Radical Hearing: Arjomand / Mozart

The piano is a radical invention, always was, always will be.  Attempts to make it less than radical are doomed to fail.  Ask any child.

It is a matter of the conflicting resonance of white vs. black keys.

The piano is an instrument of collision, in a very vivid way.  Its acoustical nature is so complex that composers writing for it as a solo instrument tended also to write for it in combination with instruments of other families--strings, woodwinds, horn.  The specific genius of these compositions has reinforced my conviction that what I sensed as a child in the piano music of Mozart is truly the essence of the instrument.

I think primarily of Schumann: The Piano Quartet, the Fantasy Pieces, without which I would have only a limited understanding of the instrument I play.

Then there is Arjomand, a contemporary, illuminating the action of listening to this radical sound by being more than radical himself.  I will go back to hear him again and again because he makes me aware of what I am hearing and because he does so in entirely non-static terms, non-static in the most literal sense of constant motion.

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Ramin Arjomand: Improvisation that Inspires

It was the third time I heard Ramin Arjomand perform one of his hour-plus uninterrupted improvisations on the piano.  I would go back and hear him again and again.  There is no way that I can categorize or describe his playing or the way his mind works, other than to say that it seems to me, in many respects, the exact opposite of what I do at the instrument.

We clearly belong to different generations and our work arises from different sound environments.  But I believe that we share a deep desire to connect our sound environment, whatever it be, to internal attentiveness of a purely musical kind.

I enjoy listening to improvisation and learn a great deal from regular exposure to some masterful improvisors.  The need to follow structure or form always struck me as completely irrelevant to the musical experience.  To be purely taken up in the body of the sound suffices.

He gives a lot to think about.

Tonal Refraction Unearths What Gets Trained Out of Us

Wanting to be good enough is a desire I shared with many of my contemporaries, growing up in Chicago.  It was not as though what I wanted was to excel, far from it; awareness of the gulf between myself and mastery precluded any such goal.  And it is not as though that desire was ever talked about, under any circumstances.

It wasn't until after I left Chicago that I became aware of the role that competition played in learning music.  I had never had to compete for any of the paid or unpaid musical jobs I had as a high school student--there simply was no competition.

But competition definitely played a role in my opting out of conventional piano training in favor of studying the organ.  College at Oberlin was definitely a competitive environment; one heard the "top" students of the "top" teachers perform regularly.  I had no desire to be among them.

I had every desire to pursue my ideal piano dream but to do so in secret, without having to pretend to compromise any of its terms or their intensity.

Those terms turned into Tonal Refraction, my visualization work that objectifies the power of the highly individualized terms in which we all experience tone.

It is rare to hear a performance in which that secret place is in any way relevant.

What is the Point of Control?

Back to Beethoven Op. 10 #3, the Minuet and Trio:  Start with the proposition that easy is boring.  Repeating triplets in the right hand against quarters in the left has not much to recommend it.  Unless you play the triplet figures in duples, in which case it becomes a kind of rhythmic conundrum, much more difficult than one likes to imagine, especially since the left hand has to articulate clearly AND cross over the right into uncomfortable territory.

Try it.  Let it happen.  Hard as it is, it explains the several beats notated rest at the end of the Trio before resuming the Minuetto:  Now look what happens: the three to one ratio still prevails, threes in the right hand, ones in the left, but this time the terms have changed and the shorter value is the quarter note.  Notice that this minuet is marked dolce.  After that turbulent cross-rhythmed trio the fragility of all rhythmic values is there for the expressing of receptive minds and bodies.

Who is more likely to be receptive in this magical way?  An amateur player, one whose fingers are not pre-conditioned to play always in a certain, secure manner.

I heard it happen this morning when my young adult student who does not have time to practice produced a transparency I have never heard in the opening of the minuet upon return after the trio.

Weaving, Embroidery, and Making Music

The current textile exhibit at the Met is more than a little frightening to me, fascinated though I am with string's many uses.  What I find so chilling is the use of string not on its own behalf but as camouflage or simply to create illusions.

People have been incredibly ingenious with string, some of the most beautiful work being not for royalty or the high church but for other kinds of eyes and purposes.

It would have been refreshing to have some sign of that, as well.  I can't help recalling the similarities between courtly and folk dances throughout Europe. 

Leonard Michaels on Sentences

To read Leonard Michaels' Nachman Stories is to experience language fused with life, but inner life of which one sees only minuscule outward evidence as most of us live from day to day.

He wrote an essay on sentences.  No wonder he was such a master story writer: his grasp of the essence of structure, even to the degree of "why bother?" is inspiring, no matter what your genre of writing, reading or, for that matter, playing the piano.

We are taught to play Mozart as if Mozart wrote according to the rules of musical sentence structure.  But to read Mozart is to experience in, say, every third "sentence" a radical departure from those norms.  I knew it as a child.  Oh, if only I could have said out loud: "But this doesn't make sense!"

Now, at last, I know what sense it makes.  It took a long time.