Conversations

The main difference between a conversation that includes piano playing and a recital is the engagement of listeners and player together in questions having more to do with life than with music.  We are too accustomed to treating music as a thing apart from life, something you study and practice and otherwise feel perpetually outside of.

Several people have brought up their dread of such conversations being "over their heads."  On the contrary, so far they have been more about early childhood experiences of sound than about anything learned.

 I believe it was Rubinstein who pointed out that with maturity his connection to his earliest musical self became most clear.  Maybe this is what distinguishes the performer from the theorist: the performer, in constantly dealing directly with sound, is more likely to be arousing memories of past experiences, of even first experiences, whereas the theorist--at least in my impression--is more likely to be building on learned vocabulary, at least on argument rather than on identity.

Invitation to a Conversation

The first of my summer series of Conversations at the Piano took place last night and, sure enough, it was exactly that.  It began with an exchange about black keys and white keys, the announced subject of the evening, and quickly included Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Milhaud among the conversants.

How refreshing to engage the listener and the repertoire in a sense of ongoing open-ended curiosity and conversation rather than to approach a piece of music as a thing cast in stone rendered once and for all definitive.

This should not be the goal of performers nor should it be the expectation of that most critical of all participants, you, the listener.

Stone Age Eyes and Ears

An article about Stonehenge in last Tuesday's New York Science Times spoke of two teachers at the Royal College of Art who "were looking to cure students of their dependence on digital material by exposing them to 'what Stone Age eyes and ears' once perceived..."  The study on the acoustical properties of the Stonehenge rocks by Paul Devereux, appeared in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. 

Sounds like a must-read.

Apparently there are such resonant rocks scattered all over the planet.  Why don't we all try to find at least one thing every day that will produce a sound we have never before experienced?

Does Having a PhD make it Harder to Have a Reaction?

Having been so moved by what I heard at the memorial for my friend the voice coach, I shared my reactions with a friend who is helping launch an effort to increase awareness of the realities of mental health.  This extraordinary undertaking (called the Hot Stove Project) seeks to put faces on individuals who cope well and contribute to society in overwhelmingly positive ways.

She was astonished that I was made so ill at ease by the made-in-the-factory singing I heard at their gathering.  Just because you have a PhD in some demanding discipline does not guarantee that you have reliable gut reactions to such elemental signs of life as the singing voice.  Most of us are unaware that we have genuine singing voices, having been bamboozled into thinking that those algorithmed products we hear constantly whether we want to or not are what human voices are supposed to sound like.

Wake up.  Sing something.  Sing something that you know from way back when, before you listened to CDs or the radio.  Sing something your mother or father sang to you....

Last night a friend told me of crossing the Atlantic on a ship laden with students, at the beginning of the folk song revival period of the 60's.  Though they wanted to sing together the only songs they all knew were commercials: "Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser..."

Finding Your Own Voice

At the memorial gathering for a highly unusual drama-vocal coach many of his former students spoke of his insistence that they sing with their own voice rather than try to sound like, for example, Frank Sinatra.  There were some extraordinary testimonies to the power of that advice. Attractive?  Some, certainly, more than others.  Genuine?  Unquestionably.

It was such a contrast to the made-in-the-factory quality of a woman who sang (incomprehensibly, I must add) two songs of her own composition at a gathering of admirable people seeking to raise consciousness of our society's lack of understanding of persons with mental illness.  How is the cause of mental health addressed by imitating the worst effects of commercialization on human expression:  for isn't our voice one of our most cherished manifestations of self-hood?

Maybe everyone needs a good vocal coach, in whatever guise such a person comes.

More on the Natural Horn

Yesterday in our third rehearsal on the Brahms Horn Trio (natural horn, violin, and piano) my son Jacob made the most extraordinary observation:  the horn's falset notes have a timbre quite like that of the violin, while its "real" pitches, in this case the overtones of E-flat, resonate more like the piano's black keys, of which there are many in the piece.

This shockingly relevant observation informs and enriches every single note of the piece for each of the players.

It would never occur to either the violinist, Gregor Kitzis, or myself, or probably anyone else playing the piece with a modern horn, that such detail would be possible or desirable or meaningful.

For all of the above, thank you very much, Johannes Brahms!

Poetry in Music

It has definitely helped my musicianship that two of my closest friends are a painter and a poet.  What we share is a respect for imagery of a non-literal kind.  Isn't all imagery by definition non-literal? Not if your musical education relied on the language traditionally used to describe music.



Turning to Look

Such words as heroic, poetic, atmospheric make it harder for a student with   an instinctually keen ear to develop confident musicianship.

These terms are meaningless unless they attach directly to sound imagery.  But even here we have to discriminate between genres of sound.  The 21st century notion of music resembles coloring book objects more than live sound,  which is subject to countless variables both in the origin of the sound and in its perception.

This is not to throw out the pictorial or literal poetry--quite the contrary.  I use drawings by my friend, Joan Farber, as covers for my recital programs, not because of any literal parallel between their subject matter and the music du jour, but because they embody attentiveness of eye and hand the way I want my performance to embody attentiveness of ear and fingers.

And I pay a great deal of attention to my poet friend, Michael O'Brien whose ear for all manner of sounds is receptive and instructive all at once.

I invite your attention to their work as I feel their work invites attention to our shared worlds.