Table of Contents or, A Guide to Blog Tags on gwenkrosnick.com

Études & Inspirations:

About my teachers, one at a time, very possibly written over my computer late at night while weeping a little bit (especially when I talk about Vivian Weilerstein and how her belief in me gave me the courage to go forth and be me). My teachers are miracles. These ones are a tiny attempt to distill and share the very specific wonders about them: an impossible task, but then I have never loved what is easiest, simplest, most within reach. Things my teachers taught me, words they said, descriptions of how to hold your hands just so and make Schubert come out.

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Études & Inspirations: Barbara Stein Mallow

Here is what you gather about Barbara moments into being with her - whether in a chamber music coaching, in the audience, or in conversation with her, eyes aglow with her rapturous love of music: there is no end to the belief she has in those around her, in music, and in the great, life-affirming things that happen when people make music together.

Études & Inspirations: Brian Alegant

I am 19, and I have just left my Music Theory III class in a shroud of ignominy after the teacher invited me to leave (emphasis very pointedly on the italicization). I skip down the second floor of the Bibbins building, defiant, triumphant, and even think I glimpse — can it be? (No, it can’t) — a faint whiff of sunshine falling into the huge glass diamonds of the windows facing Tappan Square.

Family Sagas:

One of my favorite genres of literature, from contemporary litfic to 19th-century Russian dachas and back again. But here, it is about my family, the people who are part of my heart, from the blood kind to the people I text pasta ideas to at 3am and whose intonation makes my heart feel at home. You’re gonna see my folks, you’re gonna see Ari; Laurie goes in this category (when I’m not writing very narrowly and specifically about her teaching, a glorious thing unto itself, but she is my family family). You are in for a whole lot of essays about my dog.

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Family Saga: A Bad Time to Laugh

About 12 seconds into the performance, I look down, and that is when I notice that I never changed out of my flip-flops. Ari’s in a suit and tie; I’m in my mid-twenties mélange of tight, stretchy, lacy black; Em’s in a long black dress. But my feet are ready for the beach.

Family Saga: A Changing Room (Brahms Cabin, with Laurie)

Laurie puts her violin down on the chair next to her.

“Here, just look at this and tell me if it’s a tick bite!!” She starts to pull her shirt up and I scream.

“No!!!”

“I don’t care if you see my breasts, I just can’t see it myself!!” I start laughing and put my head in my hands, the neck of the cello tucking into my elbow.

“What!!??” she cries.

I can barely breathe I’m laughing so hard.

Family Saga: Flying Debris

“I was hit in the head,” he shouts, “by flying debris!” His voice escalates at the end of the sentence, an adrenalined but very characteristic bit of word painting. The triage nurse stares at him, wide-eyed, and then looks at me. She hands me a clipboard, asks him to please have a seat, calls him “sir” as people always call my Dad.

Program Notes:

I know this one sounds dry: it is not dry. Those program notes, the dry ones (and…of course, I’ve read many, angrily flipping through program books while I sit in the audience, face turning red, brows furrowing so ferociously as to plant the seeds of a headache) are, in my ever-understated opinion, an injustice and an insult; a tale told by an idiot; a misuse of funds and words and brain cells. Program notes – mine that live here, I guess, might more accurately be called Performer’s Notes; but I’m gonna keep and co-opt the original title – should whet the appetite, make us voracious and meltingly obsessed with the music we’re hearing or about to hear, give us windows into what there is in a piece to love, to life for, to cause our eyes to fly open in disbelief and wonder. I’m going to share program notes I’ve written over the years – some from long ago, some from the last year or two, some yet to come – and will try, almost always, to share them with a recording, so you can listen as you read, refer to something, ask questions out loud as you listen and think about the pieces here. My only goal when I write notes, and in sharing them here, is for an audience – for you – to love a piece more.

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Program Notes: Beethoven String Quartet No. 1 in F major, Op. 18, no. 1

This is the 18-1 of my childhood, my dreams, my heart. My program notes, I hope, describe the way in which 18-1 is elemental, foundational, and influential of everything that came after – and the best thing I can say is: so too, is this recording, for me. My Dad’s quartet made this recording – which is actually a live performance, with the tiniest and most minimal editing from another live performance – in 1982, four years before I was born. My Mom loves to tell the story that she brought me to my first Juilliard Quartet concert when I was two weeks old: she carried me in a basket to Carnegie Hall, and sat with me backstage, listening on speakers, while they played a Beethoven Quartet Cycle. (If you’re thinking “This explains a lot,” you’d be right.)

Program Notes: Donald Martino - Trio for violin, violoncello, and piano

Donald Martino is one of the great American composers of all: a master of lyricism, humor, complex polyphony, and rhythmic drama. This is deeply-felt, deeply evocative music: it is Italianate, mercurial, gorgeously melodic; it is hot-tempered and emotionally complex; it changes mood at the virtuosic drop of an especially beautiful hat.

Cleonice Archives:

Memories from our youths (ha, ha), heavily featuring Ari and Emely, very likely about food. Occasional cameos by twelve-tone music, Vivian Weilerstein, hecklers in audiences and airports, the way it feels to come down the homestretch of the Smetana Trio or Brahms C major. Dating drama more likely found here than in the other categories, by simple dint of the fact that Trio Cleonice existed from 2008 to 2016 (i.e. most of our twenties, good god). Nostalgia and chocolate abound, as does vintage Kneisel Hall swag and conversation about how to pick a good tempo. One of my favorites to write, not least because I can tell you about the miracle of the restaurant our trio was named after, and how we miss it and its people so.

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Family Saga: A Bad Time to Laugh

About 12 seconds into the performance, I look down, and that is when I notice that I never changed out of my flip-flops. Ari’s in a suit and tie; I’m in my mid-twenties mélange of tight, stretchy, lacy black; Em’s in a long black dress. But my feet are ready for the beach.

Cleonice Archives: Shellfish Notes from Crystal River

“I am absolutely not going in here to eat.” I am usually a great food researcher, but I had made a terrible mistake, and now we were parked outside an enormous deserted mall in Crystal River, Florida (population 3,108). Looking up at the old bricks and the huge K-Mart sign, my fantasies of fried oysters and jambalaya began to drift away. I was starving, but my survival instinct would not permit this.

Love Letters: rarely, or possibly never, an actual love letter. (I have learned that really knowing something is impossible or definite is almost always projection, hope, madness.) Words about people, music, words, food, creatures, places that I love. Expect…Maine, dogs, pasta so lemony-chile-spiked-garlicky-amazing that you can taste it when I tell you about it. Expect book recommendations, because even if we are not in-person friends I would like to tell you about books I hope you’ll love.

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