Hard to Listen

One of the parents who attended my recent class get-together remarked that it was hard for her just to listen when she goes to a concert.  Oh!  The MuzApp devils have truly taken their toll!  Where else would she have gotten the idea that she had to be doing something besides just listening?

All it takes to listen is that one relinquish control over time.  Think about it:  It means whatever timing you walked in with you will let go of as soon as the music begins.  If it is Adagio and you are a distinctly Allegro con brio type this will not be easy.  (It never was for me; I used to hate having to listen to anything slow.)  Just doing that, though I do not mean to imply that that is a simple thing to do, but doing that will allow you into the realm of the vibrations that the performers are producing and you will be more likely to listen.

Of course, that assumes that the performers are themselves paying appropriate attention, which is not always the case.  I would go so far as to say that if you are bored they are bored.

"Do Nothing"

These simple words were among the most important instructions I have ever received.  Hans Neumann, my piano teacher, indicated that this was what the true artist did after having done all there was to do with a piece or a passage.

Ironically I teach all my students to do nothing, all the time.  They must learn to respect articulations and dynamics on a par with the notes themselves, but their ear is the only arbiter of sense in the sounds they produce.  Because they listen intently everyone who hears them play listens also at that level.

Sounds make their own sense.  A good composition makes its own sense.  We have only to learn to listen to it.  The time that it takes to achieve this is well worth spending.

Listening Binds Us

An extraordinary group of people met yesterday afternoon in my home, several current students, one former student.  Of the current students one has been studying with me for 16 years, one for 17 years, one for 14 years.  The former student had left town to go to college after at least 10 years of study.

It seems extraordinary to me that each of them had gone beyond the arbitrary quitting dates for many young people: graduation from elementary school, high school, college.  No, these people had stayed on.  Why?

I wish I could answer the question in any number of words, but I cannot.  The premise in my studio is that the art of music involves precision in the coordination of bodily and mental responses to the infinite variables of sound and of sound perception - I believe these are two separate things, each to be observed and respected in its own right.

With maturity the importance of this coordination grows, as nothing is assumed to function according to a template of expectation.  Not only that, but the relevance of the process to every other activity of the individual becomes clearer with age, whether or not the individual practices the piano.

It has been a privilege to work with these young people.  Their perseverance is in no small measure a reflection of their parents' belief that there is more to achievement than the measured results associated with traditional piano lessons.

More on Precision

Among my students is a young man who is blind, autistic, and severely developmentally challenged.  He does not verbalize any aspect of his experience. Weighing the impact of his work on the other students, I have come to appreciate the extent to which both his deep caring about music and lack of facility arouse in those listening a keener awareness of their own caring as well as more meaningful connection to their own capacity for verbalizing.

It is astonishing to me that in this highly competitive area of music, particularly of piano playing, this most elusive quality - verbal precision - has been fostered by exposure to its opposite.

Clair de Lune

Were you one of those teenagers whose piano repertoire had to include Clair de Lune (along with the Rachmaninoff Prelude in C# minor)?  Of itself it made no sense to me except as delivered in an overly maudlin state by other players.

It wasn't until many years later that I realized it was part of a Baroque-inspired suite of dances.  I have been fascinated with the Suite Bergamasque ever since.
The more I perform it the closer it gets me to the feeling that, while all the other movements bear appropriate names: Prelude, Menuet, Passepied, that one alone has the wrong title.

It must be for a reason.  The Verlaine poem of the same title (Clair de Lune) is all about not knowing what is real and what is imagined, remembered, or no longer alive.  The movements are usually played with metric strictness in all the movements except this one.

The other evening it was as if the suite played itself in exactly the opposite manner, with all  the movements except this one played freely, conversationally, lyrically. This movement seems to have its lyricism notated right into it: no freedom required.  It comes to life on its own terms in what has to be one of music's most colossal ironies.

The Sound not the Notes

If the notes were all there was to it, everything would be so easy.

Yesterday I had a first-time appointment with an orthopedist to interpret the results of an MRI.  The imaging facility had released a report indicating a broken bone.  This is not good news for someone who goes to a lot of trouble to not have trouble in the bone department.

Both the younger and the older MD read the pictures, looked at the foot, indicated what it was that triggered the knee-jerk reaction of the technician who submitted the report and assured me, in fact demonstrated, that the problem was soft not hard tissue. 

The older doctor took some time to bemoan the mechanization of medicine.  As he put it, the "craft" is not sufficiently valued these days. 

It's the same with music, I told him.

Translating from the Greek

Yesterday the eminent Biblical scholar Dr. Phillip Towner preached a sermon using for his model his pedagogical strategy of assigning to students the task of translating from ancient Greek, not a passage from the New Testament, but some piece of historical writing with which they are totally unfamiliar.
According to him the students report that it took them days to accomplish the assignment, not like the familiar Bible stories which, as he put it, they can "do on the fly."

As I commented to him afterwards, it's the same with music.  We have heard the piece a thousand times therefore we know how it goes and there is no need to work at it.  I have the same problem as everyone else:  I am a good reader, I know how to play a Beethoven minuet when I see one.  But do I really know what it is about?  For example, how much irony enters into a Beethoven minuet? 

The performance I heard last week of the Septet leads me to believe that there is huge potential here, disguised by the illusion that one knows how it goes.