Tones and Talking

So far removed from singing we have forgotten that voices are music.

Recognizing an unnaturally high-pitched voice is familiar to anyone who has lived with a person who could not control their muscle tone, or someone who is tense if not downright angry all the time.

But we are so far removed from the center of our voices, especially now that we text all the time (at least some of us do), that making this analogy have meaning in terms of an instrument is an uphill battle.

Pitch is not abstract.  It is always related to some identifiable source in nature or in the mechanized universe, even if "only" an imagined source like planetary rotation.

The piano talks.  Simple.  At least it used to before pianists stopped enjoying that feature of its mechanism and began training all their fingers to be equally muscle-bound, and demanding that all keys, white and black, be correspondingly interchangeable.

Woe.

Recordings are not Music

'Twere better far not to listen to recordings but instead to hum one's own when hungry for music.

The ready supply of repertoire on demand removes us ah so far from the essence of the art which is VIBRATIONS.  

Fuer Elise Does Not Require Genius

In an on-line discussion about the well-known, often maligned work of Beethoven someone commented that it would take a genius to impart original insight into it.  (That is my rewording of the comment made, I must say, by an invisible person rendered toneless and expression-deprived as only the Internet can render.)  

All that is required is the ability to hear.  The work is brilliantly crafted to blur the boundaries between a black key and a white key so that, at the beginning of the piece, they almost become one tone, like a trill.  Later Beethoven stipulates that they should be clearly articulated in pairs, the black key coming first (unlike the beginning), as if to spell the real, right name of the dedicatee, Therese, not Elise.

Thus: consonant ( = black key) E /  consonant   E /  consonant  E.
Th was one letter in the German of his day, pronounced like our letter T.  D#, spelled enharmonically, is E-flat, which in German is called Ess, the letter S.

Note that the famously difficult B section contains 7 unmatched measures, the number of letters in the name -- if you, for purposes of asymetry, disentangle the T from the h in Th.  Fun, games, a tremendous amount of intimate ingenuity.

I love this piece and play it as what it clearly is, a love message.

Why Assign Mozart Sonatas?

Giving piano students Mozart Sonatas to learn as if they were Himalayas begging to be climbed is a sure sign that the teacher is a victim of stunted growth.  Sorry for the oversimplification, but I was mystified when, as an adult, professional level student, I was assigned an incomprehensibly difficult Mozart Sonata (D major, K. 576).  What was I to do with this enormously complex music?

The assumption behind such assignments is that if one can only play the notes the music will follow.  This strikes me as backwards.

I have seen students who, drawn to Mozart solely by their ear, dig and dig into the notes defying technical levels or categories of preparedness.

The prevailing assumption seems to be that the ear does not, in fact, convey or grasp meaning.

Words Are Too Slow

Spoken words are, indeed, heard.  But they are not music.

They have to go through multiple filterings before they have meaning.  Music goes straight into motor and emotional responses, both at the same time and in equal intensity -- such is the anatomical nature of the auditory nerve as I understand it.

Concepts interfere with this immediacy.  Words, being attached to concepts, interfere also.

Last week I enjoyed a one-on-one with an almost-three-year-old, new to my environment.  I had started out by telling his parents we would not talk, but just engage in sound together, he and I.  Well, that is almost impossible with such a young child without the presence of other children to form an experiential commonality.  No sooner did I open my mouth than one parent followed suit with words, definitions, etc.  Perhaps that person wanted to be part of the experience but could not join us on the floor under the piano.

I am scheduling Improvisations With and For Children for mostly three-year-olds and older (no upward limit, as all children enjoy this).  I play the piano, not kid stuff but real music; they improvise on the assorted percussion instruments I have scattered in the room.  There is no condescension on my part: I do it because it is truly satisfying music-making.   Younger children are welcome to sit on their parent's lap and engage with smaller close-up sounds.  E-mail for information.

Listening for Meaning

Most of the discussions about meaning in music have to do with the theoretical life of tone outside of the perceiving sensibility.  This yields such nonsensical words as "heroic," "pastoral," etc. while entirely ignoring the essence of the matter.

Listening itself imparts meaning.  We are not trained to listen, however; therefore the realm of sound remains opaque, superficial, lacking in depth.

The depth is a function of immersion and there is no end to that.  To experience that requires, however, that we get beneath the surface of the sound (see post of August 3, 2013) and taste from close-up the friction, the infinite variability of the sounds themselves and of our responses.

The trouble is multiplied by the fact that many performers, trained to be heard from a distance, have themselves lost the ability to hear close-up; distance has become the standard of the classical recording industry and now of musical training.  No flaws please. No signs of fragility or vulnerability allowed.

All backpacks subject to search without warning.

Well Worth Listening To

We make assumptions all the time about what is worth listening to.  Music with certain names attached to it--which names depends on what magazines you read--automatically qualifies.  Perhaps its the name of a performer or composer; perhaps a school or a place--whatever it is, I can almost guarantee that listening through such a filter is not really listening.

"What's in a name?"

Take the names away and what do you have?   It was a child who said out loud that something by Beethoven was boring, thereby causing me to notice two things: a consistent source of irony in some of his works; and that, cowed by the name of the great man. I would not be capable of such candor.

Too much musical training has to do with reverence for names and not enough with paying attention to sound itself.  It is almost as if we are trained to believe that sound, in and of itself, cannot convey meaning.  Shouldn't it be the other way around? 

Getting it to work the other way around is the way I teach: that's why I teach children who are open to this possibility.  Having been trained to pay attention to sound their playing, however "flawed," is well worth listening to.