I Before E, Perhaps, But NOT in Music

The trouble is that too many teachers, mostly piano teachers, put eye before E(ar).  Notation becomes, in that case, merely a set of motor instructions: Put this finger here, that finger there, etc.

Rather than deal with actual sound the teacher proceeds, usually, to supply the sound that is supposed to be heard, usually an imaginary sound implied through over-stimulation of the [teacher's] theoretical nerve.  To give the example cited at the Music Perception and Cognition conference, the Bach Minuet in G, the famous one that every beginner plays.

There is a chord in the first phrase, but only one, the opening sound, a full G major triad in the left hand.  After that the left hand moves in single tones against the right hand melody.  But at the conference a well-meaning graduate student was analyzing the harmonies of the minuet.  What harmonies?  And who besides me was objecting to this falsification of the score?

Ever since this demonstration I have been re-working the difference between implied and explicit harmony in my own ear.  Two tones do not a triad make.  The suggestion of a triad is only a suggestion.  Imagining it as a full-blown triad distorts entirely the composer's intention, which must have been to imply rather than specify a triad, especially if the composer is Bach (pick one!) or Mozart.

Think about this simple fact:  Every major and minor triad is a combination of one major third and one minor third, the difference between them being only which one is on the bottom.  A minor third floating around is literally doing just that unless explicated by the missing major third that will pronounce its modality.

Implied modality is the art.  What do we accomplish by presuming to fill in the missing third?

Blog as Conversation

Most of the posts on this blog are actually suggested by conversations of the previous day, sometimes in lessons, sometimes over coffee, sometimes after my in-house recitals, or rehearsals.

I invite you, dear reader, to participate on this level with remarks, questions, suggestions, objections, etc., either posted to the blog or via email to me: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com.  The worst thing that can happen is that the conversation will not go anywhere at the time.

Sometimes when I hear a public presentation, as just happened in Seoul at the conference on Music Perception and Cognition, I make a comment that appears to fall flat.  Thud....silence.  In a later exchange that same comment, slightly varied, may produce a nod of recognition, a smile, or even a stream of consciousness reference to some shared source of insight.  At any rate, even the thud will have proved useful.

We are all in this together.

Why Play Minuets?

Why not teach American children to play swing or blues?

Why do so many (thank goodness not all!) piano teachers insist on starting children with music of a bygone era, music that relates to nothing in their world?

The answer is simple:  Because it is dead, therefore, like the proverbial wild beast, it can be tamed.
But first it has to be dead.

Reducing music to print was always a bad idea.  Socrates had his misgivings about what alphabets and written words would do to thought.  Hate to say it, but he was probably right, if you extend his misgivings to music.

Rhythm has to be alive, no matter what era or country it's origin.  If you can't find the life in it by all means do not teach it to anyone!  And if someone wants you to swallow a lifeless assignment take a lesson from an infant with it's first mouthful of carrots and spit it out.

At the very least recognize in your boredom a question of the utmost urgency and do not stop asking it until you find someone who can and will address it.  (I recall once bringing up a troubling passage with a renowned pianist who turned up his nose at the very idea that there might be a problem with an obviously playable piece.  This is not a matter of technique, but of liveliness.)

I repeat again and again: I am a passionate performing pianist because I never practiced the lifeless stuff - lifeless because never presented to me in a manner worthy of full attention.  Yet I played constantly: imitating every popular idiom, desperately searching out the warm, the jazzy, the convincingly lyrical in whatever form I could find it.

Sometimes I found it by virtue of an attractive picture on the music's cover: That's how I discovered Bartok's Sonatina when I was 13.

Many fine living composers have addressed this problem and given teachers and children great stuff to chew on.  Go!!!

Faster Than a Speeding Anything: Sound

Getting the ear engaged should be the point of any music instruction.  Alas, all too often it is not.
That is because it is not easy to engage the ear of anyone living in a culture in which sound is mostly noise, in other words unwanted, therefore blocked out.

When I say I offer instruction in Music Inside and Out I am amazed at how difficult it is to arouse awareness of that inside part, so busy are we trying to mask what is outside of our ears most of the time.

Bach's Minuet in G

It would not be possible to convey in a brief blog post the test lesson I gave this morning to a young man, not a facile reader but with an extraordinarily precise ear.  The lesson was inspired by a demonstration at the ICMPC conference of the most frequent errors made by young piano students.  That piece, one of my favorite examples of hidden complexity, was given as a prime example of the student errors.

My student proceeded as he has been encouraged to do, by playing the black key in the key signature before sounding the notated pitches.  As a result he played a wrong note, not the one in the conference presentation, but an "error" in the corresponding spot in the first measure -- a far more interesting and musically relevant error.

My philosophy about errors is that people, especially children, do not make them mindlessly, as the scholars would have had us believe.  My position is that errors signal extraordinary departures from expected tone logic.

My student's error proved me right.  In attending to his error and straightening it out I learned a whole dimension of the piece that had previously escaped my attention.

Let's hear it for the vitality of musical elements at every level: I mean e v e r y level.

The Music Part

Internalizing specific sounds is the key to the music part, that elusive goal expressed by so many adults whose childhood training led them to expect that all there was to it was the ability to churn out notes on time as accurately as possible.

When specific sounds are truly heard as such the music part of the player becomes engaged just as the mind of the scientist is engaged in tracking evidence while conducting research.  However many choices one had until that moment are now exponentially increased.  The music part thus defined is the key to what is truly compelling in music, the reason an intelligent person can without fear of boredom devote a lifetime to mastering the art.

That it is enormously difficult affirms the complexity not of musical structures, as the Muz App establishment would have you believe, but of sound and sound perception in and of themselves.

Brahms and the Natural Horn

Writing an email to my friend Ursula Mamlok this morning:

I imagined how sad Brahms must have been to behold the natural horn, an instrument he knew thoroughly and loved deeply, be so readily abandoned by musicians happy to have an easier way to find the right notes, even though those notes, however "right", in no way resembled the sound he had in mind when writing for this highly pitch-specific instrument.

Music sounds so simple.  The trouble is that the music-training establishment has fallen for that piece of nonsense almost more than the general public.  Students are expected to churn out the good stuff at breakneck speed--not just the speed of the actual playing but, even worse, the speed of accelerated learning that leaves no time for comprehension.

How different music is when the player, like the composer, has to account for every single sound.

How different one's sense of purpose is when that is the prevailing standard--how very much more satisfying!