Children are exposed to so little live music that by the time they reach adolescence they are sometimes terrified of it: What is expected of them? Some special behavior, perhaps? Some "appreciation" such as is taught in schools whereby all music is reduced to thing-ness?
This morning I saw something positively lovely and loving: The moment a beautiful live trumpet sounded together with voices and organ a father reached over and touched his small child, as if to embody the gentle warmth of this very special sound.
Lucky child!
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Friday, May 23, 2014
What Do I Enjoy Listening To?
I would rather listen to a motivated student struggle with musical elements than go through the motions of listening to players whose contact with musical elements vanished in their pursuit of technique.
What are the elements? Every aspect of music that is felt is elemental.
What are the elements? Every aspect of music that is felt is elemental.
- Rhythm: There are so many levels at which rhythm is manifest that it can never be entirely routine.
- Tone relatedness: There are so many ways to relate one tone to another that, again, this defies routinization
- Touch: How many fingers you have and how you position them on the keys or on the strings makes all the difference.
- Breath: Applies to and enhances all of the above, over and beyond its direct application to singing and to winds.
Thursday, May 22, 2014
Vibrato to Mask Vibration
To continue from yesterday's post:
What happens is overuse of vibrato to mask any qualitative difference between one tone and another. By making all pitches uniform there is no need to attend to the implications of sympathetic vibration.
Violinist Gregor Kitzis and I did a Beethoven Spring Sonata last week (and will do a second performance this evening) that revealed what happens when this kind of listening is unleashed: It sounds like Webern Klangfarbenmelodie! One hears a counterpoint of resonant tones traded back and forth between the instruments, playful, lustrous, crystal clear. Nothing that can be read on the page, but that exists only because it is heard. At no time did we discuss this. But I immediately sent a CD to my composer friend, Ursula Mamlok, who is tremendously affected by specific sounds as was Anton Webern.
What happens is overuse of vibrato to mask any qualitative difference between one tone and another. By making all pitches uniform there is no need to attend to the implications of sympathetic vibration.
Violinist Gregor Kitzis and I did a Beethoven Spring Sonata last week (and will do a second performance this evening) that revealed what happens when this kind of listening is unleashed: It sounds like Webern Klangfarbenmelodie! One hears a counterpoint of resonant tones traded back and forth between the instruments, playful, lustrous, crystal clear. Nothing that can be read on the page, but that exists only because it is heard. At no time did we discuss this. But I immediately sent a CD to my composer friend, Ursula Mamlok, who is tremendously affected by specific sounds as was Anton Webern.
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Bid on The Rugs
I invite you to bid on the rugs and throws on silent auction at www.tonalrefraction.com. Proceeds from the auction, which will be finalized on June 9, will help defray expenses of my upcoming trip to Seoul, Korea to present practical implications of Tonal Refraction at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition.
It would be a great way to show your support for my work and, at the same time, to come into possession of a unique (and practical!) piece of fiber art crafted entirely of recycled string passed down to me by a designer of knit patterns.
Miss Twiggy, wool and alpaca, 59" x 32" demonstrating by its irregular shape the extent to which it is truly a String Improvisation.
More pictures : Posts of May 7, 10, 13 and 15.
It would be a great way to show your support for my work and, at the same time, to come into possession of a unique (and practical!) piece of fiber art crafted entirely of recycled string passed down to me by a designer of knit patterns.
Miss Twiggy, wool and alpaca, 59" x 32" demonstrating by its irregular shape the extent to which it is truly a String Improvisation.
Melodic and Harmonic Hearing
After hearing countless string quartets and soloists play their instruments distressingly sharp I went to Europe in the early 1980s expressly to hear whether playing out of tune had become an internationally established practice. I was delighted to find that, thanks largely to the early music movement, it had not.
There was one book that completely took my breath away and I find myself using its insights again and again to inform my ear -- by that I mean, to become aware with greater precision of what I actually hear.
Melodisches und harmonisches Hoeren auf Streichinstrumenten by Christian Heman. I feel as if it let me in on a classified secret. I know of no translation into English and I have never heard anyone speak of the book or its implications which are, roughly:
Tones that vibrate sympathetically with the pitches and overtones of the instrument's open strings will have a different quality than those that do not. For example, A will always have a different tone quality than B-flat. It is not a matter of intonation, but of resonance.
He gives examples of how different scales on the violin become enhanced, informed, intensified, when this is taken into account.
It seems so simple. What gets in the way oft this being audible in most string playing?
There was one book that completely took my breath away and I find myself using its insights again and again to inform my ear -- by that I mean, to become aware with greater precision of what I actually hear.
Melodisches und harmonisches Hoeren auf Streichinstrumenten by Christian Heman. I feel as if it let me in on a classified secret. I know of no translation into English and I have never heard anyone speak of the book or its implications which are, roughly:
Tones that vibrate sympathetically with the pitches and overtones of the instrument's open strings will have a different quality than those that do not. For example, A will always have a different tone quality than B-flat. It is not a matter of intonation, but of resonance.
He gives examples of how different scales on the violin become enhanced, informed, intensified, when this is taken into account.
It seems so simple. What gets in the way oft this being audible in most string playing?
Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Standards? Who Sets Them?
Talking casually with a bunch of musicians (not classically trained but musicians nonetheless) the subject came up about the effect of recordings on generations of players.
I know that classically trained pianists bend over backwards to sound like recordings they have heard, even though many of those recordings were made in the days before microphones could pick up bass sonorities. So there is only treble.
The others were talking about highly skilled guitarists who picked up the details that distinguish their playing by imitating recordings some of which don't even maintain a constant speed.
This technology business is severely life-threatening.
Though I recall a brilliant conference back in the 80's on the subject of "Technology and the Rest of Culture" which treated, in addition to railroads and steam engines, the alphabet and the fig leaf.
I know that classically trained pianists bend over backwards to sound like recordings they have heard, even though many of those recordings were made in the days before microphones could pick up bass sonorities. So there is only treble.
The others were talking about highly skilled guitarists who picked up the details that distinguish their playing by imitating recordings some of which don't even maintain a constant speed.
This technology business is severely life-threatening.
Though I recall a brilliant conference back in the 80's on the subject of "Technology and the Rest of Culture" which treated, in addition to railroads and steam engines, the alphabet and the fig leaf.
Monday, May 19, 2014
Our Subjective Experience of Music
On the Music Theory Society's on-line talk feed this week, a theorist commented: "Our
subjective experiences are known only to ourselves. Nevertheless, human
beings have always tried to communicate these experiences to others."
To which I replied:
"Validating subjective experience of musical elements is very much at the heart of my life's work, as my own subjective responses to specific sounds, very pronounced when I was a child, were never substantiated in my training. When I read Viktor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol back in the 60's I realized that he was talking about the necessity of figuring in subjective responses to tone relatedness as essential to making and listening to music. Based on my understanding of his findings I have made it my life's work to demonstrate the practical implications of his insights.
In order to do that I set myself the task of listening to my students without looking at the score. I deliberately chose to work primarily with adult amateur chamber musicians (I founded a non-competitive chamber music program at the Mannes Extension Division in 1975, which I coordinated until 2007) and with children (Mannes Prep, where I taught techniques of chamber music for many years until performance pressures and competition made such an approach untenable).
The idea was that these populations would be more vulnerable to the subjective elements of their hearing than would professionally-motivated students whose technique would mask such vulnerability. The result of listening in this way has been quite remarkable:Often I would hear specific things, like a consistently out-of-tune A in a Handel Trio Sonata in G minor for two violins and continuo. How does a composer contrive a composition that causes A on a violin to be difficult to find?
When I would go to the score to look for an answer I very often could not see it.
My conclusion is that reading the printed score can lead to a a too-readily pre-determined notion of sound which, if allowed its own life (so to speak) will run its own course, often deviating from the trained identification of a proper course.
The culmination of this work is a technique which I call Tonal Refraction, whereby an individual using colored pencils and a grid, can give visual form to the variables that enter into her own individual sense of tone relatedness using color for the intervallic sense (whether harmonic or linear) and the grid to play with spatial elements (degrees of high / low; rising/falling).
Allowing the visualization to be imprecise (according to our notion of precision based on standard notation), and to be flexible, i.e., to vary from day to day, as from one specific composition
to another, has revealed a great deal to me about the composer's inner ear. Of course, you are right, I am guessing. But my guess is now based on having aroused a level of auditory involvement that stems entirely from my inner ear.
When a prominent theorist studied my work on the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet (which has since been published along with a presentation of the method) his comment was: "This is about what gets trained out of us."
I will be presenting my findings at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seoul, Korea this August.
My use of "refraction" is related to that of Steven Rings in Tonality and Transformations, though I derived it from Proust, who refers to what happens to sensory memory when processed through layers of subconscious association as refraction. Rings uses it in analogy to prisms per se; he, too, is strongly influenced by Zuckerkandl.
To which I replied:
"Validating subjective experience of musical elements is very much at the heart of my life's work, as my own subjective responses to specific sounds, very pronounced when I was a child, were never substantiated in my training. When I read Viktor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol back in the 60's I realized that he was talking about the necessity of figuring in subjective responses to tone relatedness as essential to making and listening to music. Based on my understanding of his findings I have made it my life's work to demonstrate the practical implications of his insights.
In order to do that I set myself the task of listening to my students without looking at the score. I deliberately chose to work primarily with adult amateur chamber musicians (I founded a non-competitive chamber music program at the Mannes Extension Division in 1975, which I coordinated until 2007) and with children (Mannes Prep, where I taught techniques of chamber music for many years until performance pressures and competition made such an approach untenable).
The idea was that these populations would be more vulnerable to the subjective elements of their hearing than would professionally-motivated students whose technique would mask such vulnerability. The result of listening in this way has been quite remarkable:Often I would hear specific things, like a consistently out-of-tune A in a Handel Trio Sonata in G minor for two violins and continuo. How does a composer contrive a composition that causes A on a violin to be difficult to find?
When I would go to the score to look for an answer I very often could not see it.
My conclusion is that reading the printed score can lead to a a too-readily pre-determined notion of sound which, if allowed its own life (so to speak) will run its own course, often deviating from the trained identification of a proper course.
The culmination of this work is a technique which I call Tonal Refraction, whereby an individual using colored pencils and a grid, can give visual form to the variables that enter into her own individual sense of tone relatedness using color for the intervallic sense (whether harmonic or linear) and the grid to play with spatial elements (degrees of high / low; rising/falling).
Allowing the visualization to be imprecise (according to our notion of precision based on standard notation), and to be flexible, i.e., to vary from day to day, as from one specific composition
to another, has revealed a great deal to me about the composer's inner ear. Of course, you are right, I am guessing. But my guess is now based on having aroused a level of auditory involvement that stems entirely from my inner ear.
When a prominent theorist studied my work on the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet (which has since been published along with a presentation of the method) his comment was: "This is about what gets trained out of us."
I will be presenting my findings at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seoul, Korea this August.
My use of "refraction" is related to that of Steven Rings in Tonality and Transformations, though I derived it from Proust, who refers to what happens to sensory memory when processed through layers of subconscious association as refraction. Rings uses it in analogy to prisms per se; he, too, is strongly influenced by Zuckerkandl.
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