Criticism

In an editorial in the Sunday NYTimes of Dec. 15 Maureen Dowd expresses impatience with the be-nice culture of never saying anything critical about anything.  She points out that such criticism is essentially dishonest; that it is really thinly disguised advertisement.

I found it remarkable because she is employed by a newspaper whose policy in arts coverage has been to a great degree to print criticism of that nice-whether-you-mean-it-or-not category.  In at least two instances that come readily to mind the critic had decidedly critical things to say about the performance but ended up noticing how many people were in the audience, or how the audience reacted, or some such irrelevant nonsense.

The audience at last week's boring Baroque performance was large and clapped loudly.  It merely indicated to me that they recognized same-old and appreciated not having to pay attention.

The Half-Light and Tone

The notion of the half-heard is powerful.  We find it in the Forgotten Waltzes of Liszt, in the many musical renderings of falling asleep from Vivaldi to Schumann.  It is a quality of sound that cannot be written down.

But Schumann makes it almost impossible to miss, sometimes by his titles, which might be *  *  *  (sorry that I cannot align them properly in this computer program) or by dynamic markings that make no sense in terms of conventional sound because they are simply "too" soft, or because they interrupt what might otherwise be perfectly sensible phrasings.

This morning I was discussing this quality with a casual acquaintance, a professional musician with whose work I am completely unfamiliar.  He described this quality as madness.  I wouldn't put it that way.  For one thing, that makes it too easy to write off as simply the work of a madman--a tendency that people have every time Schumann brings them face to face with something they do not readily grasp.

Text and Tone

Without text some tones are incomprehensible.  In that respect Schumann is very like Bach or Mozart.  But when we read Schumann's titles or consider his literary references we are usually engaged on the level of some kind of literal meaning rather than on the level of imagery.

It rarely occurs to us that the imagery might be in the tone itself, not in the word associated with it.

This was the great lesson of the Jagdbevier (Op. 137) we played the other evening.  As the translated poems made clear we were creating not settings of poems but the actual subject matter of those poems, particularly the Daemmer, the pre-dawn half-light in which everything becomes more real than real.

This is Schumann's environment of musical truth; it accounts for the pianissimo marking in so much of his music, for beats that occur over a stretch of time, and for such tempo indications as nicht schnell, leise.  This music transcends music as we are taught to conceptualize it.

Interestingly the work is scored for four of the most dangerous instruments known, natural horns.  One takes one's life in one's hands with them; to sing with them is an enormous satisfaction.  It makes Waldszenen comprehensible.

Schumann's Heart is in the Forest

The cycle of hunting songs we did informally in my home last night with four natural horns and a group of men singers turned out to be far more than mere hunting songs.

The text celebrates the connection between the wild forces of nature and man's natural drive to be part of the wild not as a mere spectator.  Schumann clearly equates the pursuit of the hunter with that of the artist.  Fully aware of all the dangers that entails he celebrates in tone the half light of predawn in which things are seen as they truly are--already amazing.  It is one thing to have a text that states that explicitly, quite another to achieve that in music.

It is all about exposure, danger, mystery, ultimately joy, all the more powerful because the reference is to such ordinary things.  As the poem says, it looks so easy and is so difficult--it could be describing Schumann's music.

I am still delirious and have no intention of coming back down to earth.

The Grand Experiment: Freeing the Ear from Visual Interpretation

In the process of writing up my teaching career as an experiment, I realize it is just that.  I set out in the late 60's to demonstrate that Viktor Zuckerkandl (Sound and Symbol) was right to observe that no training whatsoever was required to discern the sense of a piece of music; rather that musical logic was an almost universal aspect of human nature.

I found this such an amazing notion that I realized it could provide the basis for a fascinated and fascinating life as a teacher, and set about freeing my ear from reliance on the printed score.  This proved extremely difficult.

But the rewards have been huge.

It required that I listen not for notes but for the movement between the notes, which is where Zuckerkandl concluded musical sense lies.  What a difference it makes.  Instead of faulty intonation on the part of the violinists in the non-competitive amateur chamber music program I originated at Mannes, I gained insight into the way composition actually works, and discovered things completely invisible to the pre-educated (literally pre-judiced) eye.

When I recommend this as a technique to professionals they report back to me that it is extremely difficult.  I know; it took me years.

Thank you!

A very warm thank you to those of you who responded to my invitation to subscribe to the blog!  Your support warms my heart.

I hope to keep you engaged in the coming days. 

By Ear

The expression "by ear" usually refers to the ease with which a child picks out a tune on the piano, or the uncanny ease with which some people can just sit down at the piano and play whatever music is fashionable that week.

But I use those words to evoke the activity of the inner ear.  This is more elusive as it is in constant shift between past and present hearing.  There is definitely a clash between the way we are taught to conceptualize tone and the way we actually experience it.  All notes on all instruments are not equivalent to all other notes.  Period.
It may be that some people, recognizing the inconstancy of their perception of tone, unconsciously require of themselves that they keep tone in order by mechanical repetition.