Schubert Op. 122 continued

As a young piano student I was taught to recognize phrases: a series of measures that clearly began and led somewhere, at which point it was appropriate to breathe.  The phrases at that stage all seemed to have in common somewhat symmetrical trajectories. 

It is terribly difficult to free oneself of that deeply ingrained paradigm; nowhere does it matter more than in this sonata.  There are phrases, but they are often interrupted and they rarely reach satisfying endings, as if they were punctuated with question marks.

But the sonata begins with a virtual question, and the absence of a defined resolution concludes the work as the thematic material is interrupted, moved from the deepest register of the piano (where we are very rarely called upon to play a lyrical phrase) to the treble, and then to a whispered final chord.

The mystery, to me, is that this should happen in E-flat, usually a key of warmth and security on the piano, not the usual setting for angst.  The sonata becomes more meaningful with every passing performance.

Listening for Stasis

Up close, music is anything but stasis.  This morning I heard an a cappella choir rehearsing.  Suddenly there was a perfectly tuned, fully resonant F major harmony.  Later, when they sang the same work in the context of the service, that "same" harmony was nowhere to be found.  Vocal intonation is not in the least static.

Preparing to perform the Schubert Op. 122 E-flat Piano Sonata I was reviewing some of the G-flat passages in the last movement.  It struck me that their fragility was very like that of the vocally fragile tuning I had just heard.  G-flat is a marvelously stable key on the piano when it is the home territory.  But when it appears in the middle of an E-flat movement it virtually "undoes" the stability of G, so essential to the tonal definition of E-flat major, and it changes E-flat itself by the introduction of D-flat rather than D-natural.

It could be that my ear is particularly sensitive to such changes:  I have spent my entire musical life singing as well as playing the piano, and remain deeply involved with a cappella tuning.  When the overtones of a given piano pitch are tampered with in the course of a composition I can taste the whole environment going sour, as it were--tilting in search of the stability I have learned to crave in the course of the composition.

I know from having performed chamber music with many different instruments and personalities that this structural instability is not acceptable to some musicians: they will simply not allow the composer to effect such a significant structural upheaval.

Is it a result of recording techniques that correct every deviation from the strictly correct, even when it is musically wrong to do so?

Does it Go Up or Does it Go Down?

We risk thinking that every rising series of tones in music notation indicates rising tone motion.  This is an oversimplification in need of some clarification.

The best image would be that of a turn: start on a given tone, go up one, back to the starting tone; go down one, back to the starting tone.  Where have you gone?  Nowhere, really.  On no matter what instrument -- even the piano on which three different keys would be required to produce the indicated turn -- the quality of the motion is entirely altered if the intention is to produce the varied tones without going anywhere.

Another hard-to-read indication is what looks like a leap up, say from A to E.  Is it really a leap, or could it be, in the manner of a yodel, a light touching of an overtone of the lower note.  Again, the execution is totally altered by this concept of two completely different physical properties of the tones; I think of them as solid and vapor.

Otherwise music is a continual anchorless sequence of down-and-up-and-down-and-up:  like auditory ping pong.

Dvorak Teaches Me to Understand Schubert

There are many parallels between the writing of Dvorak and Schubert, among them the striking use of articulation to achieve rhythmic variation. 

When, in a 3/4 bar Dvorak used repeated eighth notes on every other beat, always on the same tone, it creates a fascination counter pulse, and adds orchestral depth to the sound.  Today I found in Schubert's A minor Sonata, Op. 42 a similar repeated two-eighth-note pattern within a 3/4 meter, though not on every other beat.  In the Schubert these notes are most often detached from the notes around them, yet at times he clearly indicates that that the 2nd eighth is an upbeat to the note that follows. 

Repeated notes are always difficult on the piano: they generate more sound than we usually quite know how to handle.  It changed the Schubert to play as if Dvorak had written it.

Sonata allegro form: Schubert E-flat Sonata, Op. 122

Today I start a sample of four posts on the subject of a particular composition.  I am offering a premium to subscribers who reach a certain amount on their subscription: the soon-to-be-reconstructed website www.tonalrefraction.com will give further details.  Watch for the announcement of its opening which has been delayed due to unforeseeable technical difficulties beyond my control....The premium is that you get to pick a composition for piano or chamber music as the subject of four blog posts with the invitation to pose specific questions or enter into an email or on-line discussion on the subject.  I will keep the tone as much as possible of general interest: i.e., instead of discussing particular measures or passages in the work I will treat items of general musical relevance, such as tempo, timing, recognizing allusions, meter, etc.

The key of a sonata is its subject matter.  It is not possible to abstract ideas on the piano from the key in which they are written.  This is, I realize, an item of considerable controversy.  One of the myths underlying piano instruction is the interchangeability of tonalities, a myth disproved by simply listening to the difference in sonority between an E-flat and a D major triad.  (I treat this subject in What Might It Mean? An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious:, to which I will be making frequent reference.)

The very opening sound of a sonata movement evokes either stability or its opposite.  The malaise of a unison opening -- left and right hand playing in octaves with no accompanying harmony or complementary rhythm -- is palpable.  Beginning a large composition this way feels like teetering on the edge of a one-dimensional world.  Doubly upsetting is an opening in which, as in this instance, everything is in question: the root of the tonic triad is hidden in the broken chord and a reliable downbeat is nowhere to be found.

How you deal with that depends on your gut connection to the effect of those opening sounds.  Once you have digested (or not digested, depending on your disposition) you may then launch a movement worthy of Schubert.

A sonata is like a game in which the composer engages you as partner, rather like tennis doubles in which Schubert is the one who serves.

Quarter Note Quagmire

Which came first: tone or timing?

It matters only when we try to separate the two, customarily for pedagogical purposes.  "Count!"  What a demeaning directive, if you stop to think about it.  Surely the child can count but, as one of my astute nine-year-olds put it, "I can't count and play at the same time." 

Two things come immediately to mind :

1.  The teacher inferring that it is easy to count and play at the same time is unable to discern the movement that is actually impelling the student's auditory and physical coordination at the instrument.  I was a student who could not play the piano and count at the same time.  I would have given anything to master that skill.  Teachers who insisted on counting as the solution only made things worse.

2. The artist striving to pierce the mysteries of Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, & Co. is hard put to overcome the habit of assuming that the quarter note (and its arithmetical subdivisions) conveys the unit of true rhythmic vitality.  I am a mature artist whose astonishment grows every time I confront a composition that I had previously striven to master by counting it to death.  At the moment it is Schubert Impromptus:  The magic of playing multiple triplets as sextuples (i.e., in hemiola -- remember him?) is literally transformative.

The Case of the Hidden Hemiola

"Everything's good in America!"  If you know how to s(w)ing that, you know that a hemiola is "me -ri - ca."  Though I cannot back this up scientifically I would venture to guess that every music in every culture since the beginning of time fooled around with triple meters (3 to the bar) dividing and multiplying each beat by 2.

The underlying point of the minuet, this rhythmic double entendre, explains why Baroque, classical, and even some modern composers wrote so many of them.

The hidden hemiolas are those places outside of dance movements in which, for example, a chord sustained for three-beats is bound by a slur to a "resolution" chord lasting one beat.  I have learned to accent not the resolution chord, usually the first beat of the second measure, but the hidden strong hemiola beat: i.e., the third beat of the three-beat chord, weakening the chord change over the barline.

There are many such instances in the Schubert Impromptus and Moments Musicaux, not to mention the sonatas.  Also in Beethoven, Mozart....