Imagining Again What Chopin Heard

"Bach and Sons: Listening for the Future" is the theme of my current recital series.  Along with selections by the aforenamed I am programming requests from students and audience members.  This month's request was for Chopin waltzes.  What a tremendous gift that request has turned out to be!

It has caused me to imagine Chopin having heard CPE Bach and WF Bach in addition to his well-known admiration for Bach pere.  I hear in the waltzes, especially the A minor, direct connections to keyboard techniques used by the two Bach sons:  it is extraordinary what a difference it makes in recreating a sound universe.

I feel privileged to have had an organist's training with so much emphasis on articulation and touch--it occurs to me that every keyboard musician of that time would have played many different instruments each with a distinctive action, tonal coloration, and touch to match.  I can only imagine JS Bach sitting down at a fortepiano and realizing that this was a whole new animal, therefore not presuming to write for it just because it was there.  At the same time I can imagine his taking to this new creation had he but world enough and time.  I see no logic whatsoever in emulating Baroque keyboard sounds, whatever they may be, on the modern piano.

Music Notation: Does It Make Sense?

It is tempting to be in a hurry to get children to read music.  There is no way to speed up the process except by dumbing it down to a tabulature system in which this symbol stands for that specific key on the piano or fingering on whatever instrument.

But the auditory sense of music cannot be written down because tones that are visually close together are often farthest apart in terms of resonance or sound quality, while those that are acoustically so close as to be almost indistinguishable from one another appear on paper to be considerable distances apart.

It is a matter of subtle coordination but it can be taught.  It just takes time.

There is no Preparation for Artistry

By the time most "serious" music students have won their competitions and entered their conservatories whatever artistry they were born with is probably long buried and not too likely to respond to resuscitation.

The kids who are making it up according to the energy they perceive in their own lives and in their changing worlds--these are the ones who are revitalizing the experience of live music.

Why not give your young child, by which I mean really young, to the tutelage of an artist teacher who is committed to the notion that artistry is innate and that it is best nurtured by interpersonal attentiveness?

As it is most people assume that a truly serious mature musician is not interested in children.  Bizarre.

As Though Your LIfe Depended On It, Which It Does

It is remarkable to me that some people who come across in their writing as truly passionate about their work suddenly clam up the moment they retire:  they probably deserve the appellation "academic" because it might be that their passion was really for their position rather than for the work per se.

My life depends on my not being limited in any way in the pursuit of what I love.  That means no gaps in attentiveness.  That's why boredom means so much to me: it has revealed kernels of insight at the very center of sound, the magic and mystery seem to be best conveyed by signs that seem not to mean anything and by seemingly mindless repetitiveness.

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.