Living-Room Concert

I had a great time today playing a kids' concert in my living room with Mara Milkis, a fantastic violinist from Odessa. Mara commented that the music we were playing -- Beethoven, LeClair, Vivaldi -- was originally performed in salons of palaces, and that we were in a modern-day palace. (My living room has a panoramonic view of the Hudson River, and it is pretty lordly.)

The one fly in the ointment was that we didn't have much of a take. Fortunately, two anonymous donors made the concert worth Mara's while. My concept for these presentations was that they would be self-sustaining, but maybe that's not in the cards. In the past, performers were often princes or princesses who had the time to master an instrument. The musicians in the nobility's house orchestras were regarded as servants and expected to behave as such, right down to taking out the trash. "Professionals" of the day not employed by church or palace were basically carnival curiosities playing showy, shallow music designed to appeal to the unsubtle tastes of the public.

Things began to change with with Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, who mixed entrepreneurship and public performances with musical mastery, but many performances up to the mid-19th century were private events. Guests did not pay. Perhaps my little production company will have to be nonprofit. As Gurdjieff used to say, "When you go on a spree, go the whole hog, including the postage."

I took a walk along the river when the day was done. I began reflecting on my grandparents as I looked at the Statue of Liberty. My grandparetns were Slavic immigrants who came not for any nebulous "liberty," but for the opportunity to make a better living than was possible in the Old Country. My grandmother Stella came through Ellis Island. Grandpa Andrew took another common route, through the Pennsylvania coal mines. They met in New York City and saved enough to buy a Connecticut farm; their youngest son, my father, went to an Ivy League school on scholarship at 16. He, in turn, paid for me to learn music. From peasant to princess in two generations -- that's America.