Chopin and Beethoven

I am not the first person to notice close connections between these two giants of piano composition in the early 19th century, though that connection might be hard to discern in the overly self-indulgent virtuosity that seems de riguer in the hands of certain players.

Just looking over some of the Preludes while giving Beethoven some extremely detailed study reveals similarities I never noticed before: For example

1. A fascination with multi-level meters:  what look like repeated eighth-note chords actually going against the grain of the quarter- and half-notes they accompany
2. Figures that repeat odd numbered groupings within duple meters
3. The indication to play lento or sostenuto when "nothing" seems to be happening

The last one is by far the most revealing when it comes to measuring the distance between visual and auditory response.  As a student I was a fast reader at the expense of being a good listener.  An observant and wise teacher (Hans Neumann) caught me at it and knew how to change it, for which I will always be grateful.   It seems these two activities occupy the mind in opposite direction, the one ultra fast, the other even faster though on the surface ostensibly slower.

The trouble is that most of our education relies on quick responses to visual information, in fact everything in our multi-tasked environment suggests that this is the way to go.  But listening, though it seems at first to be passive, is actually attuning one's mind to the speed of vibration, than which nothing is faster.

The ear signal requires the ability to open the mind to peripheral vibration, the parts of the sound that cannot be written down, and the parts that vary from piano to piano and from room to room.

This is definitely the hard part.

Listening for Meaning

We encounter markings in printed music that are difficult to understand, ranging from notes that are marked as if to be played staccato but with a slur over them, to peculiar tempo indications, like rubato.  I don't recall where I found out that those slurred staccato notes indicate a very specific touch on the piano.

But yesterday I was overjoyed to find them in Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata, which I am exploring with Gregor Kitzis, violin.  Four repeated unisons, in both instruments, once marked crescendo, at other times with no crescendo indicated.  If played correctly there will be no pedal used, but rather a touch that permits the hammers to restrike the strings without the dampers reducing the vibrations in between hammer strokes.  The result is a very specific overtone ring that can be attained only in this fashion.

Gregor had to move so that he could savor the result and savor he did.

I think this is the reason why these sonatas are for piano and violin, not the other way around: their acoustical world is generated by the sympathetic vibration of the piano strings.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

There is simply no way for me to get you to hear as I do.  None.

I know this from watching the YouTube video of my performance of a Haydn piano sonata.  Following the playing on the original tape, I commented that, for the first time, I noted while playing that the piece is occupied with C#.  When I listen to the tape I cannot detect that detail, probably because my ear is so conditioned to tonal listening that I can no longer allow my mental ear to pick up the peripheral sounds that would potentially skew a traditional interpretation.  While playing, however, this is exactly what I am primed to do!

Interesting, isn't it, that something can be so vivid in the act and become so subject to ordinary intake at a time of more disengaged listening!

So there is more than a semantic difference between hearing what I hear and hearing as I hear.  And this is the subject of my new teaching initiative, Music Inside and Out.

What Might Happen to a Tone?

I recall a certain amount of annoyance in Music Theory class (granted it was a long time ago) when we were rewarded for identifying the functionality of a note in terms of its place within a harmonic progression.  How extraordinarily dull!

In the tone circles I devised for the tones in the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet lies a much more to-the-point image of what must concern us as players and as listeners:  what happens to this tone, or that?

There are many ways in which a composer may call attention to the volatility of a given tone, the most obvious being to change it soon after introducing it, as Mozart often does with C, turning it into C# soon after the opening of a movement in C major.  Another, more subtle way, is to do as Mozart does in K.478, to invert its logical placement by descending, rather than rising, to D.  Whereas the rise would affirm G as a reliable fundamental, that critical descent does the opposite.

There are so many subtle ways to untune a tone.

Let's Hear it for Music Librarians

I just returned from my first ever Music Librarians Association Conference - 4 days of very interesting conversation about the newly published Tone Perception Visualized: Mozart's G Minor Piano Quartet.  To my surprise many are already deeply committed to visualizations of various sorts, many seemed open to the notion of a graphic presentation of a musical work, and many were generous in their response to my invitation to try it themselves.

Asked to visualize even primitively the opening phrase of My Country, 'Tis of Thee produced a splendid variety of shapes and colors, exactly the sort of thing I recommend in learning to orient to the text.

There were those, of course, who couldn't get themselves to abandon the idea of sound being discrete as the symbols we us to represent it are discrete.

Thinking Along the Same Lines

Thanks to the Internet's ability to track just about anything I discovered the word "refraction" used on p. 38 of Tonality and Transformation, a music theory study by Steven Rings, whose academic credentials and affiliations are impressive.  Searching further I found that he and I share not just the use of that word in relation to music perception, but also several sources for our way of thinking.  In response to my email noting that, though I am not a theorist, our scholarly interests in music have much in common, he replied that, indeed, it seems to be the case.

Ever since receiving his reply -- in itself remarkable in that few academics bother to reply to emails from total strangers who are not credentialed in their field -- I have been imagining dialogue of a kind that had never occurred to me.  Could it be that I could discuss my work as a real theory of music but based on listening as THE critical activity, not the printed score?

And could it be the the act of listening, the infinitely variable act of listening to infinitely variable music could at last be respected as worthy of being taken seriously from day one of a human life?

Perhaps my fascination with listening to all sorts of students might at last be taken as a sign of real seriousness rather than regarded as the putdown implied in such terms as "piano teacher" or "teaching beginners."

Names, Like People, Come and Go

An article in a recent NYTimes brings up the issue of the effect of names passed down from one generation to the next, carrying with them reputation, fame, expectation, etc.

It is rather like branding.

What chance does an artist have of making an impact during a single lifetime in a field as ephemeral as music?  We are so dependent on the responses of our audience, live and on-line.

Help independent artistry survive.  Do your part. www.tonalrefraction.com