This morning I watched a sixteen-year-old become increasingly fascinated by the modal scales in the Clementi Exercise in B-flat from Preludes and Exercises. I was struck by my memory of boredom with scales rendered overly stable by simplistic harmonic reduction. The modal scales are nothing short of pure magic because in every transposition the black keys fall in different places, throwing them into imbalance.

Yes, but aren't exercises simply exercises? If the body were a machine the answer might be "yes." But the body is not a machine. (Perhaps one cause of many sports-related injuries is that people expect their bodies to behave like machines.) Our hands, being no less expressive than our eyes or our face, are ill-served by being subjected to mechanization.

Once that has happened a person will understandably have trouble reconnecting the hand to auditory nuances. It is a bit of an uphill battle to teach children to respond to what they hear; nothing in our culture favors subtlety in that department. But once children realize that they have this power, "technical" problems become expressive extensions of their inner experience. They become fascinated, even (I would go so far as to say especially) with scales.

Our piano-playing culture seems to conform to the "first-kill-the-horse-and-then-it-will-obey-you" school.

A propos yesterday's post: Since no one has been forthcoming with the requested help, I have helped myself. My dilemma is disillusionment. I know that Classical pianists read novels while they practice. But jazz pianists? Listening to CDs while they practice?

It reminds me of Walter Gieseking, I believe it was, who said that if playing the piano was really a matter of physical training then the best way to prepare to play the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto would be to take up boxing.

In the spirit of not believing everything I read I am asking for help with this: In today's New York Times is an obituary article about the prominent jazz pianist Hank Jones. Describing the contents of Mr. Jones' 12-foot-by-12-foot room just a block away from where I live the authors (Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman) mention:

"Scattered about were CDs of Debussy, Ravel and Chopin...The Yamaha electric piano had a pair of headphones lying on the keyboard and a music exercise book still on the music stand, along with one of Mr. Jones's compositions.

'He would practice while listening to classical music -- classical was his favorite music,' Mr. Ramirez said." (Mr. Ramirez rented Mr. Jones the room in his apartment.)

Eric Havelock's little book The Muse Learns to Write presents the dilemma that underlies all writing and reading. The act of writing causes non-linear events to appear linear. Non-linear thought seems, then, not relevant to "real" thought.

I can see how, in our approach to notated music, this has come to apply also to non-linear tone perception. The more I teach the more clearly I perceive the problem in terms of the many dimensions of tone.

Tone's linear aspect can be shown with standard notation on a staff. But every child will tell you that A is not "close to" G at all, while B is--indeed the octave G, apparently even farther away, is even closer. The child correctly perceives the resonant relationship between G and its overtones as closer than the proximity of the keys designated G and A on the piano.

The in and out of resonance is what causes music to come alive.

How much has your training conditioned you to deny that level of response to tone?

At yesterday's Acoustical Kaleidoscope people reacted with surprise at the idea that they might play some of the most miraculous pages of piano writing by Beethoven without necessarily having to play the entire composition. It's funny how ingrained the notion is that a piece of music has a necessary beginning, when it is most obviously not a narrative. In fact, I believe many musical structures are flashbacks.

I let my young students start wherever they wish: find a spot you can play and work around it. Its amazing how that illuminates structure.

As you have probably gathered by now, I am totally fascinated at how astute the untrained ear can be. I teach singing to "non-singers" by getting them to be sensitive to tunable and untunable intervals. Yesterday a complete novice demonstrated, instinctively how musica ficta works -- the sharps and flats not printed in the score of Renaissance vocal music, but known to represent the way the notes were actually tuned in practice. Such things knock my socks off.