Doors Opening

My brother, James Caballero, taught math for many years at Santa Monica High School, where he pioneered a math curriculum that not only incorporated computers but also, and more important, treated head-on the difference between thinking for yourself and having the illusion that a machine could do it for you. 

He has a quote in a newly released book of quotes about mathematics, one for every day of the year, by many notables including Richard Feynman, Winston Churchill, and so on.  His advice: "The day you decide not to take any more math courses listen carefully; you may hear a lot of doors closing."

I have thought about this, not that I know anything about studying math, but I do know about doors openings and closing.  In the arts it is a bit different than in organized academic pursuits, though musicians are trying like mad to get their art to conform to organized academia.  (All those Ph.D.s running around!  I call them PhuDs.) 

My solution: Make your own door. Start a non-profit.  Go for the source of the greatest energy you can find.  It's probably not on a campus anywhere.

Risk it.

Models

A discussion is raging (well, maybe not raging) on the Music Theory Society chat line about appropriate models to use to teach various musical syntactical procedures.  One professor pointed out that students were likely to be more bored with a recording of  [famous pianist] playing Mozart than by a recording of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas." 

Here we have a beautiful example of a fundamental flaw in our system of commercialized music:  Because Mozart is supposed to be all by itself better than Irving Berlin, less artistry is required in recording it, right?  Just put a famous name on the label, take out all the errors (read, life) and it will sell.   Lousy model.  Poor Wolfgang.

But for I. Berlin we will do everything we know how to do with mikes, with reverb: we will pull out all the recording stops to assure success and long life to the artifact that is the recording.

Apparently even musicians aren't aware of how much more sophistication/art goes into pop recording than into the classics.    Hello!!!

Notes are Taken Far Too Seriously

A refreshing Ph.D. in Music Theory, Isaac Malitz, actually has started posting on the Theory Society Chat Line about how notes furnish only one of what should ideally be several possible models for music.  He uses a model of his own devising that has to do with meaning.

Tonal Refraction is an alternative model that  does not pretend to model music but rather the experience of musical elements, an experience directly analogous to life, thus subject to infinite variability.

None of the terms of Tonal Refraction is fixed, not the colors, not the spatial aspects representable on the grid: everything is fleeting, subject to change depending on a multitude of ever-changing conditions, needs, etc.  Check out the website: www.tonalrefraction.com

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!!!!