanted them.”
Bob Lehmann had already been exposed to jazz and big band jazz ensemble as a freshman in high school and through his former teacher, Terry Summa, learned where to see live jazz bands in the Bay Area, including Count Basie and his Orchestra twice, Stan Kenton’s Orchestra, drummer-led bands like the Buddy Rich Orchestra and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, as well as the Dexter Gordon Quartet.
Before meeting Copeland, Bob Lehmann didn’t really know his name or his reputation in jazz, but his music friends were telling him Copeland was awesome, and a really nice guy with a gentle personality who seldom got ruffled or sweated minor details.
Bob Lehmann said it was challenging to play with Copeland, who had charts written for the drums and other instruments, with chord changes and lyrics. Everyone would read the charts before they actually jammed, and each musician was expected to bring a music stand to read the charts while they were playing.
“He liked to call himself Weaver, a weaver of themes,” Bob Lehmann said. “He was good friends with the composer Henry Mancini, called him Hank. Mancini wrote the song ‘Mr. Lucky’ and Weaver adopted that name too. They were good friends. Weaver felt that way. He felt like he had led a charmed life, like he really was Mr. Lucky.”
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Copeland was known for decades as an ultra-smooth vocalist who performed with The Modernaires and on Your Hit Parade and The Red Skelton Hour in the 1950s and 1960s.
Copeland wrote or co-wrote hits including “Make Love to Me” — Jo Stafford’s version made it to No. 1 on the Billboard chart in 1954 — “Too Young to Know,” “High Society,” “This Must Be the Place, “Darling, Darling, Darling” and “While the Vesper Bells Were Ringing.”
Copeland took arranging lessons from Mancini, then began arranging vocals for big bands and jazz leaders like Fitzgerald, Vaughan, Basie, and Sinatra, and other stars like Bing Crosby, Jim Nabors, Engelbert Humperdinck, Peter Marshall, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme.
Jazz critic Stanley Dance once said Copeland was known for combining music and wit, and Copeland spent several years on Skelton’s CBS variety show with The Modernaires, who would morph into The Skel-tones and The Alan Copeland Singers, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In his early years, Copeland sang as a member of the Robert Mitchell Boy Choir, in such films such as Angels With Dirty Faces (1938), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Meet John Doe (1941), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and Going My Way (1944).
Copeland served in the U.S. Navy, then started his own vocal group, The Twin Tones, a featured attraction with Jan Garber’s orchestra. He joined The Modernaires for the first time in 1948, and soon, the group was performing alongside The Andrews Sisters and Dick Haymes on a five-nights-a-week radio variety program hosted by singer/bandleader Bob Crosby, Bing’s brother. The show then segued to television. Copeland appeared with the group in The Glenn Miller Story (1954), starring Jimmy Stewart, then left to perform solo on the popular NBC/CBS program Your Hit Parade from 1957 until it left the air in 1959.
Copeland rejoined The Modernaires and did arrangements and added lyrics to such classics as “In the Mood” and “Tuxedo Junction” for the 1960 album The Modernaires Sing the Great Glenn Miller Instrumentals. Copeland’s memoir “Jukebox Saturday Nights” was published in 2007.
Sheila Ross said Thursday she is planning a celebration of life with live music for Copeland, perhaps in March, with a venue yet to be determined. It will likely be in Tuolumne County “because that’s where all his musician friends are and they appreciate his music.”
Copeland did his thing in music the way he wanted to do it until the end of his days, Bob Lehmann told The Hollywood Reporter.
“It was his dream to play in a small group until the last curtain,” Bob Lehmann told the publication. “That’s how he termed it.”
The Azerbaijani State Philharmonic Hall will hold a concert
‘Gara Garayev-105’ on February 6 in honor of the outstanding
composer, Azernews reports.
As part of the concert, the State Chamber Orchestra will perform
Gara Garayev’s music pieces under the baton of Honored Art Worker
Elshad Bagirov. Honored Artist Farida Mammadova (soprano) will
perform as a concert soloist.
Gara Garayev’s music is performed all over the world. He
composed his first music piece, a cantata ‘The Song of the Heart’
in 1938 to the poem by Rasul Rza. This composition was performed in
Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater in the same year. He was only 20 years old
at the time.
In 1945, both he and Jovdat Hajiyev wrote the ‘Motherland’
opera, for which, they were awarded a prestigious Stalin Prize.
At the age of 30, Garayev was again awarded this prize for his
symphonic poem ‘Leyli and Majnun’, based on the same-titled famous
work by Nizami Ganjavi.
In 1952, under the direction of the choreographer P. A. Gusev,
Garayev’s ‘Seven Beauties’ ballet was staged at the Azerbaijani
Theater of Opera and Ballet. Based on Nizami Ganjavi’s famous poem,
‘Seven Beauties’, it became the first Azerbaijani ballet and opened
a new chapter in the history of classical music in Azerbaijan.
His ballet ‘Path of Thunder’, staged in 1958, was dedicated to
racial conflicts in South Africa. In the same year, he wrote the
music score for the documentary film ‘A Story About the Oil Workers
of the Caspian Sea’, directed by Roman Karmen and set at the
offshore Oily Rocks townlet.
The memory of the great composer will always live in the hearts
of the Azerbaijani people.
Tickets for the concert can be purchased on the iticket.az and at the ticket offices in
Baku.
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One fateful day in 1990, an undergraduate in his junior year who had never been around the Stanford music department strolled into the Stanford Concerto Competition and stole the show. He won that year with his famed Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 performance. In 1997, he went on to become the first American in 16 years to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. This (now, not-so-unknown) mystery pianist is none other than Jon Nakamatsu B.A. ’91 M.A. ’92, who has returned to campus to teach Stanford students this winter quarter.
Laura Dahl, Director of Collaborative Piano and Interim Director of Keyboard Studies, said she contacted the Van Cliburn gold medalist back in November 2022 to see if Nakamatsu would be interested in substitute teaching during her medical leave in the upcoming winter quarter. According to Dahl, the two had met almost a decade earlier through Stanford Director in Choral Studies and mutual friend, Stephen Sano.
Nakamatsu is on the adjunct faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory and says he keeps “a very small studio,” due to his intensive travel and performance schedule. During this winter quarter at Stanford, he will be mentoring five students who have been studying under the instruction of Dahl.
In his days as a Stanford student, Nakamatsu too once balanced rigorous schoolwork with practice schedules. Dahl is excited for her students to connect with somebody who’s been in their shoes before: “He understands, on an extremely personal level, the kinds of students that we have at Stanford so I’m really excited for my students to work with him for these ten weeks.”
Reflecting upon what he hopes he brings to students during his time at Stanford, Nakamatsu emphasizes the importance of learning different ways to approach a piece of music. He said it’s easy for pianists to sit down at the piano, start playing, and let their fingers “take over.” On the other hand, he hopes to guide students toward conceptualizing and expressing the components of a piece musically before practicing.
“I don’t care that you can memorize the whole piece the first day and play it really fast. That doesn’t interest me,” Nakamatsu said. “What interests me is that I can hear your thought process going into every single phrase in every single detail and that you understand the overarching structure of this piece, which is considered a masterpiece for a reason.”
So far, this approach to teaching has varied from what piano student and intended math major Abhy Devalapura ’24 has previously experienced.
“[Nakamatsu] looks at both the macro and micro perspective,” Devalapura said. “He’s very passionate about looking at unique perspectives that you haven’t really explored before. So that’s one thing we’ve been working on and it’s something that I thought was really new and vibrant and interesting.”
According to Devalapura, there are often several lines of voices in music that were composed before the 20th century. Balancing these details with the overall phrasing of the composition is a skill Devalapura has been working on with Nakamatsu.
Nakamatsu never personally received piano instruction from the music department during his time at Stanford. He began piano lessons at the age of six with Marina Derryberry (1936-2009). She was the same teacher who accompanied him to the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which jump-started his musical career twenty years later.
Having one’s education “led by one primary source is unusual,” Nakamatsu said. “But at the same time, [my teacher] immediately started seeking out other people to help me musically in different disciplines like composition.”
As part of this additional schooling, Nakamatsu studied with Leonard Stein at the University of Southern California for 11 years and learned from Karl Ulrich Schnabel from the age of ten. At that point in his childhood, Nakamatsu began living what he described as a “two-pronged” life.
“I was having lessons with my teacher four times a week for four to six hours at a time, so I had a very different lifestyle,” Nakamatsu said. “And then at home, I was kind of the normal public school kid who played in the neighborhood with his friends.”
In addition to Nakamatsu, the music department is also welcoming pianist Stephen Prutsman as a Visiting Artist. Prutsman has collaborated with the St. Lawrence String Quartet at Stanford and is additionally looking forward to seeing Nakamatsu on campus. As pianists, their paths haven’t crossed much before.
“It’s not like string players or singers where ensembles are a part of one’s professional activity. Pianists do play chamber music, do play in orchestras, but a lot of our time is spent practicing alone,” Prutsman said. “But I’m thrilled Jon is there and I look forward to seeing him.”
The excitement to see Nakamatsu back at Stanford and in the music department is echoed by colleague Dahl.
“It’s a real opportunity and I would have been worried to step away from my students but he’s an extraordinary teacher and a really kind, warm, and sincere human being,” Dahl said. “They are in extraordinary hands – even better than me. He’s an extraordinary pianist and pedagogue and so it’s a great opportunity for them.”
Three factors determine the price of a violin, Mel Sapp explained, just as I was leaving the bright, airy shop she and her husband Greg run in Batavia: one is workmanship. Two, materials. And three, the name of the luthier who built it.
“You notice I didn’t say, ‘sound,’” she added. “Sound is subjective. You can change it.”
Indeed, most masterpiece instruments of old —by Amati, Guernari, Stradivari — have been modernized over the years, their necks and fingerboards lengthened, to bring them into line with current musical tastes.
I am not in the market for a violin, alas. But I visited Sapp Violins earlier this month because of a quip. When the shaky future of journalism is being discussed, with what colleagues I yet retain in a rapidly contracting profession, I’ll sometimes attempt to both sound a positive note and move the conversation along by observing, “They still make violins.”
Meaning, even antique trades thrive, for some.
Though it got me wondering: How is the violin business doing? Chicago, being home to one of the world’s great orchestras, is unsurprisingly also a center of violin craftsmanship. After I visited Sapp, the January Chicago magazine took an in-depth look at John Becker, the Fine Arts Building luthier to the multi-million dollar instruments of musical stars such as Joshua Bell, the article by Elly Fishman itself a finely constructed marvel.
So how does one get into the violin making biz?
Gregory Sapp has made violins for over 40 years.
Greg Sapp was a music education major at Duquesne University in the mid-1970s when he had a realization that often comes to those whose ambitions lie in the arts.
“This isn’t going to work.”
Luckily, senior year, he had a class with the very 1970s name, “Creative Personality.” His final project was constructing an Eastern European folk instrument called a “prim.”
“It’s kind of like a mandolin,” Greg said, pointing to the ur-instrument, displayed on the wall. “I was the only one in my class that made something so functional.”
That wasn’t a complete accident — his father was a woodworker and singer.
Greg moved to Chicago in 1978 to attend the Kenneth Warren & Son School of Violin Making (now the Chicago School of Violin Making). He also bumped into Mel, whose car had broken down and needed a lift to the train station. When Greg told her he was going to violin school, Mel, who’d known her share of prevaricating creeps, assumed he was lying.
“How do I find these guys?” she asked herself.
Now Greg, 69, divides his time between building and repairing violins, and Mel does the books. Business is solid — they have three employees. Aubrey Alexander was busy at work when I visited.
Aubrey Alexander, a violin maker at Sapp Violins in Batavia, uses a plastic liner and counterform to keep the top plate of a violin stable while she works on it. She also fishes. “Pretty much all I do is make violins, and I fish and make coffee,” she said.
“I’ve always been more in tune with the violin, no pun intended,” said Alexander, explaining her choice of profession. “I don’t do well with people so much.”
How did she get started?
“When I was 8 years old my mom took me with her to pick up my sister’s violin when it was repaired. I was instantly fascinated by the tools and the instruments,” said Alexander, 39. “When I later started taking lessons I was always more interested in my cello and how it worked, rather than actually playing it.”
And what does it feel like, to create a violin with your hands?
“I start to associate a personality with the instruments,” she said. “They take on a personality of their own. I name the instrument. I gender them. This one’s a boy. That one’s a girl.”
How can she tell? A fraught question nowadays. It isn’t as if you can flip a violin over and check.
“It’s more about the feeling and how I interact with the instruments,” she said. “If it’s giving me a lot of trouble, it’s a boy.”
The vast majority of her instruments identify as girls. Her last cello, for instance, was named “Ophelia,” after the Lumineers song.
The Sapps also tend to anthropomorphize their instruments.
Violins “sulk.” They wait for buyers like puppies in a pet store. “Some instruments like kids better than others,” Mel said. The violins choose their eventual owners like wands in a Harry Potter book.
“The way I look at it, these instruments are all waiting for their person,” she said.
Working with stringed instruments is a protracted process — constructing a violin can take years (new projects tend to get put aside in favor of more pressing repairs, which themselves can take months). A violinmaker is seldom rushed. I wondered if hobbies are necessary and, if so, what Alexander does to relax from violinmaking. She told me she loves to fish, particularly bass fishing — she is from East Texas after all.
“When I’m not up to my elbows in wood shavings, I’m up to my elbows in lily pads,” she said. “Pretty much all I do is make violins, and I fish and make coffee.”
Speaking of wood. The top of a violin is spruce, the back, sides, neck and scroll are maple. The two types of wood, soft spruce and hard maple, combine to create an ideal sound. Along with a healthy dose of time.
While aging wood is important — Sapp pays hundreds of dollars apiece for small pieces of lumber that have sat for decades — everyone agrees that once constructed, violins need to be played to keep their sound fresh.
Playing “keeps it doing what it needs to be doing,” Greg said.
That sounds almost spiritual, I observed.
“Oh, This is juju personified,” Mel said with a laugh.
And on that note — sorry, couldn’t resist — we reach our fine, pronounced fee-nay, the musical term for the end of a composition.
Aubrey Alexander’s name peeks from within a violin she constructed. She considers her instruments male or female, and gives them names.
Students with an interest in the great brass music of Malcolm Arnold have the chance to put their thoughts into writing.
The Malcolm Arnold Society has informed 4BR that it hopes to receive entries from the brass banding world for its 2023 Essay Prize.
The focus of the topic to be explored is: ‘Malcolm Arnold and his contribution to music for brass instruments’.
Essay Prize
Supported by the Malcolm Arnold Trust, the Essay Prize is open to students under the age of 19. It is intended to encourage inquiry into Arnold’s work and to reflect on the experience of performing his music.
The completed essay of between 2500 and 3500 words should be typed in double spacing and will be assessed by Dr Timothy Bowers and Paul Harris (Chair of the Malcolm Arnold Society).
Entries should be submitted by 31st August 2023 to maessay@icloud.com
The author of the winning essay will receive £300 which will also be published in ‘Maestro’, the annual magazine of the Malcolm Arnold Society. The winning author will also receive a personal letter from Katharine Arnold, Sir Malcolm’s daughter.
The Malcolm Arnold Society has also just announced a JustGiving campaign to raise £10,000 to fund the release of a new CD of Arnold’s brass music with Foden’s Band.
The author of the winning essay will receive £300 which will also be published in ‘Maestro’, the annual magazine of the Malcolm Arnold Society4BR
Denis Wick
Performance help
Society secretary Ken Talbot told 4BR also hopes that bands will also take the opportunity in 2023 to let them know of all performances of his works in concerts, competitions and recordings.
“We are aware that Sir Malcolm’s works remain immensely popular for the brass band medium. We would encourage any band who is to perform one of his works to contact us.
We can then update our records and in return we will advertise the upcoming events through our extensive membership to hopefully help increase audiences for them.”
Things are happening at SUNY Schenectady’s School of Music and Dr. Christopher Brellochs, the new dean, couldn’t be happier.
“Our fall 2022 enrollment was up 13% compared to fall 2021 and our spring 2023 enrollment is up 17% compared to spring 2022,” he said.
That means the department had 113 music majors this year when the spring term opened on Tuesday. While most of those musicians are vocalists, guitarists or pianists, because of initiatives in the curriculum, the school is now attracting students interested in composing, becoming audio engineers, working in musical theater and teaching music.
Much of this new direction comes from Brellochs, who became dean in May 2021.
“I was chair of the academy of music at SUNY Dutchess and had been aware for 14 years about this school of music through Bill Meckley,” Brellochs said. “I was very impressed with what they were doing.”
When the opening for dean came up, he immediately applied. Because the school was recovering from the pandemic and a slow enrollment decline, one of the questions he was asked was: could he be a visionary?
“I knew the school had a long history of music — it’s been accredited since 1984 — and the administration was highly supportive,” Brellochs said. “I was interested and intrigued to take it to a new chapter, so I gave them some ideas.”
One of his first was that there was no musical theater offered.
“They needed to have that to expose students to be able to study . . . to be a triple threat,” he said.
Starting last spring, students were allowed to take one-on-one lessons not only in classical music but music for musical theater, jazz, R&B. Coming in the next year or so is foundation work for those who want to learn to act and dance in musicals.
“The school also didn’t want to be in an ivory tower where only music that was written 100 years ago was taught,” he said. “Composition has to be related to contemporary mediums as a business, such as used on Amazon, television, film, or video games. You need to stay current and relevant to technology. I want to welcome pop composers to SUNY.”
So Brellochs suggested composers study the latest in digital programs such as Pro Tools to learn to write jingles or work in audio recording. He also learned that the program Abelton Live was not only a good software for composition but also for lighting cues for live shows — a great tool for bands. Some students might only want to study for a year and then go to work in their related field. There are now two options depending on whether a student is headed into producing or teaching.
“The one-year certificate makes it easier to expand into a two-year program. But the new requirement is that the study must be on a collegiate level and the student needs to take a jury in front of a panel as an audition if they wish to move into a degree program,” Brellochs said.
The school, however, still only offers a two-year associate’s degree. This is fine for those students who either because of financial concerns or are not interested or ready for the more competitive performance levels generally expected at conservatories such as the Eastman School of Music or the Juilliard School. A community college is also unique in other ways.
“If you want solo opportunities with an ensemble or chamber group, you don’t have to contend with upper class competition. And if you want to major in electric bass, for example, we allow that. Most music schools don’t,” Brellochs said. “With the school’s size, which over the decades has averaged between 100 and 170 students, you won’t get lost in the crowd such as at a conservatory. And teachers talk to each other. They’re always looking for opportunities for outstanding students.”
Sometimes, too, many students do decide to go on to more competitive situations and a four-year degree. The most popular transfers are to SUNY Fredonia and SUNY Purchase. Some students have also gone to Ithaca School of Music.
But Brellochs had something else in mind.
“We needed new ideas on how to reach out to the community, to local schools,” he said.
Allyson Keyser, the school’s trumpet/brass teacher and conductor of its wind ensemble, began to go into local public schools to help with their ensembles, give lessons, get the kids to like to practice and generally make music exciting.
“They see that the Schenectady School of Music has an amazing faculty. They take the college seriously as a place to go. It lets the local teachers and students see what SUNY is doing,” Brellochs said.
This was further expanded to creating the first High School Jazz Competition, which the School of Music ran last spring. Working with A Place for Jazz, which recently finished its fall season at the school, the competition was open to all enrolled students in nine Capital Region schools for any instrument or voice. There was no entry fee. The four judges included Grammy-nominated pianist Geoffrey Keezer, vocalist Gillian Margot and SUNY teachers Dylan Canterbury and Kevin Grudecki.
After a couple of rounds over the summer and early fall, the grand prize winner was announced in October. He was Niskayuna High School drummer Kiemon Noel, who got a recording session, a $1,000 scholarship to SUNY Schenectady as music major, and a concert date May 3, 2023 with the college’s jazz ensemble. The two runner-ups — Niskayuna High School tenor saxophonist Nathan Yan and Guilderland High School alto saxophonist Bohdan Kinai — each received the same scholarship amount and the May 3 performance date.
And what with all this positive momentum, there is one more success story and this from an alumnus: recording engineer Charlie Post (Class of 1993) received a 2021 Grammy Award for his work with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on its recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 “Babi Yar.” In a profile on the college website, Post credited his SUNY Schenectady education and music faculty with preparing him to ulimately transfer to Fredonia.
“Mr. [Brett] Wery was a great influence,” Post said of the former music school dean. “He was a fantastic professor and he taught me saxophone as well as clarinet. It was amazing preparation for my Fredonia audition,” he said.
A music history course with Meckley sparked Charlie’s interest in reading music scores. “Dr. Meckley got all of us really excited about orchestral music,” he said. “I would borrow scores from the music library to follow while listening to large-scale symphonic works at home. I learned notation, instrument groupings, how to read melodies and harmonies, and orchestration. These skills propelled my career recording orchestras and helped me to be a strong candidate for my current position.”
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As we sit in a Zamalek café, maestro Nader Abbassi’s mind is preoccupied with many commitments: two upcoming concerts, one featuring Egyptian soprano Fatma Said at the Grand Egyptian Museum (20 January), and the other with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. They follow in the footsteps of a busy few weeks that recently included the Abdel-Wahab Symphonic project’s premiere in Riyadh and the Nutcracker ballet at the Cairo Opera, among others.
A musician who has been awarded numerous recognitions and whose name resonates with a large public, Abbassi is the force behind the United Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he is the founding director, and which he conducted during two grand globally broadcast national events in 2021: the Pharaohs Golden Parade and the reopening of the 3000-year-old Avenue of the Sphinxes in Luxor.
Of course, those huge concerts did not happen by chance. Abbassi’s history as a musician includes playing bassoon, singing, composing and conducting, generating enough momentum to keep his name almost permanently in the headlines. As we begin to talk, I discover that I am in the presence not only of an internationally renowned musician, but also of a captivating storyteller. He begins by taking me to his childhood marked by his first steps in the performing arts, a story that is extremely entertaining when told with his sense of humor, which reveals a lot about his boundless dedication to music and explains the formation of an artist we know today.
“As a child, during family gatherings, I would prepare a stage and set chairs for the audience. I would then take a broomstick and pretend it was a microphone for the children who, as I saw it, all had to participate. I would be the last one to take the stage,” Abbassi laughs, recalling how that final appearance got the most applause.
Many years later, he was conducting the orchestra with those same, now grown-up family members in the audience. “After the concert, my family members congratulated me, not without reminding me of those great times we had as kids and how I used to ‘torture them’ with our performances.” He swiftly adds, in a more serious tone, that one can recognise a musician from a very young age, especially when home performances take all sorts of creative formats.
Photo: Ahmed Hassan
Although Abbassi’s first performances featured the Arabic repertoire, there was a strong presence of Western music in his household. “My father was from Alexandria, educated in French schools and fond of Western music, especially musicals. He had a very European mind. My mother was originally from Fayoum and more steeped in Arab culture, yet she followed my dad’s ideals and music tastes.”
Stressing his father’s “modernity”, Abbassi says he followed his choices, experimenting with many instruments, at first with darbouka and keyboard. “I was around 14 years old, when a friend from the Higher Institute of Ballet encouraged me to take up music in a professional way and join the Cairo Conservatory,” an institution which at the time had many renowned foreign teachers.
Abbassi’s entry to conservatory was yet another saga of self-realisation. “I remember the first day… I walked through the corridors, hearing the voices of practicing singers and instrumentalists coming from the closed rooms. I was mesmerised. I didn’t feel there was anything odd about this. On the contrary, I recognised this as my life, my home.”
The maestro started his formal music education with bassoon (also called fagot). “The music professors at the Conservatory believed that my physicality – height, long fingers, etc – justified this choice. I was told ‘either bassoon, or bye bye’. It was awkward for me to hold the instrument and hear its deep sound. I wanted to play music, I wanted piano.” Abbassi incorporated composition into his studies, and that made the piano an important part of his course of study.
“Of course, I loved piano more, dedicating a lot of time to it, until my bassoon teacher, a strict Russian musician, brought me back to my senses. ‘Either you become the best at your main instrument, win the competitions, or you end up no one,’ he told me, making me study at least eight hours a day.”
Abbassi listened to his teacher and his dedication to bassoon paid off, eventually granting him the first bassoon player position at the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. While on that road, Abbassi’s interest in singing was yet to find its own path. “It was more imitating other singers, I’d say,” he explains, recalling how he always experimented with vocals, imitating the various textures of other singers. His talents were noticed by a voice teacher, Violette Makkar who invited him to vocalise lessons, only to discover his unique basso profondo, the lowest bass voice type and a unique timbre in the operatic repertoire. As his vocal lessons progressed, preparations for Verdi’s La Traviata were underway, and he was perfect for the role of Barone Douphol.
Photo: Ahmed Hassan
Though this encounter with singing on stage took place shortly before Abbassi left to continue his studies in Switzerland, it left an unforgettable mark on his formation, a fact that bore fruit many years later.
Over three years in Geneva, Abbasi established himself as a renowned bassoon player, joining numerous orchestras and becoming first bassoon at the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. Yet, as Egypt was calling him back to resume his obligations to work as a bassoon teacher at the Cairo Conservatory, Abbassi wanted to remain in Switzerland. “I want to sing,” he told one of the professors who, understandably, was not thrilled with the idea. While pointing to Abbassi’s lack of formal education in operatic singing, due to the rarity of his bass the teacher agreed to let the young man audition for the singing classes. A perfectionist by definition, Abbassi was bound to succeed. “Long story short, I stopped playing bassoon and began singing. In the following five years, I landed numerous roles at the Opera House in Zurich.”
Of course, when speaking of Abbassi’s life, nothing ever stays as it is. As his singing career began to flourish in Switzerland, the late Egyptian musicologist Samha El-Khouly (1925-2006) insisted that Abbassi should have a go at the Egyptian composing competition. And so he did. Between Dusk and Dawn, a symphonic poem inspired by the story of Raya and Sekina, brought him the first prize. When the news reached Switzerland, he was offered to expand the composition into a ballet, the recording of which he also conducted. “This was my first experience in conducting a big work, a challenge for which I took a few months conducting studies with a German conductor based in France,” he reveals. This led to an invitation to take the baton of the Cairo Symphony Orchestra in one of its concerts.
The push and pull involving Switzerland and Egypt, led to his home country offering Abbassi the position of a principal conductor of the Cairo Opera Orchestra performing opera and ballet works. “At first I was very reluctant, yet eventually I accepted the position in 2002, the year I conducted Verdi’s Aida, the mega production staged at the Pyramids in Giza and featuring numerous international singers.” Abbassi remained the principal conductor of Cairo Opera Orchestra until 2010, a role which in the last years overlapped with being in charge of the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra (2009-2012) too.
During his time as an opera conductor In Cairo, Abbassi’s baton led orchestras in countless works in Egypt and internationally, at the Marseille Opera House, Opéra de Bordeaux, Ireland, Russia, during the Glimmerglass Festival New York, in Greece and China, among others. The list includes operas such as Maria Golovine, Dialogues des Carmelites, Hamlet, Un Ballo in Maschera, La Belle Helene, countless takes on Aida, Carmen, La Traviata, La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Barbe Bleue, and the musical Kiss Me Kate, to name but a few.
As with almost everything in Abbassi’s life, the musician says that he found himself conducting “by pure chance, and working with operas gives me a particular joy. Opera is a marvelous form of art. What helped me progress in it is simply my background as a singer. It is important for a conductor to understand the tiniest intricacies of a voice.” Indeed, it takes a skillful and experienced musician to understand the internal acoustics of a singer’s vocal apparatus, their internal resonance, and the covering that they use. Those details of which many audience members are not even aware, are in the mind of a conductor as he supports or even guides the singer through the many arias interlaced with mise-en-scene. “In my career, I lost my voice once. I had to go through a reeducation, a process which has additionally helped me to understand the many layers of voice, challenges and ways of overcoming them.”
Numerous Egyptian ballet dancers see Abbassi as the conductor of their choice, bringing us to his experience as a ballet composer. “The ballet story is a bit different. It relies on strong communication between the conductor and the dancers, their tempo and movement. I admire ballet too, and maybe this allowed me to find a special language with this art form.”
From bassoon and singing to composing and conducting, Abbassi’s multilayered experiences have only enriched his musical vision while allowing him to master many aspects of music. When asked what he loves the most, he takes a minute before saying, “Undeniably, I love opera. It is a full art. The operas have everything in them: music, words, singing, drama, the whole mise-en-scene… Yet, if the opera is not done properly, it pains me. However there are other musical forms that I appreciate a lot as well. Some works are wonderful as symphonic works, with all their phrasings and musical depths.”
As he plunges into the classical repertoire, structured by centuries of great Western composers, or touches on Arab repertoires, Abbassi never forgets the audience. He points to a concert in which he conducted Omar Khairat’s orchestra a decade ago. In the video that was shared by many YouTube users, shortly after Khairat’s solo on piano, Abbassi reintroduces the orchestra while turning to the audience and leading them to clap to the music. The concert and video saw mixed reactions, with some critics calling the maestro’s actions an unnecessary show and others applauding the interactive initiative. “I saw it as an opportunity,” the maestro comments. “This very concert and this video brought me closer to the public. I see it as a simple gesture that resonated with new listeners flocking to the concerts. It prompted me to think about tailoring the classical music concerts so they can resonate with the listeners, interlacing the heavier works with lighter compositions.” Here Abbassi reminds us of countless Western music compositions which are engraved in Egyptian listeners’ minds, often without them being aware of the fact. Numerous old Egyptian movies as well as countless animated movies use classical music in their soundtracks.
Following this concert, the very first he conducted with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra saw a high attendance with Abbassi’s name filling the halls. For regular music attendees, the figure of a conductor is not always well understood; the maestro simplifies it in a few sentences: “The conductor is simply a music director controlling the tempo, phrasings, dynamics. However the role of a conductor is to conduct, not to count. Even listeners who are least aware of those technical components are still fully aware when the maestro is musically honest. I always think about the musicians, the composer, but also about the listeners who need to feel their importance. We need to introduce listeners to music without terrifying them. This process begins with programming, through studies of the compositions, vision applied to them, to the honesty in presenting one’s thoughts at the hands of the orchestra.” Abbassi explains that when setting a programme, the audience is his first parameter. A concert presented to students will be very different to one performed for experienced classical music listeners, the audience coming to the Cairo Opera House differs from European listeners attending a summer concert in an open air setting for instance.
With this huge baggage of experience, thoughts and achievements, founding of the United Philharmonic Orchestra was a natural step in Abbassi’s musical development. The large ensemble has given a number of concerts since 2017, accompanying singers such as Fatma Said, Gala El Hadidi, Elhamy Amin in one concert, followed by The Three Egyptian Tenors concert (2018), performing music by Amar El Sheraie (2018), then a concert featuring the Lebanese soprano Majida El Roumi on several occasions included in Cairo Opera House (2018), in the mega concert at the Pyramids’ Sound and Light Theatre (2019) and at the Cairo Royal Al Qubba Palace (2021), all the way to the Pharaohs Golden Parade (April 2021), which celebrated the transport of mummies from the Egyptian Museum of Cairo in Tahrir Square to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (NMEC) in Old Cairo. The orchestra also participated in the grand concert during the reopening of the 3000-year-old Avenue of the Sphinxes in Luxor (November 2021). The latter two events shed international light on the orchestra and Abbassi himself.
As the conductor explains, the United Philharmonic Orchestra is a melting pot of musicians from all walks of life, comprising those who work at the Cairo Symphony, Cairo Opera, Alexandria Opera Orchestras, Arabic Music Orchestra, in addition to independent formations. “It is united in terms of musicians and their generations, religions, musical genres and cultures, styles of performances,” Abbassi explains, adding that the orchestra allows him to perform on all occasions and out of every repertoire, be it Western classical, symphonic, operatic, Oriental, film music, or mixed compositions, often featuring unique instruments. “The orchestra also fills gaps separating many artists, musicians and singers, who otherwise keep competing with each another. In the United Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir they all stand for one cause, one concert, one performance.”
Music to the Pharaoh’s Golden Parade – one of Abbassi’s biggest sources of pride – was composed by an Egyptian composer, Hesham Nazih. The work included chants in the Ancient Egyptian language sung by an Egyptian soprano, Amira Selim, with lyrics of the hymn “A Reverence for Isis” taken from inscriptions on the walls of the Deir Al-Shelwit temple in Luxor. Other lyrics were taken from the Book of the Dead and the Pyramid Texts, topped with songs in Classical Arabic and Egyptian Arabic performed by Reham Abdel Hakim and Nesma Mahgoub, respectively.
“Nazih presented a truly great work. If you focus on music, you will find a lot of classical components fused with American-style grandiosity, very Star Wars-like. The choral part adds the power of Carmina Burana to old Egyptian lyrics. The Isis aria has an Egyptian scent yet if you listen well, you will find that its choral, symphonic music is not easy by all means.”
Abbassi underlines the joy he experienced while conducting the piece. What astonished him even more than the impact it made internationally was the way it resonated with locals who had never attended a large symphonic or choral event. “I met simple people who were humming the melodies drawn from the parade. What more can one wish for? The parade music is truly international, a term that cannot be limited to differences in languages or simple melodies interconnected in music. It is the depth and intelligent composition that created this cultural blend, one that speaks of the depth of our history.”
Abbassi’s baton in both the Golden Parade and reopening of the Avenue of the Sphinxes – with the latter also featuring several of his own original compositions – has opened many new doors to the conductor. One of the most recent great endeavors is the Abdel-Wahab Symphonic, a project that saw the light on 10 December at the grand Abu Bakr Salem Stage in Boulevard Riyadh City, followed by performances at the Cairo University concert hall. Performed by the United Philharmonic Orchestra, the concerts featured singers Reham Abdel-Hakim and Loai. The project presents works composed by Mohamed Abdel-Wahab (1902-1991), the prominent Egyptian singer, actor and composer – with a new arrangement for the big orchestra written by Ahmed El-Mougi, Amir Gado and Mohamed El-Ashy. “The musicians embroidered Abdel-Wahab’s compositions – many of which we did not have notations for – with a new musical concept, one that testifies to Abdel-Wahab’s progressive mind,” Abbassi says. The Abdel-Wahab Symphonic is the result of an idea presented to Abbassi by Abdel-Wahab’s grandchildren. As everyone involved hopes, the project will yet tour many European and Arab countries.
As we conclude our conversation, the maestro is about to begin rehearsals for the concert of the internationally renowned Egyptian soprano Fatma Said who will be the first female singer to perform at the new Grand Egyptian Museum on 20 January. Immediately after this concert, on 21 January, Abbassi will move to the Cairo Opera House to conduct the Cairo Symphony Orchestra in a concert including works by Rossini, Shostakovich and Liszt, and featuring solo violinist Salma Sorour. Abbassi will then return to the Cairo Symphony in April, yet even prior to that we will definitely see him in numerous other concerts, details of which will be revealed in a due time.
I realise that in our short time at the café, this great storyteller had to leave many musical tales untold. Whatever they are, they all contributed to Abbassi’s huge reservoir of experience, fed and shaped his passion. They all made of him the remarkable musician he is today. We are yet to attend many concerts during which the maestro’s unique musical journey will resonate in each music bar of his partitura.
*A version of this article appears in print in the 19 January, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
