Nancy Garniez

2011-12-08T10:24:00.001-08:00

The sale has been so successful I am repeating it Saturdays through December. Contact me for more information. One happy purchaser wore her sweater to school (she teaches at an upper East Side girls' school); not only did she receive "tons of compliments," but one girl said "If it were my sweater I'd wear it every day."

Special Sale: One of a kind knits, crochets, etc.

2011-11-03T10:05:00.000-07:00

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons Nov. 26 and 27 I will be having a show and sale of the one-of-a-kind tops, scarves, jackets, bedspreads, etc. that I have made over the past several years out of recycled materials.

Here are photos of just three items out of the roughly 35 that will be for sale for $100 to $1,000 and up. All are my original designs, my spare time recreation. The sale will support my continuing work on Tonal Refraction -- the T and R of sTRing.

If you would like to see a larger selection and for more information please email me: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com.

2011-01-18T07:04:00.000-08:00

This will be the last post for the foreseeable future. Serious writing deadlines are governing my thoughts and taking up every available word space in my brain. I have enjoyed the opportunity to share and hopefully shake up thoughts on subjects I love dearly.

Nov. 2011: Clavier Companion will publish my article "Can young students learn rhythmic flexibility?"

Fall 2011: Mozart's G Minor Piano Quartet, K. 478: A Player's Guide, the first full-length Tonal Refraction text will be published, available on demand. Anyone interested in a pre-publication copy at a discounted price of $50 please contact me for more information. A deluxe limited collector's edition will also be printed.

All this on the heels of "Experiments of a Chamber Music Coach" published in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Chamber Music Magazine. If you haven't seen it, send me an email and I'll send you a pdf.

2011-01-04T15:58:00.000-08:00

Hope you didn't give up on me...a touch of a nasty viral infection knocked me down for a few days. All that aside, Happy New Year.

Today a wonderful hour was spent appreciating the oddness of Handel's magnificent carol Joy to the World. Have you ever sung it correctly -- i.e., without the customary rhythmic distortion at the end of the second phrase? I would be curious to know when and where and whether there were repercussions.

I have sung it correctly in public only once. It was never again repeated without the distortion. Earn a nickel: figure it out, and figure out why it is so difficult to do it correctly.

2010-12-31T07:11:00.000-08:00

No matter how hard I try to be optimistic there are times when it seems too unrealistic. As I tried this morning to make vivid the difference between a hammered-out predictable rhythm and its many subtle alternatives it hit me that there is wondrous little rhythmic subtlety in the musical culture of today's young people.

2010-12-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of sight-reading at the piano: public and private. For public reading one must be prepared to sacrifice notes in order to keep a steady rhythm. For private reading one sacrifices the beat to the vivid color of the tones.

The question arises whether it is possible to train a child to be good at both kinds. That requires first of all knowing the difference between them.

The public kind, at which I excelled when young, favors quick movement; in my case it led readily to a short attention span. The private kind, of which I had no inkling as a young musician, yields in-depth understanding of the complexities of a work, therefore it lasts longer.

The difference may be compared to speed reading as opposed to reading for comprehension.

2010-12-27T06:25:00.000-08:00

What can be more mainstream than Mozart?

Depends on what you mean by Mozart.

Shouldn't the question rather be: What could be farther from the mainstream than Mozart?

Why are we so eager to reduce music to lowest common denominators when in many cases there is no such thing?

2010-12-26T06:16:00.000-08:00

This is the dilemma facing the parent of the young girl who plays at home but who does not practice her lesson: the question is one of elegance, the development of taste--not mine, as that is already formed (and constantly changing, thank God) but hers, of course.

At present she thinks that Classical music consists of reliable downbeats and patterns--that's how she plays it. I find it boring and encourage her to notice when she is bored. So elegance has something to do with playfulness, with wit, with options to do it this way or that way. It commands attention.

This is the essence of style in any period; it is only the terms that vary.

2010-12-23T08:34:00.001-08:00

The other night I heard a concert by what must be called a perfect vocal ensemble. It was a kind of sound that is, I am happy to say, becoming increasingly fashionable: a cappella singing by small ensembles of highly individual voices.

My reaction on seeing the program was that it was too short. As the evening progressed, however, my reaction about halfway through the program was that it was too long: too much of the same sound. It was like listening to a CD end-to-end: not something I enjoy doing, but the "going" thing in sound marketing. I craved variation.

When, at the encore, they broke into a modern harmonization of "In the Bleak Midwinter" my reaction was laughter: at last, something fun! It felt like barbershop. Greatly to their credit they did not throw this lovely carol away but delivered it with the simplicity of which it is fully worthy.

I believe that chant is a vehicle for introspection, for reflection. It is not well served by being part of a concert program; the timing of the whole event somehow misses the essential point.

Perhaps deliberately loosening up of the sound for the purely secular numbers would help.

2010-12-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

Some children are remarkably sensitive to the differences between their at-home instrument and mine; they invariably do not practice their lesson. I never practiced my lesson, either, when I was young. I played all the time, but not the music I played at my lessons.

Today one of the mothers told me that her daughter works and works on things at home until she gets them right; but they are not the assigned music. "What should I do?"

"Nothing!"

The child is beginning to grasp the substance of music and how much fun it is to be delivering substance rather than repeating the notes in reliable (i.e. mechanical) sequence. I have no doubt whatsoever that she will soon be ready for substantial repertoire, not to poke at it but to really savor it.

The situation is totally different for children who play the violin or the guitar; they play their own instruments at the lesson.

"The" piano does not exist.

2010-12-22T05:09:00.000-08:00

I received a warm letter from a philosophy professor at St. John's College in Annapolis, a woman who knew Viktor Zuckerkandl when she was a young teacher at the college. Responding to my article on teaching chamber music she wrote: "I kept thinking to myself: She's doing for music lovers what we, at this college, try to do for students: not turn them into professionals, but try to preserve their amateur's enthusiasm. They read a lot of philosophy together, and professional philosophy is a contradiction in terms."

2010-12-20T11:45:00.000-08:00

As I listened to a quite fine community orchestra play the very demanding slow movement of Dvorak's rarely-played Sixth Symphony I was struck by how different the motivation must be to play an orchestral instrument than to play the piano.

One of the main differences is the loneliness of the pianist contrasted with the constant emphasis on ensemble skills for the other musicians. I have seen it happen over and over again that the pianist is expected to master ensemble skills the same way the other instrumentalists are, even though burdened with at least four times as many notes. In other words, pianists are usually thrown into the pot too soon and without the proper support to make the experience meaningful.

I recall vividly my first experiences playing chamber music: The score was set in front of me and I felt overwhelmed. It was like plunging into the Atlantic and being unable to come up for air until running aground at Southampton --and I don't mean Southampton N.Y.

2010-12-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

My recent article in Chamber Music Magazine was entitled by the editor "Experiments of a Chamber Music Coach." My first reaction was puzzlement. Now I realize that that is how my work appears to others, particularly to other teachers. I have, in fact, been conducting a lifelong experiment in teaching and not just teaching chamber music.

I put the ear first. The ear is the motivator, the organizing force, and the source of satisfaction for the player at every level. Yesterday the proof of that came through more clearly than it usually does.

The student is a young woman whose younger brother is blessed with a gift of musical facility the outward expression of which is severely limited by physical constraints. It is nevertheless facility which she does not possess. What she does possess is an ear, not a musical ear as usually defined by the ability to imitate pitch and rhythm, but a responsive, emotionally informed ear readily affirmed by an astonishingly precise vocabulary.

Wanting to produce her own music, she has produced some very seemingly primitive music unlike anything anyone has ever produced: it is truly her own. Wanting to expand her possibilities I have suggested she learn some of Bartok's folk song settings in his brilliant For Children based on Hungarian Folksongs. She chose for its title one about a young girl.

Turns out it is not the happy piece she expected. Yesterday, after several weeks of puzzling out the unlikely harmonies we worked on combining their mournful colors with a rhythm that had to move on, as if relentlessly. The tension, the drama were all there: internal, transparent to her and to me.

I couldn't help but feel that, had it been the other way around, with the rhythm coming first the intensity of the sounds would not have penetrated.

Ironically I know that many great pianists advise their advanced students to do what she began by doing: take all the time in the world over each sound so that you digest it thoroughly before moving on. When this is integral to the learning process the stamp of the music is profound and indelible because so deeply felt.

I wasted years trying to do it the other way -- i.e., beat first, against my nature. The result: impatience, boredom.

2010-12-17T07:55:00.000-08:00

The trouble with the printed page is that it is easily reproduced--visually reproduced. The trouble with reading, whether language or music, is that no two people comprehend what they are reading in quite the same way.

Children are as capable of insightful reading as adults, often even more so. The same is true for amateurs vis a vis professionals. The absence of pretense to regulation reading makes these two populations valuable to me. Why not to everyone?

Why is the music establishment so threatened by non-conformity?

Surely Mozart, Beethoven or Bach, not to mention Chopin and Schumann and a few others, would not have lasted long in a conventional music school. (Maybe that should read: "should not have lasted ....")

I find that when singularity meets singularity the delight is immense, the fascination endless. But the singularity of the listener needs to be reinforced no less than that of the creative artist.

2010-12-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

When does one start to talk about elegance to a child?

A ten-year-old wearing an exquisitely designed striped knit sweater was my excuse this morning. Showing her the finesse with which the stripes were measured in proportion to the collar and edgings made vivid to her the difference between a humdrum fingering and one that made an ornament feel -- and sound -- as if caressed by her hand.

2010-12-15T11:35:00.000-08:00

We must all be sure to keep live sound actively present in the lives of children and of each other: sing, tell stories, give little brass bells or Tibetan finger cymbals as Christmas presents, take children to student concerts and sit in the front row.

As the culture gets further and further removed from real sound in all its lively complexity the pedagogical establishment has less and less reason to notice how inadequate music notation is to evoke much less transcribe actual reverberating tone.

We are all paying a high price for today's accommodation to new technologies.

2010-12-14T07:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had a long chat with a distinguished Professor of Psychology (a woman) whose specialty is visual attention. I thought we would be talking about my work. We did that to some extent, but what we really talked about what the passion involved with music study.

It turns out that, despite the obligatory twelve years of piano lessons, she cannot read music--never could. This mystifies her to this day. "Isn't it like reading words?"

Well, no it isn't. Tone does not behave like anything else; it has its own intrinsic logic that defies both visual representation and verbal metaphor.

Despite (because of?) all her training and expertise she could not wrap her mind around that possibility. She could, however, express her "agony" (her word) about not being able to play the piano even when, widowed and alone, she decided to give it another try, this time without a nagging mother and competitive siblings to complicate things.

I described to her the secret I have finally discovered after decades of puzzling it out, that the grand staff corresponds to the layout of the hands in both closed and open positions. This she could grasp. "Ah! If you embody it the notation takes on concrete meaning!"

We left it that she should get a piano.
"The best I could do in my limited space is get a keyboard."
"That will never do; a keyboard will never enter your dream life."
"I have no space for a piano."
"Move!"

2010-12-12T16:03:00.000-08:00

Last night a warm-hearted group of musicians gathered to read informally two Bach cantatas for the Advent season: No. 1 (Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern) and No. 140 (Wachet auf!)

Without an understanding of the theology of the season this music is simply difficult. The theology of Advent has to do with the unexpected: something is going to happen, we know not when exactly. Thus the rhythmic conundrums, the long rests, the sudden bursts of energy. The difficulty is still there, but it takes on a human feel which altogether transforms the experience of singing and playing.

2010-12-11T08:30:00.001-08:00

The subtle voice leading of a Bartok cadence (in which the middle voice becomes the bottom voice, while the bottom voice "leaps" to its overtone an octave higher, becoming the top voice, and the top voice becomes the middle) reminded me of a sleeve I saw over thirty years ago.

It was on a jacket worn by Jean Louis Barrault in a production of The Marriage of Figaro (the play) with costumes by Yves Saint Laurent. There he stood, center stage, in profile to the audience, his arm relaxed at his side, the sleeve perfectly draped without a crease or wrinkle. Breathtaking. Then he bent his arm at the elbow. Still no disturbing line. Even more breathtaking. I will never forget that sleeve.

Well-performed voice-leading should be like that, don't you think?

2010-12-10T10:31:00.001-08:00

As if on schedule, a beautiful instance of singularity occurred at my piano yesterday afternoon. A young girl learning to read music with comprehension--that is with punctuation (articulation) and dynamics (tone of voice) inherent in the music rather than pasted onto neutral notes--played through a song in Bartok's For Children, Vol. I. To my surprise she preferred the "eerie," "peculiar," harmonization (her words) to the more conventional one.

Her reactions, her access to descriptive vocabulary, and her delight in the sense of connection to the piece--all of this represents tremendous progress toward experiencing mastery.

Too much music pedagogy has as its goal making the young learner feel the opposite.

I wonder how much that is based on the teacher's own removal from a directly passionate experience of music, which might lead to a belief that the only way to hold a child's attention is to bind them in slavish obedience to some incomprehensible standard.

2010-12-09T06:21:00.000-08:00

Apologies for missing several days - sometimes things pile up in unexpected ways.

I am thinking a lot about singularity, particularly how out-of- sync it is with the prevailing wind approach to culture. That affects everything we buy, think, foster in our children and in each other -- everything.

What happened to it?

Why is it like sticking one's head into a guillotine to hatch an idea that doesn't conform to the accepted norms? I find myself in this odd position of having had a strong influence on the singular lives of quite a few individuals, some of them professional musicians, and yet with my approach singularly unvalued by music school administration.

Odd, isn't it?

2010-12-05T14:01:00.000-08:00

A long talk with a retired art teacher drew out the observation that competitiveness is built into music study from the earliest levels while it is missing from art study.

She remarked that depth is apparent in children's artwork even at an early age. Very often parents do not discern it and opt to train the child's facility. The counterpart to me in piano study is the absence of ear-awareness/touch that goes with competitive piano playing. Don't the parents hear the hostility? It is the first thing I notice. I always wonder how long will that child's musical life will last.

I once had a young student who played like that after a bad day at school. I would change places with her and do some playing myself. A few minutes later she got the point: Music is a two-way street on which the listener is to be respected as much as the player.

2010-12-04T10:41:00.001-08:00

Some people accuse me of doing music therapy. Music therapy assumes a norm of hearing and response to music. But I do the opposite in that I encourage each student to listen on their own terms and to develop the sense of mastery that comes with satisfying one's own ear.

Today the young woman who is a master dressmaker had trouble playing her Bartok piece fluidly. "I can do it at home," she said; "why not here?" The answer is analogous to making individual stitches in hand-sewing; she knows well how hard that is. It is much more difficult to recognize as "the same" a composition played on one's home piano and played on my beautiful grand.

I find it incredible that she expresses nuanced touch dealing with consonance and dissonance; that she is moved by the piece to extend it with her own material. I find her observations nothing short of masterful and they teach me a lot about the music and about my own hang-ups about playing the piano.

2010-12-03T10:49:00.000-08:00

The list of pieces with dauntingly simple beginnings got a bit longer yesterday when I sat down to actually note their titles. Notable among them is a piece I do not dare play, to this day, certainly not in public and almost never in private.

Its opening is, to me, sheer anguish. It is the Mozart A minor Piano Sonata. Various recorded performances of its first ten bars or so were played at a recent conference as an example of how hard it can be to tell a real half-cadence from an elided phrase. By the time the sixth or seventh rendition was played everyone was laughing--everyone but me.

On paper it is utterly benign. Touching those sounds is like touching an open wound.

2010-12-02T06:14:00.001-08:00

Closely related to boredom is simplicity. Beginning a work whose beginning is utter simplicity strikes me as extremely difficult; I have in the past refused to perform works whose openings are so exposed that I cannot bear to play them.

I can count the number of such works on one hand.

Such simplicity is associated with late works as tolerance for simplicity in a performer is a sign of maturity.

Simplicity implies questions "Why?" "Where does this come from?" "Why does this frighten me so deeply?"

I used to dislike playing one note unaccompanied by a chord. If you ask me now I would declare it to be the height of musical expression--even on the piano.

I think often of Henry Purcell's setting of "Music for a while shall all our cares beguile" in which the word "music" is sung on a single tone: G.

2010-12-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Today's topic is boredom. I know it well, having suffered from it for years and years. Yesterday I saw the makings of it in a young student and the opposite of it in a slightly older student.

The makings of boredom: When tone is crammed into rigid rhythmic units it loses its traction. It has no inherent reason for moving, whether up or down, or for repeating, or for not moving. Tension cannot exist when metronomic rhythm determines the next event. One young student needs desperately to be relieved of every sensation of tension. He is in a hurry to learn "how it goes" so that he can repeat it, fooling himself and others into believing that the music has been learned.

The slightly older student feels the imprint of tone in specific rhythmic contexts so intently that variation is almost painful to her. Incredible to me is the intensity of this phenomenon. Dealing with it requires substantive work.

As a young learner I more resembled the first case. Ultimately I distorted every detail of a composition: articulation, note values, and so on; in my rush to pretend I knew what I was doing I could only play fast and faster. Needless to say, I could not sustain interest in a composition until someone caught me at this little game and showed me what musical traction is.

2010-11-30T09:03:00.000-08:00

Singing William Byrd's Mass for Three Voices together with two highly intelligent musical amateurs last night I became aware of how much professional musicians miss because the notes are, for them, so easy. For these people, in contrast, every linear push and pull required effort and yielded insight.

In the light of this detailed attention the work took on added significance; every tonal motion conveyed meaning directly linked to the text.

This is why I treasure the work I do with amateurs.

2010-11-29T11:47:00.000-08:00

I have grown increasingly convinced that composers work with specific tonalities implanted in their consciousness by vocal colorations or instrumental timbres. Premature schooling in theoretical generalities leads us to believe that tonalities are interchangeable. Thus, it takes a little digging to get people to respond to my question about whether they have a favorite key.

But most of us do have a favorite key; the more active musician probably has several, just as the literary enthusiast undoubtedly has several favorite books; the answer may depend on when, where, and by whom the question is posed.

I recently heard a string quartet recital the most memorable event of which was the cellist's obvious fondness for the low D in the "Rosamund" string quartet by Schubert. Oh my! That a single tone could generate such excitement.

Forty-five years ago (cast your minds back) I heard Dvorak's Dumky played by Adolf Baller's piano trio. The cellist's repeated C quarter notes an octave up and down totally galvanized my attention: it clearly was holding up the whole world at the time; it inspires me to this day.

2010-11-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

For many years I have taught rhythm not by counting but by two different but complementary methods: 1) as a function of bodily gesture as expressed in geometric figures drawn two-handed with colored pencils while singing several verses of a song in different tempi and with varying emotional intent; 2) as a function of ratios.

The ratio concept clarifies a lot about how rhythm actually feels: why, for example, two hands at the piano are so difficult to coordinate. It also explains why more than one person may be necessary to express the underlying energy of a piece of music.

In a Beethoven symphony it is not unusual to have a ratio of 1:128, the single unit being a tone sustained by the French horn in a tie over 4 bars in 4/4 time, the 128 parts corresponding to 32nd notes in, say, the flute. In between one might find
1:2, the 2 corresponding to a two-bar tie in the double basses; 1:4 the 4 being whole notes in the bassoon; 1:8 = half notes in the cello; 1:16 = quarter notes in the clarinets and oboes; 1:32 = eighth notes in the viola and second violin; 1:64 = sixteenths in the violins.

With all these layers of energy--all these different gears, so to speak, it is perfectly sensible that a symphony requires many people for adequate realization.

One difficulty posed by easy-access-flattened-out music reproduction is that it all sounds so simple, so easily reduced to 1 - 2 - 3 - 4.

2010-11-27T08:48:00.001-08:00

For the past several months I have immersed myself in the study of Mozart from the standpoint of his instrumentation, on the theory that one of the outstanding characteristics of the piano from the very outset was its ability to imitate other instrumental colors: it could talk; it could sing; it could substitute for orchestral strings; it could be a bassoon, an oboe, a flute, a horn.

To my surprise, this important instrumental attribute does not come up in discussions of his music.

2010-11-26T18:56:00.000-08:00

Pedagogical questions: Is it necessary to become like everyone else before you can become yourself?

Is it even possible to become like everyone else?

What's wrong with becoming yourself?

Hearing more and more generic singers, pianists, etc. raises these questions with some urgency.

2010-11-23T07:55:00.000-08:00

In today's New York Times several arts critics weigh in on the topic of Lincoln Center's recent White Nights Festival, purportedly about the spiritual in music.

When I received the festival's slick, expensive flier I could see immediately that it was a marketing ploy. Isn't all music spiritual? Does the hype insure greater likelihood of a profound experience? Do expensive graphics and heavy paper equal anything more meaningful than money?

So what's the real problem? It's that we are so bombarded with glitz and noise that we (some generalized, non-existent we) do not trust ourselves to find something beautiful on its own terms, whether it be our child playing in the next room or a lesser-known performer in a club downtown.

Stick your neck out: The next time you hear something beautiful tell the player that you enjoyed it: Don't assume it's a frequently conveyed message. It is not.

2010-11-21T15:24:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a memorial service for a person who was known as an extremely powerful, brilliant leader and organizer who almost always had the last say-so. I knew a different aspect of this person: I knew the tears that accompanied her reaction to beautiful sounds--tears that gave away how much she wanted music in her life--something she could not simply commandeer.

She proved willing to do the hard work of learning to feel the music without dissolving; learning to channel the feeling into generous participation together with others in a chamber music setting.

It was almost the exact opposite of what constituted her professional personality and accomplishments. How I admire anyone who will take such a risk.

2010-11-19T05:34:00.000-08:00

What is so amazing about the voice -- about everyone's voice, whether trained or not -- is its uniqueness. One cannot help but respond to the intrinsically vocal: is the note high for me or low? is it comfortable or not in relation to the other sounds around me? These are the essence of vocalism.

Post-Baroque instrumentalists get that trained out of them. I think that's why so many good ones are going into early music. In Baroque music the voice comes first; instrumentalists are assumed to take their cues from the voice.

I guess that's the basis of my feeling that the instruments and the voices on the harmonia mundi Idomeneo recording are not united in their art. The instrumentalists play as though they understand the harmonies, not the words. I have always found this to be the real difficulty of getting singers and instrumentalists to make music together. In superbly crafted opera or lieder the words reinforce the vocalism of the singer, not the other way around. Instrumentalists, trained to treat all notes as interchangeable, often don't get it.

2010-11-18T19:00:00.001-08:00

The singing on the harmonia mundi release of Idomeneo is outstanding: fearless, stylish, convincingly alive. It is unusual that vocal coloration was not sacrificed to the recording process. I recommend it highly.

We would all do well to pay attention to singers, particularly to how they make us feel what they sing. There is no truer instrument.

2010-11-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

My research into Mozart's soundworld is leading to some very interesting and unexpected discoveries. I have suspected a connection between the natural horn and his sense of tonality, particularly minor keys. I suspected also a strong connection between the horn and his sense of vocal line. Then I found an essay by Paul Bryan about Mozart and Haydn's use of the horn. It mentions specific numbers in Mozart operas in which the horns figure prominently and with unique power.

Eager to hear this I wondered if there could possibly be a period-instrument recording of Idomeneo, the opera cited as making rich use of this instrumentation?

To my surprise, there is. Harmonia mundi has released a three-CD set of the opera with the Freiburger Barockorchester. Wonderful, thought I!

Actually less than wonderful.

The voices are superb--alive, wonderfully present in the force of their characters. But the instruments I find completely lacking in color, producing harmonies that have been subjected to modern homogenization. So why use period instruments?

2010-11-16T06:04:00.000-08:00

Sunday afternoon I heard a performance that illustrated beautifully my point about chickens and eggs. This was a young string quartet -- clearly nice people, unpretentious yet serious in a very convincingly youthful way. There were no flaws in their work. None, really. Except that the first violinist played, from time to time, ever so slightly out of tune with the others. Okay: I can attribute that to the adrenaline of being the leader.

But there were no moments of real fusion inside of the sound. The drama was all technical, not native to the instruments or the compositions.

As the elderly gentleman seated with me put it: Too much drama; not enough heart." I maintain that the "heart" part is what children dream about. I certainly had vivid childhood dreams about musical elements, very specific elements--also nightmares. Their power has lasted a lifetime: indeed, has sparked a lifetime of curiosity and intent pursuit of its underlying mystery.

2010-11-14T06:22:00.000-08:00

Chickens ... eggs ... The way our culture thinks about music is that it has to be learned, technique first. But technique, at least on the piano, is taught very much the way the old Fred Astaire dance charts used to try to impart the art of dancing to total klutzes who didn't have a clue. In case you have never seen such a chart let me attempt a description. It showed basically the floor plan of a step, with outlines of the left and right foot shoes of a man and a woman with dotted lines and arrows indicating ... you guessed it.

No trace of body, no indication of a rhythm. Just shoes positioned in a diagram that might show where to put the sofa in relation to the coffee table.

But it doesn't work like that. Impulse counts for more than 90% of it. Impulse and an instrument translates directly into sound. Start with that and there is meaning.

Start the other way and count the days until it dries up.

2010-11-13T10:43:00.001-08:00

Last night I went with a friend to a concert of compositions mostly by graduate students at an eminent conservatory. Performed by a skilled ensemble of roughly fifteen players with a full battery of percussion -- I love percussion!! -- it presented a range of styles written by composers from China, Italy and the US.

When it was over my friend asked: "What is the point? There was no evident feeling, nothing to remember. It all sounded more or less the same except for a few pings here and there in conspicuous places."

All I could think of was airport/drugstore/movie music -- the ambient noise music of our day. Is this where employment lies? Is that why so much energy is devoted to mastering this cold, cold art (to paraphrase the famous country/western lyric)?

2010-11-12T06:22:00.001-08:00

Think for a moment about the real deal vs. phony baloney. It gets harder and harder to tell the difference, or rather the distinctions become more difficult to define as expertise abounds and content dwindles.

Thinking about how many note-perfect musicians the schools are churning out is mind-boggling. Pondering how many truly unforgettable performances I have heard from young musicians is mind-boggling in the opposite direction.

I pay a lot of attention to young performers (and heartily recommend that you do likewise) because they are the real windows into the present state of the art.

I start with the young children who study with me: Their notions of sound instruct my ear as to the state of music in our era. If you have occasion to hear young players of any age you might consider this mode of listening.

2010-11-11T06:23:00.000-08:00

What a thrill when my sixteen-year-old began her lesson yesterday with an astute question about Beethoven's Op. 14 No. 1 Sonata in E: "Why does he start off the Development section as if he is going to stay in E then go off into C major?"

By the end of the lesson we had explored all the sharps of E major in relation to tones in the C major scale. I have long realized that Mozart writing in the key of C uses accidentals that tie C to E major--D# is not infrequent as a first accidental in pieces in C. It is as if Mozart is using E as a covert key while Beethoven uses C as the covert key.

What fun to see a young person excited about Beethoven through personal experience rather than by some kind of theoretical approach.

2010-11-09T07:12:00.000-08:00

I often describe the difference between a D major and an E-flat major triad on the piano: the black-key major third in D causes the triad to be jarringly, ever-so-slightly out of tune, while the black-key tonic and dominant of the E-flat create the opposite effect.

A propos yesterday's post: I recall an eminent theorist speaking about the superior treatment by Schubert later in his life of a theme he had used earlier--the earlier setting in B-flat, the latet in A. The theme begins on and centers around the major third of the tonic triad. The speaker was nonplussed when I pointed out that it literally hurts me to play the theme in A, while in B-flat it has the opposite character.

Walking downstairs after the talk a fellow pianist confided her agreement with my observations.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus; but no, Virginia, despite what many theorists would have us believe, all tonalities on the piano--indeed, on most instruments, are not alike.

2010-11-08T14:47:00.000-08:00

Just returned from a conference of music scholars, theorists and musicologists, I must say that I heard quite a few extremely stimulating papers. A couple of them stand out for their disregard of what it feels like to play the music being examined. This is a run-in I have had in the past, sometimes with quite eminent scholars.

According to visual analysis a piece is in the key that it is in. Seems obvious, doesn't it? Except that some keys are painful on the piano, while others are quite the opposite.

One of the papers was about Poulenc's setting of the Babar story. I have tried many times to play it and never succeeded in getting past the opening bars. There is something fundamentally disquieting about that music, though it looks calm enough. The lecturer seemed to believe it was full of nostalgia for the good old days of a comfortable bourgeois childhood. I say, "Nonsense." It embodies malaise--a malaise that penetrates every sound of this work.

I call that precision in composition. His early life was anything but comfortable, except perhaps to the casual observer.

2010-11-04T07:07:00.000-07:00

What a big difference there is between reading music with a theoretical bias and listening to it as it leaps off the piano. Yesterday a ten-year-old was sight-reading a Bartok piece from For Children, Vol.II: a piece I know well and love dearly. As she fumbled her way through it, making her own logical sense of its chromatics I realized that I have missed a great deal of the piece's inner sense which, in her fumbling, she had stumbled upon.

I read G# as a necessary element in A minor and G-natural as signalling a change to C major; her errors often confused the black-key version of G with the white-key. After listening to her reading, which made its own perfect sense, I realized that the piece's drama depends upon the alteration of its three black keys at unexpected times into their corresponding naturals. It is the surprise in each case that conveys the message.

When I read it there is no surprise but simply a right note or a key shift--both rather boring in comparison. Her wrong notes were more insightful than my right ones.

There will be a three day break from posts as I will be attending a conference. Back on Monday to report on it.

2010-11-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

Some of my students are professional jazz musicians whose love for the piano keeps pulling them forward into the "real deal." Yesterday came an accomplished pianist with a compelling desire to get into the Chopin Etudes. He spoke of his dislike, distrust even, of technical drill. What looks more like drill than the "Aeolian Harp" etude with its repetitive rhythmic figures?

Ah! But the overtone configurations within those visual repetitions are in constant variation -- to such an extent that repetition is virtually impossible.

"That changes everything!" he said.

2010-11-02T18:34:00.000-07:00

It has been interesting to track the responses and non-responses to my article in Chamber Music magazine about the chamber music coaching I did at Mannes for thirty years. For some people it was a life-changing experience, I gather in large part because of the new and unfamiliar music we all learned together.

It seems to be a radical notion that chamber music involves more skills than counting, and starting and stopping more or less at the same time. The elemental skill is, of course, listening sympathetically. Sounds simple. Try it.

(If you haven't seen the article and would like to read it drop me a line and I'll send you a pdf copy.)

2010-11-01T14:25:00.000-07:00

Anderszewski came to town and played / conducted two Mozart Piano Concerto's with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, natural horns and all. I was overwhelmed, as were my companions, by the range of his emotion and his power, both loud and supremely soft.

Too often, I feel, Mozart is played as though there is a correct way to perform it, i.e., without flesh and blood. I find this unbearable; therefore do not attend many Mozart performances. The extremes are there, especially in the D minor Concerto, which Anderszewski played yesterday. The piano that he played is modern; he is modern; the music, being timeless, can take it when updated by such a fearless, honest musician.

2010-10-31T06:46:00.000-07:00

Another example of how profoundly classical composers think in related tonalities: Preparing a Player's Guide to Mozart's monumental Piano Quartet in G minor, K. 478 (due out next year) I have studied all his works in that key, and in G major, the key of the Mozart Piano Sonata, K. 283 that so troubled me when a child, and which gave rise to my visualization technique, Tonal Refraction. Yesterday I discovered that just before writing K. 478 he wrote three songs, K. 472-4, in the keys respectively of G minor, B-flat major and G major, the same sequence of keys as the three movements of K. 478. Then there is my favorite Mozart song, Das Veilchen, K. 476 which, despite its brevity, is in three keys: G major, minor and E-flat for a slight change.

The discovery elates me.

2010-10-30T06:54:00.000-07:00

What could be better than being sixteen or twenty-one, playing great music and being totally aware, totally in command of what you are hearing so that you are free to respond to it as you play? That's not the way I recall playing at sixteen or twenty-one.

For me at that age it was a matter of going over what I knew, of repetition, not of discovery.

What gives these young students freedom to respond is that they were never led to believe that music is static, that it can or should be reliably repeated. OK, that's a luxury. But life, too, is a luxury.

2010-10-28T10:34:00.001-07:00

Today I am thinking about the contrast between two concerts I heard recently. In one, listening was the subject--active, attentive, spellbound listening, backed up by all kinds of skill: in the composition and in the performance. Mysterious, challenging, cathartic.

In the second, where I had anticipated warmth and sensuality since I was familiar with the music, authenticity seemed rather to be the subject: historical, theoretical, literary authenticity.

The first took me by surprise: works by a living composer, 39 years old: Matthias Pintscher, completely new to me. Give him a listen whenever you get the chance.

2010-10-27T14:47:00.000-07:00

I now have a pdf file of the Chamber Music Magazine article in case you are interested. Send me an email: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com and I will gladly send you a copy.

One person responding commented on the courage that it takes for amateurs who know that their "bodies" are imperfect to get up and play together with others. I should say so! But I don't think of it as their "bodies" but rather what my teacher used to call their "equipment," i.e., their technique, their chops.

In my experience persons with less than perfect bodies often play and sing most beautifully. Have you heard Thomas Quasthof?

2010-10-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

As many of you know from seeing my work I am fascinated by the connections between visual and auditory experience, most specifically on the interchange between them, or the lack thereof.

My friend who specializes in Greek culture as perceived in 18th-century England (how's that for specificity!) tells me that the Greek language was at its most highly inflected with specific endings when it was newborn. With usage it eroded, becoming gradually less refined.

Imagine if music notation had had a similar history, moving from visualizations of vibrations to the rather coarse system we use today.

2010-10-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

This day is special: My article Experiments of a Chamber Music Coach on the program I inaugurated at Mannes in 1975 and coordinated until 2007 is in the Nov/Dec. issue of Chamber Music, the magazine of Chamber Music America. In it I describe the program's philosophy and structure -- my methods which were kept under-the-radar for more than 30 years.

The germ of it all is hidden away 5 paragraphs from the end: "It became increasingly clear that the students who trusted their own ears played with greater confidence and satisfaction. There was no way any of them (or us coaches) could play like the Amadeus Quartet: not many Americans equate music with survival, though I know that persons with disability or chronic illness often do." The program would never have happened if my own disability and chronic illness had not precluded a professional performing career.

I do equate music with health and joy, both synonyms for survival.

2010-10-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the rare experience of playing the Mozart Quintet for Four Winds and Piano, K. 452, together with three expert woodwind players--all of us playing the work for the first time with a natural horn. It was astounding to hear everyone respond to the surprising colors of the horn. These are players who know every note of this work, not only their parts but everyone else's as well.

It completely changed the work for them. The drama was inside of the sound, which is where I have always thought it should be.

2010-10-21T10:41:00.000-07:00

Today I had an interesting conversation about teaching music. Why would anyone want to do that, I mean really want to really do that, as opposed to having it be a default way to make a living?

Look at it this way: music is a gift. If you are fortunate enough to have that gift you must have observed that people around you -- family, friends, acquaintances -- often envy the gift. The good news is that it is readily shared.

If luck is with you you share it as a performer. If you are not so fortunate you can find other ways to enrich your life by imparting the best aspects of your gift to others, teaching being an obvious option.

The question really is how are you going to teach: Will it be to have as miserable a time as possible, constantly reminding yourself of your failure to "make" it as a performer? Or will you find ways to keep your spark alive and growing by responding to the individuality of your students -- that is, by treating them the way you would like still to be treated, as both unique and privileged?

2010-10-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

What do you see when you open your program at the theatre? A cast of characters:

Joseph, an old man
Gilda, his beloved young daughter
General McMuckamuck, commander of His Majesty's Army
A Sanitation Department worker

Already you are involved in the plot and the curtain has not yet gone up.

What does my sixteen-year-old student see when she opens her Beethoven Sonata in E major, Op. 14 No. 1, last movement? Four sharps, lots of A, A-sharp the first accidental followed soon by B-sharp. Aha! that makes six sharps! One is missing! Which one? E-sharp.

She sight reads the movement, not up to tempo, it's true, but not missing a thing. At the appearance of E-sharp she bursts out laughing: There it is!

When Beethoven transmutes the E-sharp to F-natural in order to proceed to the key of B-flat she gets the giggles. Now this is really funny.

All I recall from being that age was bafflement and a short attention span, certainly nothing bordering on an awareness of tones as characters in a drama.

2010-10-19T07:06:00.001-07:00

Is there a non-verbal equivalent to the text in instrumental music? I believe there is. Every instrument, except those in the category of electronica, has a distinctive timbre and specific acoustical properties distributed unevenly throughout its range.

No matter how hard the music establishment has tried to brainwash us into thinking the contrary, this is the case also for the piano. The various registers of the instrument are distinct and affect the total sound differently. Then let us not forget the mechanical/acoustical difference between white-key and black-key resonance.

Contemporary commerce-driven culture is eager to sell the public on the notion that it doesn't matter how pitch is produced since all pitches are interchangeable--correction, since musicians are trained to believe that producing interchangeable pitches is a good idea. A gifted young singer recently told me that even singers are being trained to perform to this standard.

All you have to do is go hear some really fine early-music players to be reminded of the extent to which lyricism is inherent in instruments as it is in the human voice. After all, most instruments were modeled after the voice.

2010-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been making music together with a fine singer of French chansons, one of the things I most enjoy in all of music. Do I practice them? Not actually. But I sing them constantly: every idle moment a phrase of one or the other is wafting through my entire being. This is perhaps why I love songs so much: I am entirely at their mercy. Actually playing them together with the singer is like giving vent to one's deepest subconscious responses to the song. An ideal art form.

2010-10-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

I wish it were possible to convince people that the number of notes one plays or the speed with which one plays them are not what make a performer compelling or even minimally interesting.

This past week I heard three ensemble performances, in only one of which the awareness of pitch was evident, indeed compellingly so. One situation was a Master Class in which graduate students at an eminent conservatory were unable to get interested in tone quality; speed was their only selling point. In the second case it was a highly recognized string quartet whose rhythmic coordination was outstanding but whose absence of tone put me literally to sleep in the one work they programmed that demanded tonal involvement. The third was a young opera company with an uneven assortment of voices and talents--when they were good they were very, very good indeed, and their pianist was exemplary. Not famous--just riveting.

2010-10-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of talk among people who teach academic music theory about why so many students who are passionate about music do so poorly in theory classes. Some have even come out and said that music is as much about visual as about auditory experience.

Recently I was put in a position where I had to acknowledge in print that it took me years to be able to hear objectively--that is, without prejudicing my hearing by what I see on a printed page. The music I hear is valid; what I see is often stereotypical and not subject to the life of tones.

I have staked quite a lot on the difference, which constitutes a form of heresy among musical thinkers, so entrenched is the visual-analysis approach.

How do I know it doesn't work? Because of Mozart.

2010-10-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

Somewhere early on I was given the impression that all major keys on the piano are interchangeable. Ha! Not so, McGee!

Children who are encouraged to notice how different they are can open a book of sonatas and get into subject matter before they have played a note.

Consider this: Are all books interchangeable? Doesn't it matter that you know the difference between fiction and non-fiction? Admittedly the categories have gotten out of hand in terms of book publishing and it is impossible to imagine a book that cannot be strictly departmentalized. My little book, What Might It Mean? An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious* is funny and yet dead serious, for adults young and old, for serious musicians as well as amateurs--even writers who don't know anything about music have found it insightful concerning criticism. Because it cannot be categorized I had to publish it myself.

The ability to tell the difference between something of specific relevance and something more general is a sign that one knows how to read, no?

*It is available on line, or you can contact me for a copy.

2010-10-13T17:01:00.000-07:00

Last week my sixteen-year-old piano student, who doesn't "practice" but who plays a lot, wondered why Clementi's Preludes in A minor are so short when they are so beautiful.

Today she wondered why Mozart wrote only one piano sonata in that key, and whether Beethoven had written any. Fascinating question. (There are two sonatas for piano and violin but none for piano solo.) I sang for her what I consider to be the quintessential A minor piece: Der Leiermann from Schubert's Winterreise.

She told me she had been playing Chopin's A minor Prelude and played it for me, with some wrong notes, to be sure, but with such right sound that I was awed. Clearly she has a deep feeling for the sonorities of A minor, even though the tonality is only obliquely present in that piece. It is one of the most sophisticated pieces of music I know.

We had a talk about private vs. public piano playing. She is clearly a private player. If she wanted to play that piece for people she would have to get some experience doing so by inviting people -- any people -- to sit and listen to her. It is a personal choice, after all.

I recall at her age not being able to tolerate the mystery of that piece.

2010-10-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a small group of amateur singers sight-read a Mozart four-part canon V'amo di core, which I had never sung before, though it has called out to me for many years. It turns out to be all about tenderness. And so it is, every note. The point is made right away with the first deviation from the obviously tunable notes of the tonic triad. He makes them risky in the most beautiful way.

I woke up this morning realizing how easily such fragile music gets destroyed by banging out the right notes on the piano rather than allowing (encouraging!) singers to puzzle out the emotional distances between pitches. It makes all the difference in the world.

2010-10-11T10:10:00.000-07:00

Do you remember how demeaning it felt when you first realized that the over-simplifications you learned as a child did not help but only hindered comprehension?

We hear the effects of such oversimplifications every day of the week in a music school where bar lines are more apparent than anything else.

There is no reason in the world why children can't learn rhythm as the endlessly variable phenomenon that it is, except that deep-down parents want their children to replicate their own bad experiences. If you have a better explanation please let me know.

2010-10-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking all day about how different music seems when the point is to get it, rather than to get all the notes right but miss the point entirely.

Too often the meaning has to be supplied by theoretical analysis then pasted onto the music via some intellectual process that has very little to do with actual listening.

2010-10-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt: sound comes first. The young duo sightread Rachmaninoff's Barcarolle this morning. Immediately it sounded wonderful, even when there were rhythmic meanderings between them. They were listening, that was the secret. Without knowing the piece they already had discerned its scenario, without any help from me.

I could not have done that at their age because my reading was vision-based, not ear-based.

I find that when I listen without a score I hear the music more accurately. When I read the score I pre-judge what I am going to hear and miss the instrumental subtleties that distinguish this particular version of the G triad from all others the world has ever heard.

Read this way a Beethoven sonata comes to life from within--right away.

This kind of learning, which admittedly takes longer, also lasts longer, both in terms of sustained concentration while playing and in terms of integrated fascination with the work.

2010-10-08T13:51:00.000-07:00

Think about the difference between a public and a private instrument. Are all pianos public? One would think they were judging from the way children are encouraged to think about them--or rather, are encouraged to treat them. Because from what I observe, the child's thinking about the piano rarely enters into the picture.

The thought part is more closely bound up with the tonal imagination--with sound itself rather than with proper execution or interpretation.

The thought part is harder to define, harder to train, yet more lasting in its impact and more central to the real power of music.

2010-10-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard an eminent theorist/musicologist present two versions of a Beethoven Sonata for Piano and Cello, Op. 69. It was a fascinating presentation which featured performances of both versions of the piece by a highly competent student duo. I had to leave before the conclusion of the presentation, but heard enough to realize that the scholar, himself a cellist who has played the piece many times, got it backwards: It is an accompanied sonata, but it is the cello that is accompanying the piano, not the other way around. The duo who played definitely had been advised to keep the cello on top, so to speak, and the piano took a receding role. This is entirely wrong as it skirts all the critical issues raised by the composition: why it contrasts A major, a fine cello key, with F# minor, a lousy cello key but a fascinating piano key.

The piano was a knockout invention. Its sound, then as now, is unfathomably rich, particularly in the black key department. Beethoven was totally fascinated with the sound of black keys in contrast to white. How do I know? Look at the key signatures of Op. 2: No. 1-- four flats; No. 2 -- three sharps; No. 3 -- none of either. This pattern repeats throughout his life. Can it be accidental, then, that he regards this as subject matter?

2010-10-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

Questions of intonation are among the most difficult to address. It is as if string players, already facing intonation challenges when playing together, cannot imagine that the difficulties they have playing in tune with winds or with the piano might signal details of passionate importance in the composer's mind.

Yesterday I had a remarkable conversation with an eminent bassoonist who told me about specific difficult-to-manage pitches on the bassoon. I was astounded, having played often with bassoon, one of my favorite duo instruments. How differently I would listen knowing what I now know! I should think such information would be critical to an understanding of specific sounds in all music.

2010-10-05T06:14:00.001-07:00

Now that everything is equally accessible at the push of a button we risk losing the sense of the difference between the intimate musical gesture and the public musical event. Some genres are made for household enjoyment while others are clearly intended for public spectacle or mass participation.

Some of the most intimate music was written for duets, particularly piano four-hands. This was meant to be played after a good dinner, with and for friends, probably after a glass or three of good wine and other spirits. A fair amount of this music is downright inebriated. (Schubert's Notre Amitie est Invariable is certainly in that category--even the title is over the top.)

Children taking piano lessons are rarely let into the secret. It makes all the difference in the world, as the emotions accompanying wrong notes are critical in making the distinction between public and private. If public, a wrong note is embarrassing at least. If private, the same wrong note may be endearing.

Perhaps this is why so many pianists really hate to play four-hand music.

2010-10-02T07:59:00.000-07:00

I note with some amusement how different it is to train young people to be discerning amateurs than to be pretend professionals. Perfectionism is a dead-end street when it comes to music; pretend perfectionism is even deader. All too often pretense to perfection is the disease of professionalism.

A discerning amateurs is like the five-year-old who, when listening to Don Quixote read to him, burst out laughing at the second instance of Sancho Panza uttering his inimitable words of wisdom: "I know what he's going to say!" and then proceeded to get it.

2010-09-30T20:02:00.001-07:00

Imagine someone putting a period at the end of every line in an Emily Dickinson poem.

Today someone brought in an edition of Brahms works for piano in which Emil Sauer had done the equivalent, adding slurs that entirely change the texture and implications of the piece.

It reminded me that as a teenager I was given that edition. I decided that Brhams was an inferior composer. One look at the Authentic edition (very inexpensive, published by Kalmus) in which there are almost no markings, assured me that the opposite is true.

Try fooling around with the punctuation in a poem you know and love, then compare the Sauer edition of Brahms to the Authentic and see for yourself.

2010-09-28T20:20:00.000-07:00

Working on the Rachmaninoff Waltz from Opus 11 with two fully aware, intelligent young people has been a real eye-opener for me. Until working with these two, I always approached four-hand music from the standpoint of getting it right at all costs. Here, however, is a piece that is crafted with wrong notes that exude inebriation. It literally reels, gets blurred vision, misses the correct note again and again. The fine ears of these young people make it clear to me that this ultra sophisticated aspect of the piece is very subtly composed into it. Ironically, it is an aspect of music that cannot really be written down--it simply must be heard. How do I know that they hear it? Because they trip over its illogical passages. Listening to their errors has revealed the piece to me.

My respect for Rachmaninoff has grown enormously. So has my respect for these students and for the uniquely difficult challenge of reading aspects of music that defy notation.

2010-09-27T16:15:00.000-07:00

Formulas are OK as far as they go, but in music they often go nowhere. Take, for example, time signatures. These are not formulas, contrary to what you were told when you were ten or eleven. Every time signature needs to be interpreted in conjunction with a tempo marking, prevailing note values, and other small details.

It is amazing how simplistic we learn to be when the opposite is called for in so many cases. As a result the music seems to be leaden, boring.

Just last week I had two examples of time signatures that were entirely the opposite of what I used to think they were. Now that I finally know how to read....

It takes a while.

That is the point.

2010-09-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

There is a lot of drunkenness in classical music--more than most piano teachers would care to think. My teenage four-hand students are working on the Rachmaninoff Waltz, from Opus 11. Its scenario is intoxication of two kinds: rhythmic and alcoholic. Playing and listening to it in this light changes drastically how one hears and comprehends what is and isn't happening: wrong notes composed into the piece, accents that do not jibe between the two parts, missing beats and downbeats, slowings down and speedings up, spinning lines that go on and on for indeterminate amounts of time... it has "out of control" written all over it.

2010-09-24T06:09:00.000-07:00

Two extraordinary lessons in rhythm yesterday: one a teenager just learning her way around Beethoven. We started with the definition of Allegretto in 3/4. It cannot mean a straightforward quarter note beat because I believe that "-etto" implies an eighth-note pulse. Are there any eighth notes? Sure enough they were all over the place but hidden, as it were, in dotted quarter notes (what is a dotted quarter if not a 3/8 value?.

She sightread the movement as an eighth-note piece rather than the plodding 3/4 piece I have always heard and played myself when her age. The result was a fascinating reading of a piece that otherwise can feel quite pedestrian.

Later came a mature woman, very experienced pianist but not a good sight reader, with a Brahms Intermezzo in 6/8. What do you know about 6/8? Two strong beats to the bar. Really?

It turned out not that simple. Her delight was boundless.

Again, it is a piece I had always heard and played myself (or attempted to play) in a conventional 6/8 meter.

The point is that "'taint simple, McGee!"

2010-09-22T06:14:00.001-07:00

Overtones. That's what happened when the piano was invented. Overtones became the subject of the music and the content of the sound, not discrete notes or harmonies. That's why there are so many broken "chords" in the left hand: the harmonic context shifts gradually as overtones compound upon already sounding mixes of sound. That's why the "bass" notes in a broken chord are not to be sustained and why they do not indicate full change of pedal: they are specifically crafted to carry over and blend with an already sounding constellation of vibrations. Visual analysis often obscures this essential auditory observation.

In much piano music one cannot--must not--separate functions in the Baroque manner of bass, melody and chord. Doesn't work.

2010-09-21T07:51:00.001-07:00

Details, details. As important as it is to get the general idea of a piece of music it is the details that stick in one's craw. They certainly bothered me as a youngster, particularly those pesky chromatic alterations Mozart inserted in all the wrong places. I disliked them to the point of "correcting" them. No one stopped me, so what difference could it possibly make?

I notice when a student trips over details because it shows that the student is reacting to their specificity. This often means that I have to make the effort to go into the probable cause for these improbable musical events. I have benefited greatly from this effort and so has Rachmaninoff, the composer du jour.

2010-09-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

Today I remember the remark of a young girl who had played a wrong note: "But the note didn't want to go up!" Labelled by everyone but me a poor reader she did not last long in my tutelage: her parents were determined that she remain a poor reader. I feel that she was really ahead of the game in that she showed comprehension. If that isn't the point of reading, what is?

I recall also moments in which I heard distinctly certain tonal events that surprised me by making it impossible for me simply to play the notes in front of me. When I have gone back to find the passages they have vanished. It is as though I read theoretically and listen acoustically and the two simply do not line up.

2010-09-19T06:24:00.000-07:00

Intensity is something that cannot be pasted onto music, either in composition or in performance. Phony baloney is not hard to spot. (Real baloney--Liberace, for instance--is altogether different: my sophisticated piano teacher from Prague admired his pianism and could laugh more easily than I could when it turned into schlock.)

Many library copies of chamber works at Mannes where I have taught for over 30 years, used to be marked with pencil: "More! More!" What did those coaches want if not pasted on intensity? I would have marked: "Less! Less!" which is to say, do less and listen harder. The tones themselves, if composed with real intensity (a fair enough assumption when the composer is Beethoven or Mozart) inform all the passion required.

2010-09-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Usually people don't think of Rachmaninoff as an ironic composer, but the Waltz my students are playing, piano four hands, is definitely ironic. Purposeful wrong notes, hiccuping rhythms, it can't be serious. Maybe the trouble is that we tend to take music seriously just because it is written down. Then it comes as such a shock when someone brings it to life and we realize that it is amusing.

2010-09-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

Among the most powerful images we carry around with us are those we learn early on, when first beginning to study music. Among these are quarter notes, associated with beats, and the musical staff with five alphabet-named lines. All of these images affect the way we process written music and very often they distract from our perception of musical sounds and rhythms.

Since about 1963 people have been seriously studying the effect of writing on thought: what a huge difference an alphabet makes! It's about time we were more aware of the effect of notation on music perception.

As important as reading music is--and I believe it is very important--it must refer primarily to what is heard, not what is seen.

2010-09-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

Never underestimate the power of an image. I am thinking a lot these days about the image of the major scale: Unfortunately it is imprinted on our brains both visually (as a ladder, primarily for ascending) and in sound (as an auditory symbol of utter stability). The fact is that the scale is, in a definition I read somewhere long ago and unfortunately did not write down the attribution, a combination of melodic fragments.

My work with Tonal Refraction permits musicians to depict the relationships between scale tones as they hear them, not according to the "correct" visual imprint. The results are surprising and have released seemingly intractable blocks to reading and to physical coordination. For me it has provided insight into the nature of musical themes, many of which express just such repositionings of the tones of the scale: Brahms Piano Trio in C, Op. 87, for instance, or many piano sonatas from all periods.

Many people hear the 6th degree of the scale as lower than the tonic. This re-formulation of the scale is frequently encountered in classical music.

2010-09-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

Some serious and even interesting people have begun asking "What is music?" It becomes an urgent question these days when so much that passes for music bombards us: on "hold," in the elevator, in stores, not to mention the venues in which musicians dutifully plod through the classics.

I think often of Leonard Bernstein's wonderful song: I Hate Music but I Love to Sing!

2010-09-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Hilarity is one of my favorite topics partly, I think, because it seems to be a forbidden aspect of music. It doesn't occur to most serious musicians that Rachmaninoff deliberately plants a wrong note throughout most of a piece of music so that when he finally gets it right it will sound wrong. Similarly, it doesn't occur to most musicians that Beethoven is actually writing 5's plus 3's in duple meter, boring you to tears trying to get 2's or 4's to work until you discover the hidden clue and then delighting you to pieces every time.

Funny how closely allied they are: boredom and hilarity.

2010-09-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I told my two young duo students that they were in a terrific position to do a bang-up job on the Rachmaninoff Waltz they are studying. They thought I was crazy.

Today I let them rehearse on their own. I kept hearing laughter, not complaints or groans. There were errors, but there was laughter.

That is the point: this maddening work, full of on-purpose wrong notes and very difficult rests (!) is hilarious. If it isn't, well....

2010-09-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

Music is such a totally engrossing activity--it makes sense that it holds out to anyone with disability the promise of a holistic life.

There are many problems, however. I cannot begin to name them all or pretend to deal with them. But I know that people with physical disabilities, major or minor, wrestle with the conflict between bodily and mental commands and responses. As someone who had trouble obeying physical instructions I very much resented anyone insisting that I do so, or even positing this as a norm. Most of my solutions were worked out in my head, in my imagination, at my own speed and in my own time.

This has saved my musical life and my spirit remains intact. It pretty well sums up the way I work with young learners and so far I see ample evidence that it is successful in terms of their learning processes, their motivations and their spirit. It has nothing to do with being competitive or measuring up to anyone else but one's own potential, whatever that may be.

2010-09-08T07:10:00.001-07:00

So, in ten words or less, what is the reason?

Why do we learn to factor integers in various ways? Beethoven spends a lot of musical energy refactoring simple meters so that it is impossible to tire of them. But, not knowing that, most of us never advance beyond counting to two in a 2/4 bar.

For that reason I have often fantasized about staging a massive "happening" where quarter-note balloons would be positioned along all the major arteries and on all the bridges around Manhattan (why not the world?) and at a given signal all would be popped, once and for all.

2010-09-07T15:13:00.000-07:00

I firmly believe that a person going into third year of high school is capable of understanding all kinds of things that in my day were not considered appropriate for young minds. Why play sonatas by Beethoven? was a question that arose in my mind at about that age. It is a difficult question to ask and a harder one to answer.

Many young people that age are given, as I was, the task of learning to play these works without the foggiest idea of what we are doing, let alone why.

My student is working, at her own request, on improving her rhythmic control. We use Vol. I of the Beethoven sonatas to work on this problem. This is the routine: She opens the book at random and spots a passage that seems playable. Today it was the second phrase in the A major Sonata, Op. 2 No. 2. It looks straightforward but, as must happen to everyone who reads it for the first time, her fingers were soon tied up in knots (as well as notes).

The meter is 2/4. Considering the length of a slurred group to be a single unit of rhythm there is a problem because one slur group is 1 1/2 beats while another is 4 bars, which is 5 x 1 and 1/2 plus 1/2. This proposition is so amusing and so obviously what holds the passage together that she was soon able to play it because it had been properly parsed.

Where does the idea originate, do you suppose? Contrary to what one would expect, in the opening idea the set of four 32nds is slurred into the following quarter--a most unusual occurrence--making a total of 1 and 1/2 beats. Did you ever notice that?

Did I ever notice that?

2010-09-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

If I had to choose a single element of music theory that has most interfered with my understanding of how the ear works it would be the notion of tonicity.

More important to the ear than the tonality of a composition is the history of what and how one hears, in other words, the tones in the order in which they are presented. Just because the tonic may come first does not mean it is a solid tone--I can think of several examples of works that begin with unsettling tonic tones or even triads.

Taking the first tone of every composition seriously also illuminates the beginnings of many interior movements and many single pieces within a cycle: often the first tone can only be understood in relation to the last tone of the preceding movement.

2010-09-05T06:21:00.000-07:00

We do strange things to ourselves in the process of acquiring culture with a capital K. We get ourselves to believe that there are twelve tones in the octave and are so surprised that composers come up with twenty-three (see Allan Kozzin's article in yesterday's New York Times). There are actually millions of tones out of which different cultures choose a manageable number to which they pitch their songs and their instruments. When western composers write well for the traditional orchestra they are releasing many more tones than those in the notated score: all them overtones!

And the piano? It was always a microtonal instrument and it still is. Only our insistence on those twelve keys keeps us from hearing that.

I had a great row with a quite prominent musician/teacher/authority on the subject. He was aghast at the notion. Then why, I ask, did Brahms routinely account for 21 tones in the octave, and Schubert 24 in his posthumous B-flat Sonata?

The keys are not the sound.

2010-09-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

Let's think about speed: I think it's fair to say that Beethoven developed the notion of musical speed more explicitly than anyone else, specifically the direct connection between the very fast and the very slow. I am convinced that he responded to the vibration speed in slow tempos, of which most of us are entirely unaware.

One of my students is incredibly aware of that speed and, oddly, it slows down his superficial motor responses. It is an internal involvement which has required of me that I learn to hear and respect it. This is the student who plays a Beethoven sound more expressively than I can imagine doing myself. I am convinced that he responds to the piano in a manner comparable to Beethoven's, otherwise he could not intuitively find such a sound.

The sound defies theoretical identification or description much the way that piano sound defies electronic synthesis.

2010-09-03T11:04:00.000-07:00

Playing painlessly is like holding your nose when you swallow something you expect to taste awful. But what if you are holding your nose all the time?

The best image for playing painlessly remains Milt Gross's brilliant solution to King Midas breaking his teeth when he chewed his peas: He had a vassal stand in the corner with a pea shooter to shoot the peas directly into his gullet so that he could swallow them without chewing them.

If you do an Internet search for Nize Baby you will find some lovely peas on which to chew.

2010-09-02T06:37:00.000-07:00

Few things are more revealing than a Beethoven Sonata in the hands of a teenage student: I see in her comprehension-motivated reading the exact opposite of my reading at her age (16), the goal of which was to play it as painlessly as possible.

This morning I discovered that one movement that has always felt weird to me need not feel weird at all: it begins with an upbeat bar while I had always heard it as a downbeat bar which, of course, throws the entire movement off balance. She got it; I did not.

2010-09-01T04:53:00.000-07:00

A real dilemma faces educators now more than ever: Do we train children to answer or to ask questions? If to answer, then we assume that the questions we are asking are relevant to our children. If to ask, we assume that we are all living in a changing world and that the teacher generation has no idea what the questions of their era will be.

Those who favor answers are currently setting the tone of public education in this country.

I favor questions.

2010-08-31T12:52:00.000-07:00

One of my students has the ear of a composer. When he doesn't approve of the note choices of a composer whose work he is reading he changes the notes without thinking about it.

As he is a visual arts student I asked if he had ever copied a painting. Yes. Well, every time you play this piece you are copying the composition; your errors are not acceptable if the job is to copy the work as it is, not as you would prefer it to be. Playing a piece on the piano can seem like a repetitive activity unless approached with a fully awakened sense of responsibility.

2010-08-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

An eminent scholar referred in a study on Mozart to the way amateurs massacre certain of his works. I don't think it's their fault. I blame the instrument teachers who cannot distinguish between music that is technically easy to play and music that is profoundly transparent. I am thinking of those "easy" Mozart sonatas and of Schumann's Fantasy Pieces--given routinely to intermediate level clarinetists and cellists, though they are among the most sophisticated ensemble duo that exist. Once you give people a taste of incompetence for which they receive praise the ship is already sinking.

2010-08-29T06:39:00.000-07:00

One day many years ago I proposed teaching my daughter to read music; she was about eight at the time. It made sense as I was teaching singing in her school and she was very much enjoying that.

She shrugged and shook her head.

Now, many years later, she still does not read notation. Yet her musical mind works so much faster than the minds of others who do read that she gets hired for demanding gigs playing new jazz composed by some very fine musicians.

The music that most fascinates me would have been lost forever had it not been written down. My goal in teaching others to read it is to get below the level of the notation to where the sound was as alive to the composer as it is to the mind of a creative musician alive today.

I have developed a way of teaching reading that can achieve this--it doesn't work for every child, but it does work for most children that I have taught. By not tying the notes first to motor responses the child can relate them first to an auditory equivalent, then to a motor response. (Motor responses may constitute difficult or even dangerous territory for some learners.) Taught the other way music becomes mechanical, repetitive--you know the drill.

2010-08-28T05:26:00.000-07:00

It's amazing that the printed score is now so accepted as the music that I can't get through to an experienced player that musical logic precedes what is on the page. Meaning is not in the print in music any more than in poetry or prose. There is nothing scared about what is in a book or on a blog.

2010-08-27T06:15:00.001-07:00

Trying to work on the mammoth problem of rhythm control with a teenager it becomes clear that one cannot arrive at rhythmic control without considering tonal action. In a Beethoven sonata, for example, the many layers of tonal activity so directly affect awareness of the beat that the two are inextricably intertwined. Don't even try to treat one apart from the other: death will surely ensue--either the player's, from boredom, or Beethoven's from assault.

I liken the problem to the heart monitor at the hospital bedside, happily purring away at a steady rate until a bell rings. The thing goes wild. Are you going to believe that all that activity occurs within the same time unit as the quiet, predictable purring?