How should we Listen?

An article I was reading recently mentioned in passing, by way of illustrating quite another point, the change in the way audiences listened to music over time.

It argued that up until the eighteenth century, concerts “functioned as a pleasant soundtrack for aristocratic soirees”, and at concert halls and opera houses and the ballet, “the nobility would canoodle in their boxes, only half paying attention to the performers.”

This changed with the Industrial Revolution and “a rising capitalist class”: a shift occurred from entertainment to education. Audiences now sat still and silently concentrated on nothing but the music, stifling sneezes and coughs and any extraneous noises lest it break anyone’s concentration. The Germans of the time even invented a word ‘Sitzfleisch’ (‘sitting flesh’) “to describe the muscle control required for sitting absolutely still during a concert performance.”

It brought into focus something that’s been on my mind for a long time, and that I’ve been meaning to write about: how should we, collectively as an audience, here, and today listen to a concert? By this, I refer to a western classical music concert.

One hears two extremes if one speaks to a cross-section of people. On the one hand, I have been reminded of precisely this evolution of music performance and listening, and a fervent argument is made for going back to the ‘anything goes’ attitude that seems to have prevailed centuries ago, as some sort of historical validation. Going back to an imagined past seems to be trendy on so many levels in India, and it is true here too. Why not let people just be themselves, and abandon the whole stuffed-shirt image that classical music has undoubtedly acquired? Notch up a victory for freedom of expression!

The other extreme is the ‘Sitzfleisch’ brigade to the power of infinity. Sit perfectly still and become part of the furniture. And not just that; the cardinal sin of clapping between movements (sections) of a piece of music is to be countered by rounding upon the unfortunate blunderer with a Medusa glare that will petrify him/her for eternity.

The Naxos Record label specialising in classical music has an Education section on its website, with advice on how to enjoy a live concert, and has a whole section on ‘Coping with Snobs.’

And what does it say about them? It starts by saying that “snobs are everywhere, in every field”, but that “classical music snobs can be some of the snobbiest snobs of all. They assert their superiority by showing off their knowledge and declaiming opinions. Often their snobbery masquerades as helpfulness, but snobs have a way of making ignorance appear to be shameful.”

Which brings us back to the original question: how do we listen to a classical concert today? I think the answer comes down to sheer common sense. We would do well to comport ourselves in a way that 1. allows us to be at as attentive and concentrated as we can; and 2. is not distracting to those around us. Everything else follows from these two fundamental principles.

We derive the maximum benefit and enjoyment (yes, entertainment, even) and education from a good concert performance if we give it all our attention. True, some music was written for entertainment; divertimenti, serenades, cassations are good examples. But even here, attentive listening will reap further rewards.

The operative words for us are attention and concentration. In a world of texts, tweets, and emoticons, attention spans have shrunk considerably. All too often, our phones themselves are the biggest culprits, distracting us and those around us.

Attention spans have even affected concert programming. If one looks at concert programme lengths from even about a century ago, three hours or longer were not unusual. Today a concert exceeding 90 minutes might seem interminable. There are other considerations that affect concert lengths today, like factoring in commuting time for audiences after the concert. Without becoming a Sitzfleisch advocate, it is to our advantage to make the most of the hour or so of an average concert by savouring the moment. This involves, apart from sitting attentively, either switching off or silencing our devices so they neither distract us nor others around us. Rustling plastic bags or other items are a no-no too. This is not being fussy, but acknowledging the fact that in classical music especially, the notes and the music need the contrast of the quiet and the silences to be at their most eloquent. Composers like John Cage might well celebrate and bring ambient noise to centre-stage in some compositions, but for the vast majority of music, the silence is quite necessary. To quote Debussy, “music is the silence between the notes.” Mozart had made the same point even earlier.

What if we get bored in places during a concert? It happens. It helps to focus also on the visual element of a live concert. It could be the intensity of emotion on the faces of the musicians as they play or sing, or the way a theme, motif or melody is passed from one instrument or section of instrument to another. Or it could be the cues and baton technique of the conductor.

Cameras and camera-phones to record concerts have become a modern bane. Not only does one lose the live moment, but it distracts others, often including the performers themselves. SLR cameras, video-cameras, and several phones make clicking, whirring and beeping noises, further adding to the distraction. Add to that the flash element, and it becomes an audio-visual invasive intrusion. Furthermore, the recorded material is almost invariably terribly unfaithful to what your ears would hear and eyes would see in real-time. And lastly, it raises huge copyright infringement issues and many performers get terribly upset by this, and if they remember in advance, often explicitly forbid this.

At Child’s Play concerts featuring our children (our monsoon and Christmas concerts), we do try to avoid this, barring a videographer/photographer sometimes, and as unobtrusively as possible, to get archival footage necessary for our website, social media, and publicity purposes.

As for the clapping-between-movements police: many musicians do not really mind that much; I know quite a few who feel reassured that the feedback means the audience is being appreciative (and awake?). There are other musicians who do mind, and they often make it known in advance of the performance. Having a concert programme can help an audience ‘track’ the progress of the concert, and such concerts often find their applauses at the ‘right’ moments. Programme notes, or even better, a brief introduction by the musicians themselves, explaining the background to the work, and what to listen for, can immeasurably heighten the engagement and enjoyment of a concert.

(An edited version of this article was published on 6 August 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

My review of Domenico Cimarosa’s opera buffa Il Matrimonio Segreto at Royal Opera House Mumbai

In October 2016, I covered the reopening of the Royal Opera House Mumbai ROHM (after a hiatus of 23 years) for the national and international press. Although the newly restored and refurbished gem of a venue now suddenly opened up fresh exciting possibilities in India’s financial and cultural capital, I must confess I scarcely imagined a full-length Italian opera would grace its stage in less than a year.

Read the rest of the review here

My article on Il Matrimonio Segreto at the Royal Opera House Mumbai in Scroll.in!

Less than a year after the Royal Opera House Mumbai reopened its doors to the public, the first full-length opera will grace its stage this month, with four performances (27 and 28 July at 7 pm, and 29 July matinee at 4 pm, and final performance at 7.30 pm) of Domenico Cimarosa’s 1792 comedy Il Matrimonio Segreto (The Secret Marriage). This is also the first full opera ever to be performed at the ROH Mumbai in its history.

The opera is being produced by Giving Voice Society, headed by Mumbai-origin soprano Patricia Rozario (who also sang at the gala reopening ceremony of the ROH Mumbai last October), Professor of Voice at the Royal College of Music London, and her pianist-husband Mark Troop.

 

Read the whole article here.

My article on Maria Badstue in Scroll.in!

The Royal Opera House in Mumbai is poised to stage its first full-length Italian opera, Domenico Cimarosa’s comedy Il Matrimonio Segreto, with a run of four performances from July 27 to 29. The opera’s conductor Maria Badstue has a heartwarming connection to India – she was adopted from here by a Danish family at five months of age and is returning to the country for the first time in 35 years.

Read my account of her wonderful story here in Scroll.in.

This resonated strongly within me as founder and project director of Child’s Play India Foundation, a music education charity working with underprivileged children. Our whole ethos rests on the untapped potential of India’s disadvantaged children and the transformative power of music in their lives.

Get tickets to see her in action here.

The good old days when the Times of India devoted dedicated space to Music, and even had an in-house music critic!

My dad was fond of saving newspaper clippings if he found an article or news item interesting. He would slip them into a book related to the subject. So I’m constantly ambushed by little time capsules, blasts from the past that take me back decades and trigger all sorts of memories from those times.

Here is one I found today, from 1980, a concert review of a recital by Ruggiero Ricci, with Mehroo Jeejeebhoy at the piano:

The benefits to a child of a good music education

After seven years and counting in music education through Child’s Play India Foundation (www.childsplayindia.org) and also in the wider community, as a friend or relative to peers who are now parents of growing children, I hear this constant refrain: “My child has got exams round the corner, so s/he had better take a break from music lessons for a while”; or “This is an important year for my child, so we’ll take a sabbatical from music for a whole year”; or “Now that my son/daughter is in medicine/law/(fill in the blank), it’s best that we shelve music altogether.”

Parents and children have the best of intentions, of course; there are only so many hours in a day after all, and the competition to get into colleges and higher education gets more and more fierce each year.

But doctors, scientists and researchers are finding increasing benefits to the growing and adult brain development that should make parents really sit up and take notice.

It would be worthwhile examining the mounting evidence. The results of a study conducted at the University of Kansas in 2014 seem to confirm a long-held anecdotal observation that “increased music participation has important direct and indirect effects on positive outcomes in student achievement and engagement.”

After a study period of four years involving over 6000 children, the researchers were convinced that “education advocates should also be advocates for music education.” A detailed description of this study, selection criteria, methods used, data collected, complete with graphs and tables, and analysis of the data, results and conclusions is available online in the public domain for those interested.

It used to be thought that the reason that children exposed to music did better at school was because “the smart kids participate in music.” This study dispels this notion. Analysis of data showed that students (regardless of background) engaged in music education programmes outperformed their peers on every measurable indicator.

The observation of one of the researchers, Becky Eason, was also telling: “One of the key findings that shouldn’t get lost is how important music is for creating a sense of belonging and purpose for the students who participate. They identify themselves as musicians, as being in the band or chorus, and they’re motivated to come to school so that they can participate in music. The students also believe that music participation teaches them skills like discipline and concentration that they can use to their benefit throughout the school days.”

We have certainly noticed this at Child’s Play India. The bonds of friendship even across our various locations become ever stronger as our project grows, and there is a fulfilling sense of achievement as the years progress and the children notch more and more concerts and performance opportunities under their belts. Our children correspond through a pen-pal programme with peers in a likeminded music education project in the US called Phoenixville Phiddlesticks, and the letters from the children to each other reflect this sentiment repeatedly.

The Kansas study was conducted in partnership with ‘Music Makes Us’, an initiative focussing on music literacy and student participation, for all students from kindergarten to Grade 12. The quality of music education imparted, however, must extremely high for beneficial effects to be noted, and this is something that we must address in India. Noted Goan-origin music educator and pianist Karl Lutchmayer touched upon this as well in a recent interview to the national press.

Another contemporaneous research article published in the scientific journal ‘Frontiers in Psychology’ by neuroscientist Dr. Nina Kraus et al from Northwestern University Illinois was of even greater interest to me, given Child’s Play’s particular emphasis on children from the underprivileged sector. The paper was titled “Engagement in community music classes sparks neuroplasticity and language development in children from disadvantaged backgrounds.” This was a much smaller study group involving just twenty-six children between the ages of six to nine; they were followed as they participated in a music education programme for 2 years. But the beneficial effects of music education even over a 2-year observation period were unmistakable.

And the benefits of a music education are not limited to just the classroom. One of the largest scientific studies looking at the effect of music on the brain (conducted at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, published in 2014 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, with a study group of 232 children between the ages of six to 18 and assessed by magnetic resonance imaging and behavioural testing) seems to indicate that music provides “tremendous benefits to children’s emotional and behavioural maturation.”

James Hudziak, professor of psychiatry involved in the study noted: “What we found was the more a child trained on an instrument, it accelerated cortical organization in attention skill, anxiety management and emotional control.”

The study “provides even more evidence as to why providing children with high-quality education may be one of the most effective ways to ensure their success in life.”

56-year old Hudziak was sufficiently impressed and inspired by the results of his own study to take up a musical instrument (viola) himself, having not had the opportunity to learn a musical instrument in his own childhood.

I was not able to easily access similar studies conducted in India, using either western or Indian music education projects, but I am pretty certain they would reveal salutary effects on children’s academic performance and other life development parameters as well.

The important thing however, to belabour the point, is the quality of music education, and we have to strive harder to raise the bar here while simultaneously pushing for wider access to greater numbers of children in India. Quality should never become a casualty to quantity.

Paradoxically, music education, not just in India but worldwide, gets neglected or very cursorily addressed when it comes to budgeting and formulating mainstream education reform agendas. As increasing data gathers to demonstrate that music education can play such a vital role in child development, educators everywhere will have to factor this into mainstream education programmes.

(An edited version of this article was published on 25 June 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Dance in Music: the Gavotte

Spurred on by the positive feedback I have received from local readers, and thanks to the reach of the internet, to music educators further afield, I have decided to continue the ‘Dance in Music’ series that I began some columns ago with the Minuet.

Rather than follow a historical, chronological order in looking at dance terms in music, I felt it better to address them according to the frequency with which we might encounter them, as music students and teachers, or in a concert programme. So let us look this week at the gavotte (also gavot or gavote).

The gavotte is an old French dance form. It originated in the southeast of France, in the Pays du Gap region; its inhabitants were called Gavots, and their folk dance, the gavotte.

It became popular in the court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, where Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687) composed many examples, and its vogue in Paris lasted until the French Revolution. In its early days as a courtly dance, the gavotte involved couples kissing, but (reminiscent of Bollywood censorship and prudishness here!) this was replaced by the presentation of flowers.

Passing to other countries, it became one of the optional movements of the classical dance suite. The gavotte, the third in six movements of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita no. 3 in E major, BWV 1006, is a notable example.

It featured on the Voyager Records sent with the spacecraft launched into outer space in 1977.

An internet search reveals that many people looked up ‘gavotte’ in order to learn more about the lyrics of Carly Simon’s 1972 song ‘You’re so vain’; in the first verse she sings “You had one eye on the mirror/ And watched yourself gavotte.” In this context, she is referring to the protagonist’s self-absorbed, narcissistic dancing. Interesting use of ‘gavotte’ as a verb, and it also implies a solo dance. There is poetic license, of course, i song-writing, and a rhyme word was needed to follow ‘yacht’ and ‘apricot’. But the gavotte is danced by a couple or a group.

It is notated in 4/4 or 2/2 and in a moderate tempo. It is usually in simple binary form (which means it has two contrasting sections, A & B); the sections are often repeated.

The distinctive feature of the 18^th-century French court gavotte is that the phrases begin in the middle of the bar; so the phrases begin on the third crotchet of the bar, creating a half-measure upbeat.

For this reason, the ‘gavotte’ by François-Joseph Gossec (1734-1829), which is widely taught to music students, is not a gavotte in the purest sense, as the phrases begin on the downbeat, at the beginning of the bar.

But later composers like Gossec wrote gavottes with phrases beginning on the downbeat rather than on the half-bar upbeat. The gavotte in Jules Massenet’s opera Manon also begins on the downbeat.

Another ‘upbeat’ example worth visiting, because it also features in teaching material of many music students, is the Gavotte I/II in Bach’s Orchestral Suite no. 3 in D major, BWV 1068. It is the central third movement of this five-movement suite. Incidentally the second movement of this suite is an Air (better known to many of us as the Air on the G string, after it was arranged for solo violin).

Bach fused the Italian and French styles with his own German musical tradition. This very engaging fusion of three national styles can be observed in this suite.

It is thought that the original composition of the suite was for strings and continuo alone; his son C.P.E. Bach wrote out the trumpet oboe and timpani parts, and Bach senior’s student Johann Ludwig Krebs wrote out the second violin and viola parts.

Bach called this suite an ‘ouverture’; its very name indicates its French influence. The French ouverture was meant to be a festive composition written for an occasion. It was meant to precede a stage-work, such as an opera or a ballet. Its form had become standardised under the strong influence of Lully. A grandiose Adagio opening indicating the entrance of the courtiers, would be followed by a gay, brilliant allegro section, to suggest the entertainment to come.

Bach largely adhered to this French tradition, but also greatly enriched it, melodically (often with the bass line itself taking the melody), and with great dynamism in harmonic progression and variety. He thus raised the stature of the French dance suite to musical heights, which were to pave the way for great serenades and symphonies of the following generation.

The rhythm of the gavotte is two light steps and one heavy step twice as long. Musically, this rhythm is a light upbeat and a heavy downbeat. But Bach didn’t intend for this gavotte to be danced; the rhythm of the dance was for him only a springboard for musical invention.

Gavotte I has two subsections, of 10 and 16 bars length respectively. Each subsection is usually repeated.

In Gavotte I, the lower instruments mimic the rhythm of the upbeat when the melody is playing the longer heavy step or downbeat.

The first gavotte is linked to a second (Gavotte II). In this second gavotte, Bach extends the upbeat to three times its normal length. Melodically, this becomes a broken chord or arpeggio. Its many appearances throughout the movement are punctuated by the trumpets.

Gavotte II also has two subsections, also usually repeated, and each 16 bars in length.

Bach makes use of an ingenious device at the end of each part of this second gavotte: when the upper instruments finish off the phrase, Bach cleverly uses the arpeggio, which is the rhythmical and melodic motive of this movement, as a bass; thus it acts as a musical punctuation mark.

If one were to look at Gavotte I as A, and Gavotte II as B, it is performed as A-B-A, with gavotte I ending the movement, usually without repeating each subsection.

In popular culture, a song ‘Ascot Gavotte’ features in the 1956 My Fair Lady by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. It is an ‘upbeat’ gavotte, with a suitably canter-trot tempo for the Ascot races.

(An edited version of this article was published on 18 June 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Dance in Music: the Minuet

If you are a student of a musical instrument, a music teacher, a concert-goer, or a music listener, you will have come across the word Minuet (Menuet in French; Minuetto in Italian. It might be useful to learn more about it, so we can give more context to the term the next time we find it in a concert programme, or attempt to play it. Hopefully this will be the first of many more columns that will look at other terms in music that have their origins in dance.

The minuet began as a social dance in 17^th century France; the name probably originates from the small steps (or ‘pas menus’; yes, the menu we come across in a restaurant essentially also means ‘small’, a ‘small’ list) which are part of the dance. It may also have derived from popular group dances of the time, called branle à mener (to move) or amener (to lead).

It is typically in triple (or 3/4; sometimes 6/8) time, to be danced by two people, at a moderate tempo or speed, with a light quality to it. It is this lightness and elegance that gives it its character.

In its dance avatar, it was usually in binary form. All this means is that it had two repeated sections, A and B. Each of these sections are usually eight bars each in length.

The minuet gradually began to be used out of the context of dancing, which allowed composers to use the idiom but quicken the tempo if they so wished. The Italian-born French composer (incidentally also a fine dancer) Jean-Baptiste Lully (born Giovanni Battista Lulli 1632-1687) used it extensively (at least 92 times, by one estimate) in his theatrical works, such as opera and ballet.

It later got incorporated into the musical form called the suite, or the dance suite, about which more in another column. Orchestral suites of the late 17^th century often contained one or even two minuets. And this could be true of suites for solo instruments as well. For instance, the Partita no. 3 in E major, BWV 1006 (basically a suite) for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) has two minuets as the fourth and fifth of its seven movements.

And the minuet began to evolve as well. The B section got expanded, often resulting in a ternary A-B-A form. And could get more complex than that as well.

Around the time of Lully, it became customary to give the now ‘middle’ B section over to a trio of usually wind instruments (Lully seemed partial to two oboes and a bassoon), although other combinations were also scored. Over time, this contrasting section began to be called a trio, even when scored for groups larger than three, or even the whole ensemble.

It is thought that Austrian composer Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715-1777) was the first to incorporate the minuet and trio into the symphony, and it remained an integral part, usually the third movement of the four-movement Classical symphony, until Beethoven tossed convention to the winds and replaced it with the scherzo. Again, more about this some other time.

A good example of a ‘true’ minuet, in binary form, with equal eight-bar sections, is the famous minuet from the finale of act 1 of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni.

A minuet often used for didactic purposes for students of the piano and violin is the Minuet in G major, (BWV Anh. 114), essentially a keyboard work thought to be by Johann Sebastian Bach included in the 1725 Notebook (Notebüchlein) for Anna Magdalena Bach, his second wife, whom he loved very much. I must confess I thought it to be the work of Bach too, and was surprised to learn that several musicologists now credit it to Bach’s contemporary, the German composer Christian Petzold 91677-1733). But music books for students, including the Suzuki book 1 for violin, still ascribe it to Bach.

Nevertheless, it still is a good example to look at. Its tempo marking is, as discussed before, Moderato, at medium speed, neither too slow nor too fast, and as its title suggests, it is in the key of G major.

The ‘A’ section is sixteen bars long, divided into two equal eight-bar subsections. The first six bars in each subsection are exactly the same. Without getting into technicalities about cadences (chord sequence at the close of a musical phrase), but suffice it to say that the remaining two bars act like a semi-colon after the first subsection, and a decisive full stop after the second, to use a literary simile.

The ‘B’ section begins in E minor, which is like a cousin to G major, being its relative minor. It too is sixteen bars long, and also has two eight-bar subsections. But there the structural similarity ends. The composer takes the contour of the first bar of the work and tweaks and plays with this idea; he also travels (this is called modulation) to new keys thus far unexplored. The first subsection ends with a lovely chord (D7) familiar to jazz and popular musicians as a dominant seventh.

The last subsection has a new idea for a melodic shape, but its last four bars recall the shape of the last four bars of the first B subsection in returning ‘home’ to G major.

I would encourage those interested to go to YouTube and have a listen. If you feel a sense of déjà vu (or perhaps that should be déjà entendu), it may be because, like me, you also grew up listening to the Stars on 45 compilations, and this melody, albeit modified, makes a brief appearance in one of them.

The 1965 pop song is ‘A Lover’s Concerto’, turned into a smash hit by the girl group the Toys. It takes ‘inspiration’ (plagiarism is too strong a word, and in any case copyright laws don’t apply for composers sop long dead) from just the A section of the minuet. It is modified by adding an extra beat in each bar, effectively making it in 4/4 time instead of 3/4. This is achieved by doubling the length of the first beat in every bar. The same A section is repeated over and over, but rising a notch with a key change each time.

And if you’ve seen the 1995 film Mr. Holland’s Opus, the title character (played wonderfully by Richard Dreyfuss), in trying to enthuse his school students about music in general and classical music in particular, cites this very song and makes the connection to Bach, although we now know the credit should go to Mr. Petzold. And what about Mr. Petzold’s opus? Was he a one-hit wonder, or did he write music just as memorable as this minuet? Definitely worth exploring.

(An edited version of this article was published on 28 May 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

My Summer of ‘89

I am sure every doctor remembers the cathartic sense of release after having passed the final MBBS exam. Textbooks could be shelved at last, and a whole year of internship stretched ahead of us invitingly. Real life would catch up with us soon enough, but for now the sense of freedom and abandon were exhilarating.

My own internship year of 1989 was sweetened considerably by the arrival of Dr. George Trautwein, violinist and conductor and visiting Fulbright scholar from Wakeforest University, North Carolina USA and his wife Barbara (also a musician, a clarinet player and band instructor in their home town of Winston-Salem). It was as if the stars had conspired to bring them to Goa at exactly the right time in my life.

Ever since the death of my violin teacher Carlos D’Costa at Santa Cecilia Music School in 1983, I had no steady guidance and felt the loss acutely. I would ambush visiting musicians backstage after concerts or in their hotel rooms just to get a few pointers on technique and other matters musical. So the arrival of Trautwein was a veritable godsend.

My internship year fell into a routine, where most evenings after work if not on-call, I’d go over to the Trautweins, for a violin lesson, or just to hang out with them. My friend Winston Collaco from Margao (who would also come up to study with Trautwein) and I were exactly the same ages as the Trautweins’ two sons Paul and Matthew, so they looked upon us as their own ‘children’ here in Goa.

Trautwein taught me so much in terms of violin playing. He encouraged me to climb into the higher reaches of the register, plumb the sonorities of all the strings using higher positions, and to try left-hand pizzicato, whole passages in natural and artificial harmonics, double- and triple-stopping, and schooled me in the different basic bow strokes like détaché, martelé, up- and down-bow staccato, spiccato, sautillé, and so much more.

We worked on such a lot: the Bach solo sonatas and partitas, both the Beethoven Romances for violin and orchestra (he encouraged me to perform the Romance in F which won me an all-Goa prize that year), quite a few Mozart violin sonatas and concertos, and even a few showpieces: I remember in particular the Sarasate Malagueña. And this is just the solo repertoire. I had never learnt so much in such a short time.

But I am grateful for much more than technique and repertoire. Just spending time conversing with the Trautweins opened a window to a whole new wide world of music, in terms of history, performance, standards and so many other aspects of the art and profession.

I dearly cherish the evenings we spent making chamber music, with George taking up viola and Barbara clarinet. On some subconscious level George became the inspiration to take to the viola myself, many years later. I remember playing the Mozart clarinet quintet, and string quartets by Mozart, Haydn, Johann Joachim Quantz and Frank Bridge.

Trautwein’s music lectures at the Kala Academy were far beyond anything we had encountered until then. Despite very basic facilities at the time (cyclostyled hand-outs and a cassette player, with Trautwein using his violin to emphasise a melodic figure or a rhythm), he took us to places we had never been before. His presentation on Mendelssohn’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ stays in my memory. No-one had ever explained a piece of music, its background, its structure, its clever use of motifs to represent characters in the narrative, before. It made music come literally alive to me.

He introduced me to the Bombay Chamber Orchestra (BCO), and I played two concerts under his baton there. The reason I am strolling down memory lane after almost thirty years, is that Providence brought two soloists from those concerts into my life again at the beginning of this year, in the span of less than a month. The first concert Trautwein conducted featured Rossini’s Barber of Seville overture, Bruch Violin Concerto (Madeleine Mitchell, soloist) and Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 in D minor.

The other concert featured Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso no. 1, two operatic arias (‘Pace mio Dio’ from Verdi’s La forza del Destino; and ‘Un bel di vedremo’ from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly) sung by Bombay-Goan soprano Celia Lobo, and the Bizet l’Arlesiene suite.

I followed violinist Madeleine Mitchell’s career during my UK years and was pleased to learn that she had risen to Professor of Violin at the Royal College of Music London. A Facebook correspondence with her last year got her on a tour of Dubai, India and Sri Lanka, and many of you attended her concert on 17 January 2017 at Menezes Braganza hall with Evelyn Dias as her pianist.

And a chance meeting at a heritage conference around the same time put me in touch with the daughter of Celia Lobo, who I had not met again since her concert in 1989. During those rehearsals, I would commute from Chembur, where Lobo also lived, to the rehearsal venue at the Max Mueller Bhavan at Kala Ghoda, and she very kindly would offer me a lift when we were rehearsing her arias.

Her daughter now filled me in on her mother’s recent recovery from a stroke, and as I happened to be going to Mumbai to NCPA’s staging of Puccini’s La Bohème, I offered to go with her to that concert.

And so fate reunited me with two soloists from the Trautwein BCO concerts in quick succession, after almost three decades. I continued to play with the BCO whenever my work schedule permitted, until I left for the UK in 1998.

The Trautweins also bestowed on me a huge legacy when the time came for them to leave: he left behind for me two whole suitcases crammed with audiotapes of music by composers I had hitherto never heard before: William Walton, Frank Bridge, Erich Korngold, Kurt Weill, Aram Khachaturian… the list is quite exhaustive. It set the tone for my listening and education about music for years to come.

I was fortunate to be reunited with the Trautweins in London and we brought in the new Millenium at Big Ben as it chimed twelve. Trautwein came to the UK again in 2008, and he drove several hours to meet with me in the US in 2012. All our meetings were marked by visits to museums and art galleries and stimulating conversation. We are still in touch, mostly by email, and despite health crises and scares, the Trautweins continue to enrich my life with their humour and news about their lives in music and the arts in general.

(An edited version of this article was published on 19 March 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Along came a Spider

I envy this generation of students for having the internet at their fingertips. It would have made our own student years so much easier. It must be so wonderful for students today to find answers in an instant.

In our second MBBS year, after having been cosseted away from the real world of clinical medicine with para-clinical subjects in Bambolim, we were let loose on patients in the wards in Panjim and Ribandar. Armed with Hutchison’s Clinical Methods we began to learn first-hand how to take a clinical history and conduct a thorough examination. We encountered a bewildering array of exotic and (to us at that time) obscure terms and conditions in our study.

The ones I’d like to focus on in this article are: Sydenham’s chorea, choreoathetosis and Saint Vitus dance. The reference to ‘dance’ and ‘Saint Vitus’ intrigued me. And who was Sydenham? Some medical pioneer of sort, perhaps. As Catholics, and having studied in a Catholic school, I knew my fair share of saints, but this was a new one. And what did he have to do with a neurological disorder, I wondered. Curiouser and curiouser.

But medical school doesn’t really reward you for such speculation. As I said before, I had other –ologies to deal with, so etymology took a remote, back seat. I don’t think I ever saw a clinical case of Sydenham’s chorea, so as long as I just memorised it as another cause of involuntary movements, I was fine.

Ironically, around that time, I was being exposed to tarantella music (I had a scratchy recording of Yehudi Menuhin playing Wieniawski’s Scherzo Tarantelle; and although I didn’t know it by name, I had watched the wedding guests dance a Tarantella Napolitana in the cult 1972 American mafia film, Francis Ford Coppolla’s The Godfather) but, very much like the Hindi masala films popular at that time where everyone is related but blissfully unaware until the very end, I didn’t realise everything was connected.

The pieces of the puzzle fitted together gradually over time. I learnt that chorea itself is derived from the ancient Greek ‘choreia’ (from which we also get the word choreography) meaning ‘dance’.

Then in my UK years, a TV documentary on the ‘dancing mania’ that swept through Europe between the 14^th and 17^th centuries caught my attention. It seemed really bizarre; apparently outbreaks of collective dancing, sometimes running into thousands of men, women and children, just dancing nonstop until they collapsed from fatigue. (Today’s flash mobs and full-moon parties would be hard-pressed to match such numbers). I learnt of the notorious ‘dancing plague’ in 1518 in Strasbourg, affecting hundreds of people, many of whom died from the exertion. And in this documentary, Saint Vitus was mentioned, which made me pay closer attention. At last this mystery would be solved.

Vitus was an early Christian martyr saint from Sicily, and regarded as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers in Roman Catholicism as their intercession was effective against different diseases, a tradition that began in response to the bubonic plague or Black Death (1346-1353) in Europe. Saint Vitus was specifically invoked against epilepsy. His feast day 15 June was observed in Germanic and Latvian cultures by dancing before his statue, which is how his name got lent to neurological disorders involving involuntary, ‘dance-like’ movements.

What caused these dancing en masse outbreaks, though? Theories abound, from sorcery and demons to ergot poisoning, a religious cult (revival of ancient Greek and Roman pagan rituals), to a mass psychogenic illness or epidemic hysteria, collective stress-busting and escapism as a means of momentarily forgetting their poverty and troubles.

In Italy, as it was believed to have been caused by the bite of a tarantula spider or scorpion, it was known as tarantism. Other sources state that dancing was thought to be the only antidote to a tarantula bite, the strenuous activity allowing the venom to separate from the blood. And the typical music the victims (‘tarantolati’) would dance to was called the tarantella.

As might be expected, they are energetic dances, in triplet time, usually 6/8 although sometimes even more complex. The dancer and the tambourine or drum player each up the ante trying to outperform the other, until one concedes defeat from exhaustion.

Examples in classical music abound. Wieniawski arguably derived inspiration for his Scherzo-Tarantelle from Chopin’s Tarantelle in A flat Opus 43 for piano, in turn inspired by Rossini’s song ‘La Danza’, also a tarantella.

The last movement of Mendelssohn’s fourth symphony (the “Italian”) is in the form of a tarantella.

Liszt inserts one (“Tarantella, Venezia e Napoli) in his Années de Pélérinage or Years of Pilgrimage (2^nd year: Italy).

The finale of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden string quartet is a tarantella, a dance of death or a danse macabre, a fitting ending to a death-absorbed work.

(Here is the Kelemen string quartet playing it during their tour of India, which also included Goa).

Tchaikovsky also appropriately uses a tarantella to close his Capriccio Italien, and one of his Pas de Deux in his Nutracker ballet is also a tarantella, complete with jangling tambourines.

The spider itself (wolf spider) got its name tarantula (lycosa tarantula) from the south Italian town on Taranto where it was commonly found. The term got loosely applied to other large ground-dwelling spiders. Despite the hype around them, their bites although venomous are not fatal to humans, and they themselves are prey to larger predators. 12 March is apparently World Spider Day, so a closer look at arachnids might be appropriate.

And I did eventually find out who Sydenham was. British physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) was nicknamed ‘The English Hippocrates’ for having authored ‘Observationes Medicae’ which became a standard medicine textbook for two centuries. He ‘discovered’ the disorder which today bears his name. Also known as rheumatic chorea, it is characterised by rapid, uncoordinated jerking movements affecting primarily the face, hands and feet and occurs following childhood infection with Group A beta-haemolytic Streptococcus.

(An edited version of this article was published on 12 March 2017 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)