Listening and Baseball

Why do people go to baseball games: Aren't they all the same?

In my playing I aspire to the level of excitement that accompanies every gesture of the pitcher, every slight shift in the infield, every sign of excitement or disapproval from the bleachers.

Why don't people listen to music that way?  What have we lost?  Can we get it back?

A fine listener mentioned to me his impatience with concerts: After an hour he wants to go home and have the pleasure of playing himself.  This means to me that I am not adequately engaging him in the traction I feel between sounds--traction he may search on his own though it will never exactly match the traction I find.  And I never experience it twice the same way in the same piece.

I have tired of some fine performers' playing because I find their playing lacks this traction after years of mastering speed and agility.  There is nothing left to hold my attention (and, I suspect, their own) except for speed and agility.  Nothing is at stake; I know the score in advance, so why go?

Maria Joao Pires Defines Moment Musicaux

The title received a new definition for me this morning as I listened to a performance of No. 1 by a pianist totally unknown to me.  Every sound came from a place of maximal curiosity.  I hung on every fraction of an instant before during and after every sound.  What could more exactly define a musical moment?

The pianist: Maria Joao Pires.  Look her up on facebook.  There is a video interview with her about Chopin.  It seems she knows that that is how she plays.  Completely extraordinary.

Autism and/or Prodigy in the Family

Music is one of the most powerful familial tools available.  I am not talking about music, the external experience so codified by pseudo-scientific measurements and applications.  Rather I am talking about the internalized music expressed in the desire, not to be confused with the ability, to play.

In one family in my studio there is an autistic boy whose only developable contact with other humans is his musical ear.  When his older sister, who is not blessed with the innate ability to respond in any obvious way to what she hears, expressed a desire to play it was clear that a whole range of emotional changes would result.

Today she confided two things to me:  It took her a long time to realize that she wanted to play not for her brother's sake, but for herself.  She knows that he listens as she struggles through her pieces, though he does so from his room with the door closed.  But, whereas he used to "steal" her pieces by playing them with greater facility than she will ever have, he has learned to respect her musical space.

Naturally in a family with such a needy child everything seems to be dominated by that child and determined by his needs.

She confided also that her cousins and aunts and uncles are mystified that, though she takes piano lessons, she does not perform for them.  But she is clear that that is not her goal.  She plays what she plays as she plays it for herself.  The depth of the work increases with no judgment imposed by the cliche of "piano lessons."

What an extraordinary privilege to work with such a person.

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.