As I prepare to perform two sets of Scottish Dances, one by Schubert, one by Dvorak, I am struck by how boring these rhythms were to me as a young player and how these two genius composers pierced the rhythm at every level to produce works of extreme delight.
It is particularly notable in the light of the deliberate parodies of boring folk rhythms badly played composed by the likes of Beethoven, Clementi, et al. (Presto alla tedesco; Air Suisse).
Incidentally, it was a nine-year-old student who made me aware of those parodies.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Sunday, November 4, 2012
Allegro Moderato
Allegro in the Classical period refers to a quarter-note-based meter, not to a particular mood. In the F- minor Impromptu, D. 935, No. 1, in 4/4 Schubert specifies Allegro moderato. Assuming, as I did in the past, that this meant a quarter-note pulse throughout, I found myself bored with the repeated four-note accompaniment figures in the middle section.
Then it occurred to me that, in this case, moderato might mean "depending on the circumstances." If one allows the pulse to fluctuate to 3/16 in the accompaniment, the oddly irregular melodic fragments (usually consisting of three eighth notes, incidentally) become inherently poignant without any superficial emotion. The more I approach the work in this manner the more powerful it becomes.
Surely it is no coincidence that the arpeggiated triads between sections, played in 3/16, recall the arpeggiated chords of the Moonlight Sonata.
Boredom while playing Schubert is often the key that opens the magical lock to indescribable treasures.
Then it occurred to me that, in this case, moderato might mean "depending on the circumstances." If one allows the pulse to fluctuate to 3/16 in the accompaniment, the oddly irregular melodic fragments (usually consisting of three eighth notes, incidentally) become inherently poignant without any superficial emotion. The more I approach the work in this manner the more powerful it becomes.
Surely it is no coincidence that the arpeggiated triads between sections, played in 3/16, recall the arpeggiated chords of the Moonlight Sonata.
Boredom while playing Schubert is often the key that opens the magical lock to indescribable treasures.
Saturday, November 3, 2012
Improvisation
There are many platforms for improvisation. One of the most effective I have tried involves selecting a certain number of tones: four, say, or seven. Once the tones have been selected they may appear in any register of the piano. The child then tells a story using only those tones.
The game is even more interesting when two children play it. They take turns initiating the story. After the story is first told the listening child reconstructs it and the first child gets to respond to the reconstruction, whether or not it reflected the nature of the first playing.
This procedure is particularly useful for relating to non-tonal works. The tones of the first bar can become the basis for a story that the child unfolds at will. The story then can be delegated to the composer.
This works extremely well for Hindemith.
The game is even more interesting when two children play it. They take turns initiating the story. After the story is first told the listening child reconstructs it and the first child gets to respond to the reconstruction, whether or not it reflected the nature of the first playing.
This procedure is particularly useful for relating to non-tonal works. The tones of the first bar can become the basis for a story that the child unfolds at will. The story then can be delegated to the composer.
This works extremely well for Hindemith.
Friday, November 2, 2012
A Missing Perceptual Link
You may perhaps have noted a contradiction in the last post about the relative slowness of the visual compared to the auditory response: For many players this is the rationale for playing from memory--remove the visual from the picture in order to free the ear.
That, however, is not the way it works for everyone.
I have had to learn to hear independent of the score. I have learned it mostly from listening to my students. When I hear as they hear I know I am really listening. I notice that when they know they are being heard with that precision they respond to sounds before they make them. I see them anticipate sounds; I note the subtle changes in touch that reflect their certainty that the piano keys do not produce uniform sounds.
Reading music is no longer a matter of discerning theoretical definitions and functions at work, but rather an invitation to engage my ear, one sound at a time, in propositions I cannot imagine, much less identify. This new reading is what enables me to revisit Schubert's F minor Impromptu, utterly transformed in the process.
That, however, is not the way it works for everyone.
I have had to learn to hear independent of the score. I have learned it mostly from listening to my students. When I hear as they hear I know I am really listening. I notice that when they know they are being heard with that precision they respond to sounds before they make them. I see them anticipate sounds; I note the subtle changes in touch that reflect their certainty that the piano keys do not produce uniform sounds.
Reading music is no longer a matter of discerning theoretical definitions and functions at work, but rather an invitation to engage my ear, one sound at a time, in propositions I cannot imagine, much less identify. This new reading is what enables me to revisit Schubert's F minor Impromptu, utterly transformed in the process.
Memory: A Perceptual Trap?
A listener at my last recital asked why I do not play from memory.
My immediate reply referred to two early experiences of blackouts during professional performances on the organ. Spooked by that, I was not willing to risk any interference or distraction while making music.
Thinking more about the question I realize its implications in terms of my life-long involvement with visual response and with motor memory: both are problematic. Let's consider one at a time.
Visual response: I am very quick to respond to visual stimuli: I like to solve puzzles that rely on visual cues, I improvise visual responses in my improvisational needlework. But how rapidly I am bored by visual repetition was evident to Hans Neumann, the brilliant musician with whom I studied piano at Mannes back in the day. He spotted right away that I, a crack sight-reader, was incapable of reading and listening at the same time. (I had noticed that, having once read a composition, the only way I could stay interested in it was to play it ever faster....)
Motor memory: Given the strength of my eye-hand coordination, reliance on muscle memory as a major factor in memorizing music followed naturally. Though in many ways at a high level of competence, my vision and motor-based memory, as it did not fully engage my ear, depended on reliability, i.e., on repetitive function.
Certainly there are many components to the problem, none of which I can identify objectively. Be that as it may, the writings of Viktor Zuckerkandl (notably Sound and Symbol and The Sense of Music) compelled me to undertake the challenge of strengthening my ear to the point of making it the basis of all my playing and of my teaching.
The ear response has been scientifically measured (see James Hudspeth, Rockefeller University) as being 200 times faster than any other sense perception, based on the activity of 32,000 vibrating sensor-tipped hair cells in our inner ear. I go in pursuit of that speed, not motor speed or visual speed.
Thus, I play with the score because doing so frees me to move more spontaneously, with greater daring and passion, than is accessible via my memory--I do not want to be burdened with anything that smacks of repetition.
That said, I realize that these balances are different for different players.
My immediate reply referred to two early experiences of blackouts during professional performances on the organ. Spooked by that, I was not willing to risk any interference or distraction while making music.
Thinking more about the question I realize its implications in terms of my life-long involvement with visual response and with motor memory: both are problematic. Let's consider one at a time.
Visual response: I am very quick to respond to visual stimuli: I like to solve puzzles that rely on visual cues, I improvise visual responses in my improvisational needlework. But how rapidly I am bored by visual repetition was evident to Hans Neumann, the brilliant musician with whom I studied piano at Mannes back in the day. He spotted right away that I, a crack sight-reader, was incapable of reading and listening at the same time. (I had noticed that, having once read a composition, the only way I could stay interested in it was to play it ever faster....)
Motor memory: Given the strength of my eye-hand coordination, reliance on muscle memory as a major factor in memorizing music followed naturally. Though in many ways at a high level of competence, my vision and motor-based memory, as it did not fully engage my ear, depended on reliability, i.e., on repetitive function.
Certainly there are many components to the problem, none of which I can identify objectively. Be that as it may, the writings of Viktor Zuckerkandl (notably Sound and Symbol and The Sense of Music) compelled me to undertake the challenge of strengthening my ear to the point of making it the basis of all my playing and of my teaching.
The ear response has been scientifically measured (see James Hudspeth, Rockefeller University) as being 200 times faster than any other sense perception, based on the activity of 32,000 vibrating sensor-tipped hair cells in our inner ear. I go in pursuit of that speed, not motor speed or visual speed.
Thus, I play with the score because doing so frees me to move more spontaneously, with greater daring and passion, than is accessible via my memory--I do not want to be burdened with anything that smacks of repetition.
That said, I realize that these balances are different for different players.
Mastery in an 11-year old
It is probably difficult for any 11-year-old to believe that he or she should be any different from all other 11-year-olds. I recall wondering at that age whether I was supposed to sound like everyone else who played the piano. It was not a pleasant question and it was a highly isolating one to ponder--it could certainly not be expressed aloud.
But I have seen an 11-year-old student become fascinated with the vivid drama of sounds in a composition that I found too troubling to play myself. Her insistence on the piece despite my cautions demonstrated to me as few other instances have in the course of my teaching, that there is a deeper level of mastery than simply being able to play the notes. In fact, one of the more amazing things about her selection was that the notes were awkward, involving complex hand positions and subtle fingerings as well as challenging dissonances of both tone and time (rests with fermatas are not comfortable--they are, indeed, not supposed to be).
I call this mastery; perhaps the better word would be self-possession. How old were you when you experienced that while playing your instrument?
This child was taught in the manner I described in my last post: to give primacy to her responses to sound, whether from a printed score or in music that she improvised.
But I have seen an 11-year-old student become fascinated with the vivid drama of sounds in a composition that I found too troubling to play myself. Her insistence on the piece despite my cautions demonstrated to me as few other instances have in the course of my teaching, that there is a deeper level of mastery than simply being able to play the notes. In fact, one of the more amazing things about her selection was that the notes were awkward, involving complex hand positions and subtle fingerings as well as challenging dissonances of both tone and time (rests with fermatas are not comfortable--they are, indeed, not supposed to be).
I call this mastery; perhaps the better word would be self-possession. How old were you when you experienced that while playing your instrument?
This child was taught in the manner I described in my last post: to give primacy to her responses to sound, whether from a printed score or in music that she improvised.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Learning and Mastery
I have begun a dialogue with a former student, now a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, about the impact of Tonal Refraction upon my teaching of young children. The conversation was prompted by a recent interview with a colleague of his who works on the fear response of animals, including humans. This pre-conscious response is a matter of survival: we feel and respond to fear before knowing its cause.
It struck me at the time that one could substitute musical tone for the fear-producing stimulus . It struck me, too, that I have in fact been experimenting with reaching children's response at exactly that level ever since working with Tonal Refraction, that is, since 1993. To explain the connection you need to know that Tonal Refraction is a method of visualizing the pre-conscious emotional responses to tone buried under the layers of theoretical abstraction and technical instruction that are the basis of conventional music training. It is, as one eminent theorist put it, "what gets trained out of us." The act of visualizing this has been of extreme (I do not exaggerate) importance in restoring confident musical function to many professional and amateur musicians who, in either physical or psychological pain, are removed from full satisfaction in their music making.
If it works after the damage is done, I wondered, wouldn't it be possible to avert the damage by teaching children to read and play directly into and out of the validity of that moment? Now that a full cycle of the approach has been realized with the graduation from high school of a student who advanced to a level of sight-reading far more sophisticated that where I was at twice her age, I am taking the work public.
The biggest difference between the fear response and the musical response is that tone triggers a whole range of emotional reactions, from glorious to horrifying. What makes mastery is owning the experience at whichever extreme or wherever in between. The ownership is reinforced by my hearing the effect in the child's playing. To be continued.
It struck me at the time that one could substitute musical tone for the fear-producing stimulus . It struck me, too, that I have in fact been experimenting with reaching children's response at exactly that level ever since working with Tonal Refraction, that is, since 1993. To explain the connection you need to know that Tonal Refraction is a method of visualizing the pre-conscious emotional responses to tone buried under the layers of theoretical abstraction and technical instruction that are the basis of conventional music training. It is, as one eminent theorist put it, "what gets trained out of us." The act of visualizing this has been of extreme (I do not exaggerate) importance in restoring confident musical function to many professional and amateur musicians who, in either physical or psychological pain, are removed from full satisfaction in their music making.
If it works after the damage is done, I wondered, wouldn't it be possible to avert the damage by teaching children to read and play directly into and out of the validity of that moment? Now that a full cycle of the approach has been realized with the graduation from high school of a student who advanced to a level of sight-reading far more sophisticated that where I was at twice her age, I am taking the work public.
The biggest difference between the fear response and the musical response is that tone triggers a whole range of emotional reactions, from glorious to horrifying. What makes mastery is owning the experience at whichever extreme or wherever in between. The ownership is reinforced by my hearing the effect in the child's playing. To be continued.
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