One last post about teaching/learning:

Today one of the youthful four-hand pair volunteered that the Stravinsky piece they were playing was like a pelican.

I expect I will be smiling at this for quite a while. I suspect that both she and her partner will develop a special feel for this piece and probably for whatever music of Stravinsky they will hear in the future.

From now on I will shift the focus of this blog to performance, mostly of contemporary music.

These days I am enjoying attending many contemporary music performances. It saddens me that the music world is so divided into what feel like enemy camps--the traditionalists, who have their own sectarian subsections, vs. the moderns. Within just one week I have heard performances dedicated entirely to the work of a single composer: Ralph Shapey and Davidowsky. In each concert I was struck by the powerful musical means with which the composer treated the conflict within their own development. It is a problem on a massive scale involving far more than compositional technique. Each composer has clearly struggled to find and express an individual voice in the face of cultural forces that feel inimical.

Analysis of those cultural forces would be the subject of a major study, which has been undertaken by thinkers about music in the name of philosophy, music criticism, cultural history and so on.

My concern is with the history of each individual musician and music student confronting or condoning these forces in the process of making a life.

Debussy's music is full of revelations. This afternoon a new definition of rubato was clarified by melodies in several works. One often hears his richly inventive, flowing melodies organized according to the meter. If, however, one allows melodic line to determine the articulation a shifting pulse emerges. This produces a more convincing realization of rubato than can be achieved by subjecting a rigid quarter-note-organized tune to some vague elasticity.

Just a thought--but a thought that came right out of his line.

Every sign of comprehension coming from a young student is like pure gold. The other day there were two such signs: a great day.

The first was a nine-year-old who went directly to the left-hand black-key octave as the biggest surprise in a Haydn Minuet in F. A real shocker.

Second was a young man who answered a question about the nature of music composition by improvising his way into several rude surprises of exactly the kind that composers seek to avoid and reacting to them within the improvisation in such a way that I knew he had heard them.

Actual sound is much more vivid than theoretical explanations.

People often ask me if I am a composer. After that wonderful Shapey concert I realized that instrumentalists are not encouraged to think beyond the technical difficulties of their instruments or, if they are, it is in terms of theoretical analyses that cannot possibly "grab" an audience's attention.

Effective performers are those who inhabit the sensibility of the composer by musically living through all the references they can find in the composition to the experience of the living, breathing creative intelligence who wrote the piece. Snatches of popular music, of technical studies, of standard repertoire; references to other genres, even the use of single pitches in splendidly inventive ways (like Ursula Mamlok using the orchestra's tuning A as a joke in her oboe concerto, recently recorded by Heinz Holliger on Bridge)--all such devices grab our attention, catch us unawares, awaken us to new experience even of familiar music.

Such moments exist in all Western music; the performers job is to seek them out.

Last night I attended an entire concert of works by a contemporary composer whose work I usually find most uninviting. It is against my principles to attend concerts devoted exclusively to the work of a single composer, even if Bach, Chopin, or Mozart. I do make exceptions: Helmut Walcha playing all-Bach, Rubinstein all-Chopin--wouldn't miss it. For all-Mozart I recall Horszowski recitals with great pleasure.

Last night was Ralph Shapey. I went because the event was conceived, planned, and in part performed by someone who loves his work. The extraordinary violinist Miranda Cuckson plays this music as if she wrote it herself. The players she recruited to join in the evening were clearly as devoted to the project as she is.

The result was that the audience seemed to agree (based on after-concert chat) that this composer had not over-stayed his welcome. It was, by the way, an audience that included professionals as well as non-musicians who came out of curiosity.

Here was a good example of a performer living up to the tremendous responsibility of making the music come alive.

I did not expect to like it. I had a great time.

Using the lesson I learned from that Mozart performance I prepared to perform a Haydn sonata yesterday by not practicing it at all. I practiced around it, so to speak--a trick I learned many years ago while preparing to perform Schubert's Lovely Milleress song cycle.

I realized that practicing the actual accompaniments would guarantee their lifeless performance. (This is a form of ritual murder to which we become inured when hanging out with the wrong crowd.) Thus, with an open ear and attitude of curiosity I discovered yesterday a fascinating tonal relationship in the sonata which had never previously been apparent to me. I had so much fun tracking this new found delight that it was like playing the piece for the first time.

One of the audience members commented that it was not like the usual Haydn. I think the "usual" Haydn is a creation of teachers who have tried for years to make a Classical composer out of this most inventive man whose insights bridged two distinct eras. His piano sonatas evoke Baroque vocal sensibilities from the newfangled piano. Whenever I play these astonishing pieces I can feel Haydn's socks being knocked off by this amazing instrument.