Ursula Mamlok, Composer Extraordinaire

It is my great privilege to know Ursula Mamlok, now in NYC celebrating her 90th birthday, well enough to have just spent a few hours alone with her talking about everything musical, which is to say, talking about the musical aspects of our lives about which we care and have cared the most.

I would describe her music as requiring the kind of intimate response that we all crave as musicians.  I don't just want you to like what I play, I want you to identify with it, if only momentarily.

This evening there will be a performance of her works at Symphony Space.  Describing it to a colleague I said I looked forward to it, knowing that everyone playing would be doing so as a labor of love of her music, not simply because they are competent at playing notes.

This morning she was describing a recent composition as simple--easy enough for a child to play.  This prompted an entire discussion about how much children care about sounds and how quickly that caring gets diffused while learning to play notes in quantity.  Is there in fact anything more difficult for an accomplished musician than to play a simple sound on her instrument?

Warmth: What has Pitch Got to do With It?

Within a week recently I heard two expert performances by top-notch instrumentalists on two radically different instruments neither of which I play or know anything about except as an occasional collaborator and frequent listener.  No aspect of either performance could be said to be flawed.

And yet...

I do not recall from either concert a single moment of being swept into an unexpected shared perception of beauty.  Precision, surely--a kind of perfection, even.

But to what end?

More About Moments

Perhaps that's what music is, after all: moments.

• The sound of a tiny ocarina leading a procession of children from Mott Haven in the South Bronx singing mediaeval melodies.
• The sound of the low D-flat that begins the Chopin Nocturne in that key as played by Rubinstein in Carnegie Hall.
• A lovely ornamented melody entirely new to me that turned out to be Bach's Schmuecke dich, O meine Seele, played by Fenner Douglass.
• The moment when the wicked heroine of Handel's Alcina reveals that she, too, is under a spell and is powerless to change her evil ways.

Notice that all of these are live I-was-there-as-it-happened moments.

Note also that I say "are" in the present tense:  they are as real as they were when I lived through them in the flesh.

Melody Reserved for Special Occasions

Last Sunday we sang a familiar hymn in church--that is, the words are familiar.  The tune, however, was not.  When questioned about it, the organist James Kennerley, explained that the most familiar tune was reserved for the once-a-year special service from which it could be said to get its identity, at least from which it derives its primary meaning.

How nice to hear that argument voiced so simply.

My musical life was considerably affected by hearing Fenner Douglass play a Bach chorale prelude on a melody I had never previously heard.  It turned out to be Schmuecke dich, O meine Seele.  It turned out to be one of those once-a-year chorales associated, in fact, with the same special service as today's hymn.  As I was not brought up within a tradition of ritual finesse, the power of such scarcity was a revelation. 

Why Not to Practice the Good Stuff

This will sound paradoxical, but I learn more about Beethoven from my young adult computer-animator student than from listening to more polished pianists.  Today it was  the Minuet from Op. 10 #3.

Let's be honest about minuets: we don't get them, even when we do.  First of all, they involve overlays of rhythmic subtlety that we have no way of understanding because they rely on a cultural affinity for that dance that we will simply never have, the way there are certain jazz rhythms that I will never "get" no matter how hard I try or how loose I think I am.

Therefore we tend to dismiss these movements as "mere" minuets, though it is known that Haydn once said that if he had a good one he knew the symphony was good.   Because this young student who doesn't practice has a most remarkable ear, I must pay attention to his falterings and to his wrong notes.

Turns out the movement is undoubtedly the most densely composed of all the movements of the sonata.  I play it now with a completely different mindset.  Its opening indication dolce makes a lot more sense to me now that that quality is integral to the composition and not something pasted on after holding one's nose (or turning it up, take your pick) at the minuet idea.

Afraid of Mozart? I Don't Blame You

Probably you are one of the millions of poor souls upon whom Mozart's music was foisted in the name of "easy to play."  No wonder nobody wants to go hear it.

Candid conversation with listeners at my Mozart evenings reveals the extent to which this masterful art, evident already in sonatas he wrote at 15, has been trivialized.  If I survived with any serious (i.e., involuntarily deep) involvement in this music, it was because the vivid emotions aroused by specific sounds in his music so far eclipsed anything else I had ever encountered in piano sound that I persisted in figuring it out.  How could anything be that troubling, yet at times so pure?

In our culture's insistence on reducing individuals and individual works of art to types and prototypes we risk losing any sense of the specific, of the particular, be it person, note, or word.

Poor us.  Impoverished us.

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.