We Are Finally All InterCultural

It was delightful to run into a young dancer in the locker room today, sporting Alvin Ailey sweatpants.  Was she a student, I asked.  Was she new to the program?  Yes.  It seems she just arrived from Japan where Alvin Ailey's dance is well known and much loved.

What a relief it must be to know that it is OK to love whatever you love in the arts.  Times have changed from when I was young.  Now the problem is rather the reverse of what it was 50 years ago: now it is the Classical style that is necessarily on the defensive after decades of ritual murder at the hands of well-meaning but narrow-minded pedagogues.

My work Tonal Refraction has to do with legitimatizing emotional responses to musical elements, primarily tone (or pitch) itself.  I realized this afternoon as I was riding the bus uptown that in many of his compositions Mozart shifts the emotional content of tones so that they are rarely speaking to a single frame of mind or heart.

In learning to name notes and identify tonal functions we risk losing insight into this mercurial aspect of his, indeed, of every composer's art.

A colleague (1/3 my age!) recently said that he thinks the trouble starts when young children are taught the names of notes, as opposed to just listening to them.  Good point.

The Del Sol String Quartet

Based in San Francisco, the Del Sol is a group after my own heart.  They present works by living composers, representing a wide range of cultures, styles, even tuning systems.  They awaken the audience to what "live" means.

In one of their more astounding feats they retune their instruments to truer fifths, much like the vocal intonation I so treasure in a cappella singing. Last night I heard them play a piece by a Cambodian composer in which each player is required to sing as well as to play - at the same time but not the same pitches.  The result is amazing.

Visit their website www.delsolquartet.com to find out their concert schedule.  If you have a chance go hear them!

So Much to Think About

Yesterday I attended the funeral for a superb clarinetist who, at age 80, first enrolled in the people-oriented Chamber Music program I coordinated at Mannes for over 35 years.  Over the years I had developed an unwritten rule, to discourage if not downright refuse participation on the part of individuals above a certain age who played treble instruments--violin, say, or clarinet.   Their traditional role as leader of the ensemble plus the sheer wealth of their experience customarily made it difficult for younger players to enjoy their company.

But this man was different.  The moment he picked up his clarinet to play before the assembled would-be-partners everyone wanted to play with him.  His sound embodied generosity.

It was true that he had played "all" the music in the repertoire, but only up to and not including the 20th century.  And so began a wonderful exploration of music by composers totally new to him and, most often, to the coaches as well.   He stayed in the program for several years, on occasion playing such traditional repertoire as Beethoven's Op. 11 Trio for clarinet, cello, and piano.  Once he participated in a fund-raiser playing Mozart 's Clarinet Quintet with a group of professional strings.  I will never forget his playing of those "standards" for which he set a new standard of warmth.

Julien Ander died at the age of 96 having enjoyed and shared many years of the best kind of music-making.  Thank you, Julien.

Whoa, Bessy!

I recall when I was a student (not undergraduate) how fellow pianists would complain that their teachers obsessed over Beethoven on a note-by-note basis.  This is exactly what I find myself doing with my young computer animator student, who is just now really getting down to the business of seriously reading music -- i.e., reading it in terms not of mechanical physical responses, but in relation to his instinctual auditory life, which is both rich and precise in its way.

Those last three words provide the key to this kind of reading.  For we are all idiosyncratically involved in what we perceive, no one more so than Beethoven in response to the sound of the piano.
This is what teachers fail to point out, or to bring out in their students.  Students are, therefore, understandably and justifiably confused about whose ear they are trying to satisfy.

My approach is to slow my own hearing down to the point where I perceive the interstices between my ear, the student's ear, and what I presume (from the printed score) to have been Beethoven's ear.

This is utterly and endlessly fascinating to the two living parties to this transaction.

Foot Tapping to Your Own Playing

Predicting the beat is dangerous to really paying attention.  Once you get used to predicting the beat you are likely to lose the ability to attend to all that goes on between beats -- where the going is really at its most interesting.

People who complain of melodies going around and around inside their heads are often at the mercy of a rhythmic notion that simply does not apply to real music or to real music-making.

The best place to start curing yourself of the habit is in your own playing.  Make it impossible to predict your own beats.  Hold every note you play as long as you can stand to hold it.  Don't move on until you can't stand it any longer.

See what happens.  Send me a message. 

Reducing the Band of What is Heard

When, at age 12 or so, I first became aware of overtones on the piano, I was so confused by them that I played always with the soft pedal, effectively blocking them.

Many years later my first truly great teacher, Hans Neumann, insisted that I play always with the piano lid up so as to become increasingly involved with overtones.  (Of course, the overtones on his piano in no way matched those of mine, thus they were incredibly confusing, though admittedly still overtones.)

Yet again many years later I had a student who did the same thing, and was able to address the issue in terms of welcoming the difference between "mine" and "hers."

Now I find myself describing to people that this is exactly what they have done, but to their hearing. No matter what instrument you play you probably have a tendency to block the complicating factors of its sound so as to match the overtone-poor quality of most commercial recordings.

Allowing the overtones into your sound, into your awareness of sound is empowering beyond belief; for along with it goes increased range of expression, of dynamics, even of speed.

Music Inside and Out.  Check it out.

Music and Emoticons

For quite some time we have been confused by a tendency to reduce pieces of music to simplistic frames of reference, in essence, to verbal emoticons.

For example, Beethoven's Eroica, by definition, "heroic" symphony, has become, under the batons of countless literal-minded conductors, a simple-minded, pretentious work.  Of necessity "heroic" whether you mean it or not, is as ridiculous as the line my kids love from Flanders and Swann: "Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not."

The first time I heard this work performed by a period orchestra I was stunned at its transparency.  The mere sounds of the natural horns, the period drums, strings tuned as they would have been back then, conveyed such a wealth of emotion as to defy all the literalism of hundreds of years of misguided program notes.

The audience was even laughing aloud in some of variations.  Unheard of.  Unless, of course, heard.