Let's Hear It For Left Hands!

How often the sense of a piano work is contained in the left hand, so often neglected because it does not have the melody.

It took me a while to figure out that the usual division of music into three elements, melody, harmony, and rhythm, was entirely phoney, that a lot of music is a magical combination of the three so that they are in fact inseparable.

Having been trained as an organist I spent a lot of time identifying and articulating fugue subjects and counter-subjects.  One day I woke up to how much more interesting fugues are if you simply relax and listen.  What you hear tends to be a fascinating dispersal of long notes amid running passages. The trajectory of the long notes is utterly compelling.

I recommend to people that they approach their music via the long notes, not via the themes or the melodies.  The long notes convey both harmony and rhythm, and sometimes (especially in Beethoven!) even melody.

Body / Piano Playing : A Real Connection

One of my favorite students is an innovative scientist who has never been tempted to ignore the powerful drive to have music in her life.

Today she was working on the beginning of a Beethoven slow movement.  It is a privilege to work with someone whose sense of detail is so cultivated that she can appreciate the connection between this small step and that dynamic result.

It was a matter of overcoming anxiety about playing wrong notes: a familiar problem.

The hint very often lies in feeling the connection between the hand and the keyboard.  We tend to forget that the hand came first and approach the keyboard as a foreign object, whereas it is really the other way around.  The fifth is beautifully expressed by the five fingers in closed position.  Extending that reach ever so slightly to produce a sixth can be an utterly expressive gesture, in fact, an extension very like what a fine dancer executes to command our attention.

Treated mechanically the sixth is not expressive at all.  It was beautiful to hear what happened when notes stopped being notes and became actual physical gestures which, like fine choreography, conveyed real feeling.

Competing with Oneself

What am I doing when I get up to play for other people?

It is hard to shake the many years of feeling as if every performance is competitive, even when it is not.  But the possibility that I might be competing with myself did not occur to me until a pre-performance chat with a fellow pianist.

Even with maturity it does not get easier to go to the source and find what one needs to know and get the courage to go in pursuit of it.  There are so many factors pulling us down into the pre-judged, not-good-enough mode of much of our learning years.

This learned put-down keeps us from hearing in the here and now, that precious, fleeting moment when Mozart might reach us with a tone or tone relationship that we had never noticed before.

Rules? Models? Competition?

A few years ago I had an interesting email exchange with a well-known music theorist who has taken an interest in disability.  Replying to his questioning why I was interested in it my answer was that disability has alerted us to the extent to which conformity distracts from real learning by reducing singular works by singular individuals to a set of rules and procedures.

What does it take to direct a person's attention to the source? To get a child to feel confident that music is an inter-personal communication, not something objectified, standardized?

It takes attentiveness to and support of the child's ear.

Sounds simple.  Takes time.

Models or the Real Thing?

Already as a very young girl I had an awareness of "the real thing."  An interesting notion: That an unschooled child could have a notion of what that might be.

The plastic toy that looked like a sailboat but which, contrary to my excited expectations, sank was clearly not it.  The neighbor's spinet with no model attached either in print or in the person of a piano player was the real thing and has remained so for my entire life.

It was me and that sound with no intermediary.

When, then, specific sounds composed by someone who had lived 200 years earlier awoke in me a recognition that we were reacting to the same thing I knew it was real.

Lessons, classes, required recitals, had, for the most part nothing to do with it.  They conveyed rules, models, competition, categorical judgments--all beside the point.

An Endlessly Interesting Vocal Improv

This was one listener's reaction to the Mozart A minor Rondo that I played yesterday -- not just a listener, but a professional pianist, chamber musician, and vocal accompanist.  It might well be assumed that she knows what that means.  It came out quite differently yesterday than a few days before, who knows why.

In retrospect (and I have not yet seen the video that I had made of it - something I do only rarely) I suspect it had to do with paying more attention to the short note values this time.  It was not something I did "on purpose," but something that happens more and more as I get interested in the ephemeral aspect of all live music.

I noticed something concretely different at the very end when the long note values took on special meaning.  Where might they have come from if not from the need for them?

Mozart Rondo in A Minor: A Piece I Cannot Practice

Mozart may be the most difficult of all composers in that it is so easy to make his music sound perfect, pretty, predictable -- in other words, utterly beside any meaningful point.

This week I am performing a work that has utterly mystified me for most of my adult life.  The A Minor Rondo, K. 511 is so dramatic that it cannot be pinned down to a particular moment as the right one, or to a particular reading as definitive.  It has to be recreated afresh every time it is played. Perhaps that is the reason for it's being in the first place:  in a rondo the material "repeats" so often it has to be dealt with as new every time.

This is harder than anything one is trained to expect from music of any period, least of all the 18th century.