JAVS Summer 2021

News &Notes

Music for the Viola Announcing John Graham’s live performance archive on YouTube By John Graham

Lionel Tertis and was thus personally familiar with the zeal with which the latter had worked to have composers write music that featured the viola. Philip had a deep appreciation of the uniqueness of the viola’s voice and cared a great deal about how to express that voice and to find music that could develop its potentials. I finished my collegiate years at the University of California in Berkeley and by then was regularly performing brand new music by composition students there and at Mills College in Oakland. As I pursued my performing career, chamber music was a focus but so were solo performances whenever they were possible. As the early twentieth-century music for viola had become the basis of the repertoire, I was always looking for something newer to play and began to use the phrase “Music for the Viola” for my recital programs and recording titles. In those same years I was very active in new music ensembles in New York City. During my years at the Eastman School of Music, I had the great pleasure of having works written for me by my faculty colleagues in Composition and their students, some of whom were also my students. It was perhaps the ideal way to collaborate: to talk together about how music may be put together and about the diversities in viola voice; to gladly try things out before the work had been completed and to mutually enjoy the premiere performance. I am thereby happy to now have my recordings from those years at Eastman join the video recordings I have had posted on YouTube and my set of four “Music for the Viola” CDs. You can access these recordings here, on my YouTube channel, and find more on my website, grahamviola.com. The viola and the new were, from my start with both, combined.

I was raised in a small town in California and, in the late 1950s, entered the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Everything in the city was a new experience for me and in music three things were especially so: chamber music, the viola, and contemporary music. I was a violinist and while I had heard William Primrose play a recital in a nearby town large enough to have had the Columbia Community Concert Series, I had never had the opportunity to play a viola. At the Conservatory, as I began chamber music coachings, I also began to ask my colleagues, during rehearsal breaks, if I could try their viola. The Conservatory had a String Orchestra and in my first week as a member, Bartók’s Divertimento for Strings was one of our pieces. I recall being so amazed with the sounds that I could hardly concentrate on the notes I needed to be playing . . . it was a new world. This combination of the new led to my switching to the viola and to feeling that new music was as compelling as old music, that they were just different paths to the excitement of playing music. My first chamber music coach and subsequently my viola teacher was Philip Burton, violist in the Griller String Quartet, in residence at the Conservatory and at The University of California in Berkeley. He had studied with

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 37, 2021 Online Issue

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