Hearing First

Long ago I read Artur Schnabel's command: "Hear first; then play!"  That I puzzled over this indicates the degree of complexity involved in the notion of hearing first.  Hear what?  How can you hear before there is sound?  What do we hear first?

It is an especially interesting notion when piano playing is involved.  We pianists, no matter where we are or addressing what instrument, hear first our own piano.  Every other instrument is an affront.  (Though I cannot prove this scientifically, I am convinced that this accounts for most of the stage fright that besets players of all ages.  I know it used to upset me terribly to "have to" play my well-prepared lesson on my teacher's first-class Steinway, a piano infinitely superior to my own dinky rented upright.)

Getting used to a new level of pianistic glow and a much expanded range of touch response I am aware of how much anticipatory hearing goes on every time I sit down to play.

Memory plays a large role in advance hearing.  Can we re-direct our advance hearing to avoid entrapment in the "previously heard," which is not at all the same as "hearing first"?

Tonal Refraction provides a means of doing just that, by connecting awareness of the multi-faceted life of tone in our deepest emotional memory to the present nano-moment in which present vitality finds a new connection between the physicality of playing and our inner ongoing life of sound.

www.tonalrefraction.net

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The Dynamic Art of Sight-reading

I have an experimental approach to teaching music to young learners.  Out of respect for the complexity of the art as well as the complexity of each child I realize how senseless it is to dumb down any part of the student's orientation to sound, notation, or repertoire.

Part of my last phase of experiment involved a weekly duo lesson with two teenagers, one an accomplished reader, the other an accomplished non-reading improvisor.  To my astonishment I realize that the non-reader could sight-read even quite complex scores when the two of them worked together.  Clearly there was no trace of competition between them or this could never have happened.

It is hard for me to imagine myself as a teenager doing anything musical  in the company of a peer without competition being the prevailing dynamic.

Free

What is free?  With any luck the spirit remains free.  The internet provides a wonderful outlet for freedom of expression.  It is up to you, dear reader, to gauge for yourself the value of what you read on the web. 

If I didn't believe strongly in free I wouldn't be doing this blog.  In order to express the thoughts you read here some considerable distance is required from the commercially-determined conventional music/academic world. 

Support it.  Go to www.tonalrefraction.net to learn how. 

Thanks!.

First Impressions

My newly rebuilt Mason & Hamlin AA grand has the most lustrous sound.  Every time I play Dvorak I am reminded of how dangerous it is to form wrong first impressions of such works as his Waltzes or the Suite in A Major, works I first heard in orchestrated versions.  No orchestration can capture the overtone glow that causes harmonies to merge rather than modulate.  Before the rebuilding I could get away with playing these works on the piano while hearing the orchestral version in my head.  Thank goodness that is no longer possible: the orchestration has been overpowered by the pianistic dimension that inspired these works in the first place.

Schubert in the Extreme

Opera is extreme above all other genres.  I know this from a few memorable performances I have seen/heard/felt.  In each case a magnificently complex production led up to a moment in the third act when the heroine (soprano) could not control her voice and made an uninhibited animal sound--fleeting but oh so powerful.  It happened once at the Met in Traviata, once at the NYCity Opera in Handel's Alcina; in a recent Mannes College production of Don Giovanni it was baritone Ricardo Rivera who allowed it to happen.

Allowing it to happen is a function, first of all, of inspired composition: the composer knows the voice and writes into the part the difference between vulnerability and sheer confidence.  Masterful vocal writing does not get better than in the hands of Verdi, Handel, and Mozart.

Today I realized that I have never seen a Schubert opera.  I wonder why?  Who is afraid of them?  Is it an issue of style?  (Mozart's Idomineo was not performed until recently, after the revival of interest in early music, when people realized that it was essentially a Baroque opera.) 

Fear in Performing

Speaking recently with a mature musician who is preparing an important recital I couldn't miss the recurrent word "fear."

Fear of memory slips is easy to take care of: Play with the score.  What is the big deal?  Organists do it all the time; so did Myra Hess.  It is not a defeat to use the music.

But he expressed another, more subtle fear:  The shock of hearing a sound different from the sound to which he is accustomed.  We do not realize how specific the sound of every piano is--most especially the piano on which we practice every day, which identifies "piano" to our touch and to our ear.

It took me decades to realize that this fear can be addressed very simply: Treat the performance instrument as the "piano du jour" and touch no other instrument that day.  No matter how nervous you are this will provide a level of confidence in reacting to the sound and touch in a wonderful exploratory frame of mind and body without the shock of foreign sounds inevitably resulting from business as usual followed by a performance somewhere strange..

Reading Remembering

Learning to read music is much more difficult than most piano teachers would like it to be.  In the first place, it is not at all like reading words.  If it were each letter of each word would have to be respected as the source of layers of potential response.

I have the privilege of teaching an adult how to read, but really read, music.  We are using Clementi's Preludes and Exercises, a collection which I cannot praise too highly.  The F-sharp minor Prelude is a beautiful example of reading for mystery at the level of every letter of every word:  That it is made up of rhythmically regular patterns is clear from the start.  What remains magical is the degree of incremental change wrought by each changing vibration and by its varying placement within the recurring figure.

The exercise, on the other hand, is a study in reading repetitive words, rather than individual letters. Once having grasped the recurring motives the student does not actually have to "read" every note but can make up the piece fairly accurately out of musical common sense.  Of course, it being Clementi, the sense turns out to be far from common, after all; but the discovery of that is amusing, not frustrating.

It is a great pleasure to work with such entertaining material.  I highly recommend it.