Listening Always for the Expected

While praising the extraordinary playing of an as-yet not well known pianist a prominent reviewer comments on positive aspects of the playing, then feels obliged to point out that the player makes mistakes.

Why should he care?  What does it matter?  If the playing is truly persuasive he should not hear the mistakes or, if he hears them, they should not distract from the music's real content.

Does he feel obliged to point out the errors because he knows other listeners will certainly have noted them and that, being a music critic, he can't be allowed to seem vulnerable or unknowledgeable?

Whatever the reason it is a loss.

I have always tried to play and to record in such a way as to challenge that quality of listening, which I abhor.

A colleague reacted to my Haydn / Bartok CD:  "There is no editing, so there must be mistakes?"  "Correct." 
"I don't hear them." 

Just what I wanted.

Returned from ICMPC in Korea

The conference was an unexpectedly wonderful opportunity to meet likeminded musicians and scholars from all over the world: likeminded in that we seem to share a concern for what happens when music and human beings collide.

We have our various ways of approaching, even of asking the question, let alone defining "music."  But the company was excellent, the conversation as well.

I am running for President of the United States of America, effective immediately, with a Stanford University grad student in computer science as Vice-Presidential running mate.  Our platform, a direct outgrowth of papers delivered at the conference:  

• Get senior citizens off the streets and indoors playing chamber music 

• Compulsory music education insurance for every family in America

We consider ourselves elected.

The Joke's on Me!

Clementi did it again, bless his heart!  C major Sonatina, the one you know from having heard it murdered too many times, third movement:  there are a couple of bars in a row that I have never liked.  Usually that means that I have never paid enough attention to them to realize what they really are.

Yesterday in and because of the company of my most disabled student and his older sister I realized the problem.  Isolating the two notes that seem to make no sense and that, in any case, stick out (a sudden interrupting high D and B)  I isolated those tones and asked the blind young man what they sound like.

It took a while, but nowhere near as long as it has taken me to figure it out:  "They sound like a bell," he said, "in fact, like a doorbell."  Doorbells sound that way, I explained, because of the cuckoo, a bird known to Americans only through their ghosts: doorbells, cuckoo clocks and, if we are lucky, 18th century music.

So there it has been staring me in the ear all these years, reference to a familiar annoying noise where I least want or expect it.  Incidentally, it provides yet another instance in which music is evoking an everyday sound that is completely erased from our lives, except for doorbells.

It is particularly wonderful that Clementi puts it into a piece intended for beginners.

Authority

By the time most people have had two years of music lessons they are lucky if they have any spontaneous reactions to sound that they can call their own.

I watched the instruction for little kids at the Preparatory Division where I taught for many years turn into a kind of mill based on the assumption that children do not hear and that their brains need to be force-fed on pre-digested music.

This is completely off target in relation to just about any kind of music you can imagine.

The greatest authority comes from one's own feeling: "I like it!"   or --even more authoritative--   "I don't like it!"

Anyone is capable of expressing such response provided it won't get them into a heap of trouble or embarrass the teacher or the parents.

Children have just as infallibly reliable taste when it comes to sounds as when it comes to vegetables.

Artistic Depth is Enhanced by Teaching People with Disability

If anyone had told me this fifteen years ago I would have been incredulous:  How could that be possible?

It turns out to be entirely the case, without reservation.  The most disabled person I can imagine has been studying with me for over 12 years; he is now 21 years old.  Among his most severe handicaps is his lack of tactile sense in his hands; since he is also blind, this is no kidding around a serious liability.

It has been like a miracle to see him capable of articulated movement in each hand, separating the outside fingers from the rest--an action that most of us take for granted but which, in reality, is immensely complex.  I am astonished at his attentiveness to the task (he also has a short concentration span) and at his retention, from week to week, of the musical goal involved.

The music is by Bartok, on whom I rely for stimulating content extremely well composed to speak to the deepest available artistic and technical resources of the individual.

Today I told him that I had the feeling that Bartok had written these pieces with him in mind; that, therefore, he is his friend.

This depth of desire, of striving, of pleasure in achieving a beautiful result supports and enriches all of my own personal artistic life to the fullest possible extent.

Neat and Tidy Quarter Notes

It is ironic, or perhaps not, that the Mozart Duos for Violin and Viola furnished music for the pre-performance time for The Taming of the Shrew, which I saw last night.

I was not the one to remark it aloud, though my friend did just as I was thinking it: Quarter notes all over the place.

To what purpose all those beats?  Certainly to save time by marking time.  The point of playing thus seemed to be that each player would keep the other informed at all times of the beats of the measure.

Does it really take two people to accomplish that?

"More democratic, less hierarchical and more ambiguous"

One of the music theorists participating in a discussion about harmonics remarked that our era is "more democratic, less hierarchical and more ambiguous" than previous times in European history. 

This raises a critical point to which I replied:  

"The idea is to be alive in one's time.  The  era in which we live calls for flexibility in every department, not least in our ability to listen.  All the more reason to make clear that our visual responses are different from our auditory responses and to keep the auditory choices open to the fullest possible extent.

Most of the comments on this thread are posted by advanced scholars: But the skills to which such scholarship applies are open to all beginners in the study of music, and especially music theory, and would seem to call for cultivation of auditory diversity. 

I cannot resist an anecdote: Seated next to a prominent avant-garde pianist, I was subjected to the whacking to bits of a Haydn minuet by a dutifully trained youngster.  Incredulous, I asked my colleague: 'Can you believe that people are still teaching children to play like that?'  Reply: 'It's my student.' "

P.S. The real problem is that notation did not change to reflect the gradual changed in temperament.  Therefore, what you see ain't necessarily what you will hear.  Composers were to different extents aware of this and experimented with notation as best they could, beginning with Clementi, going on to Schumann, and, of course, Bartok.