Clementi C Major Sonatina

As previously noted in this blog I am teaching a young adult to read music: I have been teaching this improvisingly gifted young man since he was seven.  Reading never came easily to him so I did not push it, sure that if I had he would stop study.

Now he is mature enough to go along with the complexity of the enterprise.  After several months working on Clementi Preludes (which I highly recommend on many levels) we are tackling the sonatinas, beginning with the C Major, Op. 36, No. 1.

Yesterday we enjoyed together one of the most stimulating lessons I have ever taught:  We read it together, one note at a time, imagining what the next tone would be and then coping with Clementi's agreement or disagreement with our better judgment.  It was a lot of fun, and deeply insightful into the working of Clementi's superlative genius.  (How unfortunate that Mozart said a nasty thing about him in a letter to his father!)

In the process I learned a great deal about the piece and about the limitations of approaching music as if the point of learning it was purely technical.

Russia?

Okay.  Today it happened.  For the first time since I have been keeping this blog its readership in Russia has topped that in the United States. 

I want to know who you are, you Russians who are reading this.  And I want to know what you make of it.

The reason for my curiosity is my fascination with international and intercultural influence.  Since the 1980s the influx of musicians from Eastern Europe (largely Russia) has had an impact on musical life in NYC in general, and on my professional life in particular.

Part of the result of that has been a clarification of my thinking on all kinds of musical subjects.  But it is only since removing myself from the need to be diplomatic about my thinking that I am able to express my thoughts directly.

So I want to know what you make of my comments. Tell me what your musical involvement is, whether professional or not does not matter.  Please let me know by posting comments on the blog.  Thanks!

One Tone at a Time

The trouble with learning about music is that learning often gets in the way of just listening, as if "just" listening was in some way not enough.

It is striking how difficult it can be to deal with a single tone: Does Haydn actually think I am capable of responding to a single pitch?  Can we players make our audience savor the power of every tone to transform the moment?

It took me a while, I admit it; but now my favorite music is that in which everything seems to be engendered by the opening note, no matter how ordinary.

G minor: Another Manifestation

When I was in high school I was assigned the Saint-Saens G minor Piano Concerto, the first movement of which I played with the school orchestra.  I recall it being a most unsatisfying experience.  Last night I heard a graduate student perform the same movement with an orchestra in town and I understood why.

In this piece Saint-Saens (quite pretentiously, it now seems clear) sets out to make thematic the very tones that do not work on the piano: B-flat - F#.  The theme, very clearly stated in the piano includes the sequence: B-flat / A / B-flat / F#.  It simply does not sound or feel good.

This piece is quite standard repertoire.  What a pity that we allow virtuosity to hoodwink us into thinking that what we are listening to has meaning.

Saint-Saens was a highly sophisticated composer but I have long suspected that he had various agendas that had little to do with actual sound.  One of them was his finishing the project Debussy did not live to complete: writing sonatas for unusual instrument combinations.

He did write some wonderful piano etudes for the left hand alone.

Support the Blog

Every once in a while I invite you to support this blog at www.tonalrefraction.net where there is a subscription option.  PayPal accepts payment in any currency.  Why not do it?  We would prove that the public attaches value to meaning.  What is wrong with that?

You might well ask why not accept advertising on the blog?

My very first published article appeared in 1972 in The Piano Quarterly, a high-class music magazine, no longer with us.  The magazine was supported, of course, by ads, mostly from music publishers.  My article, called "The Teacher / Performer" was missing a critical sentence which went something like this:"There is no reason why we should be teaching junk."

That turned me off commercially backed publication for quite some time; most of my subsequent articles were in Music For The Love of It, a newsletter for amateurs published by a dedicated soul in Berkeley, California.

I invite you to demonstrate that an alternative system can work.

The Natural Horn and Mozart's Tonality

Again about Mozart in C minor: Ever since my son has taken up natural horn I have been deeply aware of the impact of that instrument on the sound of specific tonalities.  In last night's concerto performance he was playing one of the two horn parts and I paid almost as much attention to those parts as to the piano--perhaps even more, I confess.

The concerto is in C minor, the horns in E-flat--the natural horns, that is, the instruments he heard in making the orchestration. E-flat, the powerful fundamental of the horn in that key, is not the tonic tone.   A pianist hearing that power coming not from the tonic would have a different "take" on the piece, inevitably, it seems to me.

In the rush to get all tones and all tonalities to be uniform modern instrument design has made certain things completely incomprehensible, except to the curious artist willing to confess to problems that usually go unidentified because they manifest as malaise and we are trained to pay no attention to any form of discomfort.

I cannot help but wonder how different the pianist's interpretation would have been if she had heard this imbalance, which is all too smoothly disguised with modern instruments.

Virtuosity Meets Darkness

Last night I heard a piano graduate student play Mozart C minor Concerto, No. 24, first movement with a pretty good mostly student orchestra.  It was striking in that this highly trained soloist apparently had no way of processing the passion and the darkness that meet headon in this taxing and all-too-familiar work.

It brought back memories of my own bewilderment as a high school student playing my first concerto, the Mozart A major.  I will never forget the impact of hearing for the first time instruments of the orchestra play the "same" music I was playing.  The color of their sounds, especially the winds, still moves me.

Yet I, too, had no way of conceiving passage work--arpeggios, scales, etc.--as anything but flashy.  It had never been suggested that such passages were not simply a reason for showing off, but might be pianistic elaborations or particular tone colors.  That an arpeggio might be sad, or longing, or tragic--who knew?

The irrefutable proof that the movement is not about virtuosity for its own sake is the soft ending.