Classical Guitar at New Brunswick Library

Aside from being a place for an afternoon of great books, New Brunswick Free Public Library also can be a place for an afternoon of great music.

Classical guitarist Robert Dopira will present a program of classic music from 1-3 p.m. Feb. 23 in the Carl T. Valenti Community Room. The program will include Bach suites, Scarlatti sonatas, variations on Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and many other songs.

Mr. Dopira has been performing for 25 years at libraries, schools, churches, community groups and other organizations. He studied at Rutgers University and at Mannes College of Music, with Juilliard School and the Manhattan School of Music one of the three main conservatories in New York.

The program is free and open to the public of all ages. Refreshments will be served.

For more information or to register for this event, contact Kavita Pandey at kavita@lmxac.org or call the library reference desk at (732) 745-5108, ext. 20.

Making music

More and more each day, the piano belongs to her.

We've had an electric keyboard ever since I bought one for my wife, to honor the lessons she took in college when we were dating. But with our time consumed by children, by jobs, and by a thousand other things that steal our lives in bite-size pieces, the keyboard sat in the bedroom, and eventually in the living room, a silent member of the family whom we always meant to know better.

We are, after all, a musical family; heck, we're a musical species. Music is so essential to being human that studies have shown a mental link not only between music and speech, but also between music and mathematics, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits.

At the start of the year, I sat down with Oldest Daughter and outlined a course of music study that would involve practicing piano for at least 30 minutes a day. After all, she had been puttering about with the keyboard for years. It was time to get serious.

The initial lesson was simply to pick a song she knew, start with C-natural, and figure out the tune from there. In the five months since, she also has learned how to begin the song at a different key, and (lately) to play with both hands at the same time, her left hand two octaves lower than her right. Once she is more comfortable with these skills, it'll be time to take it to the final lesson, and learn which chords go with which notes.

Today I heard her play "When Somebody Loved Me," from "Toy Story 2." A couple months ago, it was "Castle on a Cloud" from "Les Misérables." These are songs with fairly straightforward melodies, I suppose, but she's at a place now where she can work out increasingly complex base melodies in increasingly short times. It took her days of practice to work out the notes for "Holy, Holy, Holy." Today she had  Jessie's song worked out in about five minutes.

The progress she has made is obvious even when she goofs off. Five months ago, she gave herself breaks by running her fingers up and down the keyboard in an irritated glissando or by hammering away at the keys in a raging flood of frustration. I would patiently try to wait it out, but invariably either she would walk away on her own, or I would need to remind her to focus and try again.

Now when she takes her leave of the song that's frustrating her, I hear a more delicate ripple of music as her fingers explore the keys on their own and weave the foundations of what one day could become actual songs. She's discovering the distance from one note to the next, and in finding that, she's closing the distance from her soul to the keys.

Some day, if she wants, Oldest Daughter will take formal lessons from an instructor, and she will learn to play piano the formal way, with scales, with metronomes, and with sheets all covered with quavers and breves, with cleffs and staves, with sharps and flats, and with a score of Italian phrases. When she picks up that key, she'll find that it unlocks the discipline and the knowledge that lead to vast new storehouses of musical knowledge that she'll be able to tap whenever she wants. That'll be good.

Until then, though, I think she's discovering the more powerful, more enduring thing. She's learning how to make music, all on her own.

The Sound of Music

This month's composer study: Stephen Sondheim.


Oldest Daughter spent part of January growing in her familiarity with Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind musicals such as "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Phantom of the Opera." As we've brought more of his musicals into the house via our Netflix subscription, Oldest Daughter has lamented Eva Parone's untimely death with refrains of "Oh What a Circus," while Middle Daughter has given voice to Eva's naked ambition, a la "Eva, Beware of the City."


Even the 2-year-old has got into the spirit of the thing, singing "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." This is all the result of a little calculated musical enrichment.

The older girls already are familiar with Sondheim, because of "Into the Woods," which DVD we've had the past five years. "Into the Woods" combines the fairy tales of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and an original tale about a baker and his wife; and takes the fairy tales from childhood into adulthood in the second act, when the giant's wife comes looking for Jack, who repaid her kindness by stealing from her husband and then killing him.

We're likely to watch "Into the Woods" again, and discuss some of its humanistic themes; but I expect our first trip down Sondheim Lane this month will be the Bette Midler production of "Gypsy," about the cuthroat world of show biz. (I love streaming video.)


The first Sondheim movie in our queue was the Tim Burton "Sweeney Todd." I can safely say, without fear of contradiction, that Beloved Wife and I found the movie to be absolutely hilarious. There is also no way in hell we are going to let the girls watch it for several years.


So, in its place, I've scheduled a viewing of "A Celebration at Carnegie Hall," which provides an overview of Sondheim's work, performed by a number of different singers. I especially like Glenn Close's "Send in the Clowns," and Victor Garber's "Ballad of Booth." A showcase like this provides a good overview of Sondheim's work overall, and may give us some ideas for other shows to explore.


At the moment, the other Sondheim musicals on our queue include "West Side Story" and "Sunday in the Park with George." We may also watch "A Little Night Music," though I'm still debating its merits, contentwise. There is no movie version of "Assassins" that I'm aware of, but we have soundtracks to both the original Broadway cast and the revival. She'll be listening to some of those tracks, at least.

So why treat Oldest Daughter to the music of Stephen Sondheim? I guess one answer would be that the fellow is just that good. He's won a Tony for lifetime achievement, and a Pulitzer and a number of Grammy awards for specific projects. The New York Times has called him the greatest person working in theater today.


His book for "Assassins" is a good example of his intelligence; it treats a complex and emotional subject -- people who want to kill the president of the United States -- and deals with it in a nuanced way. Sondheim gets us to laugh at buffoons like Charles J. Guiteau and Sara Jane Moore, and makes us see Andrew Zangara and Leon Czolgosz as the pathetic and angry men they were, but also lets us see John Wilkes Boothe the way he saw himself, so that by the end of the musical, audience members can't help but feel disturbed as they find themselves sympathizing with the asssassins and rooting for Lee Harvey Oswald.


The journey helps us to discover that the line between moral decency and reprehensible criminality is finer and easier to cross than we would like to think. The show makes us laugh, but it also makes us cringe at the monster in ourselves, which is the hallmark of good art.

Sondheim has written some great musicals, sometimes just the lyrics, sometimes just the music, but often both. By the end of the month, the goal is to hear a lot of his music around the house as well.

Playing by ear

Oldest Daughter has been doing a decent job learning the piano.

I started pushing her about two weeks ago to start playing the piano for at least half an hour each day, usually at the start of the day. Music is an essential part of being human, and studies have shown that our brains pick up a fundamental connection between music and mathematics, and even between music and speech, so that becoming "fluent" in an instrument can have other benefits. (Some anthropologists have speculated that humans sang before we developed speech.)

Besides, she's been puttering about with our keyboard off and on for years. It was time she got serious.

She's been doing a fantastic job  The only guidance she has received has been to start each song at C-natural, and then figure out from her knowledge of the song which note to play next. It's a method that takes time and patience, and will never get her to Carnegie Hall, but it's got fairly rapid gratification in that a player can usually work out a song fairly quickly.

With no help but her own ear and lots of practice, Oldest Daughter has figured out how to play four or five songs the entire way through a verse, with nary an error aside from the difficulty of maintaining a steady tempo. Today I had her play for me the songs she's worked out, and she played "Holy, Holy, Holy," "My Bonny Lies over the Ocean," "Silent Night" and "Joy to the World." She's also been working on "Peter's Denial" from "Jesus Christ Superstar" and a host of other songs, but she's got the idea.

So today, following her successful performance, I gave her lesson two: Figure out how to play those songs starting at a key other than C-natural, and no, playing it an octave up or down doesn't count. It's got to be a completely different note.

The idea here, of course, is that she is teaching her ear to judge the correct relationships among the keys, and training her fingers to move to the right spots at the same time. While she's doing this, I also am working on getting her to hold her hands correctly, and to use just her right hand for the melody line. We'll start using the left hand for harmony, and then for chords, soon enough.

Meantime, Middle Daughter has received a flute, and is very excited by it. Now we just need to figure out how she can play it, since neither of us knows how, I suspect this means that she will be getting lessons, since I've no idea how to play a flute and would have no clue on where to start.