The Board/Bored Book Approach

In last Sunday's NYTimes, on the front page no less, appeared an article about a new market in board books for little kids, the kind of book usually used to teach ready identification of numbers, colors, animals, alphabet letters, and so on.

The title?  Moby Dick no less.

What have we come to?  Where is wonder?

There are only numbers, pictures to be identified, quantitative entities and an occasional quote, if you're lucky.

One of my all-time favorite experiences of literature at its most profound occurred in a rowboat in the middle of a pond in the Catskills.  Every day I would row my children out together with a copy of Don Quixote, the real deal.  I would read to them a chapter a day.  One day, at the beginning of a dialogue between the Don and Sancho Panza, my daughter (then 8) and my son (5) burst out laughing and declared, both at the same time: "I know what he's going to say!"  They had him and it down. They knew it was hilarious.  Bless them.  Bless children.

Do NOT dumb down.  What would Moby say?

That Minuet, Again!

Once again my young adult student and I enjoyed an extraordinary level of insight into the Menuetto of Beethoven Op. 10 # 3, this time involving the articulation of two specific bars.  Different in the two hands, the right hand seems, as the student, unaware of the depth of his insight, put it, "not to move," while the left extends across the full two bars preparing a clear phrase ending.

Rendering those subtleties audible would constitute a terrific reason to practice at the same time as it would epitomize the entire minuet: Paying such careful attention to detail, to the tension underlying interweaving inner voices, reveals the essence of the movement.

Our anti-minuet bias may be rooted in our having had to learn minuets while children.  Bo-ring.

I will never forget sitting beside a quite known avant-garde pianist at a children's recital at Mannes.  Some poor boy was banging the bejeezus out of a Haydn minuet.  "Can you imagine," remarked I, "that teachers are still giving children assignments like that?"  (I, who do not enjoy a reputation as an avant-garde pianist, begin all my students with 20th century music --I wouldn't dream either of visiting minuets upon them or them upon minuets.)

Her reply: "That's my student."

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.