Summermusic, Part One: Bruch & Brahms in "Love & Loss"

Now that we’re halfway through the year – in fact, believe it or not, halfway through the decade – and there’s little doubt summer is here, it’s time for Market Square Concerts’ annual Summermusic, a series of three concerts of chamber music, all held at the Market Square Presbyterian Church in downtown Harrisburg (where, by the way, it’s air-conditioned).

The first program, entitled “Love & Loss,” is this Sunday, July 13th, at 4:00. Wednesday’s program, “Places and People,” features Schubert’s famous “Trout” Quintet, written for a trip into the Austrian countryside (with or without a day spent fishing) and Dvořák’s String Quintet in G Major which he dedicated “to my nation.” The final concert of the series, on Saturday, July 19th, also at 7:30, is called “Trials & Triumphs,” and includes Shostakovich’s 2nd Piano Trio, written at the height of World War II, and Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio, written during the last years of more than a decade of Napoleon’s near-constant warfare. 

(Stay tuned, as they say, for additional posts about the next two concerts in the series.) 

Music, among its many attributes, can help us become a little “absent-minded” about the reality raging around us. French philosopher Henri Bergson described in an essay from 1911 how the artist must “put on blinders” to focus on artistic perception but not necessarily neglecting the present (or the past), “absent-minded” in the sense of the mind being “absent” from current distractions that would interfere with the creative process. In turn this allows us, the audience (in this case, the listeners), to find a few moments’ respite from the world around us, whether it’s our own personal cares or more long-term concerns about the future.

In most cases, listeners tend not to be aware of what I like to call the music’s biography, what events in the composer’s life or in the times during which it was composed may have affected its creation. Sometimes, there’s a dramatic connection that makes it obvious – Shostakovich’s trio in the third program is a case in point, whether we know exactly what its circumstances were – or, as in Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, how the music came about is immaterial to your enjoyment of it.

Many listeners also tend to think composers write their music in a vacuum, that, whatever sparks their creativity aside, they simply write. That may be true in many cases – someone commissions them to write a piece for them (like Schubert and his “Trout” Quintet); Beethoven feels like writing another piano trio – and sometimes it’s not a very “up-lifting” inspiration: say, the need for money (like it or not, artists, even the Great Beethoven, needed money to pay the rent).

Brahms’ popular Horn Trio is a case in point. We think of its finale bubbling along and imagine “pleasant impressions upon spending the summer in the countryside” even if Brahms’ publisher was not enthusiastic about the use of the horn which he thought would affect sales (money was to be made in the “amateur market” and how many horn-players out there were going to buy a piece like this?). But there’s a lot more going on behind the music than we might think.

Max Bruch, c.1912

The program opens with a suite of eight pieces for clarinet, viola, and piano which Max Bruch called, rather unimaginatively, “Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano.” Schumann might write collections of short “character” pieces with titles implying a story, and give the set an evocative title like “Carnival” or “Scenes from Childhood” with individual movements like “Harlequin” or “The Rocking Horse.” Less imaginative or literary-minded composers might call it a “Suite” or dub the components things like “Prelude No. 7 in E Minor.” So, no, Bruch implied no such direct or indirect story-telling connection with his 8 Pieces despite one being called “Romanian Melody” and another “Night Song.” Otherwise, they're designated by tempo, all but one of them in a minor key. For instance, the 4th piece could suggest something causing a state of anxiety, yet he calls it simply Allegro agitato.

It’s a rather odd combination, a clarinet and a viola with a piano. Given Brahms’ business-minded publisher who suggested he would only publish those clarinet sonatas and the clarinet trio if he prepared a version for viola instead of clarinet. What would this publisher have made of a piece for clarinet and viola?! At least when Brahms wrote his Clarinet Trio, he used a cello to balance the clarinet’s register. What was Bruch thinking when he decided to write for a combination like this? Obviously, he must have liked it: he composed a concerto for the same combination of instruments the very next year.

But we’re missing a key component of the pieces’ origins: Max Bruch wrote it for his son, Max Felix Bruch, who was at the time 25 years old and just starting his career as… a clarinetist! While I haven’t found any mention of the violist in question – otherwise, why not just write a bunch of pieces for clarinet and piano? – the concerto was written specifically for his son and the violinist Willy Hess, a friend of Bruch Senior’s whom he’d helped land a great teaching gig in Berlin. Hess’ father studied with Ludwig Spohr, one of the greatest violinists of the early-19th Century who wasn’t Paganini; and Hess himself studied with Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest violinists of the second half of the 19th Century and for whom both Brahms and Bruch wrote concertos. In 1910, Hess returned from America where he’d been concertmaster of the Boston Symphony, and that was the year he started teaching at Berlin’s famous Hochschule für Musik. It was also the year Bruch composed these 8 Pieces for his son and since Hess was equally comfortable as a violist, perhaps that was all the incentive Bruch needed to imagine something as academic as “how do I solve this problem of writing for two instruments in basically the same register?”

(See photo, left. Here's something not every composer can claim: Bruch as a statue on his hometown's City Hall.)

Bruch, in his day, was perhaps best known as a composer of choral music. Not surprisingly, he married a singer, Clara Tuczek, from a family of well-known singers and her niece was a pianist who studied with Clara Schumann. She was an alto. Bruch admitted he always had an affinity for the alto voice, whether that was before or after he met Clara Tuczek. And both the viola and the clarinet play in the alto register. Hmmm… 

Oh, and just for the biography’s sake, Bruch and Clara married in January of 1881. Their first child, Margarethe, was born the following year; Max Felix, in May, 1884. By the age of 25, young Max was a theory teacher at the music school in Hamburg “and a promising clarinetist.” Oh, and here’s another biographical detail: young Max married Gertrude Kadner in 1910. 

Wedding Present, anyone?

Remember Brahms’ publisher Simrock’s concerns about those clarinet pieces of his? Simrock also published Bruch’s music and they published an arrangement of the 8 Pieces for Violin, Cello, and Piano – in other words, your garden-variety Piano Trio. Simrock also issued each individual piece separately, if the musicians wanted to “mix and match.”

When Bruch wrote his 8 Pieces, it was 1910 and he was now 72. If you hear the music first, you might be surprised to discover it was composed two years before Schoenberg wrote Pierrot Lunaire, and Stravinsky was beginning work on The Rite of Spring. Yet even if you’re familiar with Bruch’s other music – and he wrote over 200 works, including operas, symphonies, concertos, and many choral works – the fingerprints of Robert Schumann are often not far beneath the surface (listen especially to No. 4, Allegro agitato).

Bruch may never have been the innovator that Beethoven or Schumann were, and while he was considered a “conservative” like Brahms in an age dominated by contemporary composers like Wagner and Liszt, once the musical fashion shifted with the new century, his musical style went from being “conservative” to “passé.”

He may be best known for his first Violin Concerto, written in the 1860s, and a setting of the Kol nidrei dating from 1881. His Scottish Fantasy, a violin concerto in all but name, which Peter Sirotin performed last year with the Harrisburg Symphony, is another favorite work of his, if less played than respected. His most popular piece during his own lifetime was his adaptation of twelve scenes from Homer’s Odyssey for chorus and orchestra (listen to Scene No. 5, “The Tempest at Sea”), premiered in 1873, though less played than talked about these days, if either.

Bruch died in Berlin in 1920 at 82, a little over a year after his wife. His tombstone is inscribed with the words, “Music is the language of God.” Among his last works were two string quintets and a string octet completed in the year of his death. Listening to this peaceful opening of the octet, it’s hard to believe this was composed in the depressing days following the end of World War I. Not only that, Schoenberg was developing what would become his “serial” style and Stravinsky, after The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and L’Histoire du soldat, was evolving what would become his “neo-classical” style.

Because Bruch, a Protestant, composed a setting of the Kol nidrei, a Jewish prayer, in 1881, many assumed he was therefore Jewish. (However, he used Scottish folk songs in his Scottish Fantasy and wrote several works based on Swedish folk music, though no one has ever accused him of being a Scotsman or a Swede that I’m aware of.) Nonetheless, this association was enough for the Nazi Government to ban all of Bruch’s music throughout Germany between 1933 and 1945 for his being “a possible Jew.” Since his music was out-of-fashion with the times, anyway – and otherwise overshadowed by Brahms – it didn’t take much for his music to practically disappear in Germany.

Incidentally, Young Max Felix did not stick with music. Like many musicians and teachers, he eventually abandoned his career (for whatever reason) to become “a salesperson for a recording company,” and died in Berlin in 1943 (speaking of “difficult times”) at the age of 59. His younger brother Hans, a promising painter, unfortunately died in 1913 of blood poisoning at the age of 26. The youngest of Bruch’s children, Ewald, became a police officer and “fastidiously collected his father’s musical scores and manuscripts, which he bequeathed to the Institute of Musicology at the University of Cologne,” Bruch’s hometown, before he died in 1974.

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The Brahms Horn Trio is a work Peter Sirotin told me was one of his favorites. There are many performances available on YouTube with the usual caveat about recording sound or video quality, but one of my favorites, despite its old mono sound, is this amazing 1957 recording with the incomparable Dennis Brain, one of the greatest horn players ever, recording shortly before his death in an automobile accident. Though you may not have heard of his colleagues, pianist Cyril Preedy and violinist Max Salpeter, I hope you'll find the performance as vital as I did when I first heard it years ago. Alas, it is only available in individual movements:

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1st Movement (Andante)

2nd Movement (Scherzo)

3rd Movement (Adagio)

4th Movement (Finale)

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Brahms in the mid-1860s

Johannes Brahms had moved away from his native Hamburg to become – eventually – a famous composer and pianist in Vienna but, like a good son, he kept in touch with his family, especially his mother whom he idolized, particularly after his father, following 34 years of marriage, decided to move out. Not much is known about Christiane Brahms except she was 17 years older than her husband, a seamstress who was otherwise “hardly known outside the house.” Brahms interrupted his summer in 1864 to return home for a visit, helping his father set up a new place to live (and, incidentally, finding him a job as a bass player in the Hamburg Philharmonic) and consoling “two weeping women,” his disconsolate mother and her dependent elder daughter, Elise, the only one of the three children still living at home.

The youngest child, Fritz, long supported himself as a pianist who taught and performed in Hamburg, even playing Brahms' “Handel Variations” in public which Clara heard and reported were “totally beyond him.” (Small wonder: I could say the same of many pianists I've heard play them...)

Christiane Brahms in 1862

The following winter, Christiane wrote a long rambling letter to “Hannes,” worried about her weakening eyes and her hands becoming unsteady (a major concern for any seamstress, even one now in her mid-70s).

Three days after she'd mailed the letter, Fritz sent his brother a telegram: “If you want to see our mother again, come at once.” He hurried home to Hamburg but arrived two days after she had died suddenly of a stroke.

He wrote to his friend, Clara Schumann, who volunteered to come to Hamburg if she could be of any help, but Brahms hardly knew what to do himself, after getting his sister situated with friends (she, who never had a job, never had anything of her own beyond a tiny allowance from her mother, never knowing what to do without her mother telling her). When he returned to Vienna a week after the funeral, a friend stopped by to visit and found the composer playing Bach's Goldberg Variations. Without stopping, through his tears he told his visitor about his mother's death – and then after that rarely spoke of her publicly again.

Meanwhile, Clara, after taking a treatment for her arthritic hands called “animal baths” (“plunging her hands into the entrails of some freshly killed creature” – who knew?!), resumed her concertizing, a London tour because she needed the money. As he often did with a new work, Brahms sent her some sketches for “a so-called German Requiem” but not one setting the traditional liturgical text. Coming so soon after his mother's death, it would be easy to assume it was written in her memory but he had been thinking about it for some time. Even the melody he had used for the movement, “All Flesh is as Grass,” was a sarabande originally from his first attempt at a symphony (if you can imagine that sombre dance as the substitute for a scherzo!) begun shortly after his mentor Robert Schumann, Clara's husband, threw himself into the Rhine a decade earlier (that symphony's opening theme had already found a home in the first movement of his D Minor Piano Concerto).

Then it was time for his annual summer vacation – a working vacation when Brahms, just turned 32 and recently moved to Vienna where he'd become the director of the Vienna Singverein, escaped the urban distractions in order to compose. This summer he chose a village outside Baden-Baden, a quaint town near the Rhine deep in the Black Forest, mostly because Clara Schumann and her family were there and had recommended it. His day consisted of a fairly predictable schedule, awaking at dawn, then taking a walk after some strong coffee, followed by four hours of composing, then lunch either at Clara's or at a local inn, more work, then more coffee, and another visit to the Schumanns' where he usually stayed for dinner. From the windows of his rooms, he could see the forest-covered mountains just beyond the road into town.

the modern "French" Horn

While he finished two works that had been on the front burner for a couple of years – the G Major String Sextet and the E Minor Cello Sonata – the new work he began in those rooms, between walks and coffee, looking out over that forest, was a trio for horn, violin and piano, not a very typical combination for chamber music. The way most composers made their money, now that the days of being a paid employee of some wealthy, music-loving aristocrat had passed, was writing works that could be purchased and performed by amateur musicians in their own homes, not necessarily by professional musicians in concert halls. There would be little demand for a piece like this, Brahms knew, especially since he specified it should be played on the old-fashioned natural German waldhorn (or forest horn) which without valves had a limited range of possible notes it could play, already made obsolete by the modern valved instrument we know for some reason as the “French” horn, capable of playing everything within the chromatic scale. As it is, beyond its premiere, the work is rarely performed as Brahms intended though horn players today are sensitive to the differences between the instruments, especially the “color” of the tone when playing what are called “stopped notes.”

Natural Horn (with a bunch of crooks)

In order for the natural horn to play notes outside its single overtone series – a horn in E-flat was limited only to notes within the E-flat Major scale or those in common with a key like, say, G Major – the player would then have to add a length of tubing to the instrument called a “crook” to change the home key of the horn so it could now play in that key. But this left out any quick modulations between keys because one would have to take out one crook, put it quietly aside, then insert the next crook and then re-tune the instrument (a risky venture mid-performance). So either the composer would change only to keys the horn could play in with its few possible pitches the keys had in common – or did without the horn in the new key. In some orchestral works, two pairs of horn-players, pitched in different keys, could solve the problem, but Haydn, for instance, always tried to avoid such a solution because it was an added expense which the Prince frowned upon.

This is the reason why all four movements of Brahms' trio are in E-flat, rather than branching off into any number of possible related keys for variety's sake, meaning once set-up and tuned, the horn player didn't have to deal with additional, extraneous lengths of pipe. Now, while a horn could play the pitch G in the key of E-flat Major, it could not play the pitch G-flat which you'd need for E-flat Minor. But in order to manage this and other such notes, a horn player would insert his hand deeper into the instrument's bell and “stop” the pitch, which required additional control of the emboucher (the pressure of the lips on the mouthpiece) in order to “lower” the played pitch. This gave the note a distinctly darker tone, one the modern valved (“French”) instrument would not have. But Brahms wanted this effect specifically and it is most tellingly used in the third movement, the slow, mournful movement in E-flat Minor.

A scene in Germany's Black Forest

There is a natural (no pun intended) sound especially in the opening movement if we remember that the dawn of German Romanticism in the early-19th Century often evoked hunting calls from deep in the German forests (like the mysterious Black Forest around Baden-Baden) – think of the whole story behind Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz with, its sinister elements aside, all those hunting choruses full of the folksy sound of men's voices and the more prevalent sound of the horn both as a solo instrument and as a quartet. Bringing such an instrument into a small concert space – much less a family's living room – would have been very different from having a violin or a piano imitating these very sound effects. But it is only in the finale that Brahms lets the horn “go,” romping through the woodlands – off on the hunt! – with a barrage of traditional horn-calls.

Yet, coming back to that odd slow movement where the player has to “stop” the note to play the darker minor third of the key – the G-flat – that is the very pitch Brahms chose to end the movement with and he would not have done that if he didn't specifically want that “veiled” tone (he could just as easily have ended the horn on an E-flat and avoid this different sounding note). The whole movement is a mournful dirge and though he may not have specifically said so, how could it not have been inspired as a gentle memorial to his mother who'd died only six months earlier?

And why the horn in the first place? His publisher would only agree to the piece if he allowed an “alternate” version with a viola instead of a horn since, viola-jokes aside, there were more violists for family musicales than there would be horn-players. The same thing would happen almost 30 years later when his late Clarinet Sonatas also entered the world as Viola Sonatas despite originally being inspired by the brilliant playing of clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld for whom he'd composed them (as well as the Clarinet Trio and that indescribable Clarinet Quintet, another masterpiece of the chamber music repertoire), sounding so different when played with a viola (no matter how well) instead.

As far as I can tell, there is no mention of a famous horn player to inspire Brahms to write this trio in 1865, like the musician Josef Leutgeb for whom Mozart composed at least five concertos in the 1780s.

So why did Brahms choose to write a Horn Trio? Why not a Piano Trio (he had already written at least one of those)? He had already completed two Piano Quartets (the third, begun earlier, wasn't finished for another ten years), not to forget the unforgettable Piano Quintet, another masterpiece, published the previous year (it was originally a sonata for two pianos before it became a string quintet before Brahms decided it should really be a quintet for one piano and string quartet!).

Or, if he were writing a tribute to his mother and he was now the conductor of the finest choir in Vienna, why not a choral work? Ah, yes, well... there's the German Requiem (for a time, he considered calling it “A Human Requiem”) which would find its final form three years later when he added the last movement to be composed, the soprano solo setting the text “You now have sadness” and ending with “I will comfort you as one whom his mother comforts.”

Perhaps – and this is only a matter of conjecture since Brahms never mentioned the connection and would likely have scoffed at the suggestion (he usually brushed off any reference to his mother's death inspiring such music in the first place) – it is because, when Brahms was a child, his father played the old natural horn and taught his son Hannes how to play it as well (in addition to the piano, the boy also took cello lessons). There are few surviving references to his mother in the family history anyway, but perhaps there was some memory, something he recalled – did she like the way he played the horn? something he played on it that she especially enjoyed? – that made the connection a personal one, not just the idea “why, I think I'll write a horn trio”?

Brahms who loved his family now saw his family in shambles: his father had left his mother and not long after that, coincidentally one assumes, she died. His elder sister Elise needed caring for but his younger brother Fritz was not so inclined and so it was Hannes, writing from Vienna, who made what arrangements she needed and sent money to her. Not long after their mother died, he and Fritz (never close) had a further falling out and rarely communicated.

Perhaps the loss of his family is more behind the Horn Trio than just the death of his mother? Again, pure conjecture – but what goes through one's mind in the quiet times of such situations?

Who has not been there, metaphorically in Brahms' shoes, receiving a long and loving letter only to find out it is too late to respond? Such news rocks the very foundation of our world and those things you think of, things you should have done, could have done, perhaps put off doing, maybe recalling an argument or something that could have been better handled, even a chance to say good-bye, continue to haunt us. But now it is too late.

In October, then, back from Baden-Baden with a completed Horn Trio in his suitcase, Brahms receives a three-page letter from his usually tongue-tied father. In a long round-about way, Johann Jakob introduces Karoline Schnack, the woman he has cautiously asked to marry him (he is 59; she is 18 years younger). Brahms, fortunately, took the news gladly and developed a warm relationship with his new step-mother, soon even calling her “Mother.” Her own son, also named Fritz, with his frail health was a special concern for her and, calling him “the Second Fritz,” Hannes in his quiet generosity saw to it he was also cared for.

Clara Schumann, of course, had dealt with the death of her husband Robert nine years earlier, kept from seeing him during the last years of his life after that horrible afternoon when he suddenly threw himself off that bridge and was then locked away in an asylum outside Bonn which might as well have been half a world away.

Later, Brahms had returned to Vienna after his mother's funeral when Clara wrote to call off an intended visit. He'd half-expected the news, he replied, joking how he'd even cleaned up his room, bought new coffee cups, cleaned the plates and ordered fireworks and preserves (!). That she was well and “bracing [her]self with all sorts of edifying things such as philosophy” was, however, good to hear, even if he meant it ironically.

“The world is round,” he continued, “and it must turn; what God does is well done; consider the lilies [the equivalent of “stop to smell the roses”], etc; or better still, don't think at all, for things cannot be altered and a wise man repents of nothing.”

– Dick Strawser 

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(I can write a symphony but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to keep the fonts consistent in a Google Blogspot post... My apologies...)

 

The Jasper Quartet, Part 2 – Prokofiev and Two Works Written in the Last Ten Years

The Jasper Quartet, lounging (courtesy of WRTI's Fanfare)

(This post covers the rest of the program the Jasper Quartet will perform on Sunday at Temple Ohev Sholom in uptown Harrisburg. You can read about the Haydn here.)

It is difficult to put young(er) composers into the same kind of context as “the classic canon.” First of all, not only have they (obviously) not finished their course trajectory but many of them are still in what traditionalists would call their “First Period” if we go by the standard “Early-, Middle-, and Late-Periods.” With composers like the two who are not Haydn and Prokofiev on our program, looking at when their works were composed, we’d see Gabriella Smith (born Dec. 26, 1991) who graduated from the Curtis School of Music in 2013 and wrote Carrot Revolution when she was 23. It would be safe to say she’d still be in her “Early Period” at the time. Jungyoon Wie (born in 1990) earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2020, a year after she composed Han: she would’ve been in her late-20s then, so five years later (now) she may well be facing the traditional 30-Something Style-Change Transition experienced by so many composers, most famously by Beethoven (who went from the Haydn-inspired String Quartets of Op. 18 to the world-shattering Eroica Symphony three years later and in the meantime realized he was going deaf), or by Igor Stravinsky who, forced into extra-musical influences courtesy of World War I, put The Rite of Spring of 1913 behind him for a sparer approach with Neo-Classicism with Les Noces which he began in 1914 when he was 32. Speaking of context…

Who knows, if we could fast-forward 20 years or so from now, where we might find Gabriella Smith or Jungyoon Wie and what their music then might sound like in comparison to what we’re hearing today?

Gabriella Smith (New York Times) She is "a composer whose work invites listeners to find joy in climate action. Her music comes from a love of play, exploring new instrumental sounds, and creating musical arcs that transport audiences into sonic landscapes inspired by the natural world. An “outright sensation” (LA Times), her music "exudes inventiveness with a welcoming personality, rousing energy and torrents of joy” (NY Times).

Gabriella Smith described the genesis of her “Carrot Revolution” (speaking of attention-grabbing titles):

“I wrote Carrot Revolution in 2015 for my friends the Aizuri Quartet. It was commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia for their exhibition The Order of Things, in which they commissioned three visual artists and myself to respond to Dr. Barnes’ distinctive “ensembles,” the unique ways in which he arranged his acquired paintings along with metal objects, furniture, and pottery, juxtaposing them in ways that bring out their similarities and differences in shape, color, and texture. While walking around the Barnes, looking for inspiration for this string quartet, I suddenly remembered a Cézanne quote I’d heard years ago (though which I later learned was misattributed to him): “The day will come when a single, freshly observed carrot will start a revolution.” And I knew immediately that my piece would be called Carrot Revolution. I envisioned the piece as a celebration of that spirit of fresh observation and of new ways of looking at old things, such as the string quartet – a 250-year-old genre – as well as some of my even older musical influences (Bach, Perotin, Gregorian chant, Georgian folk songs, and Celtic fiddle tunes). The piece is a patchwork of my wildly contrasting influences and full of weird, unexpected juxtapositions and intersecting planes of sound, inspired by the way Barnes’ ensembles show old works in new contexts and draw connections between things we don’t think of as being related.”

Coming right after the Haydn, this will show you more about “what can a string quartet be?” over the course of intervening centuries. Where it might be fair to say composers like Haydn were limited in the musical choices they might hear that could inspire them, and that writing a dance in the Gypsy Style in the scherzo of his Op.20/4 Quartet was not only noteworthy but also bold for his day, as composers opened themselves up to the folk music of their own ethnic backgrounds (think Smetana and Dvořák or the Russian Five), these days, what sounds couldn’t possibly influence young composers today, seeking to find their creative identity? As Ms. Smith explains, “Early music strains meet bluegrass, jazz, rock, raspy electric guitar riffs, and the post-minimalist thrill ride of John Adams’ Shaker Loops. The voices of the string quartet emerge anew, occasionally with jubilant shrieks and earthy percussiveness.”

Here’s a performance of “Carrot Revolution” by the JACK Quartet (who’d performed an amazing program for us at Temple Ohev Shalom in 2011), one of the leading ensembles in the performance and promotion of the Newest Music:

 

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Jungyoon Wie. "Themes of identity, family, and personal story have been the center of her compositional journey."

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Jungyoon Wie is a composer, educator, and pianist based in San Francisco. 

Her family came to the United States when she was 16 when she began taking her first composition lessons before earning a Bachelor’s degree in Music Theory and Composition, then receiving her DMA in Composition at the University of Michigan in 2020. Her mentors include Gabriela Lena Frank (whose 4 Folk Songs we heard at our March concert with Trio Gaia).

About a more recent work of hers, written in 2021, she writes about her own feelings as an artist in society: “In my personal life, I seek a balance between being an individual and being a part of a community. I believe there is a way to have them both without compromising each other. There's been a lot of violence and hatred recently toward others whom we think are different from us. As a composer, musician, and citizen, I often times feel helpless. However, this piece is my way of showing how we can create something beautiful while preserving our own individuality. I invite you to listen to this piece and also the stories of people around us.

This applies just as well to the work that opens the second half of the Jasper Quartet’s program, the first of four-movements from a work called “Han” which she wrote in 2019. It is based on a Korean folk song called “Saeya, saeya, parang saeya” or “Birds, birds, blue birds.”

She writes how the Korean term han originates from the Chinese character (恨) for pity and regret, and “amalgamates two different characters, one that denotes the mind and the other the state of limitation or stagnancy. This idea of impasse in one’s mind is central to the concept of han in Korea, a feeling of unresolved anger, grief, and regret that has been prolonged and accumulated over time. It has been identified that han, like trauma, suffers from its delayed manifestation which results in its ambivalent, paradoxical, and transgenerational quality.”

The traditional Korean folksong, heard at the beginning, “is both a lullaby and an elegy. It was sung to commemorate Bong-jun Jeon, one of the leaders in Donghak Peasant Revolution (1894-95), an armed rebellion in Korea by aggravated peasants against the corrupt government. It was also sung by the widows of the Jeon’s army as a lullaby for their babies. I found that these historical qualities of the original melody resemble the complexity of han that encompasses grief, regret, and hope. The original melody is stated at the beginning, and its fragments appear in different shapes and emotions, sometimes peaceful like a lullaby and other times explosive and pleading.

Her most recent works include A Prayer for Peace (2024) for string orchestra exploring different emotional progressions in her journey of immigration and Starlings (2025) for the Kronos String Quartet and string orchestra. For the 2025-26 season, her ongoing projects include a new work for the Del Sol String Quartet inspired by her experience of pregnancy and motherhood.

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Prokofiev, 1940s

And, speaking of context, who knew what would happen to Sergei Prokofiev when he was in his late-20s?  

He was only 26 when the Russian Empire fell and eventually became the Soviet Union following the October Revolution of 1917. When he was writing works considered “revolutionary” in their own right (completed in September, 1917, most of it written when he was 25, even his Neo-Haydn “Classical Symphony” was a “modernist” idea), who would’ve guessed many of his colleagues would flee for points west – like Rachmaninoff – or that he himself would finally give up a year later (his real excuse, he said, was that he did not have the peace to compose in a country torn apart by civil war), and head not for Paris but, going east, eventually reaching San Francisco (there being no ships headed from Vladivostok to his preferred destination, South America)?

And while Rachmaninoff could barely compose at all in his new home – with rare exceptions – Prokofiev produced, for instance, the opera The Love for Three Oranges before realizing the United States was not that interested in what he was writing. Eventually, he ended up in Paris where initial indifference led to momentary acclaim: 1923 was a particularly good year and he chose to stay, having given up on the indifference of the American public: hostility, he’d said, was better than indifference… But his style was changing as he not only matured but faced the reality that followed World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution: the acerbic harmonies and rhythms began to include mellower textures in his Third Piano Concerto, not that his “steel fingers” couldn’t still produce the old effects. Sketched in Russia, begun in America, completed on a French beach during a holiday, it was premiered in Chicago (ignored) and performed a year later in Paris (acclaimed) – he was 32.

But he decided to visit Russia – or rather, the Soviet Union – where he found a sense of “the prodigal returned” that still took four years to finalize. After shifting back and forth between Paris and Moscow, he opted for Moscow in 1936 – he was now 45 and if his style wasn’t changing on its own, it would change because of Stalin’s ideas about art and music. In the West, there was a lot of discussion about all of this, and questions about how you’d view, say, his Fifth Symphony, an undoubted masterpiece, and propaganda like the 1939 cantata, Hail to Stalin. Was “Peter and the Wolf,” one of the first works he completed after his return, a communist allegory? (Shostakovich had similar issues – all you need to do is read about the context behind his Fifth Symphony. And for every masterpiece, critics would point out, for instance, his cantata, Song of the Forests, praising Stalin’s reforestation project, and proclaim him a “party hack.”)

Let’s focus, instead, on how his 2^nd String Quartet came about.

In the summer of 1941, Prokofiev, recuperating from a heart attack a couple of months earlier, was staying outside Moscow, enjoying the countryside, working on some scenes from the ballet Cinderella, when the grounds-keeper’s wife ran up to him with news the German army had just invaded the Soviet Union. Immediately, the composer in him recalled pages from Tolstoy’s great novel about Napoleon’s invasion of 1812, and he realized he must write some kind of opera based on War and Peace.

After laying siege to Leningrad, the Germans declared “the road to Moscow was open” and, as a result, many of the composers and other artists based there were transported to the safety of the interior – it was more difficult to get Shostakovich out of Leningrad (you can read about his experiences there and the symphony he had also been inspired to write by current events).

Prokofiev joined his friend, fellow-composer Nikolai Myaskovsky, on a train for the Caucasus, specifically the town of Naltchik on the northern edge of this mountainous region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. It was a small city – town, more like it – and the capital of what is now called the Kabardino-Balkaria Republic, an autonomous state within the Russian Federation, located north of the former Soviet republic of Georgia and just northwest of the region occasionally referred to as “the break-away Republic of Chechnya.” It’s also home to the highest mountain in Europe, Mt. Elbrus.

Anyway, in 1941, they weren’t sure what to do with all these famous personalities arriving there: one thing, a local government official suggested, was that these musicians should acquaint themselves with some of the regional folk music and use them as a basis for one of their compositions. He arranged for them to hear “field recordings” and to bring in some of the local musicians to play for them.

Prokofiev later told a friend, "I felt that the combination of new, untouched Oriental folklore with the most classical of classic forms, the string quartet, ought to produce interesting and unexpected results."

And that result was his String Quartet No. 2 in F Major which he completed quickly in less than a month. Myaskovsky, meanwhile, also wrote a string quartet (his 7th) also in the key of F Major – did he use any of the same tunes Prokofiev did? did they compare notes as if divying up which tunes they’d use? – and then did Prokofiev one better, completing his Symphony No. 23 in A Minor based on Kabardinian themes by late-December.

Whatever the local official might’ve felt – “well, at least Myaskovsky wrote us a symphony…” – even if Myaskovsky’s works may not be that well known outside Russia today (or inside, for that matter; I don’t know), certainly Prokofiev’s quartet’s international fame did help put his little corner of the Caucasus on the musical map.

In three movements, the opening of Prokofiev’s quartet unfolds in a lively standard classical sonata-form complete with three themes. The first is “a bold, jaunty march,” a Kabardinian folk theme one writer described as “combining childlike naiveté with menacing belligerence.” The middle movement is both a haunting slow movement based on a Kabardinian love-song interrupted by a dance-like scherzo which “transforms the love song utilizing a kinetic motif from the folk dance Islamey,” which also inspired Mily Balakirev to compose his Oriental Fantasy in 1869. The finale returns to the opening’s energy with a mountain folk dance complete with solo cadenzas. Prokofiev “manages to create a synthesis of authentic folk materials, skillful classical forms and the colorful swagger of the composer’s own personal originality.”

When I can, I like to include “videos with scores” sometimes because those are also good performances and decent-enough recordings, and several viewers who are not musicians find it interesting to “follow along” even if they can’t read music. Others miss the elements of a live performance. In this case, I’m going to include two different ensembles: the live performance is with Russia’s State Borodin Quartet; the second, with score, uses the Emerson Quartet’s recording. Take your pick!

In the previous post, I’d referred to Haydn as a “Germanic” composer rather than a German composer and not, as some have pointed out in the past, an Austrian. “Germany” as a nation did not exist until 1871, and Austria was, in Haydn and Mozart’s time, only part of the “Holy Roman Empire” until 1806. The Austrian Empire was more Hungarian and Balkan but it was the ethnic German Austrians who ruled these lands and dominated those cultures.

The same had happened in Russia. As the Russian Empire grew from the days of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th Century to what turned into the Soviet Union after 1917, it absorbed lands of various ethnic groups from Ukraine, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic States in the west to the wide open ranges of Central and Far Eastern Asia, even for a while colonizing Alaska – but all of this was not only ruled but dominated by ethnic Russians, regardless of the local culture. With the creation of the “union” that became the USSR, it became important to be aware of the difference between Russians and “Soviets.” I remember many phone calls from a Ukrainian friend back in the ‘90s (many of my readers may recall the Harrisburg Symphony's former concertmaster, Irene Palashewskij) when I worked at a classical music radio station who would remind me that “Russian” and “Soviet” were not synonymous, that Khachaturian was Armenian, not Russian – a Soviet composer – and that while Prokofiev was Russian, he was technically a Soviet composer; Rachmaninoff, who emigrated to the United States after the Revolution, remained a Russian composer – but did he ever really become an American one?

So, with the evolution of a Soviet state, Stalin felt the need for an inclusive Soviet culture that would reflect the vast ethnic diversity of the USSR. The government officially encouraged its composers and artists to use music and images associated with these “ethnic minorities” in their music to create not an imposed Russian culture but an amalgamated Soviet one. This made Prokofiev’s use of Kabardinian themes in his quartet a double purpose: recognizing the contribution of the people of the Caucasus, an homage to his hosts during his 1941 evacuation there, much the way George Gershwin returned from France with his musical souvenir, An American in Paris; but also creating a work that including the Kabardinian identity into the Soviet cultural sphere.

* * ** *** ***** ******** ***** *** ** * *

Given the recent Russian Invasion of Ukraine, I thought it might be interesting to examine a bit of the history where Prokofiev found himself as Hitler’s army moved across Russia in 1941. The region of the Caucasus had long been a challenging stronghold full of mountains and valleys filled with different tribes and small tribal principalities. Generically known as “Circassians” to Russia and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Kabardinians were one of 12 tribes of this Turkic people who called themselves the Adyghe, already established in the region by the 4th Century, and Christianized by the Byzantines. Later, in the 17th Century, many of them converted to Islam through the neighboring Ottoman Empire in return for military security against invading Tatars. Then, in 1714, Peter I (known to the West as “the Great”) formulated a plan to conquer the Caucasus.

This is also the area that 18th Century German “racial theorists” – treading on tenuous ground here, these days – determined was the “Home of the Caucasian Race” and that the Circassian people had a “superior beauty” which, they felt, “was how God intended the human race to be.”

All that aside, as the Russian Empire’s expansion that also saw the colonization of Alaska, the army of Catherine the Great invaded the Caucasus in 1763 and ignited a 101-year war that ended, finally, in the defeat of these proud and heroic warriors – not to mention the fact the mountainous region didn’t make it easy for the Russian troops. Battles waged and victories and defeats alternated back and forth, renewed after the Circassian Army was nearly annihilated in a 1806 battle. Not much is known of this war in today’s history books: by the time Nicholas I officially annexed the region in 1864, it would be officially glossed over following the Circassian Genocide, an example of “ethnic cleansing” in which the Russians either killed or expelled between 95-97% of the Circassian population, most of them fleeing to the Ottoman Empire. Russian and Soviet state officials have gone so far as to claim the conflict "never happened" and that Circassia "voluntarily joined Russia in the 16th century."

Another Russian figure associated with this region was the poet, novelist, and general “social misfit” which glosses over the controversy of his poem about Pushkin’s death which landed him in the Caucasus for his first exile. He would fight hand-to-hand combat during the Circassian War in 1840. His novel, A Hero of Our Time, would place him in the forefront of Romantic Russian Literature. However, he died in a duel at the age of 26.

Another figure would be the composer Mily Balakirev, more famous in the West as the Founder of the Mighty Handful, five Russian nationalist composers. Balakirev made three visits to the Caucasus between 1862 and 1868, and during one of these – note the timing with the end of the war – he says he met “a Circassian prince” who played several folk songs on “his instrument, very much like a violin.” One of these became the main theme of his “oriental fantasy,” Islamey for solo piano, one of the great knucklebusters of the 19th Century and hence a favorite of Liszt’s. The dance is a traditional lezghinka better known as a “saber dance” not necessarily to be confused with The Saber Dance by Aram Khachaturian, but a dance “with swords” originating from the same region of the Caucasus. The lyrical contrasting theme was one sung to him by an Armenian actor “from the Crimea” who was working in Moscow at the time. He completed the piece in a month – rare for Balakirev – in 1869.

One of Prokofiev’s main goals was to avoid any of Balakirev’s overt “orientalisms” – Myaskovsky did not succeed in that, judging from the finale of his Symphony No. 23 – and simply to incorporate the music he’d heard and enjoyed in Nalchik during a very trying time, all the while he was primarily focused on writing his opera based on War and Peace.

Shortly after he completed his quartet, Prokofiev moved to Tblisi, the capital of Georgia (then a Soviet republic), in November. The following May, film director Sergei Eisenstein who was staying in Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in Kazakhstan invited Prokofiev to join him so they would work on music for his film, Ivan the Terrible. I haven’t found anything implying any other reason for this change of location, but I noticed this, checking out the history of Kabardinia: as part of the impending Siege of Stalingrad, located on the Volga River just north of the Caspian Sea, Hitler planned to take control of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942, which he called “Operation Edelweiss.” By August, one of the Nazi battalions planted the Swastika flag on top of Mt. Elbrus which was only an 84 mile drive from Nalchik.

But by then, Prokofiev was over 2,000 miles away, safely close to the border with China, and didn’t return to Moscow till 1944 where he wrapped up work on War and Peace, Cinderella (finally) and composed his triumphant Symphony No. 5 which was premiered to a glorious reception. After everything that had been happening during the war, Prokofiev was now at the peak of his career.

A week later, Prokofiev apparently suffered a spike in his chronic high-blood-pressure and fainted, hitting his head on some furniture and suffering a traumatic brain injury. Fellow composer Dmitri Kabalevsky, visiting him in the hospital, found him semi-conscious and left him, assuming it would be the end. Though weakened and dealing with the after-effects, Prokofiev lived until March of 1953 when he died of a brain hemorrhage on the same day as Stalin, his death barely noticed during the dictator’s official mourning.

– Dick Strawser

The Jasper Quartet, Part 1 – Here's Haydn

Franz Josef Haydn (c.1770)

The Jasper Quartet, winner of the prestigious career-starting Cleveland Quartet Award in 2012, have gone on to be acclaimed as one of the leading quartets of the century, and they return to Harrisburg Sunday afternoon at Temple Ohev Sholom with a program that looks varied on the surface – Haydn (Germanic/18th Century), Prokofiev (Soviet/20th Century), and two 21st Century composers, Gabriella Smith (American) and Jungyoon Wie (Korean) – but is more deeply unified by the inspiration of folk music that is both playful and rustic. 

 The concert begins “standard” enough with Haydn and concludes with what many of our audience might recall had once been called “contemporary,” written in 1941. (You can read the second installment about the works not by Haydn, here.)

In this case, the Haydn quartet is one of those usually considered an “early” quartet and not as familiar to the general audience as the more famous later ones. They’re generally underrated and as a result often deemed “less important.” Also, it seems odd to refer to these Op. 20 String Quartets as “Early Haydn” since he was 40 when he wrote them and, after all, at that age Mozart would’ve been dead five years…

However, we’re concerned only about one of them on this program, the fourth of the set which is in D Major. Here’s a complete performance with score from a recording by the Doric Quartet (who’ve also appeared in past MSC seasons). The slow second movement, marked un poco adagio affetuoso, begins at 11:15; the scherzo – I’m sorry, minuet – at 21:02; and the light-hearted finale, what one would expect from Papa Haydn, the Presto scherzando (there it is, out in the open!), at 22:43. Incidentally, the Doric players interpolate a few embellishments of their own as performers would’ve been used to in the hey-day of the Baroque era, but it’s pure Haydn coming down to the finish line when – uhmm – the final cadence just sort of vanishes. Nothing “faster and louder” (or expected!) about this ending!

(Seriously, if you’re hearing this music for the first time, did you not smile a little at that ending?)

“Early,” in this case, refers not to the composer’s age but to the age of the String Quartet itself. While Haydn is often mentioned as “The Father of the Symphony,” he was also paternally involved in the development of the string quartet. There is no journal where Haydn jotted down his day’s achievements by writing “And today I created the string quartet.” In fact, when he entered the six quartets of Op.20 into his “Complete Works Catalogue,” he wasn’t even sure what they were, listing them as “6 Divertimenti.” Only later when they appeared in print were they identified as “Quartets.” Yes, they were works written for four string instruments, but the idea of a more serious “form” (genre would be more appropriate) called a String Quartet didn’t come about until later. 

His first set, published as Op. 1 when he was maybe 23 or so (now, that’s early), dates from the mid-1750s and were received so favorably by his employer, Count Fürnberg, he wrote some more, and, as a result, Fürnberg recommended him to Count Morzin who was looking for music director for his palace. After Morzin experienced financial difficulties in 1761 and had to make serious cuts to his musical staff, Haydn was offered a job as assistant to the old and established (read “cantankerous”) Kapellmeister of Prince Esterházy, the family who then employed him for the rest of his career.

Haydn did not immediately begin writing more quartets – in fact, he produced his first forty symphonies instead. But in 1769 he wrote six quartets published as Op. 9, and then, two years later, another set of six, Op. 17.

But things were changing in the wider world of Classical Music. The old-fashioned Baroque Style Haydn had grown up with had basically become passé by the time Bach died in 1750 (Handel died three years after Mozart was born), and the New Style (which we call Classical) was still trying to figure out what it was. For one thing, it needed to be more than the opposite of the past: yes, simplicity and a more accessible approach to the general public which the Germans called liebhaber (the equivalent of “amateur”) those who “have love” of music, as opposed to the kenner or those who have “knowledge” of music.

Rather than counterpoint and dry stuff like fugues, they said, let’s have a beautiful melody with a simple accompaniment. And let’s have more contrasting moods – music can be emotional (if the sewing machine hadn’t been invented yet, it couldn’t describe the way many people probably played the old stuff).

Around the late-1760s, there evolved an almost extreme form of “emotionalism” the Germans called Sturm und Drang (basically, “storm and stress”) and suddenly the “accessible” style where everything should be “pleasant” (imagine these as “air-quotes”) was suddenly assaulted by turbulent textures in (horror) minor keys. And Haydn complied: he started writing minor-key symphonies like the famous “Farewell” Symphony which is best known for its famous joke at the end but which otherwise, in the dark key of F-sharp Minor, is a classic example (pun intended) of a Sturm und Drang symphony at its best. He wrote it in 1772.

Now, the whole point of the “farewell” in this piece was, at the conclusion of this tempestuous finale, a “second” finale began as the musicians packed up and left the stage, one by one or in pairs, until, variation after variation, only two violinists were left. The joke had been, since his musicians were complaining about being kept too long at the Prince’s summer estate at Esterháza and kept away from their wives and families living in the palace at Eisenstadt, it was time for the Prince to likewise pack up and return home. Though only some 30 miles away, it was not considered an easy commute when you’re always playing Haydn symphonies for your boss. (And, seriously, is Wikipedia making that up when it says the current palace in Eisenstadt was built by "Prince Paul I, the 1st Prince Esterházy of Bum Bum"???)

That same year, Haydn composed his set of quartets, Op. 20.

Everyone says they are a milestone in the development of the String Quartet (even though he still labeled them divertimenti in his big book) – but was there some reason, some non-musical impetus behind their inspiration? What if – and again, this is only conjecture because we have nothing in writing from Haydn or anyone else saying this is what happened – because he needed music to entertain the Prince, he started to supply him with something requiring only four players as opposed to twenty to thirty in the orchestra? And, this is a key point considering the change in musical style, if the Prince enjoyed the meatier substance of a symphony, perhaps Haydn should be supplying chamber music with more fiber to it as a replacement, rather than the empty calories of something meant purely to delight? Something, shall we say, for the kenner?

And what did Haydn do in these quartets that’s so different? First of all, it’s impossible to go back to 1772 – Mozart was only 16, Beethoven not yet 2 – and pretend we’ve never heard everything that came afterward (and not just Mozart and Beethoven or even “late-Haydn”). What this must've sounded like to a guest of Prince Nikolaus' visiting Esterháza, we'll never know. We don’t hear anything new and startling in these Op.20 quartets because they essentially set the standard as Haydn proceeded to produce more and more advanced quartets: the fact that it was four players, not just one playing to an accompaniment of three others; the fact the elements of contrast and emotion could be more of a focus; even the fact that – liebhaber beware! – he wrote fugues for three of the six finales!

Mozart’s first serious quartets (at 17, we can hardly call them “mature”) were written in Vienna in 1773. While he’d’ve had access to the Op.9 and Op. 17 quartets, and considering the Op.20 set weren’t published until 1774, did they influence Mozart then? Anyone who’s ever been confused about the Mozart Haydn Quartets (what, a collaboration?) knows the role Haydn’s quartets played in the development of Mozart’s writing for the string quartet, but those date from 1782, the year after Mozart arrived in Vienna as a free-lancer.

Keep in mind, Haydn – born of the lower classes and from the age of 6 spending his life geared for the service of the aristocracy – had become the Leading Composer in Europe by that time. But considering his job as the Prince’s Kapellmeister (basically, “music director”), everything he wrote belonged to the Prince. It was only in 1779 that Haydn negotiated a new contract with the Prince where he could now accept commissions from outside the palace and sell his music to publishers, both Austrian and foreign. It was something of a paradox that he was not only a successful “free-lance” composer, now, something Mozart longed to be, but he was still an employee of the Esterházy family and still required to supply music for his employer (if Downton Abbey had an orchestra, Haydn would still be taking his meals downstairs with Carson and Mrs. Hughes).

The Prince had built his country estate, Esterháza (separate from the palace in Eisenstadt), in what was basically a Hungarian swamp. The Esterházy family was ethnically Hungarian and Hungary was then part of the Austrian Empire. They’d also owned an estate in Galanta now in Slovakia not far from the Hungarian border (Kodály fans should know this Hungarian composer spent many summers there as a child, and incorporated some of the folk dances he’d heard there in his famous Dances of Galanta). So perhaps taking up some Hungarian rhythms in a more typical Gypsy sound (hence the zingarese in the so-called minuet’s title, a scherzo in everything but name) was a way of paying homage to his employer's roots? It’s almost as if two of the players can’t quite get in step with the others, perhaps the equivalent of an old “Mosquito-slapping Dance.” (Try tapping your foot to that!)

There are many examples of “new ideas” in these six quartets, not necessarily evident in all of them: two of them are in minor keys which was even less common in chamber music than symphonies especially among works meant purely for entertainment (like divertimentos). As I mentioned, three of them end with fugues. Words like affetuoso, a term of expression beyond what one might find in old-fashioned Baroque music, appear twice. The slow movements are much more lyrical and emotional than typical of the new style, especially the incredible Adagio of No. 5 (note especially the prolonged cadence at the end, beginning at 4:48).  

While there are movements that are certainly “violin solos” with simple accompaniments, other movements contain passages where ideas are thrown around between the different instrumental voices, something we’re quite familiar with from later-Haydn and especially Beethoven, but compare the 5th’s Adagio to the opening of No. 1 with its pairings and, eventually (say, 4:38), imitation of fragments in different parts.

By the way, the whole set is often referred to collectively as “The Sun” Quartets, though none of them have any individual nicknames (certainly none supplied by the composer) – and they’re not to be confused with the “Sunrise” Quartet of 1797, Op. 76 No. 4. Op. 20’s moniker can be traced to the 1779 edition of the Amsterdam-based publisher Johann Julius Hummel (not to be confused with the London-based publisher, Adolphe Hummel; and probably not related to the famous pianist and composer of the day, Johann Nepomuck Hummel). It seems Mr. Hummel, for whatever reasons, adorned his cover page with the image of a sunburst and as a result, commentators have forever after suggested it was because these quartets represented a new birth for a new art form, the String Quartet. Well… sure, why not?

By the way, if you want to find out more about the Op.20 quartets, check out Dave Hurwitz and his “Ultimate Classical Music Guide.” 

Of course, I could write a lot more about the importance of these quartets – listening to Op. 20/4’s Minuet, can you not hear, say, seeds for the scherzo from Beethoven’s last published quartet, Op. 135? – so I will continue with Part II, covering music written between 1941 and 2019, which you can read here.

– Dick Strawser