Physicality: What is It?

There is a lot of talk these days about the brain: even the magazine of the Sunday NY Times of Jan. 11 shows stylized "neurons" spelling something like "your brain."  A lot of this is talk unattached to actual experience.  In fact, people experience their own mental activity differently.  It is a personal affair.

Yesterday I received an email linked to an article about Beethovian rhythms showing a marked resemblance to a heart experiencing arhythmia.  Why not?  As he did not hear what almost everyone else hears is it not possible, even probable, that he could pick up bodily signals of which most people are unaware, and that these would become primary sources of insight for him? 

Defining Adventure

An Op-Ed essay in the NYTimes of January 9 calls attention to the extraordinary achievement-in-progress of two climbers scaling the sheer wall of El Capitaine without any tools except ropes to keep them from falling.  The purpose?  According to the insightful writer, so that they can define for themselves what constitutes adventure.

He might be describing why I play the piano or why I teach the way I do.  Listening without recourse to how one is supposed to hear gives access to the sheer genius of Beethoven, a composer now associated with good compositional practice but whose level of irony is discernible only to those who have ears sufficiently unprejudiced to discern fragile voice leading or articulations that don't make conventional sense.

No prompts, no props, just direct connection with the element of sound.  As if that were not enough.

When Does Music Begin?

Last night I went to hear a very moving talk by a young mother about her miraculously developing, severely disabled child, now about 7 years old, after having been given up on as beyond hope.  The audience was primarily psychologists and psychiatrists.  During the Q and A session following her presentation I brought up the issue of bonding via listening to sounds generated by one's own voice and through one's own facial engagement.

Immediately she sprang to how much the child loves music: dances, claps, sings along with the sung nursery rhymes.

But that is not what I mean.  I am talking about a different kind of listening. Listening for, not listening to.  It is altogether different.  It involves activation of a part of our brains that is in increasing danger of atrophy.

Back to Pianos Talking

Add to the one-sided aspect of harmonic analysis imposed upon piano music, we have the all-fingers-are-equal approach to piano technique.  Get all the notes to sound even so that you won't have to notice touch differences between fingers and positions on the key.

Now pianos are being manufactured so that there is less and less inflection between black and white keys.  This is accomplished by manipulating the lead weights inside of the key to equalize the leverage on all keys.

It didn't used to be that way.  It was never meant to be that way.  After years of playing harpsichord, attuning my ear to temperaments other than equal-tempered--in other words, paying an altogether new kind of attention to the tiniest variables in intonation--returning to the piano revealed this aspect of expressiveness inherent in the instrument to a degree that had not previously been apparent to me.

At that time I paid a visit to David Stanhope, a technician who specialized in key leverage.  All the way out to his studio in the woods on Martha's Vineyard I talked about this phenomenon.  When we arrived at the studio he told me that he had worked on pianos for some of the top pianists in the world but I was the only one who initiated a conversation about key leverage.

Beethoven's Second Symphony vs. the Piano

I laughed out loud more than once listening to this hilarious work on the radio last night.  As its incredibly inventive orchestration bumped my ear from one orchestral section to another at times with startling percussion punctuation, I became aware of how much sound imagination is required to enjoy Beethoven's piano writing.

He refers constantly to sounds of his time and of his culture, as does every other composer of the time.  But do we learn to call a yodel by its true name?  or a rustic country instrument, the equivalent of the modern country twang that, to my surprise, has become so "in"?

Piano students are encouraged to stay within the recognizable borders of printed note values with their predictable accents, not to notice, as one nine-year-old did in my studio one day, that the music was "boring."  It was Beethoven, by the way.  How could this be? I wondered and went into it.  Sure enough, the child was right. Ludwig v. B. was quoting a boring style of music, associated with heavy boots and stamping accents, perhaps set in motion by "a touch too much" of inebriation.

The High Cost of Technology

Talk about climate change.  The planet is paying a price for our growing dependence on oil, as more and more people are acknowledging.  It doesn't require a lot of imagination to see how this dependence has insinuated itself into all of our lives.  It isn't like buying a car.

I live in a city in which owning a car is more of a nuisance than a necessity.  I did it for a while, then decided I wouldn't do it any more, not the least of my reasons being that I disapprove of America's dependence on the automobile. When my kids were young our weekend outings consisted of a subway ride to Grand Central then hopping on whatever train departed next to a destination less than 2 hours away in any direction.  We had some unforgettable adventures and became quite attached to some of those places.

But everything oil-generated and now everything tech is good for the economy and what is good for the economy, as we all know, is good for all of us.

But hang on a sec.  This technology works only if we allow its limitations to define our sensory experience.  (This is where I start to sound like Socrates, who feared that the printed word would take the place of thought.)

In fact technology relies on vision.  Vision is slower than hearing, by 200 times - it has been measured by James Hudspeth, you could look it up.  That means that relying on technology to train hearing is actually an oxymoron.  Nothing can train hearing except attentiveness to sound.

Can You Hear It Talk?

A lot of music written for the newly invented piano was inspired by the instrument's innate capacity for inflection: white keys sounded different from black in terms of not just pitch but the amount of resonance they released. Suddenly there were inflections that did not exist on harpsichords, inflections that came directly out of the instrument talking, rather than out of melodic conventions left over from the Baroque era, like the sighing descending half steps.

Most of us have learned this music in terms of analyzing its harmony.  So what has become of the melody?