Interpersonal, Thirty Maybe Forty Years Later

In reply to yesterday's post: Having written the post I was out buying bananas at the local fruit stand, when I ran into a woman whom I had met coming home from a concert a few weeks ago in the company of a mutual friend/neighbor.  It had seemed to me that she was particularly sensitive to matters of sound.  In fact, she had begun our conversation with a question so intelligently posed that I took a lot of time answering it:  "What do you think will happen to the piano?"

Well, there she was, buying bananas.

"You won't believe this," she said.  "I once heard you play the piano.  It was on a soundtruck in the middle of 106th St., I don't recall the occasion, but I do remember what you played and I never forgot your playing." 

I recall having done this and it must have been easily forty years ago.  This sort of thing happens to me every once in a while, that people recall as if etched in their memory, my playing something specific in a specific time and place. 

As I explained to my neighbor, who had overheard this conversation, it is because I could never have made it into a music school as a pianist.  What people hear is my passion for playing, not certainty that I can "do" it.   The huge difference is why I prefer to teach children, especially children with disability, and amateurs: people who share my passion and who don't need to be certain of achievement.

Is Music Interpersonal?

I have not the slightest doubt about this issue.  It is, of course.  I know that this is true, but I seem to have trouble conveying to others that this aspect of music is the critical one, the one that counts, the one that lasts.

Do I honestly believe that Mozart was talking to me when I was 12?  Of course I do.  I did then, which is the critical answer to that question; and I did become aware fairly soon that my music education was not in the least concerned with that aspect of music.  It was presented as if objective, external to the experience of it.

Every time a student of mine responds to something she hears it is a sign of interpersonal connection.  My students do not learn music theory precisely for that reason.  Theory often blocks the actual nature of the sound by presupposing something about its function or at least its identity. 

What if its only valid identity is the one you perceive as you encounter it for the first time?

Its not Commercial Recordings: Now it's the Selfies

In the old days you had to have special, rather clumsy equipment to record anything: reel-to-reel, cassette recorder, you name it: It required an investment of cash and a real (pardon the pun)  commitment to tape, time, etc.

Now it is so easy it is almost impossible to not do it.  Memory chips, built-in mikes.  Push a button, voila. 

So now students are encouraged to record themselves.  Good idea?  Depends.

If all you hear when you listen back are the mistakes, then God help you.  This is doom and damnation.  If, however, you listen for specific attributes of the music or the playing that are not in the category of errors, then perhaps God will help you.  The idea is not to use the recording process as a freeze-dry, but rather as a warming up.

I used to listen to live performance tapes of my chamber group:  hours I spent, trying to figure out what had caused mostly intonation problems or forced, unconvincing playing. This involved listening as much to the dynamic of the composition itself as to the playing, as if the two could be separated one from the other. 

Klezmer Ear

An active klezmer musician has been coming regularly to hear my Mixed Bag experiments, where I play recitals without printed programs to encourage just listening, rather than listening always inside boxes of expectation and prejudice.

I find myself wondering whether what she hears has any influence at all on her music-making.  Does anything carry over from my approach to, say, rhythm?  It could.  After all, these are basically ways of transmitting elan vital, more than adhering to conventions within any given style or tradition.

Internal Rhythm

There has to be such a thing.  People talk authoritatively about the connection of musical rhythm to the body:  I have long had problems with that one, since it is impossible to generalize about bodily anything.  As a child I was very aware of that: I simply could not do as other children seemed to do so effortlessly:  throw a ball, move in sync with others, coordinate my movements within a team sport.

I insist that there is a different source of bodily rhythm, faster, more reliable.  That is the rhythm of hearing itself.  I notice in my students of all ages that this rhythm seems to be the most lively to them; certainly inhabiting music at that level gives them maximum range of choices as to how to coordinate their bodies with the sounds to which they respond.

Why aren't more people interested in that level of activity?  Is it already obsolete?  Has the species already evolved to a place where that level of activity has been diminished? 

Consonance and Dissonance

Actually, it's back to the subject of disability: Getting children to conform is dependent, as far as I can tell, on getting all the consonances to be predictable and, if that can't be managed, to line up neutral beats so that no definitions are subject to challenge.  (As I reread that statement I realize that I wrote it in relation to music, but it might as easily apply to life in general.)

My severely challenged student who last week slowed himself down to achieve a bi-lateral coordination, yesterday did something even more difficult by producing the same coordination with the left hand playing the "same" pattern but in two different keys, thus completely upsetting whatever arrangement of consonance and dissonance he had become accustomed to in the first tonality.

He could do it.  Every musician knows how hard this is.

Perception and Sound Have Become One

A listener commented on the Mixed Bag program the other evening, remarking on my persistence in pursuing the sounds of the music.

Interesting way of putting it.  I no longer feel that the sounds are external to myself, but are rather inseparable from my perception of them.  I live inside of them when I play and hope that my audience joins me there.

Everything in our culture conspires to maintain a distance between you and the sounds you respond to.  Think about it.  The halls are too big, the recording techniques too refining, the playback systems overly involved in equalizing volume and timbre.  What is left for you to respond to, except perhaps some vague memory of having heard it before?  And how exciting is that?