A Young Composer Newly Inventing Bach

Recently I was privileged to hear a young composer do something entirely unplanned, i.e., entirely instinctual, with a Bach Two-Part Invention: He played it as if out of his own sense of line and rhythm.  It was like listening to Arvo Part's transformation of the F minor slow movement of Mozart's early F-major Piano Sonata.  It was at the same time entirely Bach, entirely this young man's, entirely adult, and entirely fascinating.

Interesting that the word "entire" keeps turning up here.  That is what it felt like.  What more does anyone want out of music?

Cognitive vs. Sensory Reading

Slowly but surely I am finding that professionals outside of the music field are fascinated by the same phenomenon that intrigues me, namely that multiple systems are stimulated in the act of reading.  Most of the studies I run across are about reading language: A good introduction to this is Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid.

The complexities of reading language which she describes in terms comprehensible to the layman are, however, fewer than those of reading music.  For reading music involves highly complex motor coordination encompassing breath, touch, hearing, and spatial orientation, to name but a few components.  All of this is affected by very specific memory/expectation currents triggered by all of the above plus prior experience of sounds, of a piece of music, of a certain composer, etc.

Tonal Refraction visualizes some of the intangibles that affect our instantaneous response to musical scores.

Why Classical Music?

Simple answer: Because vibrations are magic and at no time was that ever more evident than when the piano was a new invention.

Unlike every other extant keyboard instrument that one rang.  To our ears, accustomed as we are to the massive ringing of the modern piano, the fortepiano* is almost as dry as the harpsichord.  But to ears accustomed to harpsichord the newly invented fortepiano would have seemed extreme in its capacity to resonate.  This would have been more than enough to trigger the huge outpouring of music with and for the piano:  sympathetic vibration so rich and so varied that it cannot be electronically synthesized.

If you want to get your children interested in classical music (Haydn, Mozart, et al) better to get them intrigued with real resonance--tiny brass bells, finger cymbals, or a triangle--than to imagine that they will gain much by listening to recordings.  The ear will get there in its own time. 

*Fortepiano, as the invention was initially named, means literally "loudsoft."

Tone Transformed: A New Way of Thinking about Classical Music

I have often asked musicians whether there is a piece they can't begin.  The question raises eyebrows among music theorists who cannot imagine such an event and who admit that such a question would never occur to them.  But, not infrequently, musicians will acknowledge specific compositions the first sounds of which are difficult to find.

It is no trouble to begin my own list: Debussy's Sonata for Violin and Piano, Schumann's Waldszenen, Schubert's big B-flat Sonata, and Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet.  So troublesome are these beginnings that they have led me to a new way of thinking about classical music.

Composers work out tonal scenarios that transform the tones from generic to entirely specific to the composition at hand, demanding more than the technical wherewithal to put your fingers on the right keys.  It is not enough that I know where G is on the piano; I am never sure exactly what G will satisfy the demands Debussy and Mozart make of that tone.  Similarly with the B-flat triad, so radically different in the Schumann than in the Schubert, each in turn so unlike the B-flat triad I expect to hear.

Curious that the four examples on my list are split between two tones: G and B-flat.

Why Should I Listen?

Okay, so you're the greatest living virtuoso.  We can agree with The New York Times and assorted authorities on the subject.  But can you make me listen to the music you play with my gut rather than with the distraction of your admittedly glowing technique?

In the old days when I was too young to understand such things such virtuosity would literally make me ill for the simple reason that I knew I would never achieve it, that it was physiologically impossible.   Now, in the new day, it is not the virtuosity that compels my response but the absence of driving impulse.

This applies as much to composition as to performance.  A young virtuoso composer whose work with sound is unusually compelling was somewhat offended when I asked if he wrote music for children.  (His work is characteristically associated with subtexts of the utmost seriousness, beautiful but literally dreadful.) It would do him good to realize the power of his sound imagination, a power he would be unable to miss if he would give it to children and allow them to give it back.

Do You Really Mean It?

Again and again this question arises in relation to music study, teaching, and performance at every level.

Does it matter whether you do or don't?

When I think of how much music has meant to me throughout my life, even during those periods when I tried to convince myself that it didn't really matter all that much, and of how much it means to my adult children, there is no question that music is to each of us life and health, joy and fulfillment.

It is asking a lot to expect young parents to subscribe to that potential in relation to any activity that does not come with a demonstrable market value.  I suspect it gets harder and harder for young adults to imagine that it matters.

I once told the parents of a new young student that music was not about achievement but about one's heart and soul.  It turned out to be a high standard for both the child and myself to live up to.

Pitch Continuity and Rests

Whether playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert on the piano apparent phrase endings indicated by slurs and by rests are often not really endings but rather deceptive suspensions of continuing resonance.  How often do these composers use exactly the same sonority on both sides of a rest or a phrasing indication?  Surely it is a matter of an interruption rather than an end and a fresh beginning.  This could only have occurred to them because of the relative ringing of the instrument when compared to the harpsichord or clavichord. 

Modern readers see a rest and they stop their ears.