Microscopic Septet and Classicism

Yes, classicism.  Listening to the Micros' exuberant performance last night at Joe's Pub was heaven.  Each of them was having such a good time and the wit behind every note made for such engaged listening on the part of all assembled!  It made me wish more uptown music was like that!

Not that every note was lighthearted: part of the success of the evening was the fearlessness with which intimacy sang out from individual voices, sometimes in explicit lyricism, sometimes in flashes of digression from the prevailing mood.  It was supremely Haydn-esque, in fact. 

The programming was excellent, the pieces and the players irresistible, and it led to some interesting morning-after insights.  Perhaps Adolphe Saxe invented the saxophone out of protest against the too-clean pitches in vogue during his lifetime:  the flute had become steely; clarinets and oboes, though still made of wood, were crafted to match the modern temperament.  Perhaps it was time to introduce into the modern orchestra a bit of the old edge.  The saxophone is all about edge.

Traction Equals Connection

Listening to some virtuoso musicians is like watching the 6:40 express to Boston whiz past with passengers and crew on board, but definitely not you.

Do we compromise the music by considering the listener?  From the remarkable insights I derive from listeners I think it is the other way around.  Listener feedback has brought about new levels of study and unveiled factors I would never have thought of connecting.

For one thing, the music we play was written in some kind of cultural context with which we are unfamiliar and about which we can only guess.  Locating that music with our own cultural context is a task that has to include the listener since we don't make up a culture all by ourselves.

As it is there is too much of a pianists' culture, rather than a musical one.

As If for the Last Time

In a special informal performance the other day I felt viscerally the difference between treating musical elements as givens (same-old, same-old) and as miracles (you cannot imagine how beautiful the descending B-flat major scale is on the piano). 

Imagine how playing would be transformed if the assumption were not that you have already heard what I am about to play but rather that you have no idea how marvelous this is going to be.

I extend that way of thinking down to the level of the single notes themselves, especially at the beginning of a composition: the first sounds engender everything that follows.

Meaning Coming from the Listener

Yesterday I had the rare privilege of playing Schubert's B-flat Piano Sonata, his last work for the instrument, for a small audience of former students, one visiting from Stockholm, another a friend for over fifty years who had participated in my singing group for over half of that time.  I had decided not to treat the event as a performance but rather as a conversation between friends.

In the course of the first movement I heard loud and clear that Schubert was pronouncing the B-flat scale for the last time in his life.  It was as if he was pronouncing it through me.

 

 

Playing Fast Listening Slow

Slow is perhaps the hardest thing and getting harder with every passing nanosecond.

Everything in our culture is moving fast and faster.  Electronic signals, multitasking, so much to do, so little time.  And it shows up in our musical lives.

The hardest thing about teaching is learning to listen because it demands the ability to distinguish between one's own trained musical speed and the speed of the student, which is usually exponentially slower--even the so-called advanced student is slower than the practiced pro.

My own playing is much improved as a result of learning to listen slow.

How Fast is Fast?

Speed is a real issue for me, it always has been.  As a kid I was antsy, restless, easily bored, impatient, intolerant of anything slow.  Putting it in contemporary terms, I had an attitude: "Get on with it."

Now that I have become aware of the speed of hearing - it works 200 times faster than any other sense perception - I realize that I spent most of my life deceived by a perception that was actually far too slow relative to sound, namely sight.

With so much emphasis on reading and on trusting what we see, I had come to mistake the visual symbols of standard notation for music itself.  This huge oversimplification underlies the vast majority of approaches to music instruction, extending even to college-level ear training and dictation.

I train my young students to remain true to their most vibrant sense of the magic of sound rather than be tied down to the level of their neuro-muscular control.  I have had kids use the metronome to compare their innate sense of fast and slow so that, aware of the variables between friends, speed is not competitive.

Memory

A recent on-line discussion I have been following brought up the inclusion in Japanese music of sounds of nature, the most familiar example of which is probably the sound of the breath heard in music for the shakuhachi, the traditional Japanese flute.

This brings up my deep feeling that all music relates to things we have heard, not tunes that we recognize, but sensations of vibration, chaotic if you will, that we retain from our pre-natal life in utero.

The intrusion of technology into our definition of music is limiting our access to this deeper level of memory by placing a conditioner upon it.

To me the proper study of music is sound in the larger sense, not repertoire in the narrow sense.  Listening is the core of the art: the greater the expanse of auditory recognition the more meaningful notation is and the less inhibited performance becomes.