Listening as an Animal Listens for Danger

The Deagan Chime Company was located just a few blocks away from my childhood home on Paulina St. in Chicago.  That the chimes ringing every quarter-hour had anything to do with telling time was beyond me as a small child.  I was fascinated by that four-part melody: Why did it stop there?  was my question.  When was it going to come back?

I believe this atmospheric involvement with a much-loved sound was the model for my life of listening for meaning.

Practicing is Overrated

I was amused to read in a footnote to a chapter on the art and teaching of Artur Schnabel that a colleague of mine chastised Schnabel in no uncertain terms (in print, not face to face) for recommending that piano students not practice so much.  Schnabel maintained that he did most of his preparation while going for walks.

I tell my young students not to practice and, if they do, to tell somebody else.  Of course, I can tell right away that they have or haven't practiced.  What is more important than practicing is dreaming about music, any music.  Internalizing is really difficult.  Getting the external music to match the internal is the work of a lifetime -- work worthy of a lifetime.   Putting the emphasis on the external aspects (i.e., technique), especially at an early age, merely  fogs the issue.

Boredom / Frustration

In a recent radio interview British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips was discussing the importance of frustration: acknowledging it, accepting it, dealing with it as important determinants of a fulfilled self.

He might have been speaking of boredom in practicing music.  Some of the most fulfilling aspects of my musicianship have emerged from my acknowledgement of utter boredom, with the Alberti bass, for example, which has become one of the features of Classical style that I most enjoy.

Orchestration and Bartok's Roumanian Dances

Apparently Bartok himself orchestrated the Roumanian Dances about which I was complaining recently.
Curious to explore the issue further, I checked on Wikipedia where there is a link to a recording of three of the dances by the Adelphi Chamber Orchestra (unknown to me).  Listening to their sound I realized that they don't sound like any ensemble I have ever heard, nor would they probably be given the time of day were they to audition for a gig in NY in 2013.  They are clearly playing with sounds in mind with which we are totally unfamiliar, and with a kind of manic energy that simply does not get conveyed in printed music.

So the orchestration is inseparable from the orchestra doing the playing.  Had that been the version to which I was initially exposed things might have been altogether different.  Who knows?

Memory of Things Unheard

Among the strongest influences in my creative life have been two friends, one a visual artist, the other a poet.  In conversation the other day the novelist Jose Saramago's description of the real subject matter of painting came up, specifically that every good painting depicts something unseen.  The question arose whether there is a comparable level of content in music.

I maintain that it is memory: Every musical sound refers to some remembered sound, whether "the same" or not.  Perhaps it is to remind us of this simple truth that so much European music contains quotes from nature and from other sources (I refer to European music because it is the music I know best, not to exclude every other music).

It is a real loss that, in the name of music, so many young children are being force-fed tunes and notes as if that constitutes the blood and breath of the real thing.

Agitato!

The presence of 3s in a 4/4 bar is not always indicated by the actual number 3.  Sometimes its presence lurks in a dotted eighth, sometimes in a three-sixteenth "beat" following a sixteenth rest.  Three of something plus five of something else is as much eight as two times four.  But the feeling is totally different.

The feeling is what agitato refers to, not agitation in our frenetic literal sense of the word, but in the sense of a structured non-structure.

Isometric? Allometric?

Just because a piece is notated in 4/4 does not mean that its rhythmic sense is determined solely by duples.  What is the term that would apply to the simultaneous presence of two meters within one notated meter?

Is it to simplify coordination that we learn to verticalize beats to be sure that the two hands are together at all times?  Isn't it more exciting to take off from there and have one hand play freely while the other keeps the beat?

The idea is not so much to identify a concept as to find the necessity for this multi-layered movement within the body's desire to move the limbs independent of one another and to assert the autonomy of the imagination throughout it all.

A rhythmic concept risks stifling this level of animal vitality.