Most-read Post

Allow me to point out that more people have read the post of Feb. 11, 2014 than any other since I started this blog several years ago. 

I invite you to read it, perhaps a second time, and send me your comments.

Or do you simply agree with every word?  In which case, I would like to know that as well.

More About How Competition Dulls the Mind

Competition in music performance fosters a kind of listening that can best be described as having already been heard, otherwise on what basis could one judge one performer to be better than another?

An incident that revealed this dynamic was a piano performance workshop I led at Mannes Prep several years ago.  A bunch of kids aged 6 to about 9 took turns playing their recital pieces.  As the younger ones played most of the older ones were unable to conceal their utter lack of interest.  As I tried to get them to talk about their reactions, one of them pointed out that all she could hear was that when she had played the same piece "at that age" she had played it much better.

Later, when some of the older children played completely unfamiliar repertoire, these bored kids perked up their ears and their faces, truly enjoyed listening, and were glad to talk about the music.

Hmmm

A Music I Cannot Name

Once a month I trek out to Park Slope in Brooklyn to hear sounds that I cannot identify brought to being by the events of the day, the weather, the people in the room, songs that I have heard hundreds of times, or all of the above.  The performer/improvisor is Rachelle Garniez, my daughter, whose work inspires a deeper understanding of what it must have been like to be Mozart than anything I ever learned or read about him.  For that is the point, reading or learning about is like dancing around Emily Dickinson's ring:

We dance around in a ring and suppose
While the secret sits in the middle and knows.

I go back again and again because I know that I will be listening on the edge of two chairs, the one upon which I am actually sitting, and the inner one on which I wait to be delighted, surprised, moved, discovered in a state of disbelief -- "Did I really hear what I think I just heard?"  Except that here there is no repeat sign.  Nothing is or was ever written down.

When I went to teach her to read music, that wise 8-year-old shrugged her shoulders and walked away, already in the middle of that ring.

Hearing, Really Hearing

The ephemeral nature of hearing is what makes it irresistible, tantalizing, overwhelming.

Think about it.  It might explain that mysterious musical marking, the repeat sign.  "Did I really hear what I thought I heard?"  If properly played, the answer would be, "You'll never know!  Because this time I will play it differently!"  At least, that's how it would have been done until visual analysis took over and enslaved us all into thinking that repetition (i.e., reliability) is the point of Classical music.

Someone asked me the other day whether printed music was really necessary since so many people play by ear.  Good question.  My reply was that, had it not been for printed music I would never have stumbled upon those sounds in Mozart sonatas that convinced me, a 12-year-old kid in Chicago, that I would never again in my life need to feel isolated: a person who had lived 200 years previously understood me!

I would go so far as to say that the need to rely on the visual symbol is a way of denying the volatility of hearing.

This was beautifully expressed by Hannah Arendt in her extended essay On Thinking (The New Yorker sometime in the 1970s) in which, after covering the Eichmann trials, she observed that nothing in her schooling had prepared her to take in knowledge gleaned from listening, pure listening. She was referring to what she knew to be the truth not so much from what Eichmann said as from his tone of voice.  She went on to observe that the ancient Greeks knew  truth because they saw it, while the Hebrews knew God because they heard His voice.

Nothing small here.

Marshall McLuhan and the Piano

If McLuhan was right when he said that all new media should go first into the hands of children, then it is not too late to get the piano, that radical sound medium, into the hands of children without spies in the form of people who already know what you "should" be doing with the instrument.

All of the great music for the instrument was written by people who discovered it for themselves: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Bartok, Schumann, the list is long and still not finished.

Get into the instrument by getting into its sound on your own terms.  Is it right? Who knows.  Is it wasting time?  Certainly not.

It will heighten your awareness of every sound you hear whether practiced or not, whether professional or amateur in origin.

Beethoven the Experimenter

With all the pianists in conservatories encouraged to learn as many pieces as possible within the shortest possible time little room is left to value the experimentation of Beethoven.  There is no time to notice that counting to four gets to be boring; doing so saves a great deal of time, you see.

But there are so many instances in which counting to four completely destroys the creative impulse, not even to mention the underlying wit of the master.  How often does he take four note figures and compound them into sets of fives?  or threes?

This morning my young adult computer animator student coaxed groups of threes out of the four-note broken chords in the "Moonlight" Sonata, third movement.  It took some doing, as it is, at first, counterintuitive.  I let it take as long as it had to take for him to "get" it, at which point the sense of it was so evident that it would now be inconceivable to approach it any other way.

Questions?

Sometimes people who follow this blog contact me with questions or observations about some of the posts.  Nothing could please me more, considering the time and thought that goes into maintaining this connection with all of you out there, whoever you may be.

Yesterday a former student emailed me to the effect that she often does not understand the musical references I make.  How could she; she is just starting out on her independent musical life.  But for every arcane reference there is probably a much more accessible one lurking somewhere.

She brought up the issue of slurs, one of my favorite subjects.

I would refer anyone curious about them to consult Fuer Elise, another of my favorite subjects.  The opening tones, E and D# alternate, but when they return just before the "return" to the opening material after the "B" section, they are slurred in pairs: D#-E / D#-E / D#-E. This implies a completely different spacing of the tones and a definite upward motion repeated three times.

It is also a covert spelling of the real dedicatee's name: Therese.  Th in old German is one syllable, thus:
D# (consonant) E (the first vowel in the name)/ D# (consonant) E (second vowel) / D# (which is the enharmonic spelling of E-flat, which in German is called Es, pronounced like the letter "S", third consonant) E (third vowel).

I love it.