A Music School Based on Ear Activity

Imagine the day:  At least half of it would be spent listening to one another, learning to differentiate and verbalize sensations generated by a composition, by the player, by the listener. 

Imagine the quality of generosity in performance and in composition that would be thus engendered.

The Real Action is in the Ear

If the real action is in the ear then it is not possible for

• a teacher to be bored because there is so much variation possible within sound and rhythm
• a student to feel belittled because the teacher is listening with an open mind
• a composition to become tiresome because the natural variation of sound and rhythm combined with our inborn variability as living creatures brings every note to fresh realization every time

What more can anyone ask?

Touch and Tone Sensitivity

As I pointed out a few days ago it is wondrously difficult for a pianist to find the right combination of touch and tone to evoke the style of the mid to late-18th century usually identified by the mysterious words, empfindsamer Stil.

The muscle-building approach of modern conventional piano training leaves little room for cultivation of touch / tone.  I have heard even very young students who are taught to play always and only with all their might as if they are in Carnegie Hall.  Will it ever actually happen that they play in such a vast space?  The approach is more like training race horses than musicians.

Playing privately for small audiences on my own piano has dramatically increased the range of my touch, which I had thought was already pretty inclusive, particularly in the direction of soft.

Now They're Intent on Murdering Color! What Next?

In today's paper I see notice of an App called Interaction of Color, Josef Albers, no less--not the App, but the source of the remarkable series of silk screen prints meant to be savored, one at a time, to demonstrate his point about the dynamic nature of color.

So another murder by ear plug, so to speak.

The Albers is so vivid that, when I first looked at it, it had been handed to me upside down and the first print I saw, meant to be the last, caused me to burst into tears.

How likely is that on a mobile device?

I invite you to join me in the world of real vibrations.

Murder by Earplug

Worse than being bodily stabbed to death by the innocuous little buggers is the death we endure every time we plug ourselves in: the death of tone.

At least there is an actual corpse to show in cases of bodily murder.  Who is the victim in the other case?  Well, Mozart, for example.

When are music teachers going to own up to their own insensitivity to tone and stop inflicting "easy" Mozart on their students?

Yesterday I heard two different students play two different movements of the Piano Concerto in A, K. 488, which I first played (with orchestra) at age 15.  I retain memories of the piece's agony.  I did not know when I played it that it was agony, but I felt the agony of the sounds--not the themes, the sounds themselves.

I had a chat on the way out with a self-taught singer/songwriter about the key of A major as an embodiment of physical pain.  Turns out she had found herself plus other musicians in the studio two days before having to transpose a song from B-flat to A.  It was so entirely altered by the change of key that they had to rearrange the whole thing.  She knew exactly what I was talking about.

What does it show?  Ear  Ear  Ear    no plug   Ear  Ear  Ear

Empfindsam

Playing the five early Mozart Piano Sonatas in the ear-environment of C.P.E. Bach is a tremendous adventure.

Note that it has taken me months to "get" the right combination of ear and finger touch to do full justice to the non sequiturs on which hang so much of the humor and the pathos of these pieces.

I would propose that as a working definition of Empfindsam in describing this style.

Watch Out!

Schumann's Album for the Young is a brilliant treatise on how music works at the piano, presented in small forms with the utmost precision as to articulations, phrasing, etc.

Then an editor gets hold of it, puts his name on it, collects royalties.  For what?

For misusing such words as Moderato (one of my favorites, remember?) for Melodie, where Schumann has indicated a clear and decisive nothing as a tempo marking.  This absence of a directive can only mean what my teacher, Hans Neumann, used to call "watch out!" or "pay attention." 

As if that weren't enough the editor in question proceeds to change articulations, fully distorting the truly waggish (schalkhaft) originals in the Sizilianisch. 

Watch out!

(Actually that is a quote from a great Schumann lied: "Huete dich!  Sei wach und munter!"