Sound Imagery

We are in an age of reproduction, simulation, mass production, uniformity--you get the picture.

In terms of sensory aliveness, alertness, attentiveness this is a disaster.

For centuries humans have crafted art out of their surroundings, bringing to enhanced life the facts of life in which they live their ordinary daily lives.  One of the commonest references in music is to bells.  These have all but disappeared from the soundscape (a useful and truly relevant word).  No longer do we know when there is a wedding, a funeral, a feastday, or simply time to stop everything and say your prayers.  There are no church bells to herald such events, except for a very few countable exceptions in high tourist parts of Manhattan.  The neighbors tend to complain about church bells in residential parts of the city.

I am struck by the fact that the Muslims do have calls from their minarets...

The many references to bells in music thus are likely to go unobserved.  The post-USSR Eastern European will not notice bells because the Communists melted them down to make cannons.  The quoting of street cries and folk songs is all but gone as street cries and folk songs are obsolete.  The most characteristic noise of my surroundings is the automobile horn--immortalized in Gershwin's An American in Paris.  I am grateful for the little scissor-sharpener's truck that occasionally roams my neighborhood with its distinctive chime. 

The Likes of Ludwig

Think about what he must have liked....tradition has it that he walked around humming to himself all the time.

I once got a disbelieving adult student to notice that he dreamed music: after considerable attempts to deny the possibility he phoned one morning to say that, indeed, music had awakened him in mid-sleep.

It must have been Beethoven's delight in certain specific combinations of tones on certain instruments that sparked the 32 Piano Sonatas, the many sets of variations and sonatas for other instruments and piano, the string quartets, the symphonies.

Much of that specificity is threatened by the over-production that is the pride of the commercial recording industry.  But think about it: just because delight in new technology is exciting--just look at video games and the attention they command--does it mean that we should not notice what price we pay for these intrusions into the lives of our sensory selves?

Listening is one of the areas where the deprivation seems to be almost hopelessly threatened.  And now, with the volume turned up in restaurants, on headsets, and just in general, prospects don't look too promising.

The Trap of Specialization

In my one semester of teaching piano in a music conservatory I was advised not to have my students accompany lessons.  Naturally, the first thing I did was to assign to each the job of attaching him or herself to a voice teacher to accompany lessons.

My motive was not to be a contrarian but because I strongly feel that it is impossible to understand the literature for piano solo without immersion in the vocal repertoire.  Perhaps it starts with the Bach Chorales, which we are assigned to study in theory class as examples of four-part harmony.  They are no such thing!  Rather they are paradigms of the interpenetration of tone and text, each voice in each chorale setting revealing aspects of the text of that particular stanza of the chorale.  In most theory classes the relevant text is nowhere in sight, nor does the issue arise.

Once having grasped from the Bach Cantatas how profound this link is, it became imperative to prepare Schubert sonatas by getting to know his lieder, Mozart by immersion in the operas, Brahms and Schumann, Debussy and Faure, in their vocal works.

And now we have people majoring in Collaborative Piano.  Yikes.

"Death by Encyclopedia"

The title is in quotes because I did not make it up.  The late Joseph Marx, oboist, chamber musician, and scholar extraordinaire, thus entitled a terrific piece of musicological research demonstrating that the authors of various 19th-century encyclopedias had merely cribbed the poor work of a forerunner, thus helping ruin the reputation of a composer who was actually quite good by mixing him up with someone else.

I wish to address a different manifestation of the same crime, this one a result of over-specialization.  Pianists seem to care only about piano works, conductors about symphonies, and so on.  In the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, therefore, the works of any given composer are divided into categories yielding not the smallest hint of the possible relevance of one genre to another.

In more than one case I have had to compile my own personal timeline, for Mozart and Beethoven, for example.  Wouldn't it make more sense to compile a time line of works according to key?  This would at least encourage curiosity about the relevance of one source of sound to another.

Equal Temperament Induces Oversleeping

Ever since the push to equal temperament (which established its firm Western European grip only in the early 20th century!)* musicians have been been trained to save time by playing the notes without listening to them.  It saves time.  It is importable and exportable.  No problem.

No passion.  No inherent interest.  Why bother?

Left to their own devices musicians will find ways to bend notes back into life-evoking shapes, whether electronically or acoustically, as many jazz musicians and other free spirits continually do in the off-center clubs and garages around the country.

I recall vividly trying to tune a cappella vocal intervals with a fine musician who simply cannot help but tune every notated pitch into an equally tempered piano pitch.  So why sing a cappella?

*I recommend Ross Duffin's How Equal Temperament Ruined Music and Why You Should Care

Standing on One's Nose

Tonic.  Dominant.  Standard theoretical vocabulary.

Useful terms?  It all depends.

Yesterday the limits of their usefulness were tested so beautifully that I hope I will never recover from the shock.  It came via the natural horn in E-flat morphing from its B-flat, one of its happiest tones, to A-flat, one of its least possible tones, into my entrance on B-flat.

The temptation is overwhelming to enter boldly on what is, after all, the dominant in E-flat, the tonality of the piece.  But yesterday I chose instead to match rather than "correct" the quality of the horn's falset A-flat.  The difference was staggering.

Played on a modern horn this situation would not arise.  A-flat? No problem!  But Brahms stipulated Waldhorn (i.e., natural horn) for his Trio Op. 40 for Horn, Violin, and Piano.  And this must be the reason why:  The acoustical specificity of this most fragile instrument dictates meaning, not the theoretical function we hide behind so that we don't have to listen.

The art of music is, after and before all, listening, not playing.

Why Bother to Recover from Bad Piano Lessons?

There is no single or simple answer to the question.  It is an especially peculiar question to pose when so many conservatory graduates (well-meaning perhaps naive) pass on without any qualms the woefully unexamined achievement of having satisfied the requirements for graduation.

My guess is that Beethoven would not have passed the test, as Debussy did not.

As long as the standard is set by Beethoven and not by the piano faculty there is reason to want to recover.  Go straight to the heart of the matter without the distraction of technique.  Sound, pure and simple, is the reason to want to recover.

Anyone can connect with those sounds, in isolation, perhaps-- i.e., not playing entire sonatas--but nonetheless compelling.

Let the likes of Ludwig set your standard.