Don't Orchestrate Piano Pieces!

Among the piano works popularized in orchestral versions are Bartok's Roumanian Dances.  That is how I first heard them.  It has taken me years to appreciate the destructive distortion visited upon these masterful gems.

First, the beat.  In order to coordinate an orchestra someone has to give the beat.  A look at the piano score indicates such subtlety in the articulation of beats that it is hard to imagine an orchestra or conductor sensitive enough to make them come alive as the composer has indicated.

Second, the sound.  Drunk on the rich resonance of the piano the "dancer," me, turns into a veritable gypsy.  Everything is motivated by the sonority, not by a genre or a title. 

The difference is so vast that the listeners last night commented on it right off without my having said a word.

How do you know when you're bored?

For player and listener alike the answer is the same: When your mind wanders, or simply turns off.

What "mind?"  This is the interesting part.  We have all kinds of minds.  The one addressed by Music Appreciation is not, to my taste, relevant to playing or listening to music.  Identifying themes and subthemes is a distraction from other mental activities that define listening.

A good example comes readily to mind: Last night I was listening to the radio.  Strictly by chance I heard announced a recording by the Belcea string quartet of Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet.  What were my first reactions?  a) Recordings are not my preferred listening   b) Another cliche reading of that over-done piece?  c) Yes, but the Belcea is a very fine ensemble.  So I listened.

It took less than a minute to realize that the Belcea was giving me no choice but to listen for every nuance of their superior playing:  Not a trace of a cliche; every single note intoned purposefully, every event personal without a trace of sentimentality.  The piece flew by, a new important definition of paying attention.

For all their virtuosity they played as if they had never heard or played that work before.  No trace of boredom there.

Reading the Program

I love to instruct people on how to read a concert program, giving short definitions of what the words might mean: structure words like sonata, symphony, minuet, and tempo words like allegro or adagio.

Then there are the keys: Some people disassociate themselves from this altogether as if the key didn't concern them since they neither play in the orchestra or have perfect pitch.  But just about everyone has sung My Country, 'tis of Thee or The Star-Spangled Banner, and has some memory of their own vocal comfort zone.  The orchestra tuning to A invites every listener to internalize that reality in relation to their own voice.

One of the most interesting aspects of a program is what happens between movements of a sonata or symphony.  Unlike most CDs, in which this is dead space, a truly musical performance will use the that time to build tension in the transition from one key to another and from one mood to another.  In fact, most fine composers effectively compose those silences to contain extremely important information.

One of my favorite teaching memories involved some 7th-grade classes I had taught about how to read the program and how to get interested in the music in a highly participatory way.  The first thing was to figure out whether the piece was serious or humorous--very important.  Next was to figure out when to clap.

After a few weeks of class I invited them and their teachers to a recital in which I deliberately programmed a variety of serious and tongue-in-cheek works.  When I finished the Mozart sonata that trailed off into nothing the kids burst out laughing, much to the embarrassment of their teachers, who were extremely surprised when I then congratulated the students on their response which proved that both I and Mozart had succeeded in getting a point across.  The teachers apologized to me on their way out. 

Two of these equals ... ?

Wouldn't we all read music better, even as children, if it were clear from the outset that it is not arithmetic?

I have learned this primarily from my young students.  I would teach them by ear a simple two or three-note figure with appropriate fingering and inflection.  They would invent phrases to fit the music.  My favorite for a simple mordent was : "Who are you?"

Adult students are plagued with the equations of subdivisions that literally tie them up in knots, produce tedium on every page of every composer, often missing the point entirely.

 

Improvisation and Reading

Increasingly I see the profound connection between improvisation and effective sight-reading.  If invited to rearticulate, rephrase, rewrite the material rather than render it note-perfect or meter-perfect the student will inhabit the material first and be motivated to render it "correctly" with active involvement.

Emphasis on perfect reading first time around inhibits auditory involvement and delays musical instincts. 

It works with Bach Inventions, of all things.

Ma non troppo

A beautiful example of what this might mean is the C# minor Exercise by Clementi in Preludes and Exercises - a truly magnificent source of lyrical insight into the piano, the hand, tonality, you name it.

The exercise's meter is 3/4, the tempo  Allegro ma non troppo.  I maintain that this means that the quarter note is not the structural metric unit, except perhaps when it is.  There are seven, count them, seven quarter notes in the whole piece.  The measures are either clearly divided into halves (dotted quarter plus six sixteenths) or some marvelous unlikely combination of asymmetrical rhythms like 6 eights in one hand plus ten sixteenths after an eight rest in the other. 

I propose playing such an unlikely measure as two groups of three eighths in one hand, with two off-beat quintuples in the other.

This was for a student whose rhythmic command is far from reliable.  He played better the more complex the task.  More important still, he had a blast doing this impossible coordination.  

I had him play in strictly emphasized quarters just to feel the difference. 

Such a piece convinces me that Allegro refers to a metric proposition wherein the quarter note has distinct structural function.  A modifier like ma non troppo indicates that the quarter note is theoretical only, not actual.

Hilarity and Boredom: The Connection

Perhaps, just perhaps, boredom is the quintessential classical music question.  If you stop to think of it: How can Beethoven be boring? 

Perhaps, just perhaps, the point is that boring means you don't get it.

Get what?

Hmmm.

I am rereading short stories of Leonard Michaels, who claimed he knew nothing about music.  But his stories, some of which are two sentences long, are fundamentally lyrical in a most contemporary yet totally classical way.