We are all Music's Children by mJ Buell      Welcome back for a fourth season of Music’s Children contests!   If I had to pick the one common thread, a golden tie that binds absolutely all of their stories, it’s hearing music in their childhood homes, regardless of whether they came from musician families… radio, with mom and dad’s records a close second, and relatives who sang together for fun.   Septembers’ Child is …? clue: Make new friends but keep the old; one is silver and the other’s gold! Trumpeting  a silver anniversary this season, but still rubbing shoulders with his old friend the euphonium, September’s Child probably has lots to say about the social benefits of being in a band.   Think you know who September’s child is? Send your best guess to musicschildren@thewholenote.com Be sure to always send us your mailing address, just in case your name is drawn!   Winners will be selected by random draw among correct replies received by September 15 2008.   Are you hoarding a treasured old photo? Suggestions welcomed. (Music’s Children gratefully acknowledges all of  Music’s Children. You know who you are.)     Musical Life Vladimir Orloff – a life in music   Who has not heard a recording of an old favourite so fresh and captivating that one becomes intensely curious about the artist? This was the feeling for me generated by a new release of Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations played by cellist Vladimir Orloff, recorded live in 1970 with the Lucerne Chamber Orchestra (DOREMI DHR-7896). In this performance and in the following pieces on this CD, in addition to a velvet tone, elegant phrasing and inspired musicianship, one senses a depth and breadth of tradition and culture that captures Tchaikovsky’s gamut from the poetic to the turbulent.   Yet Orloff is not a household name as Rostropovich and Piatigorsky are, even though he is very much in the same league. In an enthusiastic review of The Art of Vladimir Orloff (DOREMI  DHR-7711/3, 3 CDs), Diapason, the influential French journal, states “Un violoncelliste de tres grande talent a (re)decouvir.”  Actually, Orloff was a well-known and respected concert soloist during the 50s and 60s, regularly appearing with conductors the likes of Barbirolli, Boult, Sawallisch, Goossens, Silvestri, and Ancerl.   His busy concert career slowed down in the 70s after he became a cello professor at the University of Toronto, devoting himself to his students, the most notable of whom was Ofra Harnoy, who had come to him as a special scholarship student from the Royal Conservatory when she was 12 years old. Health problems also contributed to the slowdown of his concert career. Nonetheless, he was still performing in various parts of the world until his retirement.   Vladimir Orloff still lives in Toronto, where I spent a few delightful hours with him just before his eightieth birthday last May in which he reminisced about his roots and career. In spite of his years, he is an athletic, handsome man, with the charisma of a matinee idol.   So, start at the beginning ... . I was born in Odessa. My father, a fine cellist, was my first teacher. I started with him but father and son didn’t work very well together ... after a while he gave me to his best student. We lived in Minsk but my family came from Bessarabia.   I heard the Rococo Variations since before I was born because my father was practising it all the time. In 1943 my parents moved to Bucharest where my grandparents lived. At that time Romania was a German-controlled territory.   My father was not Jewish so the Nazis did not touch us but my teacher was killed because he was Jewish and I witnessed it. The way they killed him was to push him in a hole with many other people and put them on fire.   Bucharest was such a big change from poverty and war ... it was beautiful and prosperous. There was a king, princes, and counts. Rich people sent their children to Paris... Most people spoke French. Very musical people, the Romanians.   The famous Grigoras Dinicu was active, leading his own orchestra in a posh hotel which had a concert hall. Jascha Heifetz stayed in this hotel and heard Dinicu playing his Hora Staccato and asked for the music. The piece became almost a signature tune for Heifetz who played his own version of it and popularized it. Another illustrious figure in Bucharest was the violinist and composer George Enescu. I heard Enescu conducting ... by this time he was not playing anymore.   Do you know the story about Enesco and Ravel? When Enescu lived in Paris, Ravel presented him with his new violin sonata. The two played together with Enescu sight- reading the violin part. After they finished Enescu said “Let’s do it again.” Enescu put away the score and played it entirely from memory! This episode was witnessed by Yehudi Menuhin who was Enescu’s pupil.   When I was 16 I joined the Bucharest Symphony Orchestra, a great orchestra. At that time Bucharest was influenced by the French style with cafes and an easy life. Under the Communist regime things changed.   I entered competitions and was successful in winning the events in Bucharest, Warsaw, and Geneva. After winning the competitions, the Ministry of Culture awarded me the title of State Soloist and I was then taken out of the orchestra and played with them only as a featured soloist. As a state soloist I received a salary from the government. Romania had only six musicians awarded this title, including violinist Ion Voicu, pianist Mindru Katz, and cellist Radu Aldulescu. Although I hate Communism, I must say that it worked to my advantage. The state salary covered solo engagements with the Bucharest Symphony. As a soloist with other cities’ orchestras, I received an additional honorarium.   However, I was not permitted to leave the Communist bloc ... until they allowed me to go to the Geneva Competition.   How did that come about? In 1962 I met the composer Anatol Vieru and asked him to compose a cello concerto for me. He was reluctant, saying that it was too difficult – The cello register complicates the balancing of cello and orchestra. To my great surprise, at our next meeting he announced that he was working on the concerto, had finished the first movement and was working on the second. It had to be finished soon because it had been submitted to the Geneva Competition for compositions and the deadline was fast approaching. Vieru finished the concerto just in time and a tape of the work had to be in Geneva within three days. I felt that I could not learn this new work in less than three days. Vieru had good connections in Bucharest and a studio, an engineer, and an orchestra were made available immediately around the clock. Day and night, we were living there practically... so we learned a little and then recorded it and so on and finally we finished it in time.   The Vieru cello concerto won first place!! Now, because we won first prize, the two of us were supposed to go to Geneva and give the world premiere at a gala concert... and the authorities could not say no.   So when I was there I met some people from the Geneva competition and asked them why I never got any concerts or invitations. I met the director of the Swiss Romande who took me to his office and showed me correspondence with the Romanian Concert Bureau management. I saw that I was invited many times but the replies stated that I was sick or I had other engagements. The Romanians were worried, of course, that I would not return if allowed out. I asked the Swiss Romande to send copies to me as well as the Romanian Concert Bureau, the next time. In this way, finally they let me go.   The first tour in Switzerland consisted of five or six concerts and recitals. I was there with my wife, Marietta, who was my accompanist, and when we finished the tour we had one free week before a concert tour in Yugoslavia. We decided to go to Vienna. In Vienna I went to say hello to a man who met me at the Enescu Festival in Bucharest.   Hans was a very nice person. I didn’t speak German but Hans asked me what am I going to do now and suggested that I should stay in Vienna. I wanted to say that I wasn’t prepared yet ... we had only my cello and a suitcase. I said that I would do it at the next opportunity. Hans replied, “How do you know there will be a next time. Besides, your wife is with you now and this is not likely to happen again. Wait a minute...”  He picked up the phone and called the Vienna Philharmonic office saying “I have someone you should hear.”   An appointment was arranged for the next day and I was immediately hired and told to report tomorrow for rehearsals. Of course I had to do the required official audition. I shared the news with my wife... “Do we stay or go.” We stayed. We were giving up everything:  fame, recognition and possessions to begin life in Vienna. The position with the Vienna Philharmonic provided for rent and food but it was a difficult time for me, particularly because of the language. The VPO is an independent organisation with the same personnel as the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. The members drew their salaries from the Opera, not from the Philharmonic concerts. The Philharmonic had 15 cellos and, like all other instruments, they worked in the Opera on a rotation system. Even for Wagner or Richard Strauss, only eight to ten cellos are needed; for Verdi six or seven; for Mozart only four or five. There are always a few members free. One day Leonard Bernstein came and we had rehearsals in the morning, a recording session for Decca in the afternoon, and a concert in the evening.  And still some members were free.  This system was very well organized and my partner at the cello desk helped me with it.   I still did not have resident papers so I went to the police and asked for asylum. The police officer asked why I needed asylum. I told him that I was a concert cellist and I want to play concerts anywhere in the West but the Romanian authorities won’t let me out. In my profession one must travel around and not just stay in one place. The police answered that they couldn’t grant me political asylum on the grounds that the Romanians wouldn’t let me play music in the West ... ridiculous ... not a good enough reason! I was disappointed and went back to my friend, Baron Otto Meyer, who undertook to take care of everything. I have no idea of how he did it but in two weeks I had a passport. This was a passport without citizenship, which meant I had to have visas. So, if I couldn’t get a visa I just stayed with the Opera and the orchestra travelled without me.   After two years with the Philharmonic, I was invited to become a professor at the Vienna Academy, which automatically granted me citizenship. At the Academy I had to teach only two days a week and had lots of time to play and travel, so I looked out for concert opportunities. Pierre Fournier and his wife helped me to get concerts as did Gaspard Cassado ... I knew them from Geneva when I played in the competitions. They had attended the concert of the winners.   Cassado came to Vienna to give a concert which I attended and afterward went with him and his group for dinner. In this group I met Peter Weiser, who organized all the concerts at the Vienna Konzerthaus. Later, at an after-concert dinner at the Fourniers, I met Weiser again. Madame Fournier was very active in promoting me. After that Weiser invited me to be a soloist with the Vienna Symphony and I played my favourite, the Rococo Variations. That was on January 13, 1966 and the conductor was Zdenek Kosler. In November 1968 I played the Boccherini with the Vienna Philharmonic and Heinrich Hollreiser. Very favourable reviews.   Who else do you remember from this time? The Romanian conductor Constantin Silvestri who had defected two years before me had become very famous. Much earlier, my first solo concert in Bucharest had been conducted by Silvestri. I wrote informing him that I had left Romania and was not returning. Silvestri was the artistic director of the Bournemouth Symphony and he immediately invited me to play there and also recommended me to his UK management. Concerts were arranged in London where I played the Dvorak Concerto with Sir Adrian Boult ... a really nice man. He didn’t argue at all. Also the Elgar with Sir John Barbirolli. In general, very good conductors don’t interfere with the soloist’s way of doing things. They might suggest, but great conductors adapt.  So everything was great for me... I had concerts all over Europe and had a good paying position at the Vienna Academy.   So why Toronto? I received a letter. Ezra Schabas, who was in charge of the string department at the University of Toronto, wrote offering me a position as professor. This invitation was prompted by a strong recommendation from Janos Starker.  In Vienna I had everything; except that because I left Romania I had been sentenced, in absentia, to 10 years in prison. Romania was close to Vienna and in my travels, if by chance my plane should touch down there, I feared arrest. I accepted the Toronto offer and contracted for one year. In that way I could take a leave of absence from Vienna and, if I were not comfortable in Toronto, I could return to the Academy. Happily, everything worked out... the students were nice and the political climate peaceful.   I was fast-tracked in Toronto as I had been in Vienna. Again, doors opened for me.  The next step was to get an engagement with the Toronto Symphony. Karel Ancerl was the conductor then and I knew him from our concerts in Prague. He invited me to play and suggested Strauss’s Don Quixote, an attractive piece but not that attractive for the cello soloist. I wanted to do something else but Ancerl insisted. While I was back in Vienna, winding up my affairs, a letter came from Ancerl saying that he had a big scandal with the orchestra’s first cellist, Peter Schenkman, who argued that Quixote was traditionally played by the principal cellist and not by a guest soloist. Ancerl asked me to select a concerto and I chose the Shostakovich E flat, which I liked very much. It was a big success, even though it was not yet a repertory piece and many in the audience were hearing it for the first time.   (The following day, Wednesday, April 11, 1973, William Littler wrote in the Toronto Star: “... He scampered his way through the first movement with pinpoint accuracy and narrowed and intensified the focus of his tone into a pure shaft of silver to sing his way through the Moderato. Sing, yes, and whisper, too. By the time he reached the cadenza, he was making more out of the composer’s shadowy plucking and sudden bursts of melody than this listener had dreamt the music contained. What a bow arm! And what impeccable intonation! In short, here was a performance on the plane of complete technical assurance – the kind that relieves listener and player alike of anxiety and frees them to search beyond technique into the meaning of the music...”   After that I was asked back by the orchestra every two years, for a total of five engagements. This was the perfect life ... to teach at the school ... to play ...to tour ... and then become popular and have the students want to come to you at the school. I played chamber music with my faculty colleagues, Lorand Fenyves and Patricia Parr, and in a trio with Steve Staryk and Gloria Saarinen. I also presented concerts and recordings with Marietta, my wife. There is nothing I haven’t played that I wanted to. I have always played the full repertoire available. What I enjoy are the Rococo Variations and Shostakovich... These are pieces that resonate with me.   Orloff continued teaching and concertizing until 2002. His last tour was in Romania. He had received amnesty from the new regime and was awarded top state honours and ceremoniously decorated.   Vladimir Orloff may be heard playing all the concertos mentioned above in addition to Schumann, Khachaturian, Saint-Saens, the Brahms Double, the two Haydn concertos, and a few sonatas. (DOREMI  DHR 7711/3 and 7896). Summer Reflections On The Current State Of Music Ed   by Sterling Beckwith This year’s celebrations of R. Murray Schafer’s 75th birthday bring irresistibly to mind the days, half a lifetime ago, when the whole music world looked to Toronto with admiration and respect. Not, to be sure, for any premature success in replicating a Vienna or a Juilliard or even a Bayreuth on Canadian soil; but because forward-looking new ways of involving ordinary schoolchildren in the discovery of music as a creative adventure were being actively developed and practised here, under Schafer’s inspired leadership.  (See his remarkable book The Thinking Ear for full and fascinating documentation.)      How much of that spirit is still alive here today?  And where should one look to find its impact?  These questions were much on my mind when I was invited, earlier this summer, to check out what some European colleagues have been doing lately to foster children’s musical creativity, in ways that also take advantage of the latest computer wizardry to further enliven the musicmaking process and heighten its appeal to today’s kids.  (Adapting the technology for just this purpose happens to be a longstanding research interest of mine, although Schafer himself, a well-known technophobe, might view it with some suspicion, if not outright disapproval.)   My first stop was at the Sonic Playground (Klankspeeltuin), a suite of rooms inside the city of Amsterdam’s sleek new waterfront Music Palace (Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ), crammed with a unique collection of cleverly engineered sound-activating contraptions, each designed to catch the imagination and engage the participation of those youngsters (aged 7 through 11) lucky enough to show up for one or more 90-minute visits during the school year.  They may come on their own, in small groups, or with whole classes, not just from schools all across the city but from outlying areas of Holland as well.  There are even a few times when adults are allowed in to play, and workshops tailored to particular interests can also be scheduled.   We are all immersed in sounds almost everywhere we go, and there is usually little any child can do to influence them or fend them off.  But if you can turn particular sounds instantly on or off just by stepping on or hitting or stroking something in a special way; if the sounds themselves are unusually arresting and varied; and if, whenever you and your friends do keep still, you can actually hear the stillness—then you’ve got the beginnings of a powerful linkage between your own body’s restless activity, on one hand, and a shareable world of potential sonic events whose pattern of occurrence is both increasingly predictable and more and more under your control, on the other.   That seems to be the guiding principle behind most of the installations in Holland’s Sonic Playground.  And since musicmaking is typically a group enterprise, each installation is designed to accommodate more than one would-be “composer” at a time.  Children are thus encouraged to cooperate and interact while working out their team sound-projects inside a shared listening-space.  For example, in one darkened area of the Playground called Kosmix, a wide black dance floor is dotted with different-sized circles of white light beamed from overhead.  Jumping or tiptoeing around among those circles is hard for any kid to resist, especially since each time you move to step on one and thus interrupt its beam of light with your body, the particular ringing or percussive sound currently assigned to that spot is automatically triggered.  Result?  A giant super-drumset you and your friends can play simply by dancing back and forth over it, finding or making up your own visual and musical patterns as you go.   A central facility such as the Sonic Playground, and the innovative child-friendly composing games and musicmaking environments it has built, are well used and highly valued by the members of AMUZE, Amsterdam’s lively consortium of music educators and institutions. The French, as one might expect, have taken a different approach.  At IRCAM, their high-tech Paris centre for “research and creativity in music and acoustics” founded in 1969 with government support by Pierre Boulez, some of the most advanced compositional software is being re-packaged and taken out into the hinterland for everyday classroom use, thanks to the initiative of a few of the centre’s brilliant young researchers, and with the blessing of the nation’s Ministry of Culture and Communications.  Meanwhile, the ever-practical British managed to bypass all such comings and goings, by putting a delightful set of children’s composing games on the BBC’s web site, where they were freely and immediately accessible to any youthful members of the wired generation with a yen to make their own kind of music.  (That is, until the BBC’s whole online digital curriculum had to be scrapped in 2007, in response to protest by the educational software industry.)   To whom should we in Canada be looking, I wonder, to create and make available more such resources for our own kids to explore?  Of course, not everything that’s good for kids has to be computerized, nor vice versa.  It takes a special kind of vision to build facilities and programs that are genuinely mind-opening and child-friendly. And the temptation is strong (even in Amsterdam!) to just sit each kid down in front of a screen running a commercial program like Garage Band, and call it a day.    Though our various high-profile music faculties seem to be prospering, they could hardly be expected to support R&D of this unconventional kind, preoccupied as they are by filling their enrolment quotas for future performers, with perhaps a few musicologists thrown in.  Would local music teachers’ associations be interested? What about faculties of Education—any hope there?  Perhaps an enlightened retailer or manufacturer could help?  Surely there must be at least a few committed composers or improvisers willing to share their expertise with kids, as Morton Subotnick has done with his Making Music CD-ROMs and Creating Music website.  Might the Ontario Science Centre, TVO, or the CBC be persuaded to contribute further resources, as part of their expanded cultural mission?    Certainly our New Music community is large, ambitious, and technologically sophisticated enough to embrace such a challenge. Who knows?  If we can pool our talents, coordinate our disparate efforts, and keep our focus on supporting children’s creativity, Canadians might again find themselves at the leading edge of 21st-century music education.  .