A Minute with Miles

Much of what we know about the great composers we’ve learned from their letters.

A violin may look perfectly symmetrical from the outside, but on the inside it’s not symmetrical at all.

Bernstein stopped and said, “I’ll give ten dollars to anyone who can tell me which piece this Walton Concerto is directly modelled on.” I raised my hand.

For at least six hundred years, composers have been borrowing the melodies of folk songs and incorporating them into their compositions. And there’s a good reason: they’re good melodies; they’re melodies that have stood the test of time—that have never lost their hold on people.

In a famous letter to his father, Mozart once wrote, “you know I become quite powerless whenever I am obliged to write for an instrument I cannot bear.” He was talking about the flute, and the occasion of the letter was a commission Mozart had received to write several flute concertos and quartets for flute and strings.

Now, if ever there was a musician who was entitled to say of a Bartók quartet, “This is the way it goes,” it was Robert Mann. He knew those quartets inside out, and had recorded them more than once.

When musicians and music scholars prepare performances of works by dead composers, they often get stuck in arguments over determining what the composers’ “original intent” was. And while I certainly recognize the importance of scholarly accuracy and authenticity, and of staying true to the composers’ wishes, I think that sometimes musicians forget that dead composers were once alive.

Virtually all major composers of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries, of whatever nationality, have made important, and in some cases extensive contributions to the chamber music repertoire.

You could write a book about the life of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann– and as it turns out, Telemann himself wrote three – three separate autobiographies.

I had the enormous good fortune as a young man to get to work with the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich, or “Slava,” as everybody called him, was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra when I played in that ensemble, and with all his other engagements he still somehow made time to give master classes just for members of the orchestra.