On Wednesday, November 19 at 8 p.m. in Boston Conservatory’s 31 Hemenway Building, 4th floor, the fantastic violin and cimbalom duo, Lamnth, will present a portrait concert of my music. Lamnthis Lilit Hartunian, violin, and Nick Tolle, cimbalom. Lilit will present the premiere of A Terrarium for Lilit, a new piece I write for her. Nick and guest mezzo-soprano Carrie Cheron will perform my Mary Magdalen, and Lilit and Nick will perform Inflorescence, the piece I composed for their inaugural concert.
Marti's Blog
Marti's Winter Concerts
January 28, 2025: pianist Yuseok Seol will perform my etude, Hummingbirds as part of the Berklee Faculty Composers Concert. 8 pm, Seully Hall, 8 The Fenway, Boston.
February 2, 2025: pianist Jack Yarbrough will premiere the piece I wrote for him, For Jack, as part of the Boston Conservatory New Music Festival. 8 p.m. Seully Hall, 8 The Fenway, Boston.
March 2, 2025: New England Philharmonic will perform my orchestra piece, Celestial Navigation. 3 p.m. Tsai Performance Center at Boston University: https://patch.com/massachusetts/boston/calendar/event/20250302/7bfa6970-c299-41d4-9e09-5a36139ee339/new-music-new-england
Welcome to Marti's Website
Welcome to my website! I have often used this homepage to host blog posts; if you are interested, you can scroll through to find various musings on topics from baseball to Sibelius to grief to being a parent (and more).
If you would like to explore my music, the navigation bar is at the bottom of the screen.
NOTE: Please contact me at either marti@martiepstein.com or martiepstein@gmail.com about score purchase, or just to say hi!
Recent Interviews
on "Classical" music
Random thoughts on this unwieldy thing we inadequately call "Classical Music":
I have been listening to Joshua Weilerstein's Sticky Notes podcast. He repeatedly reminds us that "Classical Music is NOT supposed to be relaxing". So very true. This music has the power to transform us, to move us, to anger us, to frighten us, to fill us with joy- and all those things simultaneously, within one piece. I have been watching Simon Rattle's Sibelius cycle with Berlin, and in the middle of the 7th symphony (which really only makes sense as an interrupted coda to the 6th, the way Rattle does it), the camera showed a woman, sitting in those seats behind the orchestra, discreetly but openly weeping. Yes, this is what "Classical Music" can do if we listen carefully in a deep engaged way.
Beethoven the Radical: a Modest Proposal
Lately I have been seeing lots of suggestions on Social Media about how to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday this year. Many of these offer the idea that, because LVB’s music is already so ubiquitous, all celebrations should involve vows to not program any of his music at all this year. Some of these are said in jest, and ALL of them come from a very real place of anger at the lack of imaginative programming on the part of orchestras and other music organizations.
I have a different idea. First, it isn’t Beethoven’s fault his music is overplayed. During his lifetime, music of the past was rarely performed. Each concert was a celebration of the next new piece by living composers, Beethoven in particular. He was not composing for posterity; he was composing for next week’s concert. He was just doing his job. On many levels, I am grateful that we know his music and can learn from it (more on that in a bit), but the disdain many people, especially today’s living composers, have for his music is a perfect example of Familiarity Breeding Contempt. Every time his 5th Symphony is programmed, a little more of its breathtaking weirdness gets rubbed off. It makes perfect sense that one could feel weary of hearing his music and come to dread the prospect of a whole year of MORE BEETHOVEN. Also, to be perfectly honest, not every thing he wrote was genius. If I never hear the Choral Fantasy again, I will be able soldier on.
Here’s what we forget about Beethoven when he gets overplayed. He was a radical modernist. His sense of architecture and structure and proportion in music has not been seen/heard in any previous composer (with the exception of Bach, but he is another story). His awareness of the large, overarching scale in music is something that all composers can- and should- learn from. His harmonic explorations set the stage for the end of tonality. And, his interest in texture and the sounds themselves (Waldstein sonata opening) were so strange and fresh that his peers thought he had lost the ability to compose when he lost his hearing. In fact, I believe the opposite is true; when he lost his hearing, and had to rely solely on his inner ear, he became much more experimental and wonderfully strange.
The prospect of a year of Beethoven when many music organizations show little interest in composers of the 20th and 21st centuries feels unconscionable. This results in less of an interest in or awareness of non-white and/or non-male composers. Beethoven’s music is criticized for being such an integral part of the Canon of Classical Music-but the canon is not made of stone. It has infinite room. Adding people will not bump Beethoven, or Brahms, or anyone else. There is room for everyone.
So- here’s my proposal. To celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, program his music. Program the best of it. Celebrate him. BUT- make a pledge that, starting this year and continuing in to perpetuity, EVERY TIME a Beethoven piece is programmed on a concert, it will always be paired with a piece by a living composer, whether a pre-existing piece or a new commission. And, I have the perfect place to start. Jonathan Bailey Holland, a fine ALIVE composer, has composed a companion piece to LVB 9- a brilliant piece for chorus and orchestra called Ode. That would be a perfect place to start.
شعر فارسی مارتی
۱ من و تو (برای ر ش)
بین ما، بندی پنهان است که ما را وصل می کند
بند پنهان و غیب است
اما می توانم آن را ببینم
بند، طناب سیرک است
اگر یک طرف بیفتم
از تو نفرت دارم
اگر طرف دیگر بیفتم
دلم برای عشق تو آماده است
تو می گویی که عاشقم هستی
اما من را نمی بینی
در دست چپ توست
که تو یک انتهای بند را نگه میداری
در دست راست من است
که من انتهای دیگر بند را نگه میدارم
فقط تو میتوانی بند را قطع کنی
بند را قطع کن
۲ دل ناهماهنگ من (برای گ ک)
دو شخص
یک زن بیرون است
یک زن داخل است
زن بیرون پیرتر و پیرتر میشود
خاکستری، خسته، غیب، کوچک
زن داخل دختری جوان است
زنده، قشنگ، جالب، قابل توجه
اینجا پسری هم هست
هم کودکی خردسال هم مردی تازه
پسر خواهد رفت
آزادیِ غمگین
دلِ ناهماهنگ من
۳ هنوز تولدی دیگر (برای فروغ)
زندگی شاید
عکسی از او باشد
دستها، مثل پرنده ها
انگشت شصت
چسبیده به هم
انگشت دیگر لرزیده با هم
زندگی شاید
پسری محبوب باشد
که قربانی هنر شود
پسری دیگر محبوب باشد
که نزدیک است
زندگی شاید
تنهایی زنانه باشد
در اتاق پر از مرد
رندگی شاید
عشقی باشد کی آزاد نیست
هم با هم هستیم هم با هم نیستیم
زندگی شاید
سکه ی باشد
یک زن و یک زن دیگر
دو روی سکه
۴ غنچه پنهان (برای م س)
عشق من به تو نامرئی است
هیچ کس نمی تواند آن را ببیند
حتی تو نمی توانی ان را ببینی
در یک فضای تاریک ساکت پرکشش پنهان شده است
وقتی کنار من مینشینی
برقی بین ما میلرزد و میدرخشد
تو به سمت من خم میشوی
برقی میان ما جرقه میزند
عشق من به تو مثل یک غنچه پنهان است
در انتظار شکوفه دادن
۵. گیجی (برای م س)
وقتی به من نگاه میکنی
اسمم را فراموش میکنم
نمیتوانم صحبت کنم
قشنگی تو حواسِ من را پرت میکند.
Imagination (and the Dangerous Consequences of a Lack Thereof)
Small children all have prodigious imaginations. Observe any preschool classroom, and you will see that every child exhibits some sort of expression of wonderful and nonlinear thinking. Somewhere along the way, many adults seem to lose access to this part of themselves. I would even suggest that our country seems to be mired in a kind of Cold War, a kind of Civil War, between people who can access their imaginations and people who can’t, or won’t.
Evidence of this is the recent news about a group of straight, white men trying to organize a “Straight Pride Parade” for Boston later in the summer. This group of people looks at the LGBTQ community and wonders why they get their own parade; why can’t we straight people have one? Some of the more hilarious comments about this on Twitter and Facebook point out that every time there’s a celebratory parade for a sports championship, that is a kind of straight parade. The problem, though, is that this small group of straight white men lacks the ability to imagine why a group of people might need some sort of public celebration of who they are. The LGBTQ community has routinely been discriminated against, denied access to health care, denounced by religious institutions, etc. etc. (for a better explanation, please read ”LGBTQ Allies at Pride Need to Know These 9 Things Before They Go”: https://www.bustle.com/p/lgbtq-allies-at-pride-need-to-know-these-9-things-before-they-go-9376627). Straight people are not targeted for their sexual orientation. So, for some, it’s impossible to imagine that a group of people could be targeted for that reason. STRAIGHT PEOPLE DON’T NEED A CELEBRATION PARADE because we have nothing to celebrate that our privilege doesn’t afford us every single day. This is an example of a lack of imagination on the part of the Straight Pride organizers.
A lack of imagination, or access to imagination, is clear when you hear someone say “Black Lives Matter? ALL LIVES MATTER!” Again, people who say this are unable, or unwilling to imagine a reality that is not theirs; a reality in which you are at risk of losing your life just because of the color of your skin, or a reality in which you can’t enjoy the art at a local museum because patrons and staff assume the worst of you because of your skin color. Black Lives Matter is necessary because the default in our society is that only white lives really matter. If you are white, you don’t see the discrimination, bias, and threats that people of color experience. Again, we white people need to access our imaginations in order to see things we don’t experience.
A lack of imagination is how our country got in this particular pickle (constitutional catastrophe?) we are currently in. Too many people couldn’t imagine a woman president. Her faults were so magnified that they trumped (pun intended) the daily moral and legal transgressions committed by the person who did get elected. Women must be gold to do a bronze job, the saying goes. We have to be beyond perfect because too many people can’t imagine us in positions of authority or power.
The bias against women, the lack of imagination about who we are and can be, is deep and often not conscious. Recently I was one of 6 composers commissioned for a certain project. At the culmination of the project, checks were issued to the male composers. A check was not brought for me and I had to fight for weeks to get paid. Did the organizers say “Let’s not pay Marti because she’s a woman”? Of course not, but even more insidious is that I wasn’t even on the radar. I am often left off of email lists for groups I am in. Do people do this intentionally? I doubt it. But, once again, I am not on the radar. A former student of mine told me that she, an expert in electronic music and sound production, was not taken seriously by a sound engineer at a concert where she was trying to work on the correct levels for her piece. Every single woman professor I know has stories about the young men in their classes not taking them seriously, and often openly defying them and questioning them. Recently I was at a lecture-demonstration by Dr. Kate Biberdorf (aka Kate the Chemist at https://www.katethechemist.com/). She is amazing and brilliant AND HAS BEEN ON STEPHEN COLBERT so I asked her if she experiences this problem. Her answer? “Every. Single. Day.” What does all of this have to do with imagination? I think we all need to take it as a given that we have unconscious biases about things, and try to access our imaginations to root them out. Once we are aware of them, we are a step closer to eliminating them. Assume that you have unconscious bias about people who are not like you.
In addition to experiencing bias as a woman (and by the way, while the above examples may not seem bad to you, try to imagine them happening all day, every day- it is a death by 1000 pinpricks), I also have the apparent invisibility that comes with age, height (lack thereof), and appearance. Every day I am bumped into, ignored in restaurants, generally treated as if I weren’t there. “I didn’t see you” is not an apology. Try to imagine that there are people around you whom you don’t see at first. Look around, look up, look down. Look away from your phone. See the humans around you and celebrate their infinite variety of existence. Imagine us, and imagine our excellence. I promise you it won’t detract from your own.