Too Often It's Just Notes

It should be the case from the very beginning of lessons that children (and adults!) learn to distinguish between notes and music.  You can play a lot of notes without making music and you can play a lot of music without playing "notes."

A lot of notes may be the composer's invitation to let go of inhibition and enjoy the ride, sometimes associated with drunkenness, as in Bach's Hunting Cantata, or in Schumann's Pieces in Folk Style for cello and piano, where the impossibly difficult double stops on the cello are a precise imitation of the kind of maudlin 3rds and 6ths that to this day drunks sing on the continent.....  Let go, people!

Run the Risk - Always

Contrary to what marching band leaders and other music teachers say whose livelihood depends on your obeying them, it is very often a better idea to not be together than to slavishly pound out correct beats all the time.

Last night my son and I hosted one of our periodic Bach cantata evenings: A whole slough of players showed up despite pouring rain with natural horns, oboes da caccia, flutes, strings, even a double bass which came all the way from Brooklyn!  I knew some, not all of the guests: some were friends of invited friends - the more the merrier. 

After thanking everyone for having the courage to show up at the home of a stranger in the company of who-knows-who to risk playing some of the most engaging music that exists to what standard (? ) who could say in advance....after thanking everyone I said merely that the purpose of the evening was not to emulate recordings of Bach but to have a blast.  Don't worry about right notes or wrong, beats or not, just get into it.

It was music that none of us knew except for the familiar aria, Sheep May Safely Graze.  At one moment, in response to a tenor struggling with some pretty florid tenor lines, one of the amateur players suggested we take a slower tempo.  "No, no!" responded an experienced professional, "that would ruin everything!?  So on we flew.  It was hilarious.

I dreamed about that aria all night and am still laughing.  From the Hunting Cantata, it was obviously (in hindsight) Mr. Hunter himself getting tossed about by his galloping steed.  I wouldn't have missed it for all the world.

Don't Tell Me What To Do!

It's as simple as that to play the piano.  Just sit down and do it.  So what is a teacher for? 

Great question.  There are tricks to using one's hands fluidly and without consciously having to control their every tiny response.

One of my students has no actual technique except for responses to his extremely accurate ear.  I watch him adjust fingering and touch in the tiniest increments to match balances that he hears coming through Beethoven's line.  It is extraordinary to watch.  His goal is not to slam through the piece as if he knows what he is doing, but rather to know what he is doing. 

And does he ever!  I could pay attention to that kind of responsiveness all day.  And I mostly do, the only exceptions being when I chance upon commercially mangle-ironed samenesses (purposeful plural)coming at me over the media.

Public as in Publicity

It gets a bit tiresome to hear me bemoan the utter public-ness that music has become:  All around us, ever the same volume and intensity, always correct in every detail.  Horribly predictable.  Why pay attention?

A perfectly good reason to pay attention:  finesse.  Somebody cares about something so deeply as to make it audible, time-stopping, unforgettable.  Heinz Holliger playing the upward wafting thirds in a Bach Trio Sonata, heard by chance on the radio the other evening.  (Ordinarily I switch the station when a Bach recording is announced, but I was specifically curious to hear how he would handle these written in ornaments with which I have become fascinated lately.  And  there they were!)

Then today I look up the announcements for a NYPhilharmonic concert I would have like to attend except that the announced conductor is apparently ill.  But talk about public:  There are the photos of the featured concerto soloist:  Strapless, of course.  Made up to the nines, bien sur.  Playing the cello in the woods?!?  Come on!!!!

Take Your Minuets Out of My iPad!

I just had the most amazing musical experience!  I found the "sounds" button on my iPad and decided to try all the options:  One by one I went down the list:  Aha!  "Minuet!"

It was in 4/4 time -  I kid you not.

"Typewriters:"  This one was a minuet, in fact the famous one in G by Bach that everyone plays like, well, like a typewriter.

What qualifications did the person have who made these decisions for Apple?
At whom is that person laughing?
At whom are you laughing?

Or crying...

I ran this past a computer professional who maintained that it is entirely possible that the decisions were made by people who didn't have a clue.  What do you think?

I Fear the Definition has Changed

A fellow member of the Music Theory Society is circulating a questionnaire trying to figure out what music theorists listen to.  His questions are interesting and seem to comprise music broadly defined - music of non-Western cultures, for example.

But the category he leaves out is recorded vs. live.  I have come to the point where I don't believe recorded music is really music.  Facing the prospect of recording the Schumann Waldszenen cycle, perhaps the most fragile piece of music I have ever encountered, I find it difficult to imagine preparing for this most challenging task.  The whole point of that piece is that it is securely perched on the brink of the unknowable.

Many years ago I decided that when asked whether I liked a certain piece of music I would reply only if it was something I had myself played.  No recording would do; not even a live performance would do -- neither category being risk-free in terms of doing justice to a composition.

To me music is music only when live.

Something to Touch

If you want to refine your sense of color you have to have colors to fool around with.  I have always loved color but when I was a kid red was used for the war effort, not for fooling around.  Nobody told me that until many years later.  I noticed that what was supposed to be red was brown passing for red.  How could I have said, "Hey!  This isn't red!" 

Now we have a similar thing happening with touch on the piano.  With less and less exposure to real, live, subtle piano sound kids think that all there is to it is touching the keys on the piano.  Hopefully one day they will hear someone play who makes a real sound with fuzzy edges, not just metallically clean.  I'm talking about the kind of sound that contemporary composers miss and are supplying by doubling the piano with vibraphone of all things.