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Are Dots Digital?

I'm talking about the little dots attached to "stems" and "flags" or "beams" that are the stuff of standard music notation.

In relation to what sound actually is they are, in fact, digital, as pixels are that, try as they may, cannot make a curved line.

The irony with the music dots is that the less ink they require (think whole notes) the more they contain (think length / compounded resonance).

I am pretty sure that many musicians take the dot for the thing and quickly lose interest.  I have been there, done it, suffered the loss.

I know what it's about.

BLOG MOVING

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Why Don't We Learn to Value the Multi-dimensionality of Sound?

Simple answer: It takes too long.

More complicated answer: In order to do so you would have to sit still - already an out-of-date proposition.  And you would have to not listen to any canned music for a period of time: a week, say, or more.

Why?  Because the processed version of sound that survives electronic manipulation of any kind is by definition reduced in terms of its resonance, its tone space, if you will.

We are so accustomed to that other product that we don't know the difference unless we make ourselves notice it.

It's a bit like food.

Reacting to Knowledge is not Reacting to Sound

"It's an A.  Go away and don't bother me; I know how to play that note!"

"Do you really?  What if I play a bass F while you play it, and then a lower octave F: does it change the A?"

"Hmmm.  It feels different."

This acknowledgement that it feels different is the beginning of grasping that the character of sound is multi-dimensional and that no theoretical explanation of identity or function will account for the ingenuity that Beethoven employs to make you taste the difference between the A in different contexts.

BLOG MOVING: A REMINDER!

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Attention Span too Short?

Yesterday I had one of those bus-ride chats with a colleague who had just performed a "Schubert's Last Year" recital the previous evening.  His program had been wisely chosen; it made me wish I had heard it.

Rather than play all three of the last great piano sonatas - something pianists feel is now de rigeur - he had chosen instead to play the F minor Fantasy for four hands, the Shepherd on the Rock for soprano, clarinet, and piano, and one of the last sonatas, the big B-flat.  He was commenting on the difficulty audiences express about paying attention to the long sonatas, how much more interesting they find opera.

That led me to recall how I turned Schubert sonatas into one-performer operas instead of sonatas a la Beethoven, and how differently they come out.  (It is not an unlikely approach, as Schubert during his 31 years on earth walked around with 18 operas in his head, not all of them finished or even undertaken, but still...)  What is the difference?

We approach sonatas, I should say, some of us approach sonatas as if they involve themes and the treatment of themes.  If approached as an opera the music becomes immediately speech-driven rather than abstract -- as generally presented a theme is, in comparison to speech, abstract.

I do not approach Classical sonatas in that way, because I feel that the piano was always, from day one, an inflected instrument; that it prompted so much composition because of that quality.  Listening to or for themes involves repetition and is essentially boring because it entails repetition.  Listening to individual tones come alive is never dull.  Every sonata thus played is too short.

BLOG MOVING

As of today I will move the blog to my website: www.tonalrefraction.com.  Today I announce a new learning initiative.  Read about it there.

Future blogposts will be on that site!

The First Note

Of the three Tonal Refraction books in or almost in print, each one was sparked by a singular composition whose first sound is problematic.

How does Mozart contrive to make G so uncomfortable?  How does Beethoven make A sound like a mystery?  How can a B-flat triad in root position  produce such malaise - is it just because Schumann left the 5th to the imagination?

I am fascinated by first sounds that belie all one knows about tone, about theory, about harmony.

I once asked students in a graduate seminar in Music Theory if they were aware of compositions whose beginnings made them uncomfortable.  The teacher, amazed at the notion, said aloud, "I never asked that question."  Several students could immediately think of pieces that met the criterion.

It is important to pay attention to those feelings of uncertainty.  They may yield profound insight into many of the work's odd passages:  why that articulation?  that dynamic?  that octave break?

Being Listened To Encourages Listening

A few weeks ago a former student who hasn't studied piano since she went away to college, joined the community of students and families that is my studio for a get-together that included some extraordinarily generous playing.  On that occasion I did something new: I interpreted each student's playing to the listeners, essentially instructing them what it is that I find so fascinating in the work of each young person.

It varies as widely as the individuals vary.  But the quality of their work is not comparable to the work of anyone else on the planet.  It is precisely that individuality that attracts me to teaching; cultivating that quality is my purpose in teaching.  Confident expression of that individuality constitutes mastery.

The other day the mother of that former student informed me that her daughter had played the piano a lot after that afternoon.  I don't think it is an accident.  Learning to listen is the hardest part of studying music, just as learning to see has to be the hard part of being a painter.

When she was a student, before she went away to college, she wrote a statement that shows she was aware of this:

""I took piano lessons from Nancy for twelve years, and over the years I learned much more than how to look at little dots on a piece of paper and press a corresponding lever. Nancy encouraged and drew out from me emotional involvement and conscious thought about music, both in general and specific to certain pieces. Essentially, she taught me how to listen, one of the most difficult skills there is both to teach and to learn."

Where Connections Come From

Without the need to conform to historical or stylistic program arranging I find it wonderful simply to free-associate composers, styles, genres.  I find myself listening to myself listening and enjoying every unlikely minute of it.

In the process I am getting a whole new sense of what a sonata really is: It is a mini-program, complete unto itself, with a song, a dance, a complicated puzzle piece (usually the first movement) and a game at the end combining two or more of the above.  So why on earth would anyone play more than one sonata on a program?

There must have been a reason.  Probably a pretentious reason.

One afternoon my adult children and I were invited to a concert featuring three (count them) Bach cantatas.  On the way home my daughter (a singer/song-writer/musician of extraordinary versatility) remarked that it was too much: Surely one cantata was meant to be sufficient for one occasion.

She was right.  The programmers got it wrong.

Or perhaps it is that we, the consumers of CDs, now want the experience of live music to be as much like that as possible.

Autistic Achievement via Bartok

One of my longtime (16 years) students is blind, autistic, and severely developmentally challenged.  Underneath all those opacities he is a real human being and music is his only access to shared experience and to real expression.  He has long been fascinated by the music of Bartok, specifically For Children.  His many problems are complicated even further by the absence of a sense of touch. From the very beginning my pedagogy with him has been based on two fundamental principles:

• Variation, variation, more variation.  Never repeat yourself; never play the "same" piece twice the same way.
• Dissonance, dissonance, more dissonance.  Whatever the problems he has learning, he is bound to grow into some kind of unexpressible awareness of his limitations.  Dissonance is the musical equivalent of what he cannot otherwise express.

Today he enjoyed a spectacular lesson in which he accomplished some coordinations which had, not long ago, been impossible for him: He opened his left hand to play an octave then promptly returned to a closed position for the rest of the figure.  He could combine this new challenge with the melody which is itself deceptively simple - it has asymmetrical phrasing, and is not consonant with the accompaniment in the same way in any of its three verses.  

Why could he make the effort today that he could not begin to imagine several weeks ago?  I think it's because he has grown to love the piece, to such an extent that he is fascinated by its complexities. I know he loves it because it's what he played when I asked him to play anything at all at the start of the lesson.

What a student loves is the key to learning, no matter who the student and who the teacher.

Knowing a Piece Really Well

I know that I know a piece really well when I grasp the importance of its pushes as well as pulls, that is, the places where the note values and the articulations require me to resist forward motion, or indeed, not to move at all.

It was a true compliment when someone noted a couple of weeks ago that the Mozart I played seemed to move backwards.  That is exactly what I wanted to convey.  Of course, one cannot move backwards, but music is full of indications of reluctance: reluctance to move ahead, to rise, to fall, to resolve.

So much of my early Wagnerian-style training was based on a model of onward and upward that it is still hard to proceed confidently in the opposite direction.

Let's Hear It For Left Hands!

How often the sense of a piano work is contained in the left hand, so often neglected because it does not have the melody.

It took me a while to figure out that the usual division of music into three elements, melody, harmony, and rhythm, was entirely phoney, that a lot of music is a magical combination of the three so that they are in fact inseparable.

Having been trained as an organist I spent a lot of time identifying and articulating fugue subjects and counter-subjects.  One day I woke up to how much more interesting fugues are if you simply relax and listen.  What you hear tends to be a fascinating dispersal of long notes amid running passages. The trajectory of the long notes is utterly compelling.

I recommend to people that they approach their music via the long notes, not via the themes or the melodies.  The long notes convey both harmony and rhythm, and sometimes (especially in Beethoven!) even melody.

Body / Piano Playing : A Real Connection

One of my favorite students is an innovative scientist who has never been tempted to ignore the powerful drive to have music in her life.

Today she was working on the beginning of a Beethoven slow movement.  It is a privilege to work with someone whose sense of detail is so cultivated that she can appreciate the connection between this small step and that dynamic result.

It was a matter of overcoming anxiety about playing wrong notes: a familiar problem.

The hint very often lies in feeling the connection between the hand and the keyboard.  We tend to forget that the hand came first and approach the keyboard as a foreign object, whereas it is really the other way around.  The fifth is beautifully expressed by the five fingers in closed position.  Extending that reach ever so slightly to produce a sixth can be an utterly expressive gesture, in fact, an extension very like what a fine dancer executes to command our attention.

Treated mechanically the sixth is not expressive at all.  It was beautiful to hear what happened when notes stopped being notes and became actual physical gestures which, like fine choreography, conveyed real feeling.

Competing with Oneself

What am I doing when I get up to play for other people?

It is hard to shake the many years of feeling as if every performance is competitive, even when it is not.  But the possibility that I might be competing with myself did not occur to me until a pre-performance chat with a fellow pianist.

Even with maturity it does not get easier to go to the source and find what one needs to know and get the courage to go in pursuit of it.  There are so many factors pulling us down into the pre-judged, not-good-enough mode of much of our learning years.

This learned put-down keeps us from hearing in the here and now, that precious, fleeting moment when Mozart might reach us with a tone or tone relationship that we had never noticed before.

Rules? Models? Competition?

A few years ago I had an interesting email exchange with a well-known music theorist who has taken an interest in disability.  Replying to his questioning why I was interested in it my answer was that disability has alerted us to the extent to which conformity distracts from real learning by reducing singular works by singular individuals to a set of rules and procedures.

What does it take to direct a person's attention to the source? To get a child to feel confident that music is an inter-personal communication, not something objectified, standardized?

It takes attentiveness to and support of the child's ear.

Sounds simple.  Takes time.

Models or the Real Thing?

Already as a very young girl I had an awareness of "the real thing."  An interesting notion: That an unschooled child could have a notion of what that might be.

The plastic toy that looked like a sailboat but which, contrary to my excited expectations, sank was clearly not it.  The neighbor's spinet with no model attached either in print or in the person of a piano player was the real thing and has remained so for my entire life.

It was me and that sound with no intermediary.

When, then, specific sounds composed by someone who had lived 200 years earlier awoke in me a recognition that we were reacting to the same thing I knew it was real.

Lessons, classes, required recitals, had, for the most part nothing to do with it.  They conveyed rules, models, competition, categorical judgments--all beside the point.

An Endlessly Interesting Vocal Improv

This was one listener's reaction to the Mozart A minor Rondo that I played yesterday -- not just a listener, but a professional pianist, chamber musician, and vocal accompanist.  It might well be assumed that she knows what that means.  It came out quite differently yesterday than a few days before, who knows why.

In retrospect (and I have not yet seen the video that I had made of it - something I do only rarely) I suspect it had to do with paying more attention to the short note values this time.  It was not something I did "on purpose," but something that happens more and more as I get interested in the ephemeral aspect of all live music.

I noticed something concretely different at the very end when the long note values took on special meaning.  Where might they have come from if not from the need for them?

Mozart Rondo in A Minor: A Piece I Cannot Practice

Mozart may be the most difficult of all composers in that it is so easy to make his music sound perfect, pretty, predictable -- in other words, utterly beside any meaningful point.

This week I am performing a work that has utterly mystified me for most of my adult life.  The A Minor Rondo, K. 511 is so dramatic that it cannot be pinned down to a particular moment as the right one, or to a particular reading as definitive.  It has to be recreated afresh every time it is played. Perhaps that is the reason for it's being in the first place:  in a rondo the material "repeats" so often it has to be dealt with as new every time.

This is harder than anything one is trained to expect from music of any period, least of all the 18th century.