Tonal Refraction Unearths What Gets Trained Out of Us

Wanting to be good enough is a desire I shared with many of my contemporaries, growing up in Chicago.  It was not as though what I wanted was to excel, far from it; awareness of the gulf between myself and mastery precluded any such goal.  And it is not as though that desire was ever talked about, under any circumstances.

It wasn't until after I left Chicago that I became aware of the role that competition played in learning music.  I had never had to compete for any of the paid or unpaid musical jobs I had as a high school student--there simply was no competition.

But competition definitely played a role in my opting out of conventional piano training in favor of studying the organ.  College at Oberlin was definitely a competitive environment; one heard the "top" students of the "top" teachers perform regularly.  I had no desire to be among them.

I had every desire to pursue my ideal piano dream but to do so in secret, without having to pretend to compromise any of its terms or their intensity.

Those terms turned into Tonal Refraction, my visualization work that objectifies the power of the highly individualized terms in which we all experience tone.

It is rare to hear a performance in which that secret place is in any way relevant.

What is the Point of Control?

Back to Beethoven Op. 10 #3, the Minuet and Trio:  Start with the proposition that easy is boring.  Repeating triplets in the right hand against quarters in the left has not much to recommend it.  Unless you play the triplet figures in duples, in which case it becomes a kind of rhythmic conundrum, much more difficult than one likes to imagine, especially since the left hand has to articulate clearly AND cross over the right into uncomfortable territory.

Try it.  Let it happen.  Hard as it is, it explains the several beats notated rest at the end of the Trio before resuming the Minuetto:  Now look what happens: the three to one ratio still prevails, threes in the right hand, ones in the left, but this time the terms have changed and the shorter value is the quarter note.  Notice that this minuet is marked dolce.  After that turbulent cross-rhythmed trio the fragility of all rhythmic values is there for the expressing of receptive minds and bodies.

Who is more likely to be receptive in this magical way?  An amateur player, one whose fingers are not pre-conditioned to play always in a certain, secure manner.

I heard it happen this morning when my young adult student who does not have time to practice produced a transparency I have never heard in the opening of the minuet upon return after the trio.

Weaving, Embroidery, and Making Music

The current textile exhibit at the Met is more than a little frightening to me, fascinated though I am with string's many uses.  What I find so chilling is the use of string not on its own behalf but as camouflage or simply to create illusions.

People have been incredibly ingenious with string, some of the most beautiful work being not for royalty or the high church but for other kinds of eyes and purposes.

It would have been refreshing to have some sign of that, as well.  I can't help recalling the similarities between courtly and folk dances throughout Europe. 

Leonard Michaels on Sentences

To read Leonard Michaels' Nachman Stories is to experience language fused with life, but inner life of which one sees only minuscule outward evidence as most of us live from day to day.

He wrote an essay on sentences.  No wonder he was such a master story writer: his grasp of the essence of structure, even to the degree of "why bother?" is inspiring, no matter what your genre of writing, reading or, for that matter, playing the piano.

We are taught to play Mozart as if Mozart wrote according to the rules of musical sentence structure.  But to read Mozart is to experience in, say, every third "sentence" a radical departure from those norms.  I knew it as a child.  Oh, if only I could have said out loud: "But this doesn't make sense!"

Now, at last, I know what sense it makes.  It took a long time.

Sounds, Words, and Surfaces

Last night I went to hear a program of the sort that I may be said to have pioneered starting in the 1980's: programs in which recent compositions opened the ear to music of earlier periods.  Needless to say I am committed to the notion.

This evening began with poetry, ostensibly on the subject of now/then, day/night.  The words conveyed little to me except the poet's narcissism.  I could not wait for the reading to end.  (Quite a contrast to a reading I heard just a few days earlier by poets published by Pressed Wafer, an evening that left me knowing myself better than I had when I went in.)

Then came the new music.  Scratchings, pre-tuning sounds, knocks--I have nothing against any of them but coming after those particularly vapid words the silence they evoked seemed phony to me.

The period music that followed was in every way expert: clean, articulate, subtly voiced.  But I fell asleep, only to realize later that I had missed completely the one movement that I might have been interested in, a slow movement marked, along with the word designating slow, "spiritoso," which means with wit.

I would have loved to hear it.  Had it been witty surely it would have awakened me.

So I come away with an awareness of surface, not enough to keep me awake, however well-executed.  

Schumann's Extremes

If there are boundaries of musical propriety Schumann transcends them all in Waldszenen.  Fixed tempo evaporates into fantasy, not programmatic fantasy but tonal fantasy.  Every deviation is occasioned by a transformation dictated by the sound.  But the player must hear it in order to make it happen.

That is the hard part.  We tend to take comfort in regular beats and knowable harmonies.  What happens when we let go of these preconceptions is that fast is free to go faster, slow slower than we would have thought possible.

I was fortunate to study piano with Hans Neumann who used to characterize some music as impossible to play while sober.  Schumann's late work is of this category.

Over-credentialed

When I was a student in Germany, lo! these many years ago, I learned a term of formal address: Herr Doktor Ober Unter Nummer Nix.  I think of it often in these days -- who would have thought it would happen here -- when every other musician has a doctorate in something.  But in what exactly?

Sound being remarkably complex, let alone instrumental technique, an honest pianist is at least 60 before he or she has a clue as to what is happening.

The real trouble with so many doctorates is that people listen to the degree not to the music.  It is a way of shutting everybody up, of filtering out reactions.

More often than not the emperor is under-dressed, the Herr or Frau Doktor sporting a degree in 0000 cum laude.  (Cum laude, pronounced ff.)