Letter to my students: Notes about composition and improvisation.

Hi All,

Thanks for an enjoyable and productive session Tuesday morning. This email is to remind you that you have a little assignment for next week's rehearsal: to make a sketch of an idea for a composition.

A few reminders:

  1. A sketch is just that --- some marks on paper that outline an idea. It is the seed of a composition; the start of a process. 
  2. An idea can come from anywhere. It can be anything. It does not have to first be musical notes. 
  3. Don't over-think this. Whatever you write will always and necessarily be only the outline of the music you will eventually make. It might help to think of there as being an elastic tension between the text (what is written) and the music (which will be sounded when we rehearse, develop and perform the music).
  4. Don't judge your ideas just as they're being born. Treat them with kindness and curiosity.

OK, that's the short version of this message. For more information, I invite you to read on…

Read More
Program notes for the Kalmanovitch/Maneri/Warren/Herbert/Quartet

My program notes for upcoming performances with Huw Warren, Mat Maneri and Peter Herbert, in which retrospection solves the problem of what to write about a program of improvised music. 

This project was born out of my frequent collaborations with Huw Warren at the Summer School of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Huw was a friendly presence my first year, a decade or so ago. Idon’t remember how it was that we came to perform together at the tutors’ concert, but I think I might have angled for it.

Years before that, while I was still an undergraduate at Juilliard, in the heydey of ‘alternative’ music, I had toured with an acoustic trio called the blackgirls. In the long hours driving between Midwestern college towns, we listened to music. We’d all fallen in love with 'Some Other Time', a 1989 recording of jazz standards by the great English folksinger June Tabor. Huw, Tabor’s longtime collaborator, played on that record, and I recognized his name from the liner notes that I’d unfolded and folded into the cassette case many times.

Read More
Notes on an anniversary

Five years ago today, on January 23 2009, I was hit by a car while riding my bicycle. I was lucky. In the instant when impact seemed inevitable, I turned the front wheel of my bicycle some crucial fraction, and I survived with nothing more complicated than a fractured pelvis. Still, my injuries changed the scale by which I measured physical fitness. Fitness became getting out of bed, then walking with crutches, then walking with a cane, then hopping and squatting, then gradually forgetting that anything had ever happened. 

Read More
Tanya KalmanovitchComment
February 2013 Newsletter

The students and faculty of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music arrived in New York this week. After performing to sold-out houses at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, they’ll cap off their tour with a three-day residency at the New England Conservatory in Boston.

ANIM opened in June 2010 with a mission to rebuild Afghanistan's shattered musical culture. The school offers music and general education to some 150 students, many of them orphans and child workers. Significantly, a third of the students are girls.

For the past three years, NEC and ANIM have been joined through a growing network of interpersonal relationships. NEC alumni Robin Ryczek and Derek Beckvold have taught as full-time faculty at ANIM, and eight visits to Kabul by five NEC faculty, students and alumni have created a kind of dynamic, person-to-person diplomacy. 

Read More
January 2013 Newsletter

November and December passed quickly and with some difficulty in my part of the world. When Hurricane Sandy visited New York my neighborhood, Red Hook, was among those badly hit. Although the storm passed swiftly through the news cycle, many of my neighbors are still living in its aftermath. So it was with special pleasure that we observed the passing of 2012 earlier this month.

The storm was a tear in the fabric of everyday life. I spent the first week on the ground floor of my friends’ house, salvaging books and belongings from the destruction of six feet of sewage and seawater. During that time the features of ordinary life became precious. Each salvaged book was a world of ideas; a good dry glove, a treasure; a table of food with friends around it, a universe. 

Read More
October 2012 Newsletter

The two classes I teach for New England Conservatory’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship department have become high points of my week. They’re sites of lively, complex and illuminating discussions about the meaning of music, making a difference, and making a living. But if anyone had told me back when I was in music school that one day I’d become a lecturer on entrepreneurship, I’d have laughed pretty hard.

I decided to become a musician at least in part because I wanted nothing to do with business. I wanted to be an artist, and to me that meant a life that aligned heart and mind, and body and soul. I didn’t see how business and the bottom line could enter into it: like a lot of the students I speak with, I drew a thick line between music and money, quietly pretending that one had nothing to do with the other.

Read More