Honest Delivery Prompts Whole-hearted Listening

At a recent conference an expert in audience involvement provided four recitations of a William Carlos Williams poem, the first without preparation, the next three with different sorts of "program notes."

I found the first recitation spell-binding, as is the poem, until he got to the last word, which he garbled.  I felt like shouting and should have shouted: "What?"    The word, admittedly and purposefully unlikely, was "chickens."  Properly pronounced, or even just pronounced as audibly as the other words it would have elicited a range of responses from potential laughter to a sense of ordinariness pierced by a poet's ear.

Of the other three readings, in which that last word was clearly enunciated, two were exercises in irrelevancy; one consisting of biographical material, the other of a cliched history-in-a-nutshell of 20th-century American poetry.  The last reading was introduced by setting the scene of the poem as if from the literal viewpoint of a seriously ill patient of Dr. Williams contemplating the situation through a window.

It robbed not just the poem of its power; it robbed me of my power to listen, to observe.  It belittled me.  I don't think I am all that atypical a listener.

I had a minor argument with a colleague about the efficacy of the first vs. the fourth reading.  It leaves me thinking that all reactions (like all deliveries) are and should be both debatable and debated.

To Empathize, or Not to Empathize

At the CMA conference I heard a brilliant two-piano team strut their stuff.  Strut they did, and admirable strutting it was.  Stuff it was.  Stuff was all it could be given the circumstances:

Two pianos, perhaps initially a parlor genre, had, by the time of Liszt, become an inexpensive alternative to the orchestra.  Loud.  Lots of notes.

But do I play that instrument?  Would I want to play that instrument?  Would I kid myself into thinking that wanting to play like that was a good idea for me?

Apparently many people who study the piano do so because they aspire to that kind of brilliance.  It's a bit like getting delusional from looking at the ads in fashion magazines.

How Can Music Be So Complicated?

If only the world would stand still!

Something like that was on Goethe's Faust's mind when he was being dragged under by the devil himself.  But the world does not stand still.

The soundscape is constantly changing.  Do we change along with it?  Interesting question and not easily answered.

From my perspective, we all crave human connection. Tone is one of the primary ways in which we experience that connection.  In the absence of tone we are lost, disoriented.  Tone arouses us to memories of other tones we know or might think we know; recognition of sounds of nature or of another moment in our lives.

Many elements conspire to remove us from our spontaneous experience of tone, not the least potent of which is recorded sound.  Take care to become aware of the quality of what you hear coming at you all the time.  Is it real?  Does it have any attributes of "real"?   If not, why not?

On the Mozart G Minor Piano Quartet

I enjoyed a brief exchange with the cellist of a string quartet that had performed the Mozart several times during their past season.  When I brought up the subject of what a problematic piece it is, he looked at me a bit oddly, then asked whether that was why the opening of the second movement -- the third eighth-note, to be precise -- was so consistently difficult to tune.

Yes!  That is a sure sign that tone is alive.  No matter how well-schooled you are or how competent, Mozart makes things come alive so that we are required to notice that tone is subject to many variables beyond our control.

It took a few sentences to get him to the point where he observed this.  No one likes to admit complexity at what seems like such an elemental level.

Check out my book: Tone Perception Visualized: The Mozart G Minor Piano Quartet: Tonal Refraction I.

Old, New, Folk, Classical

Striking that so much more recognition is being given genres that would have been dismissed as lower class (musically speaking) 20 years ago: jazz, early music of the more exotic origins (Spanish, Arabic, etc.), klezmer.

I think people who like to listen are craving a return to pitch involvement.  Tone.  Pure and simple, it resonates with us.  Why avoid it?

Because, if you are going to get seriously involved with it, tone requires attention and attentiveness.  Our training prepares us to produce tone, not to notice it.

Now here come these musicians who make tone come alive with their odd instrumentation (ouds, etc.) and their spectacular singing.  We are all wide awake to that.

I, Too, Fall Asleep

When there is nothing happening I fall asleep, just like a lot of other people.  The trouble is that too many people are already asleep thanks to unrelenting noise and sameness of audio feed (to use an idiotic modernism).

Yesterday I was listening to a series of brief performances showcasing ensembles at the Chamber Music America conference in NYC.  After one startling early music group, the Alta Consort (highly recommended)
came a modern group, whose name I don't even recall.  By their second piece I was already drifting to awake only when they stopped playing.  Could it be that silence is more interesting than what they were up to?

I do not question their sincerity (again, a la Flanders & Swann "whether you mean it or not").  I do question where we all are in relation to what we hear.

I commented to the total stranger sitting next to me, who had been there also for the preceding group, how it struck me that so much modern music performance seems to be for avoiding pitch involvement.  She would not put it that way, she said, but rather that there was a notable absence of fine crafting of compositional detail.  To me it is the same thing: nothing to hold onto -- not that we need a melody: a tone, a succession of events, if you will, will suffice.

Engaging the Audience

When I used to write "program" notes for my chamber group's performances they were actually listening notes.  I sought to involve the audience in the same kind of listening that we performers had to undertake in order to play the music -- we were an unlikely combination of timbres and we had an unfashionable habit of playing music we had never heard anyone else play, whether Renaissance pieces or newly composed works.

By drawing the listeners' attention to the fine points of ensemble rather than to historical or theoretical irrelevancies, we developed their interest in our programming at the same time that we improved their ensemble musicianship.

It worked really well as long as it lasted.

Like all good things, it could not last forever.  The invasion of Sovietized stratification killed the sort of spontaneity that prompted our very existence.  Suddenly you either were or were not good enough and  conformist enough. It was all downhill from there.