A Great Sound Can Make Us Listen

For several days I have been reliving my profound emotion on hearing Horszowski play a recital at the Metropolitan Museum over 50 years ago.

It is curious that at the time I had no conscious idea of what was "good" playing.  Did he play well?  Don't ask me.  Was his Bach good?  His Beethoven?  Ask someone else.

All I knew for sure was that my life had changed.  Sound so compelling that I would not stop working on it until I figured it out.  How did he do it!

I can't tell, of course, whether or not my playing in any way resembles his: I refuse to judge by recordings for all kinds of reasons.  But I do know that people express to me reactions very similar to those I felt on listening to him so long ago.  

The Piano Police

The more I think about the NYTimes critic pronouncing on the last movement of the "Moonlight" sonata the happier I am that I can play that movement the way I think it really goes without fear of being derided in the media.

It is a multi-media whammy: First the midguided recordings, some by acknowledged masters of the piano (though not necessarily profound musical thinkers, therefore only human), then the printed word out there for all to read.

I prefer my small responsive audience, right there, live and in the moment, giving me the feedback the music deserves and that I regard as essential for continued growth.

Teachers and Students

I was enraged yesterday to read in print a list of names purporting to represent a progeny of teacher / student mastery.

Why enraged?  I am enraged by the assumption that because a musician has studied with another musician (presumably older) he or she has merely soaked up the master's wisdom and not thought things out for himself or herself.

This is a totally false assumption, although it does happen all too frequently.  One of the names listed was a truly great performer whose name has come up on this blog as being a one-of-a-kind original thinker and pianist.  I know that he did not teach his students to play as he played, otherwise they would be doing so and they clearly are not.

I had one -- count them -- one lesson with this master in which he not only affirmed the validity of my idiosyncratic path but also discouraged me, most wisely, from aspiring to get onto the beaten path.

I know also from a year spent with a master who is often named as a source (I, too, name him in my bio) that what he taught was what he was expected to teach and not what corresponded to his true art.
He told me as much.  He spelled it out.  He demonstrated.  If you really wanted to learn from him you had to listen to his playing and listen very carefully.

And there you have it. 

It's not the name or the succession.  It is compelling artistry and the ability to listen attentively. That is the only true succession of mastery. 

Presto agitato: What Might It Mean?

In The New York Times of Wednesday, July 17, 2013 I read in a music review by Zachary Woolfe:
"...his control seemed to wane only slightly in the [Moonlight Sonata]'s finale, when the beat should underlie even the most furious passages."

Really!

Here is an example of how recordings have come to "be" the music.  You can listen to as many recordings as you can readily find of this great work without finding one that seriously questions the meaning of either word, "presto," or "agitato."

But there is plenty to question:  Presto does not necessarily mean as fast as possible.  It might indicate a tempo set by the smallest note value, a meaning consistent with Beethoven's other uses of the term which are, by the way, infrequent.  (In one piano sonata he uses it clearly ironically: "Presto a la tedesco," i.e.. Presto in the German manner, which must mean not fast at all.)

Agitato cannot mean fast: There are many more accurate indications of speed that Beethoven would have used, according to Koch's Lexicon, a 19th-century musical dictionary.  I observe agitato to indicate the pronounced presence of 3's within a duple meter.  Why else would Beethoven so clearly distinguish between the arpeggiated sixteenth-note figures when they appear in sets of 27 (count them!) as opposed to 28 notes?

My question to Mr. Woolfe: If someone were to play the movement in a true agitato would you even be able to take it in or would your only recourse be to listen comparing it to recordings you know and love so well?

I played The Moonlight Sonata in a series last year and one musician's reaction was that he had never heard it played so fast.  Interesting.  It was not, metronomically speaking, fast at all.  Being agitato it felt fast.

Accentuate the Negative - Why Not?

As powerful as the child's response to magic -- another word for beauty -- is the child's response to the unpalatable, the first experience of carrots on the tongue.  Yuck.

I recall the feeling:  How could Mozart do this to me, after giving me such a beautiful sound on one beat to expect me to play the exact opposite just one beat later?

I love to draw children's attention to their negative reactions to specific sounds, which are as important to the musical health of the child as having plots in the books they read.  I wonder what would have happened to my musical life had someone pointed out that the vast disparity between consonance and dissonance was essential to the whole business.

I wonder how many children/teenagers quit because of just such "negative" feelings never acknowledged, never attended to.

Dissonance and Meaning

Why should it matter that children be made aware of dissonance?

The power of the individual's response to sound lasts a lifetime.  It has nothing to do, really, with the ability to play a piece.  Without responses to the individual sounds that make up the piece the action of playing is of short-lived importance, if of any importance at all.  I recall getting bored pretty quickly with pieces as soon as I had "mastered" them.

I notice that when children are encouraged to savor their feeling about sounds they do not lose interest in the music: quite the contrary, their love grows and grows. 

One of the most startling instances of this is a radically challenged young man whom I have taught since he was seven.  Now in his early twenties, blind, autistic, and intellectually challenged, he knows and loves some incredibly sad pieces by Bartok: pieces that require of him a subtlety of touch and coordination to which he otherwise lacks access.

The other day at his lesson I was moved that he could produce the touch and articulation that made one chord progression seem to weep.  I told him that he had just done something so beautiful with his hand that I will never forget it. 

I told him that some people live their whole lives and never do anything that beautiful with their hands.

He needs to know that he did it, that he can do it again, that it speaks for a capacity that he cannot access by himself or express in any other way.  Why does he need it?  Because for all his disability, for all the trouble his life is, he is a human being as subject to feeling as everyone of us.

Taste and Dissonance

What is taste if not the sensation of "I like it" or "I don't like it"?

I once spent an extraordinary hour trying to get a nine-year-old who spoke very little English to relate to me.  Seated at the piano before an extremely easy duet the idea was that we would play together stopping every time she heard a sound she did not like.

Apparently wishing she were anywhere else in the world but seated at a piano next to--heaven forbid--a piano teacher, she banged and banged.

"No," I insisted: "I really mean it: Stop when you hear something you don't like."  This time, rather than wait for her to take the initiative, I stopped at the first ugly sound and asked whether she thought it sounded good.

"No!" she replied.  I agreed; in fact we agreed that most of the piece sounded pretty awful.  Very excited, she ran babbling to her mother in Croatian.  Apparently, according to the mother, she was so excited because no one had ever asked her whether she thought something sounded good!

This was not the first time I had seen a strong reaction of a child to unpleasant sound.

Why am I on the lookout for it?  Because of my own pronounced childhood reactions to unpleasant sounds--reactions I could never have expressed except by re-writing the compositions: "correcting" all the diminished triads, lengthening the unresolved cadences, or simply turning the page when the sounds became too much to bear.