The Spirit of the Enterprise

I was privileged to hear a concert yesterday afternoon in which dedicated amateurs joined dedicated professionals in performances of two very demanding works: the Beethoven Septet and Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder, with accompaniment arranged for mixed octet.  The performances were of the category which I call better than perfect.

Everyone involved was giving their all, paying the best attention to the spirit of the music and to one another.  The more experienced players were not looking down anything resembling a nose, with the result that everyone was moved; no one wanted to leave.  A beautiful afternoon.

"Zimmer 718" the name of the group.  Don't ask - even they can't tell you why! 

When Is It Loud?

Many years ago I taught an unusually thoughtful child, about ten.

One day I asked her "When do you play loud?"   "When it's important."

"And when do you play soft?"


.............(thinking......)

"When it's important."

Listening, I Surmise, Sometimes, To My Delight, Incorrectly

There are now two instances in which I presume Beethoven to have intended a slur when, in fact, there is none.  The first I was aware of was in his First Symphony, in the Minuet movement.  The second I heard this morning, again in a Minuet, from Piano Sonata in D, Op. 10, No. 3.  Two left-hand chords, the first long, the second short, in a set-up that had "SLUR" written all over it.

Except that in each case there was none. 
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The first case was vivid enough to cause me to check to score when I returned home from the concert.  It was, in fact, the most vivid single event of the whole evening which was singularly lacking in humor, except for this one detail.  It is true that I went to the all-Beethoven concert out of curiosity to see whether a conductor of my generation (in fact, a classmate from Oberlin) could actually get the NYPhilharmonic to observe Beethoven's articulations correctly after lifetimes of doing them by ear, i.e., a la 19th-century esthetics, i.e., wrong.  To my surprise they did very well, the proof being that this one absence-of-slur stood out.

The second instance involved my young computer animator student:  After going to some pains to get him to finger the chords so as to connect them so as to assure the proper balance between them, he played the progression perfectly as notated, unslurred, and burst out laughing. "That is the point of the whole piece!"  Deception.  Surprise.

In each case unforgettable delight.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world.  Neither would he.  Took some digging but yielded pure gold.

Thank you!

To the few loyal and responsive readers of this blog who annually contribute to its continuing, many thanks! 

The blog is important to me for several reasons: It is, as are all blogs, a place to rant and rave without editorial (or commercial - often the same thing) interference.  It is also a means for me, and hopefully for you, dear reader, to keep track of how complex this music thing is.  Just when you think you've got it, surprise!, a whole new area lights up.

This applies to teaching as well as to making music.  When I tire of either one I will become a professional potato masher - not that I have anything against either potatoes or those fortunate souls who get paid (!) for mashing them.

Everyone reading the blog thanks you who support it. 

An easy way to join them is at www.tonalrefraction.com where a link takes you to Fractured Atlas, the arts-services non-profit which enables you to make a credit card tax-deductible gift. 

Thank you!

Origins of Rhythm

A member of the Music Theory Society raised the interesting and complicated question of what in a piece of music generates the beat.

It is far from a simple thing to observe.  There are people for whom the beat comes naturally and generally for them the difficulty comes when they want to alter the beat for some reason, to play as if improvising in a cadenza, for example.

But I believe that the most interesting and reliable source of a beat is the tone itself, or rather the tones themselves: As soon as there are two or more tones in play there is a hierarchy that the ear "invents" in response to their relatedness.  The result of this is the desire to hold one of the tones longer or make it stronger than the other(s).   Whether or not one has permission to do so is a function of the note value.  Wanting to hold a note that one must move away from is fraught with tension.

That tension is characteristic of the composed rhythm we encounter in classical repertoire, and that may include works written this morning.

Not paying attention to that tension is a sure-fire way to obliterate tone awareness, not for everyone, to be sure, but often for the most gifted children.  Alas.

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!!!