Of Note

The self-styled ‘viola player and composer’ Rebecca Clarke (b. Harrow, England, 1886; d. New York City, 1979) played violin until her composition teacher, Sir Charles Stanford, urged her to shift over to the viola because then she would be ‘right in the middle of the sound, and can tell how it’s all done. ’ The viola became basis of Clarke’s world-wide career as a soloist and as a partner in chamber music with many of the greatest artists of the early twentieth century, including Schnabel, Casals, Thibaud, Rubinstein, Grainger, Hess, Monteux, and Szell.

From years of working closely with many musicians in other genres (notably Lyle Lovett and Chet Atkins), many of Matt Walker’s compositions have become heavily swing- and blues-influenced. Written for various instruments including cello, flugelhorn, violin, viola and piano, these pieces rely heavily on the cellist (as well as the rhythm section) to improvise over standard jazz chord progressions. Several of Matt’s solo cello pieces are imitative of blues guitar music, and thus require complex finger-picking patterns and left-hand “hammer-on” techniques.

Like Kafka and Mahler, Erwin Schulhoff was a German Jew in a Czech cultural milieu, and he took full advantage of his “outsider looking in” status to forge a compelling musical personality. One of the earliest and most successful exponents of art music drawing on jazz, Schulhoff refracts multiple approaches of his time, from Dada to Expressionism, and from a distanced self-mockery to the stolid seriousness of Socialist Realism.