Thanks for the theoretical explanations. Even though I am pig ignorant of music theory, I was able to follow much of it.
That said, I just know what I like and my sweet spot is almost anything by Haydn-Mozart-Schubert with some selected works (including Dvorak’s) scattered until the 20th century. Nothing beyond that but I will listen to what you’ve included.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for writing in. BTW, if you like H-M-S, do look up the three string quartets by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, "The Spanish Mozart." He was born on what would have been Mozart's 50th birthday, had the same patron saint, and also died young.
I'm a violinist who could have ended up as a professional orchestral musician with a couple of different decisions in my 20s. Why orchestral instead of chamber music? Because a major symphony job pays the bills, or at least did in the days before we decided that, in the name of the neighborhood character, only the PMC should be able to afford places to live. It is very easy to form a quartet as a side project and very hard to make any money at all with it.
I feel more or less the same way that you do, but I think the quartet is a bit of a compromise for practicality. You can't get certain textures with it that you can with a couple more instruments. But violinists are a dime a dozen, while violists and cellists are rarer, and four players are easier to find and schedule than more players.
My very favorite chamber ensemble is the string sextet with two violas and two cellos. Unfortunately, there are relatively few works for the format. But Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" shows why I love it. So many different textures, so much more richness than he could have achieved scoring the same music for a quartet. Brahms also wrote two of them, the first of which is a spare and simple thing of beauty. Schoenberg's "Verklaerte Nacht" doesn't get any respect because it was still tonal and Romantic in nature, but I find it one of the most moving pieces of pure programmatic music in the literature, and he makes dazzling use of the textures the sextet form makes available. Dvorak wrote one too, although it's not among his best works. There are a bunch of practice pieces from Boccherini and minor works from Rimsky-Korsakov and Dohnanyi. In short, it's a format that a contemporary composer could write for and have a legitimate shot at becoming part of the canon.
Turning back to the quartet, while you have listed a bunch of accessible examples, I feel a duty to cite the most difficult one. Beethoven originally wrote his "Grosse Fuge" as a final movement of the Op. 130 quartet, but everyone hated it, and he had to write a more conventional final movement in order to get the quartet published. He then published the Grosse Fuge as a standalone work. It's the most harmonically and contrapuntally unconventional thing he ever wrote. It makes no effort to be either pretty or accessible. It aims for complexity and difficulty as goals in themselves. But if you get past the intimidating and sometimes ugly surface, you start to hear 250 years into the future. Beethoven anticipated everything from Webern to heavy metal to hip-hop in one piece that he wrote when he was deaf, sick, and going crazy. The Alban Berg Quartett (in general, one of the best quartets ever to do it) released a version in 1987 that is appropriately unrestrained and unconcerned with niceties, and you will learn more from it on the 150th listen than on the first.
If there had been Truth in Labeling Laws in the 1890s, Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" would properly have been called "Sad Memories of Mother Russia."
BTW, Tchaikovsky was murdered (i.e., forced to commit suicide) by his law-school classmates.
That is an appropriate title for perhaps 80% of Tchaikovsky's output. I say this as someone who thinks he is underrated, and arguably one of the top five classical composers of all time.
His death is a historian's minefield. So many theories (one of which you named) but not a single one of them is consistent with *all* of the available evidence.
Supposedly, when it looked like the Nazis might capture Moscow, word came down from on high that the documents having to do with Tchaikovsky's death were important State Secrets that absolutely could not fall into Nazi hands.
So, supposedly, those documents were shipped off to Magnitogorsk or some such place. An elderly East German lady archivist made something of a deathbed confession, in the 1970s if I remember correctly.
Thank you for this essay. It's a bit over my head but I'm going to forward it to my sister who plays violin in a quartet and has for years. Amateur of course, but she loves it. I enjoyed We go reading it. Thank you again.
i am depressingly unaware of most music in general so to see something of this caliber was intriguing to put it lightly
honestly this seems like coursework for a musical degree of some kind and its great that i can interact with it and glean from it a cultivated list of worthwhile pieces instead of stumbling around lesser works
Music is one of the original seven "Liberal Arts" that Educated Gentlemen were assumed to be conversant with. As in, Martin Luther knew enough about Music to be able to write "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
So, my lectures were not for a Degree in Music, because Thomas More College did not grant any Music Degrees.
My lectures were so that the students had some working knowledge of the forms and history of our shared body of concert music.
And I also made sure that (at least when I was working there) all Thomas More students had heard Bach's Goldberg Variation live on a harpsichord, had also heard Bach works for live solo violin and live solo cello, and had heard some pieces played by a live string quartet.
It’s unfortunate but true that when many people think of “classical” music, a full orchestra is all that comes to mind. Small ensembles have always been what I can’t live without, ever since I was introduced to them more than 50 years ago, fortunately by recordings from the best interpreters such as the Busch Quartet (incomparable late Beethoven), the Schneider Quartet (best if incomplete Haydn cycle) and Budapest Quartet.
Beyond quartets, there’s the Schubert Quintet with added cello (hear Isaac Stern play the first violin in the slow movement of the Casals Festival recording and you will never forget it), the Mozart Quintets with added viola, and quartets doubled up in the Mendelssohn Octet. I’m lost just thinking about these …..
There was the absolutely priceless Rodrigues cartoon in "Stereo Review" probably more than 50 years ago. It's one panel showing an attractive young woman obviously moving out of a residential dwelling with her suitcase.
She says, "Sorry, Stanley (or whatever the guy's name was). I can't any longer live with a guy who is a member of the 'Unaccompanied-Violin Record of the Month Club.'"
Well, if the first month is Bach, OK. But the second month was probably Bartok.
You irresistibly remind me of the story my mom told about when she was living with my dad at Gunter AFB in Alabama in the early 1950s. She was studying violin (esoteric for the time and place) and they also had a hi-fi setup (ditto). Anyway she warned the neighbors about her practicing, hoping they wouldn't be disturbed. Not long after, she played a newly acquired record of Heifetz playing Bach unaccompanied. After that a neighbor lady came to her and said "Mrs. A., I heard you practicing the other day, and it weren't too bad ... "
For whatever reason, my view is that the piano trio - maybe because it is inherently awkward and difficult, both to write for and to participate in - has inspired some of the very best efforts from classical composers. If I could have just one body of ensemble literature it might be the piano trios.
I won't name names, but, I was trying to convince a startup LP record label in New England to expand their classical offerings, because I had already presented three successful classical projects to them on silver platters, and I wanted to shift the financial burden of producing a new classical album onto them.
So I was sitting around a table with that label's Big Shots. The irony is that that guy who soon was to stick his foot in it prided himself on his claimed knowledge of classical music.
So, and I must admit that Schubert's "Barry Lyndon" trio theme was in my mind, I said, "Well, what about a piano trio?"
Mr. VP for A&R loudly spluttered his incredulity in my direction: "John, have you given any thought to how much it is gonna cost us to rent, move, tune, and insure THREE PIANOS, and then have them sent back???"
I humbly said, "Gee, for some reason, I had not. Thanks for pointing that out."
The irony was not lost on some of the people in that meeting.
A San Francisco label took the idea of Schubert's famous Piano Trio that Kubrick used in "Barry Lyndon" and put out gold-plated CDs of Messrs. Arturo Delmoni, Nathaniel Rosen, and Edward's performance of the original version with no cuts.
A remastered, digitally cleaned up download version is currently in the works now. I'll mention it on ACF when it streets (so to speak).
Thanks for the brilliant essay. I think it covers all the bases, and your notes on tuning/temperament explains that thorny issue very well. John Moriarty has lots of comparisons of different temperaments on his YouTube channel that would stretch anybodies ears.
When a composer decides to write a string quartet they tend to hear the ghosts of Haydn and Beethoven stalking behind them, and they write serious music and put their best efforts forward. Mozart sweat hard over his six quartets dedicated to Haydn (nos. 14-19), and he was not a composer who had to sweat much, composing whole operas in his head and writing them down later. Even Beethoven waited until he was almost thirty before composing his first batch of six quartets (Opus 18).
All musical instruments are difficult to learn and have wildly differing learning curves to mastery, the rule of thumb for mastery is eight hours of practice a day for five years. 15,000 hours. If you have the talent and more importantly the obsessive personality necessary for that type of ordeal. That's the reason so many professional musicians are uhhh, weird. In my opinion, after teaching orchestra and band for 35 years, the violin is the hardest of all.
Heartfelt thanks. BTW, IIRC, Mozart hand-wrote the score for his Requiem, from "out of his head," faster than a professional music copyist of today can copy the pages by hand.
Violin of course has a huge legacy of very difficult music. But actually getting a sound out of a "fiddle" is not that difficult. You can self-teach up to when you reach the limit of that. In contrast, the repertory for large Double Reed such as Contra Bassoon is not that wide, just getting a pure sound out of any double reed is the hardest first step of any instrument family to get over. Or, at least that is what Arthur Fiedler, who had studied violin in pre-WWI Berlin, thought. Fiedler created the US model of the "Pops Orchestra."
There’s such a thing as a copyist today? I’d think all of that would be done on a computer. Or someone has to laboriously plunk the notes into a computer on an electronic keyboard.
"If two tones have frequencies that are in a ratio of 2:3, such as A 440Hz and E 660Hz, it is conventional to say that they span the interval of a “fifth.” This is potentially misleading, for two reasons. First, it is not a question of one thing’s being one-fifth of something else, as is the case with a bottle of vodka’s being one-fifth of a gallon. This figure of speech only means that in a conventional Western scale, when you start with A and include it in the counting, E is the fifth note."
Thanks so much for this in particular of the music vocabulary definitions. I need to print this whole posting out so I can commit it to memory. My wife has a degree in music performance (piano), plays cello, and has a passion for musical theory and composition. I on the other hand have almost zero musical training or ability beyond a strong fascination with how instruments work (and are produced) on a mechanical level. Your explanations go a ways towards helping me understand what she is talking about sometimes.
I wish I was at a piano keyboard while reading that part. I’ve always kicked myself for not taking advantage of the conservatory at Bowling Green State University, and not learned piano while a student there (although between that and much extra time spent in computer labs during college, I wouldn’t have had time to sleep, or have any life). Sadly, at age 54, I don’t think, even if I started lessons geared to an OCD adult, I could ever get to be as good as I’d like to be.
A week ago we had tractor comparison tests. Earlier in the week we had another entry in a series of essays about kittens. Now an exposition on the importance of string quartets to musical theory with a short history lesson on how they came to be. All on a substack that is nominally about cars, motorcycles, and auto racing. You gotta love this place.
Your last points on Indonesian music and Debussy are fascinating. I've been blown away learning some "ethnic" string and vocal works after a Western-only education in violin. So much richness and variety in theory, technique, and notation. I can't help but wonder what the string quartet (and Western music generally) would have looked like with greater cultural cross-pollination over the last centuries, especially considering the many non-Western fretless string instruments. Then again, three hundred years of focus with violin/viola/cello have produced incredible results.
Certainly, the phonograph (and then radio) widened the audience for classical music.
Musicologists can drink for hours over whether "The Phonograph Made Caruso," or: "Did Caruso Make the Phonograph"?
(But let's not go down to road of, "Did Leonard Bernstein Bonk Mahler's Widow, Just Because?")
But what must be said, in the context of "The Only Law the Never Gets Violated is the Law of Unintended Consequences" is that, intentionally or not, early BBC radio broadcasts almost consigned the Welsh language to the dustbin of history.
Brian Eno of Ambient Music fame and I share a birthday (May 15) and also a Roman Catholic Saint's name: St.-Jean-le-Baptiste de la Salle. De la Salle was related to the extended family of Moet champagne, but he spent his share of his family's fortune feeding and teaching poor children. His Wiki is... humbling. De la Salle is therefore the patron saint of teachers.
One of the nicest compliments I ever received was when a top administrator from Roger Williams University came up to me and thanked me for arranging a recital at First Baptist, and for giving a brief orientation lecture beforehand. He said, I think somewhat in surprise and wonderment, "You are a natural-born teacher."
So, praise such as yours makes me feel very grateful--especially for my teachers and mentors and inspirational examples.
Thanks for the theoretical explanations. Even though I am pig ignorant of music theory, I was able to follow much of it.
That said, I just know what I like and my sweet spot is almost anything by Haydn-Mozart-Schubert with some selected works (including Dvorak’s) scattered until the 20th century. Nothing beyond that but I will listen to what you’ve included.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for writing in. BTW, if you like H-M-S, do look up the three string quartets by Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga, "The Spanish Mozart." He was born on what would have been Mozart's 50th birthday, had the same patron saint, and also died young.
john
I'm a violinist who could have ended up as a professional orchestral musician with a couple of different decisions in my 20s. Why orchestral instead of chamber music? Because a major symphony job pays the bills, or at least did in the days before we decided that, in the name of the neighborhood character, only the PMC should be able to afford places to live. It is very easy to form a quartet as a side project and very hard to make any money at all with it.
I feel more or less the same way that you do, but I think the quartet is a bit of a compromise for practicality. You can't get certain textures with it that you can with a couple more instruments. But violinists are a dime a dozen, while violists and cellists are rarer, and four players are easier to find and schedule than more players.
My very favorite chamber ensemble is the string sextet with two violas and two cellos. Unfortunately, there are relatively few works for the format. But Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" shows why I love it. So many different textures, so much more richness than he could have achieved scoring the same music for a quartet. Brahms also wrote two of them, the first of which is a spare and simple thing of beauty. Schoenberg's "Verklaerte Nacht" doesn't get any respect because it was still tonal and Romantic in nature, but I find it one of the most moving pieces of pure programmatic music in the literature, and he makes dazzling use of the textures the sextet form makes available. Dvorak wrote one too, although it's not among his best works. There are a bunch of practice pieces from Boccherini and minor works from Rimsky-Korsakov and Dohnanyi. In short, it's a format that a contemporary composer could write for and have a legitimate shot at becoming part of the canon.
Turning back to the quartet, while you have listed a bunch of accessible examples, I feel a duty to cite the most difficult one. Beethoven originally wrote his "Grosse Fuge" as a final movement of the Op. 130 quartet, but everyone hated it, and he had to write a more conventional final movement in order to get the quartet published. He then published the Grosse Fuge as a standalone work. It's the most harmonically and contrapuntally unconventional thing he ever wrote. It makes no effort to be either pretty or accessible. It aims for complexity and difficulty as goals in themselves. But if you get past the intimidating and sometimes ugly surface, you start to hear 250 years into the future. Beethoven anticipated everything from Webern to heavy metal to hip-hop in one piece that he wrote when he was deaf, sick, and going crazy. The Alban Berg Quartett (in general, one of the best quartets ever to do it) released a version in 1987 that is appropriately unrestrained and unconcerned with niceties, and you will learn more from it on the 150th listen than on the first.
Thank you for the truly EXTRAORDINARY comment!
One thing, though.
If there had been Truth in Labeling Laws in the 1890s, Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" would properly have been called "Sad Memories of Mother Russia."
BTW, Tchaikovsky was murdered (i.e., forced to commit suicide) by his law-school classmates.
'Nuf sed. I say no more.
john
That is an appropriate title for perhaps 80% of Tchaikovsky's output. I say this as someone who thinks he is underrated, and arguably one of the top five classical composers of all time.
His death is a historian's minefield. So many theories (one of which you named) but not a single one of them is consistent with *all* of the available evidence.
Supposedly, when it looked like the Nazis might capture Moscow, word came down from on high that the documents having to do with Tchaikovsky's death were important State Secrets that absolutely could not fall into Nazi hands.
So, supposedly, those documents were shipped off to Magnitogorsk or some such place. An elderly East German lady archivist made something of a deathbed confession, in the 1970s if I remember correctly.
Thank you for this essay. It's a bit over my head but I'm going to forward it to my sister who plays violin in a quartet and has for years. Amateur of course, but she loves it. I enjoyed We go reading it. Thank you again.
I am here TO SERVE MAN.
Get it?
john
i am depressingly unaware of most music in general so to see something of this caliber was intriguing to put it lightly
honestly this seems like coursework for a musical degree of some kind and its great that i can interact with it and glean from it a cultivated list of worthwhile pieces instead of stumbling around lesser works
looks like ive got a new playlist to marinate on
thanks bud
You are welcome!
Music is one of the original seven "Liberal Arts" that Educated Gentlemen were assumed to be conversant with. As in, Martin Luther knew enough about Music to be able to write "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
So, my lectures were not for a Degree in Music, because Thomas More College did not grant any Music Degrees.
My lectures were so that the students had some working knowledge of the forms and history of our shared body of concert music.
And I also made sure that (at least when I was working there) all Thomas More students had heard Bach's Goldberg Variation live on a harpsichord, had also heard Bach works for live solo violin and live solo cello, and had heard some pieces played by a live string quartet.
john
Unusual but very welcome fare for ACF.
It’s unfortunate but true that when many people think of “classical” music, a full orchestra is all that comes to mind. Small ensembles have always been what I can’t live without, ever since I was introduced to them more than 50 years ago, fortunately by recordings from the best interpreters such as the Busch Quartet (incomparable late Beethoven), the Schneider Quartet (best if incomplete Haydn cycle) and Budapest Quartet.
Beyond quartets, there’s the Schubert Quintet with added cello (hear Isaac Stern play the first violin in the slow movement of the Casals Festival recording and you will never forget it), the Mozart Quintets with added viola, and quartets doubled up in the Mendelssohn Octet. I’m lost just thinking about these …..
There was the absolutely priceless Rodrigues cartoon in "Stereo Review" probably more than 50 years ago. It's one panel showing an attractive young woman obviously moving out of a residential dwelling with her suitcase.
She says, "Sorry, Stanley (or whatever the guy's name was). I can't any longer live with a guy who is a member of the 'Unaccompanied-Violin Record of the Month Club.'"
Well, if the first month is Bach, OK. But the second month was probably Bartok.
john
You irresistibly remind me of the story my mom told about when she was living with my dad at Gunter AFB in Alabama in the early 1950s. She was studying violin (esoteric for the time and place) and they also had a hi-fi setup (ditto). Anyway she warned the neighbors about her practicing, hoping they wouldn't be disturbed. Not long after, she played a newly acquired record of Heifetz playing Bach unaccompanied. After that a neighbor lady came to her and said "Mrs. A., I heard you practicing the other day, and it weren't too bad ... "
Priceless.
Nobody ever mistook my bleating for Franco Corelli's singing; and, as they say in Poland, "The reverse is also true."
(That joke is, 'Under Capitalism, Man Exploits Man. Whereas, under Socialism, the reverse is true.")
john
For whatever reason, my view is that the piano trio - maybe because it is inherently awkward and difficult, both to write for and to participate in - has inspired some of the very best efforts from classical composers. If I could have just one body of ensemble literature it might be the piano trios.
I won't name names, but, I was trying to convince a startup LP record label in New England to expand their classical offerings, because I had already presented three successful classical projects to them on silver platters, and I wanted to shift the financial burden of producing a new classical album onto them.
So I was sitting around a table with that label's Big Shots. The irony is that that guy who soon was to stick his foot in it prided himself on his claimed knowledge of classical music.
So, and I must admit that Schubert's "Barry Lyndon" trio theme was in my mind, I said, "Well, what about a piano trio?"
Mr. VP for A&R loudly spluttered his incredulity in my direction: "John, have you given any thought to how much it is gonna cost us to rent, move, tune, and insure THREE PIANOS, and then have them sent back???"
I humbly said, "Gee, for some reason, I had not. Thanks for pointing that out."
The irony was not lost on some of the people in that meeting.
A San Francisco label took the idea of Schubert's famous Piano Trio that Kubrick used in "Barry Lyndon" and put out gold-plated CDs of Messrs. Arturo Delmoni, Nathaniel Rosen, and Edward's performance of the original version with no cuts.
A remastered, digitally cleaned up download version is currently in the works now. I'll mention it on ACF when it streets (so to speak).
john
Thanks for the brilliant essay. I think it covers all the bases, and your notes on tuning/temperament explains that thorny issue very well. John Moriarty has lots of comparisons of different temperaments on his YouTube channel that would stretch anybodies ears.
When a composer decides to write a string quartet they tend to hear the ghosts of Haydn and Beethoven stalking behind them, and they write serious music and put their best efforts forward. Mozart sweat hard over his six quartets dedicated to Haydn (nos. 14-19), and he was not a composer who had to sweat much, composing whole operas in his head and writing them down later. Even Beethoven waited until he was almost thirty before composing his first batch of six quartets (Opus 18).
All musical instruments are difficult to learn and have wildly differing learning curves to mastery, the rule of thumb for mastery is eight hours of practice a day for five years. 15,000 hours. If you have the talent and more importantly the obsessive personality necessary for that type of ordeal. That's the reason so many professional musicians are uhhh, weird. In my opinion, after teaching orchestra and band for 35 years, the violin is the hardest of all.
Heartfelt thanks. BTW, IIRC, Mozart hand-wrote the score for his Requiem, from "out of his head," faster than a professional music copyist of today can copy the pages by hand.
Violin of course has a huge legacy of very difficult music. But actually getting a sound out of a "fiddle" is not that difficult. You can self-teach up to when you reach the limit of that. In contrast, the repertory for large Double Reed such as Contra Bassoon is not that wide, just getting a pure sound out of any double reed is the hardest first step of any instrument family to get over. Or, at least that is what Arthur Fiedler, who had studied violin in pre-WWI Berlin, thought. Fiedler created the US model of the "Pops Orchestra."
john
There’s such a thing as a copyist today? I’d think all of that would be done on a computer. Or someone has to laboriously plunk the notes into a computer on an electronic keyboard.
Personally I like string quartets. For many of the reasons you gave.
"If two tones have frequencies that are in a ratio of 2:3, such as A 440Hz and E 660Hz, it is conventional to say that they span the interval of a “fifth.” This is potentially misleading, for two reasons. First, it is not a question of one thing’s being one-fifth of something else, as is the case with a bottle of vodka’s being one-fifth of a gallon. This figure of speech only means that in a conventional Western scale, when you start with A and include it in the counting, E is the fifth note."
Thanks so much for this in particular of the music vocabulary definitions. I need to print this whole posting out so I can commit it to memory. My wife has a degree in music performance (piano), plays cello, and has a passion for musical theory and composition. I on the other hand have almost zero musical training or ability beyond a strong fascination with how instruments work (and are produced) on a mechanical level. Your explanations go a ways towards helping me understand what she is talking about sometimes.
I am humbled.
Maybe... that is why I was put here?
john
I wish I was at a piano keyboard while reading that part. I’ve always kicked myself for not taking advantage of the conservatory at Bowling Green State University, and not learned piano while a student there (although between that and much extra time spent in computer labs during college, I wouldn’t have had time to sleep, or have any life). Sadly, at age 54, I don’t think, even if I started lessons geared to an OCD adult, I could ever get to be as good as I’d like to be.
literally only one way to find out
pull the trigger
A week ago we had tractor comparison tests. Earlier in the week we had another entry in a series of essays about kittens. Now an exposition on the importance of string quartets to musical theory with a short history lesson on how they came to be. All on a substack that is nominally about cars, motorcycles, and auto racing. You gotta love this place.
I am humbled.
john
More musical spinach, please!
Your last points on Indonesian music and Debussy are fascinating. I've been blown away learning some "ethnic" string and vocal works after a Western-only education in violin. So much richness and variety in theory, technique, and notation. I can't help but wonder what the string quartet (and Western music generally) would have looked like with greater cultural cross-pollination over the last centuries, especially considering the many non-Western fretless string instruments. Then again, three hundred years of focus with violin/viola/cello have produced incredible results.
You open up many jars!!!
Certainly, the phonograph (and then radio) widened the audience for classical music.
Musicologists can drink for hours over whether "The Phonograph Made Caruso," or: "Did Caruso Make the Phonograph"?
(But let's not go down to road of, "Did Leonard Bernstein Bonk Mahler's Widow, Just Because?")
But what must be said, in the context of "The Only Law the Never Gets Violated is the Law of Unintended Consequences" is that, intentionally or not, early BBC radio broadcasts almost consigned the Welsh language to the dustbin of history.
No free lunch.
john
I thought I knew the theory part, but since it is clearer to me after reading this I guess not.
The rest is fascinating and, as is usual for one of your posts, adds to my "to listen" list. It's been rewarding, so far. Thanks!
Heartfelt Thanks!
Brian Eno of Ambient Music fame and I share a birthday (May 15) and also a Roman Catholic Saint's name: St.-Jean-le-Baptiste de la Salle. De la Salle was related to the extended family of Moet champagne, but he spent his share of his family's fortune feeding and teaching poor children. His Wiki is... humbling. De la Salle is therefore the patron saint of teachers.
One of the nicest compliments I ever received was when a top administrator from Roger Williams University came up to me and thanked me for arranging a recital at First Baptist, and for giving a brief orientation lecture beforehand. He said, I think somewhat in surprise and wonderment, "You are a natural-born teacher."
So, praise such as yours makes me feel very grateful--especially for my teachers and mentors and inspirational examples.
john