Precision Please

Considered from the outside, i.e., in relation only to the surface of the sound, a wrong note is simply a mistake.  Attended to with comprehension a wrong note yields potentially profound insight into form, structure, musical essence.

The potential lies in the ear of the listener.  Ideally one listens to one's own playing with insight but this is extremely difficult if one has not learned to do so, a skill one learns by being listened to at this depth. Herein lies the real basis of the social aspect of music--not, as I used to think, in the fact that the performance of music implies a contract between composer, performer and audience.

An interview with author/jazz musician James McBride in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review hits on a perfect example of such precision: "If you're playing a solo in the key of B flat and play, say, an F sharp or B natural, you better have a good reason for it--or be Charlie Parker." 

Or Beethoven.

Read the whole interview at www.nytimes.com/books.

Inside of the Piano

This is where the action is: inside the piano.  The strings are the heart of it, where everything happens that is alive and magical.  Another word for magical is perhaps unpredictable.

It doesn't take a genius to notice this, it just takes a listener seated close up, ideally on the piano bench, or within 20 feet of the instrument.  All kinds of things take place that defy categorization or even identification.  For example, the intensification of a sustained tone when an Alberti figure plays into it -- though we are told that once a key is struck nothing can change the tone...clearly wrong.

I once saw a young student recoil in fright when she heard a tone on the piano come alive in just this way.  She couldn't believe her ears!  This is the model for real listening to this amazing instrument.

A Tribute to Horszowski

Now that recital programming is more and more like CD packaging the point of attending a live performance seems to have undergone a 180 degree turnaround.  Mieczyslaw Horszowski used to program wonderful mixtures of period, style, and form as if to say: I love the piano so much--listen to what it can do!

I am stunned to recall the impact of such an approach, particularly when I realize that it has affected my own programming.  I want my audience to leave with a sense of how much I love the piano.  Each listener is thus invited to love something--anything--as much.

Relishing Every Detail: Like Reading Poetry

This post is a tribute to a young adult whom I have taught, can you believe it, for fifteen years.  How have we lasted so long as a working team?

The answer lies hidden in the question, if you substitute "learning" for "working."  I have learned as much from him as the other way around.  He causes me to examine continually all the assumptions I have ever had about what it means to derive satisfaction from playing the piano.

We are in the midst of savoring the details of Beethoven Sonata in D, Op. 10, No. 3, a tremendous challenge on every level.  Simply by following the train of his disorientations we arrived at a deeper sense of the first movement than would have been possible by concentrating on fingering, tempo--the usual suspects or, as I identify it in a recent post, the surface of the sound.

I come away from such a lesson refreshed, inspired, eager to get to more substance on my own, without depending on my students to "inspire my fascination" (to quote a line from Broken Nose by Rachelle Garniez).

Reflections on First Losses

I started piano lessons at seven with a teacher whom I adored, not because she was attractive or appealing (she had a voice like a toad, probably from having sung too much without vocal training--she was also a choir director) but because she was a superb musician.  Her hands were supple, free, and every sound she made on the piano or the organ was glorious.

To study with someone of such quality promised entry into heaven.

At the time, however, children were taught by the book, unfortunately written by John Thompson.  The prevailing approach was -- and still is, for the most part -- to tell children how music works rather than to affirm that music works.  What is the difference?

How it works meant teaching musical logic as applied to phrases, to climaxes, to resolutions.  (This how pretty much described how music theory was taught at my college.)

Surely it would make more sense to encourage the child to notice the many instances when the phrase does not conform to expectations--in other words, to notice that there is no simple code that all music obeys.

Then we would have not loss but endless delight in a spirit of discovery.

Imagining What Chopin May Have Heard

As I prepare to perform a rather obscure Chopin Polonaise in E-flat minor (Op. 26, No. 2) I cannot help but notice that I was drawn to this by the Polonaises of W.F. Bach, which have been on my recital series this summer. 

There are essentially two types of Chopin Polonaises: the familiar and the unfamiliar.  The familiar make sense in the light of later 19th-century works by other composers.  The less familiar make sense in the light of works Chopin may have heard as a young man--the W.F. Bach, for example--works that almost no one plays these days because they are so bizarre.

Bizarre means that they don't fit the models of post-Classical structure we are taught in music schools.

The Surface of the Sound

This evening a performance of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings is taking place in Central Park.  As a college student I used to listen to the recording made by Britten's friend Peter Pears.  I knew it so well I could sing it by heart.

Years later when I heard a live performance I was shocked to realize that I had furnished all the bass sonorities out of my own imagination:  they were so non-present in the pre-stereo-era recording that I had simply made them up.

I wonder how much our sense of music is restricted to the treble?  Even with more sophisticated recording equipment most of our listening is through ear-plugs or in some way confined inside of metal boxes which greatly reduce the range of audibility.