Words, Words

If there were a word to take the place of a sound we would have no music.  Imagine it.

I watch it happen every time a parent, meaning well, most likely, interposes a word between the child's immediate taking in of a new sound and the possibility that the sensation might take on meaning of its own on the child's own terms.

So I have a rule when young children come to my improvisation session: No talking allowed.  There is only sound and those tiny little shifts in facial expression that betoken lively response and playful exchange.

Years ago I taught a Saturday afternoon "Teenage Theory" class for kids who played everything from drums to piano and beyond.  Coming from a broad mix of cultural backgrounds, they ranged from kids who had been taught never to open their mouths much less actually say anything, to the soon-to-be valedictorian of his Bronx Science High School class.  Determined to get them to notice that music was equally accessible to all I focused each year on a different theme, ethnic music, or music with and without words, for example.  I had to watch their faces carefully for those tiny little shifts--sometimes all that remained of a stunted communication possibility.

Listening from the Inside Out

My improvisation sessions with very young children are an intense undertaking.  They convince me that the essence of listening is stillness itself.

It is nothing short of astonishing to hear the delicacy with which a young child introduces tone into an environment in which tone is not assumed, but rather the medium of most intimate communication.  Surrounded by bells, drums, triangles and cymbals, the child nevertheless invariably begins with a musical gesture as intimate as the strange dog sniffing your hand.

Joining the child within that intensity releases a level of pleasure and play that is so deep within the definition of music that it can't be identified except, perhaps, with a child's squeal of delight.

One of my favorite students was a six-year-old boy who walked on the ceiling and made noise constantly.  His piano playing was too quiet, too intense, for the music school director.  I knew my students (and I) had no future in that place or in any other like-minded place.....another long story.

He is now a musician and a music teacher.

Moments! Moments!

Last night I had the pleasure of playing a program consisting primarily of music by Mozart: the early sonata in F, the Variations on Lison Dormait, the later sonata in B-flat, K. 330, and selections by Schumann.  Among the audience was my daughter, who "hates Mozart."  Naturally her presence constituted a significant challenge.

At the end I asked her how she liked it:  "There were moments," she replied.

She couldn't have put her finger more precisely on the point:  moments.

Her own distinctively original music often uses genres familiar to her audience, like the blues, or salsa.  But there is an inevitable twist somewhere that distinguishes it from the run-of-the-mill.  And it is that twist that stays with the listener, that haunts, and intrigues the fellow musician.  It is not all that different from Mozart who also used genres familiar to his audience but with departures unique to him and not easily decipherable from the printed page.

The undisputed hit of the evening was Schumann's Op. 133, No. 5, his last composition for piano.  Difficult beyond description, calling as it does at times for four separately voiced sounds at once, it brings out the full vertical and linear shimmer of the piano within a couple of pregnant minutes that might be said to successfully prolong a pianistic moment.

Who is it wrote Moments Musicaux?  {Yes I realize that the composer got the French wrong....)

Canned is Canned

Just off the phone talking with a dear friend, an actress about my age, also from Chicago, and temperamentally very like myself.  We were talking about the movies.

She always loved the movies until she moved to New York and experienced its abundance of live theatre.  That was that.

In recent years the only movies I have enjoyed (besides the occasional documentary and a few exceptions like the recent Hugo and that magnificent French film about 17th-century music, Tous les matins du monde) are the old ones: Jean Vigo, Jean Renoir, Eisenstein, Chaplin, Buster Keaton--movies in which the vital fluid of discovery leaks out through the tin of the can, staining you indelibly.

It took awhile but eventually the technology accessible to movie-makers took over and now constitutes a large part of the art.

I found myself remarking that the technology of recording very quickly became the most audible aspect of recorded music.   It has reached the point where students are encouraged and even expected to sound like recordings.

How soft an alarm will it take to wake us up?

Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Try vibrations.

The look on a child's face when in the proximity of real vibrations is astonishing, every time.
The other day, as I improvised together with a four-year-old, I was intensely aware of his quiet connection with the sounds we made together.  He was imparting a secret, all the more real because it was not prefabricated and because it certainly could never happen again in exactly the same way.

What a revelation as to the nature of musical intimacy: how it works and why it works.

Close-up Listening with a Four-year-old

Yesterday I had the pleasure of improvising together with a four-year-old, in my home for the first time, together with a lovely little xylophone, a little bell on a handle, his mother, and his uncle.

The boy and I were alone in the music room, the grownups in the adjacent space.  We were going to try to do the whole thing without talking and, for the most part, we succeeded.

It started with him trying out all my percussion array, which he clearly rejected, at least temporarily, in favor of his own instrument.  As he started to play, very quietly, running the mallet up and down the keys gently, without specific pitch, I joined him, imitating his touch and sound on the piano.  Then I began to punctuate the movement with short sounds which he imitated, and the conversation began, very intently, with occasional beaming smiles from him when something struck him--who knows how!

I eventually joined him on the floor with a mallet of my own, enlarging the field of available sounds to include a drum, bells dangling from a nearby music stand, a triangle, and a thumb piano (which sounds great struck with a mallet, by the way--first time I had ever tried that).

After I had sung into the piano with the pedal down, which he liked a lot, though he wouldn't try it himself or allow his mother to, he did what he had declined to do at first: he sat under the piano.  I played some light sounds with full pedal, letting them ring.  When I went down into the bass register he got scared and ran away.  I think that, like other children I have seen, he was surprised that ugly or frightening sounds are as real as the other kind.  He would hardly look at me.

Then we devised a game of rolling ringing metal balls around the room in a foursome including his mother and uncle.  This sounded great and he made sure it was totally within his control.

A beautiful time together.  Nothing trivial about it.  Unlikely, perhaps.

Staccato or Not Staccato? What's In a Dash?

Objective observation of these two markings affirms over and over again my feeling that there is, indeed, a difference: Staccato (i.e., the dot) indicates a detached tone within a prevailing meter.  The dash (that upright mark) indicates a detached tone against the prevailing meter.  In other words, a regular staccato will not alter your sense of where the beat belongs.  A dash staccato, on the other hand, wants to do just that.

It gets tricky in triple meters where one is never sure exactly what kind of meter is in play, whether that of the time signature or a hemiola-type augmentation (a la the minuet) or a courente-type diminution.

Having just reviewed the markings in two Mozart Sonatas, I can hear how players of today have little notion of such subtleties.  We live in an era of beats pounding into beats, all predictable.  Yow.

Don't do this to Mozart.  Or Beethoven.  Or anyone else, for that matter.