Note Values

This is another of my favorite topics.  Most of us learn note values as an arithmetic function having nothing whatsoever to do with sound or with the perception of tone.  Students get the idea that they must first "get it right" and only then add in "feeling."  But by the time one has mastered the arithmetic the critical germ of feeling has usually been obscured. 

As one brilliant nine-year-old once put it: " It is really hard to count and play at the same time."

Note values should never be taught as absolutes for to do is to rob them of their infinitely expressive capacity.

For example: Today a young adult student was sight-reading a Bartok piece based on a Slovak folk tune.  Just playing the melody she was distorting the note values quite a bit.  Rather than correct her outright I had her comment on each successive tone: Did she like it or not?  Did she want to go on to the next tone or not?  By the time she had read through the melody she noted that one measure in which there are four long repeated F-sharps sounded like a church bell.

Wow!

She heard it.  That very strong response galvanized the entire experience for her and the values took on meaning. 

Empathy vs. Theory

We are left to imagine what the composer had "in mind" when writing down compositions, for there is no way to know what sounds were swimming around in his/her imagination.

For example:  I cannot help but notice, now that there is a natural horn in residence in my family, that Mozart refers to horn sounds in keys most commonly identified with that instrument, notably F and B-flat.  So there was a specific sense of this tonality as opposed to that--among the things that get "trained out of us," as an eminent theorist described it to me.

Tonal Refraction, my method of equating the fleeting aspects of tone perception with colors, enables the individual to restore some of the specificity of pitch that gets lost in the process of theoretical equal-temperament, in which we learn function rather than character; in which every major scale is like every other major scale; in which a tonic chord in root position is a tonic chord in root position.

We cannot re-enter the composer's world, try as we might, and there is no doubt but that period instruments have helped illumine the difference between present-day sound and the sounds of the 18th century.  But we can re-enter our own lost world of first encounters with tonal essence.

Cooking -- REALLY cooking

I was delighted to hear two new friends describe their grandmothers' cooking methods, one in Uganda, the other in St. Croix, both illiterate, both expert in their lost art.

It rang many bells for me as I recalled watching my mother-in-law, also illiterate, raised in a Polish shtetl, who, with no utensils beyond ordinary tableware, produced culinary wonders the memory of which still astonishes me.

The in-between generation was in too much of a hurry to "improve" themselves to take the time to stand still and watch these miracles take place and now the art is lost.

Sounds like music, doesn't it?

Empathy between students

The amazing thing about teaching kids with their listening as the primary organizing skill is that when they play for an audience their listening is even better - more focused.  Also, it seems almost miraculous that when they are used to being truly heard as they play, they listen to one another with that same model at work for them.  Their playing, as a result, surpasses their actual "technical" level.

I am told that this is consistent with social learning theory, about which I know nothing except what I practice in my piano studio.  It works.

Listening with Empathy

Ensemble playing is like a dream for many people: It promises to be so much fun---until we actually do it. Then all kinds of things go awry:
The rhythm is off: Can't you count?
It's out of tune: But I play the piano so it can't be me!
It sounds so good when we all play together but I hate having to be all by myself!
It seems to me the problem is that, just as we are listened to without empathy, so we do not learn how to listen either to ourselves or to others with empathy.

And where does the composer fit into such a picture?

When I was ten I was given a ticket to hear Myra Hess play three Mozart Piano Concertos with the Chicago Symphony. She did not play in time. That's all I remember. I would give my eyeteeth to hear that unacceptable performance again.

I recall a review in The New York Times of one of the greatest concerts I have ever heard, in which orchestra, conductor and piano soloist were faulted for essentially their mannerisms, their over-exuberance, their neurotic flair. I should not be surprised that the reviewer evokes the re-embodiment of my ten-year-old self.

In tracking down the particulars of Mozart's writing for the natural horn I am struck by how much of his music was written for particular players, not in the abstract. And here I am trying to make sense of it in the abstract. Isn't that the musician's dilemma?