Setting the Composer Free

Irena Orlov (1942-2018)

Prelude

by Ralitza Patcheva

The monument of an artist are the artist’s works. When this artist is one of the most incredible pedagogues that ever lived, it is through the rich and diverse tapestry of the works of the artist’s students that we realize the living magnitude of the artist’s loving contribution to our world.

For those of us who were lucky to know Irena Orlov everything I try to write about her will seem pale in comparison to our memories of Irena’s indescribably vivid, varied, all embracing artistic personae. For those who want to learn more about Irena, the two part documentary Reaching Beyond is a wonderful source.

On April 19, 2020 which would have been Irena’s 78th birthday, six students of Irena decided to celebrate Irena in a way, which they hoped she might have liked. While I participate in the role of a narrator and organizer, Boris Ivanov, Edward Neeman, Sam Post, Zak Sandler, Leo Svirsky express their thoughts of Irena not only through their memories of her, but also through music. Living, newly composed music, whose existence in one way or another was awakened by Irena.

Because, you see, Irena gave each of her students a unique gift- the gift of finding the music within yourself. And, may be not surprisingly, this gift has led Boris, Edward, Sam, Zak and Leo to one of the most exalted and mystical, grueling and yet rewarding musical vocations- that of a composer.

What I find really fascinating is the immense variety of styles and approaches in these five composers' work. I will not venture to put labels on what you are about to hear, but do not be surprised if you feel after listening that you have been taken through a widely diverse gamut of musical possibilities.This should not come as a surprise to those who knew Irena. If ever there was a classical piano teacher who knew deeply and advocated for all the kinds and styles of music, it was Irena. Whether it was Renaissance music, Indian Raga, the symphonies of Mahler, the St. Matthew Passion of J. S. Bach, the filigree jazz improvisations of Oscar Peterson, the piercing film scores of Nino Rota, the by turns mystical and jarring music of the Soviet Avant-garde of the 1960’s and 70’s( Irena knew personally many of the composers, poets and artists of this period) or the performance of a musician on the street (be it a musician playing Bach on a bayan, or a musician improvising rhythms on several upturned plastic buckets)- to all of those, Irena could teach you to listen with love and veneration of the musical act.

I will not tell you in detail about Boris Ivanov, Edward Neeman, Sam Post, Zak Sander and Leo Svirsky, because I trust that after hearing their music, you will want to find out more about them yourself. And, thankfully, you will be able to find out a lot of their music and a lot about them on the Internet.

I will just mention that in different times during the 1990’s and early 2000’s all six of us were extremely lucky to study with Irena at the Levine School of Music (now Levine Music). And, being somewhat older, I was extremely lucky to be able to see and hear how Boris, Edward, Sam, Zak and Leo began to grow into the fascinating musicians they are today under the loving guidance of a teacher who knew how to set you free- Irena Orlov.

And now, let the music begin.

Allemande

by Zak Sandler

I was six years old when I started studying with Irena. I remember lessons at Levine (the old campus in Georgetown) and at Irena's apartment. I had fine motor challenges at the time, so Irena gave me exercises to do with a tennis ball. She used a stuffed elephant named "Ti-ti-ta" to teach me rhythm. And we did "flying" exercises (not as fun as it sounds), which I teach my students today!

Irena taught me that music can tell a story, even without words. There's a dramatic progression of events - a beginning, middle, and end - and most of all, there are characters. They may appear as a musical theme, a change in dynamic or articulation, a new tempo or feel.

As a musical theater composer / lyricist, one of my greatest joys is storytelling through music. I find it especially satisfying when the music and lyrics tell different stories. I wrote a song called 'He Smiles" in which the singer has just been dumped, despite taking care of her partner's depression and mania. She "unfriends" him on Facebook, and ends by singing: "She takes a breath, and she smiles". Even though what she's saying is positive, there's a minor note in the accompaniment under her last line, showing that she's not completely happy; she's still in pain.

When I was 12, I noticed that the keys of my Kawaii upright extended way back into the piano. Five of them - A, B, D#, G#, C - were crooked, so as to fit around the metal structures inside. I played these notes for Irena, and she taught me how to expand that seed into many variations. I ended up writing a 6-minute "Crooked Key Symphony", which won the Friday Morning Music Club Neva Greenwood Composition Competition, and was performed by the Mount Vernon Youth Orchestra.

Nineteen years later, I wrote an autobiographical musical called A BIT TOO MUCH ABOUT ME, in which 4 actors and I portrayed my journey with mania and depression, polyamory and divorce, and choosing between the career I wanted and the career I was "supposed" to follow. Irena hadn't seen my NYC shows, so when I invited her and said how special it would be to have her there, I didn't expect her to come. She wrote back: "Dear, Zak. I will try to come. Love, Irena." I started crying.

And sure enough, she came. Afterwards, she came up to me, got on her tiptoes (there's only so much that 5-inch wedges can do for a 4'10" lady), kissed me on the cheek, and said "I'm so proud of you."

Little did I know that was the last time I'd see her.

Everything I've written, and everything I will ever write, has Irena within.

This song, "Build My Own", is my big solo at the end of A BIT TOO MUCH ABOUT ME, referenced above.

Thank you, readers, for being a part of this tribute to Irena! She's truly a Star (literally, now), and her Light shines down on us every day.

Courante

by Sam Post

As Ralitza said in her prelude, Irena helped me find the music in myself. I didn’t do much composing when I was a student of Irena’s, and I didn’t know it at the time, but she set me on a path that would lead me to a life of writing music.

I was nine or ten when I started taking lessons with Irena, and for whatever reason, I had the idea that she would be a strict disciplinarian, that she would make me take practicing much more seriously. I’m not sure where the rumors came from, or if my young mind invented them, but all I can remember from our early lessons is funny technique games. (If Irena were here today, this is where she would tell the story of how she taught me to play a scale, in groups of four, with accents on the first note of each group. I still remember this method and use it with my students; the part I don’t remember, except through Irena’s telling, is that I kissed my hands after I played the whole scale!)

Much of our time together was spent playing and studying the music of Bach, and Irena urged me to take my love of and knack for playing Bach to its extreme. Shortly after starting our lessons together, Irena allowed (urged? assigned? It’s hard to remember exactly how it went, but left me feeling that we were making the choice together) me to play Bach’s C# minor Fugue from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier—one of the few 5-voice fugues for keyboard. I was just 11 or 12, so it was a risky bet, and one that really cemented my personal identification as a Bach-guy. Three years later I played the entire Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier.

I wouldn’t be the same musician or composer today without all that early Bach immersion. Everything I write, every new style I explore, always carries with that early experience and exposure.

One of the biggest questions I grapple with as an artist, performer, and composer, is: how far out of the comfort zone do I venture? If I’m satisfied with one approach, how much of a risk do I take to try something new? I think these days, the art world (and the world of composition in classical music) is tilted too far toward experimentation, toward shock value, and away from the fundamental questions of beauty. Irena always encouraged me and her students to take risks and explore new avenues of musical passion, but she also kept me focused on the fundamentals of human emotion that are always my guiding lights.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been working on exploring new rhythmic approaches in my own writing (the risky side), incorporating the influence of Latin styles, hip-hop and so forth. But for me the success of my music still comes down to fundamentals of harmony, rhythm and counterpoint that haven’t changed, only evolve around the edges as the circumstances change and as I hear new things.

Irena was in most respects the least strict music teacher I ever had, and that’s been an enormous challenge for me as a teacher. While many teachers I had through the years attempted to tell me the right way to play a piece, I think Irena understood that if playing music isn’t personal, whether it’s one’s own, or written by someone else, then there’s hardly a point in playing it. I think sometimes teachers can forget that the performance of written music is necessarily a collaboration between composer and performer, mediated through both their experiences and circumstances. Maintaining that perspective has been a challenge, but essential to my philosophy as performer, composer, and most of all, music teacher.

Sarabande

by Leo Svirsky

" When the Baal Schem, the founder of Hasidism, had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer; and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation later, the Maggid of Meseritz was faced with the same task, he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: “We can no longer light a fire, but we can pray.” And everything happened according to his will. When another generation had passed, Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov was faced with the same task, [and] he would go to the same place in the woods, and say: “We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayers, but we know the place in the woods, and that can be sufficient.” And sufficient it was. But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down in his golden chair, in his castle, and said: “We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of all this.” And, once again, this was sufficient."

Yosef Agnon, quoted in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 349–5, Gershom Scholem is also a part of the bibliography of Henry Orlov's magnum opus The Tree of Music

The problem of history is that each generation is forced to keep its secrets. Sometimes it's the wish to alleviate the burden on future generations in the hope that certain problems of the past simply will not return, but more often, it is that the real stuff of history, is itself unspeakable. The Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov said that music is “a song the world sings about itself”. In trying to put this song in writing, the composer grasps that thing that Felix Mendelsohn described as too precise for words, a trace of the inner life of the world, the hidden transcripts of a time on Earth.

My own family history was not so different from Irena's. My father left then-Leningrad in 1979, a stateless person, as part of the “Jewish” immigration. At different times most of the family left, several others settling in the Washington DC. Area. It is not just that I have difficulty imagining the life of this generation in the USSR, but the same is true of this generation (the Soviet “boomers”) and the generation that survived the war. Even in Russia, Irena was far more open about life and history than many. There are things about my own history that I learned from her, and the music we worked on.

I first met Irena when I was 9 years old. Some of the first pieces she gave me were children's music by Edison Denisov. This was the first time in my life someone had shown me music written by someone they knew! A little later, she assigned (one of the only pieces she assigned me actually!) Schostakovich's Prelude and Fugue no. 8. The prelude imitates Jewish folk music, and the Fugue is probably the most sombre in the cycle. She told me how she met Shostakovich, playing this piece for him in a competition, and that he confirmed her suspicion that the fugue theme was on the phrase “pomagitye,” help us, the phrase uttered from the starving survivors of concentration camps. She had actually overheard the argument between Shostakovich and Kondrashin about the text of the 13^th Symphony (in the end censors inserted a kind “all lives matter” verse about the holocaust, omitted from foreign performances). Near the end of his life, I played the 24^th prelude and fugue for my maternal grandfather (who emigrated to the US via Ellis Island from the Pale of Settlement in 1920), who recognized the theme from his childhood, as a song in Russian. My mother actually hadn't known that he knew any Russian for all 88 years of his life prior!

Other important pieces Irena introduced me to were Shostakovich's Aphorisms, early experimental works from the “revolutionary” period in Soviet culture, and Schoenberg's Six Small Pieces ending with the famous Mahler funeral chord. My first serious attempt at composition, a set of 7 pieces for piano, followed the morbid and abbreviated forms of this early 20^th century music. When I was 12 I went to Moscow for the first time for lessons with Elisso Virsaladze, and Tatiana Zelikman. I was absolutely not at the technical level (at least with Chopin) that would have been expected in Moscow, and I spent both lessons crying. At the end of my lesson with Zelikman, she said, “The only good thing I can say is you're young so you have time..., but I heard you write music yourself, that's strange, can you play some?” Then, “wow, but this is actually real music!” Irena picked the 4^th one of these pieces for Reaching Beyond. I don't think I wrote anything near the level of that 4^th piece for about 10 years...

I think the year after this, Irena began to introduce me to the music of her friends, the generation of composers, after Denisov. The first CD was Arvo Part's De Profundis, the shock for me that a living composer could write something that sounded like this was absolutely visceral. Then came Alexander Knaifel, Chapter 8, and Svete Tikhy, Valentin Silvestrov's Symphony no. 5 and Exegi Monumentum, Gubaidulina's 7 Words and Rejoice. Knaifel's music was especially important for me, the construction of pieces based on secret words and secret mathematics! It was maybe possible to make music without giving away the entire form! I also played the amazing piano sonata of her old friend Tatiana Voronina (who I saw passed away last year), where the incessant rhythmic pattern juxtaposed with Latvian folk themes was explained as anxiously waiting for a call from a Latvian guy she was hoping to hear from...

A typical musical education entails the accretion of techniques, composition is no different. There is an abstract technical mastery disconnected from history, and an emotional filter over it. But, what Irena made clear to me, was that these techniques always have histories, and these histories are always the stories of peoples and places. It was impossible for me to think about Webern's Variations without thinking about Maria Yudina's performance of it and the circumstances around it, or Glenn Gould's visit to Russia. My own interest and association with so-called “contemporary music” in many ways mirrors that of the Soviet avant-garde. An exploration of techniques because of an interest in the ideas that lie behind them, only to abandon them, when realizing the lack of historical thinking behind those ideas. Like Silvestrov, I don't feel like my pieces start “at the beginning”, and while my own motivations are different, I share a suspicion of the technocratic ideology lurking behind what seems to be “aesthetic” progress.

As a student I lost a lot of time following the terrible advice not to compose at the piano. It is absolutely essential that pianists and especially composers listen to a lot of different instruments and musics, but real music always comes from a human being and an instrument. In general I see composing more as a recording of music than as its construction, and music is necessarily the trace of the passage of a few persons through a brief unity of time. The “contemporary” music that particularly inspired me, was only performed by small groups of close friends, and then often only in private or semi-private contexts. My own musical practice stems from this, and has very little to do with the ethos of professional ensembles that juggle multiple premiers a season. The longer I work as a musician, the less certain I am about what a composer is or does, but fundamentally it has something to do with friendship.

(visual design by Ana Smaragda Lemnaru)

Leo Svirsky provided the following links for further listening and reading:

https://silvestrov.bandcamp.com/album/2

with pieces dedicated to Knaifel and Kancheli

An excerpt of Henry Orlov's (an eminent musicologist and Irena’s husband) magnum opus “The Tree of Music” is available in Issue 5 of the journal Blank Forms, together with writing by Masayuki Takayanagi, C. C. Hennix, Maryanna Amacher, and more

https://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/blank-forms-blank-forms-vol-5-aspirations-of-madness-book/BLANK.005BK.html

Variations, Waltz and Cadenza

by Edward Neeman

I started studying with Irena when I was eleven years old. At the time I had already been taking composition lessons for a few years. I remember one lesson in particular in those first few months when I came to a lesson and I played a passacaglia I had written. I remember Irena started asking me questions: “Why did you start on that particular major seventh chord? Why not a normal triad?” It was unsettling for me, because I had never been asked to justify my compositional decisions. In that same lesson, Irena told me that she was very good at teaching composers to play their own music. I was surprised, thinking that surely the person who wrote the music would know how their music should be played better than anyone else! That's what I thought at the time but I am really not so sure anymore.

The last time I really seriously worked on my own original compositions was in 2008 when I was living with Irena for a few months. It was a time when both of us were in limbo—I was taking a break in my studies and she had lost her husband Henry a few months before. I remember that she would go to the Levine School in the afternoons and teach her students, and I would stay at home and compose. Composition seemed like the natural thing to do, in the circumstances, and it kept me inspired to keep developing as a musician. I haven’t kept any of the pieces that I wrote during that period. The process of composing was much more important than the finished product, something that has always been true for me! I am much better at dreaming up brilliant projects than polishing anything off.

During this period in 2008, I began to fully appreciate her incredible talents as a teacher. Every teaching day, she would come home full of stories about the amazing things her students had done. She kept careful track of the personalities and accomplishments of each of her students, always encouraging them and nurturing them even when they had long since moved on from her studio. Few teachers have that much respect for the individuality and the unique character of every student. Maybe that's one of the reasons that she helped so many young budding composers find their niche.

I’m mostly a performer and a teacher these days. My compositions of the last ten years are mostly piano duet arrangements for my wife Stephanie Neeman and myself. I recently completed my first commission—three arrangements for one piano, eight hands. Writing arrangements still gives me the thrill of trying something new, something I’m not completely comfortable with, and that freshness carries over to my playing.

There’s no question that the experience of composing has influenced how I perform. It also kindled my enthusiasm for working with my composer colleagues! In a few generations, the music of our time will illuminate our place in world history, in ways that a written factual account cannot hope to accomplish.

Gigue

by Boris Ivanov

I was eleven years old when I started studying with Irena. I had been studying piano for three years when I started with her.

Irena always fostered a compositional approach to playing the piano. Engaging children to be creative was in her DNA. She wouldn’t just give a student an answer, she’d give the student the tools to discover the answer for themselves. This attitude, in itself, is perhaps why so many of her students went on to catch the composition “bug”. When I worked with Irena early on, we’d create characters together – personifying notes, intervals, and passages and infusing them with personality until the piece we’re working on would become a small musical world unto itself. At this point in my musical journey I was very shy to create anything other than what was placed on the music stand. I remember her encouraging me to sing, to invent, and I remember myself getting very embarrassed and sort of “shutting down,” because releasing what’s in your head into the world is a scary thing. She helped immensely to chip away at those boundaries until finally, essentially decades later, I became brave enough to experiment and to find my own compositional voice.

We currently live in a world where the myriad musical genres which exist are available and researchable with the tap of a button. I believe the modern composer’s role, above all else, is to be open-minded and educated about the many flavors of music which exist. An established composer often works within their particular area of expertise, but an emerging composer must be like a musical sponge. Researching, listening, thinking, and experimenting are essential in finding and forming your own unique compositional voice.

Those of us that are both performers and composers are lucky. We are able to write with the performer in mind, which can serve to make our music more alive and organic. I’d encourage every single emerging composer who doesn’t have a strong performing background to develop at least a minimal amount of expertise at an instrument – and doing this has never been easier than it is now. The technological tools available to composers allow us to sit at our keyboards and be able to instantly become clarinetists, cellists, percussionists, guitarists, and so many more things. We have literally the entire musical world at our fingertips – which can be a burden as much as it is a blessing. I would encourage emerging composers who aren’t performers to reach out to performing musicians when composing and try to understand how the instrument they’re writing for can be most effective.

As blessed as we are with musical technology, we can’t forget to look inward. Composing is like performing in a lot of ways – it requires constant practice. We must constantly engage with our own creativity by being musically imaginative without a piano, pen, or computer in front of us. Oftentimes the best ideas come to us when we’re humming in the shower or driving a car – when we physically cannot develop and edit and rewrite – we can only create and try to remember. I believe very sincerely that pushing a student to develop this kind of musical imagination is where Irena Orlov truly shined, every single day. She pushed those of us who were too scared to sing.