Tone Perception Visualized: Tonal Refraction I

It's here after many years of preparation, on the cutting edge of graphics and printing technology, the first book presenting Tonal Refraction as a method of deepening awareness of your own idiosyncratic  hearing of specific tones in specific context.

Mozart furnishes the context for this first volume in the projected series, as well he should, for it was his music that first aroused in me the baffling sensation of how special a note could feel in a particular piece of music.  The work on which this volume is based is his Piano Quartet in G minor, a work in danger of being trivialized because it is "not" difficult, as is the case for many of his most mature compositions.

An honest musician will confess to humility in the face of a work that transforms an ordinary note, G, into an almost unbearable demand.

Look at the website www.tonalrefraction.com for a taste of the book.  Order your copy and start on your own journey of self-awareness, guided by one of the most provocative works in the chamber repertoire.

The Power of a Palette

When I first went to look at Josef Albers's Interaction of Colors at the Museum of Modern Art's research library, I opened one of the two large boxes of prints and immediately burst into tears.  "This will never do," thought I. 

Certain that something must be amiss I approached the librarian.  Sure enough, the last user had put the sheets in upside down; what I saw first should have been the culmination of hours of study.

It took several days to realize why I had cried: The palette of that last print was disturbing, deeply disturbing, in fact.  And made more so by the fact that it closely resembled the palette I had chosen for the first movement of Mozart's G minor Piano Quartet, the subject of my first Tonal Refraction book.  I find that movement deeply troubling.  Its familiarity doesn't make that less true; it may, indeed, exacerbate the trouble as it tempts many players to think they know "how it goes," and that, therefore, they can play the notes (most of which are not all that hard) and not feel a thing.

I Can Show You How I Hear

After a lifetime of figuring out how to do so, I can do that and play the piano at the same time--really.  I mean there is no impediment, no extraneous process that occurs in my brain between the nano-instant when the vibration enters my inner ear and the movement that comes out of my finger tip.  Note that I put the vibration first, not after.

How is that possible?

It is the very essence of musical hearing that we hear in advance of the sounds we make.

Artur Schnabel put it as an imperative:  "Hear first, then play."  I put it as a fact of life:  A musicians hears in advance of playing.

So do children.   I have seen it happen that a child, knowing what the next note will sound like, will refuse to play it and will move to a more acceptable alternative.

This activity of hearing in advance is what my work, Tonal Refraction, visualizes.

Ups and Downs - Beats

Today, after hearing a splendid singing of a Dunstable mass, I had a chat with one of the singers who is also a music theorist, on the subject of upbeats and downbeats.

It occurs to me that the problem comes in the training that we receive at an early age to experience these events solely in terms of body movement.  This means that it is wondrous difficult for someone so trained to emphasize an upbeat, especially when short, and de-emphasize the ensuing downbeat, especially if long.

The difficult is not the concept, but rather the physicality of the event.  Twice I have seen violinists incapable of playing an opening downbeat with an upbow, even when it was patently clear that this was the best way to articulate the phrase correctly, affecting also intonation.

One was a rigidly trained 12-year-old Russian student.  He couldn't even bring himself to try it.  He absolutely refused  The piece in question was a  Trio Sonata: by Telemann, who is notoriously inventive when it comes to rhythmic invention (though you might never guess that from the pedestrian performances to which the poor man's music is routinely subjected).

The other was an always-right-about-everything professional in his 40's, also Russian, who would not allow a student to begin a Schubert Sonatina in this way, even though she and I had worked it out,  mutually recognizing that it solved many problems.

So the problem is profound, bringing into question, as it does, solidity at all costs vs. a more interesting if also fragile sensibility.

What's This About Sad Music?

An Op-Ed piece in last Sunday's New York Times was on the subject of sad music.  I confess I couldn't read it.  The notion that any music--any music--is uniformly of one emotion is an oversimplification I no longer tolerate.

Such nonsense has led to the inability on the part of a great many normal, regular folks simply to let music pour into them without labels--prescriptions, as it were.

It also makes music incomprehensible to children whose multi-faceted perceptions do not conform to any particular word or concept, thus driving them away from what I call "the good stuff."

Such discussions always bring to mind the reproduction of an oil painting in the Minneapolis Art Museum, shown at a conference of Music Education people at the University of Georgia.  The painting showed a woman in a wide-brimmed hat seen from behind, seated in a field of wild flowers looking out to the distance.  This, according to the proud presenter, called for gentle, pastoral music.

I hit the ceiling.  "But look at the brush-strokes!"

Let's Hear It for Wrong Notes!

Today I had a revelation.  A young adult student who struggles with reading but whose ear is tops tops tops was making his way through a highly complex Beethoven minuet.  After 16 bars I asked him to show me where he had made errors.  The first one he noticed was not the first one I would have mentioned, but he was right.

It took a few minutes to figure out what had caused his error.  It was the first sound in which A did not appear, the tone which had been continuous in one octave or another since the beginning of the piece. 

I take this as a sign of just how well coordinated this man is in terms of his auditory / mental process, which is one of the hardest things to tap into once one has been trained to do vision-first reading.

Actual and Factual, to Borrow Albers's Precise Terms

The distinction may be applied to everything that exists at once in the scientifically measurable world of vibrations and in the sensibility of the perceiver.

Josef Albers applies the terms to color.  In Interaction of Colors he provides countless demonstrations of colors as actual, as they affect one another, in other words, of their mutability.

My work, Tonal Refraction, seeks to do this with tone.  Though, as Albers also notes, color and tone are analogous, in one respect they are entirely different.  A musician responds to tone specifically, i.e., in terms of a particular instrumental timbre, context within a key, and also memory and association.  Every single time the musician plays a given tone all of those factors come into play but never in a predictable comixture; every action of tones is subject to constant variation.

Add to this the remarkable power of a given composition to utterly transform a tone within the range of the composition itself--perhaps one reason why sonatas and symphonies have to have several movements.