Facility / Faschmility

What a drag to be a talented kid!  Praised to the sky for facility which, while it may pass for achievement in the eyes of the less facile, amounts to next to nothing in terms of real achievement.

The curve ruled when I was in school.  That was bad enough to level incentives, achievement, real learning.  Now that there are only numbers it has become a lottery.  Who are neglected in the process?  The truly creative children, the really talented who might just turn the established order on its nose and come up with something really compelling.

We are guaranteeing that this will never happen by shifting the emphasis entirely in the wrong direction.

My kids attended a two-room schoolhouse in NYC: No grades, just a distinction between those who needed to learn to read and those who could already read.   The older/abler ones helped the others, in the process confirming their own achievement while becoming also observant of the inborn differences between people.  What could be more significant?

Why are parents reluctant to engage their smart kids in learning exchanges with kids who are challenged, either physically or intellectually?  What kind of a world do we live in -- even more important, what kind of world do they live in?

If you have learned to read you may recall that writing was an important affirmation of your skill as a reader. The best affirmation of that in music is probably Bartok's well-documented ongoing attempt to notate the singing of Hungary's mountain dwellers.

It came to mind the other evening hearing a splendidly piercing reading of Schumann's Kreisleriana by Marc Ponthus. Extreme at both ends of the spectrum of impetuous and lyrical, it proclaimed Schumann as the consummate modernist that I have always felt him to be, having written down what in fact cannot be written down. Ponthus played it as I'm sure it was conceived: fearlessly, wildly, intimately, unforgettably.

The real difficulty with that music is that it is presented to us in metered bars. It has to be the sounds themselves that propel the motion inward or outward.

The sounds themselves...

Capriccio

Haydn has given us a piano piece: Capriccio in G.  I have never seen it programmed or heard it played.  At first reading I find it less than compelling.

Hey!  Wait a minute!  Haydn?  Less than compelling?  Who do you think you are!

I take another look this time paying attention to the note values and the "repetitions" -- oh! how he loved repetitions!

I begin to get it.

Next time I pay attention to my own gut reactions.  I begin to hear the tonal non sequitors that call for extraordinary reading. 

I go back to the title and, newly empowered by my observations, let the piece rip.

It is a riot.

Maybe that's why it's one of the two late works after which he wrote "Laus Dei."

Frozen in Time

Perhaps by now we have heard enough of this and that kind of music to grasp that there can be no definitive way of interpreting any music.  I have learned this from close friendship with Ursula Mamlok, a fine composer whose music is a joy to play and to hear.  Working with her is a revelation at every stage of every project.

The music must live.  If that is an issue for music composed by a living composer who may be there, present, in the room, at a rehearsal or a performance, then it is even more true for the composer who cannot be there for whatever reason of time or distance.

Making the music live is an endlessly demanding task for the performer.  Just as in conversation one should not repeat oneself.  Yow!  This is truly difficult.

One of the terrible hazards of too much contemporary recording technique is the illusion of flawlessness, of perfection.  Talk about freezing! 

What is the Subject Matter?

Response to tone is the subject matter.  To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the song is not in the robin it is in us. 

Because a child responds to tone I listen.  Out of that response grows curiosity about how others respond to tone.  Out of that comes the ability to listen empathetically, and the desire to learn how the people we call composers have dealt with tone. 

Learning to read that caring quality is not easy.  But it can be done if the first step is recognition that the individual's response to tone is the necessary element. 

Bach and Haydn:Variations

It is a trip to turn on the radio and listen at random to whatever there is, try to identify the performer.  Last night I had quite a revelation: Organist Simon Preston was playing Bach's variations on O Gott, du frommer Gott,  a piece I used to love.  Listening last night I could see why: It could almost have been composed by Haydn, so lively is it and so impulsive.  The spatiality of the organ suggests antiphonal variation in the organ registration between sections, but Preston goes far beyond that to include differences between vocal and virtuosic variations.

In a couple of weeks I will be performing Haydn's Capriccio in G, a piece I have never heard performed.  It is ecstatic--in that way much like the Bach.  Ecstasy is apparently hard to notate.

The Ghost of GG

Again, on the subject of random listening: I tuned in to the middle of a performance of a Bach keyboard concerto that was new to me.  Sounded like Glen Gould, I thought.  But the recording technique was too modern to be him, and I know that he recorded only two of the concerti, anad this was not one of them.  The playing was so Gould-like that I had to listen just to satisfy my curiosity.

It wasn't Gould.  So then why play as if one were?  The only rationale is the master-oriented approach to instrumental performance.  Questionable whether Gould is the master to choose in the case of Bach and the piano.

On one of his first concert tours Gould endeared himself to the audience in Finney Chapel at Oberlin by announcing that we did not want to hear the scheduled program nor did he want to play it.  He sat down to play the Goldberg Variations.  It was one of the first acts of seditious concert behavior.  For that I am grateful to him.