About Rests

Anyone who has ever played chamber music -- anyone except a pianist, of course -- will have had to deal with rests that make no sense whatsoever.

Take the 5 bar rests in so many Mozart string quartets, which are commonly notated with a set of symbols inside of a single bar with the number 5 on top.  What is one to do, just sit there and count?

What's the fun of that?  It makes me wonder what the parts would have looked like in his day.  Whatever they looked or look like the problem remains that the player can only imagine imagining what "must" be going on during that time span and perhaps anticipating the sense of the coming re-entry.

I enjoyed this sport during the brief time when I attempted to figure out what music looked and felt like to an amateur by buying a tuned-in-the-factory cello and pretending I knew how to play it.  It was great fun, especially during the rests.  Noticing that my last note preceding the rest rarely if ever had anything to do with the end of a phrase, I was left to guess where the phrase actually ended, where the next began, and whether my next entrance had anything to do with phrase structure.

As often as not I would hear notes that seemed to prepare my entrance and I would simply come in because it felt right, not because I had counted properly.  The music had made it almost impossible to count the rest objectively.

From this experience I developed a healthy respect for rests and for the deception for which they stand.

This led me to conceive of chamber music as high sport. 

Here We are in Three Again

This morning was one of those unforgettable teaching mornings.  It started with my young adult who is coming to grips with the difference between notation and actual sound--one of music's more complex dilemmas.  We were working on the Andante movement of Clementi's famous C major Sonatina, a movement in 3/4, full of repetitive Alberti figures and ultra-boring predictabilities.

Aha!  Not so, she pointed out.

When listened to, the overtone interplay between the sustained melody tones and the fluctuating resonance of the Alberti figure infuses the music with a variability that defies description, much less notation.

Add to that the many ambiguous hemiolas that permeate the movement, both in right and left hand passages and not always in the same way in each hand and you have plenty to keep mind, body, and spirit occupied regardless of how "easy" the music sounds.

Meaning Goes At Least Two Ways

This morning saw an unforgettable session with a young man who is blind and autistic.  Knowing that his inner life is not something he can communicate, I always felt it my responsibility to give him access to complexity of emotion and intention by teaching him first to tolerate dissonance and then to internalize Bartok's extreme lyricism. (For Children, Volumes I and II.)

He is at the moment dealing with a piece that requires precise coordination of the two hands, something he finds extremely difficult as he plays mostly by ear and because he keeps his hands in rigid positions of immobility and tension.

But he responds to this piece.  Today he had to master the notion that his left hand, not the tune, was the source of the sadness.  He had to grasp the difference between an articulation that gasps and one that actually seems to sob.  He did it.  He came as close to crying as I can imagine, playing a descending inner voice with his left hand thumb on B, then A, then G.  I will never forget it.

Playing like this sets my standard, not recordings of perfection.

I Hate Quarter Notes -- Except in Haydn Minuets

This post's title is lifted from one of my favorite songs by Leonard Bernstein: I Hate Music,  The lyric goes on to say, "...but I love to sing."  

I don't really hate quarter notes themselves.  What I hate is the reduction of every rhythmic event to some multiple or division of the quarter note.  The other day I ran across a copy of Clementi Sonatinas in which some brainwasher of a piano teacher had written, in red, "one-y-and-a-two-y-and-a" over some of the wittiest content of the piece.  Poor lambs, both teacher and child.

Today a student came in with the minuet from a  sonata in which Haydn plays the most wonderful games with quarter notes, sometimes using them as halves of half-notes ---- ah!!!  but which half?  We will never know for sure.  But in the meantime it would be good to free our imaginations from restriction to quarter notes uber alles, even going so far as to entertain the notion that a rest might have at least as much "say" about what is happening as an actual sounding note.

Bar Lines -- Really?

One of the on-line discussion groups in which I sometimes participate is currently addressing the question of how to instill rhythm in young piano students.  It is a subject that seems easy until you talk to people who have survived the nonsense delivered to young impressionable sensibilities in the name of truth.

The irony is that just yesterday I was revisiting the third movement of Mozart's only G major piano sonata, a movement that bored me to tears when I was 12, and when all I knew about rhythm was determined by numbers and barlines.  Now, oh my goodness, I detect its real subject matter!  That innocent 3/8  is full of diminutions, augmentations, conflicting LH and RH meters-- hard, hard, hard!  Fun! Fun!  Fun!

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.