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.

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.

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.