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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.