First Impressions

My newly rebuilt Mason & Hamlin AA grand has the most lustrous sound.  Every time I play Dvorak I am reminded of how dangerous it is to form wrong first impressions of such works as his Waltzes or the Suite in A Major, works I first heard in orchestrated versions.  No orchestration can capture the overtone glow that causes harmonies to merge rather than modulate.  Before the rebuilding I could get away with playing these works on the piano while hearing the orchestral version in my head.  Thank goodness that is no longer possible: the orchestration has been overpowered by the pianistic dimension that inspired these works in the first place.

Schubert in the Extreme

Opera is extreme above all other genres.  I know this from a few memorable performances I have seen/heard/felt.  In each case a magnificently complex production led up to a moment in the third act when the heroine (soprano) could not control her voice and made an uninhibited animal sound--fleeting but oh so powerful.  It happened once at the Met in Traviata, once at the NYCity Opera in Handel's Alcina; in a recent Mannes College production of Don Giovanni it was baritone Ricardo Rivera who allowed it to happen.

Allowing it to happen is a function, first of all, of inspired composition: the composer knows the voice and writes into the part the difference between vulnerability and sheer confidence.  Masterful vocal writing does not get better than in the hands of Verdi, Handel, and Mozart.

Today I realized that I have never seen a Schubert opera.  I wonder why?  Who is afraid of them?  Is it an issue of style?  (Mozart's Idomineo was not performed until recently, after the revival of interest in early music, when people realized that it was essentially a Baroque opera.) 

Fear in Performing

Speaking recently with a mature musician who is preparing an important recital I couldn't miss the recurrent word "fear."

Fear of memory slips is easy to take care of: Play with the score.  What is the big deal?  Organists do it all the time; so did Myra Hess.  It is not a defeat to use the music.

But he expressed another, more subtle fear:  The shock of hearing a sound different from the sound to which he is accustomed.  We do not realize how specific the sound of every piano is--most especially the piano on which we practice every day, which identifies "piano" to our touch and to our ear.

It took me decades to realize that this fear can be addressed very simply: Treat the performance instrument as the "piano du jour" and touch no other instrument that day.  No matter how nervous you are this will provide a level of confidence in reacting to the sound and touch in a wonderful exploratory frame of mind and body without the shock of foreign sounds inevitably resulting from business as usual followed by a performance somewhere strange..

Reading Remembering

Learning to read music is much more difficult than most piano teachers would like it to be.  In the first place, it is not at all like reading words.  If it were each letter of each word would have to be respected as the source of layers of potential response.

I have the privilege of teaching an adult how to read, but really read, music.  We are using Clementi's Preludes and Exercises, a collection which I cannot praise too highly.  The F-sharp minor Prelude is a beautiful example of reading for mystery at the level of every letter of every word:  That it is made up of rhythmically regular patterns is clear from the start.  What remains magical is the degree of incremental change wrought by each changing vibration and by its varying placement within the recurring figure.

The exercise, on the other hand, is a study in reading repetitive words, rather than individual letters. Once having grasped the recurring motives the student does not actually have to "read" every note but can make up the piece fairly accurately out of musical common sense.  Of course, it being Clementi, the sense turns out to be far from common, after all; but the discovery of that is amusing, not frustrating.

It is a great pleasure to work with such entertaining material.  I highly recommend it.

sT R ing Improvisations

Starting today I will be exhibiting my s T R ing Improvisations at the annual Crafts at the Cathedral fair at St. John the Divine in New York City.  As a child I dreamed of one day inhabiting a mansion of which one room would be devoted entirely to sound, another entirely to color.  And that is where I live.

The string with which I work is all recycled: leftovers and scraps given me by friends, mostly by a former neighbor who is a designer of knitwear; or from previously knit garments or fabric I unravel for this new use. That the two rooms in my mansion are connected is encrypted in the odd typography of the word "string:" the sales support Tonal Refraction, my method of arousing holistic awareness of responses to tone through color associations. 

The garments are all my own design, entirely improvised, one-of-a-kind and mostly one-size-fits-many-if-not-all.  The fair runs today, Nov. 30 5 - 8 pm; tomorrow Dec. 1 from 11 to 6, and Sunday Dec. 2 from 11 to 5.  Do stop by and say hello.

What's Happening to Affect?

Do I imagine it or have the faces of the Facebook generation become faceless, except on-line?

Of the many young families I see every day, in my elevator, on the street, here and there, very few engage their faces in conversations with their young children, or with each other. The eyes do not light up; the muscles around the mouth that might turn some tissue up or down, depending, seem inert, unused.

Affect is the root of so much music.  Think of it as taste, not the kind associated with esthetic experience, but associated with carrots or chocolate.  Yum or yuck--it's as simple as that.

At the outset of a Tonal Refraction working arrangement of three sessions I ask whether the individual has a favorite note.  I wish I had a collection of photos of the answering blank looks.   A bit of prodding is usually all that is required to unearth deep emotion associated sometimes with a note, like G; sometimes with a note in a specific composition, like the first G-sharp in Chopin's E-minor Piano Concerto; and sometimes with a note played on a specific instrument by a specific person.  For one it was E-flat, the key of a hymn her grandmother used to play on the piano; for another, E on the D string of his first full-sized violin.

Is Classical Music in Danger?

Last week a letter to the NYTimes from a retired Metropolitan Opera Orchestra violinist suggested that Classical music is in danger of dying out because of rock and roll; he offered as a solution to the problem that young children be taken to animated films in which classical music is featured either as subject matter (as in some Bugs Bunny cartoons and one famous Disney feature-length animation which shall remain nameless) or as background music (as in many Warner Bros. animations set to Rossini).

Readers were invited to contribute to a dialogue to appear on Nov. 25.  I submitted the following response:

Les Dreyer’s suggestion that schoolchildren be exposed to classical music through animated films is rather like suggesting that they might learn to enjoy vegetables if fed canned green beans.  It is not so much classical music that is in danger as active, up-close, exposure to live sound.

I recommend locavore listening: Parents engaged with their children in the sounds of their own singing voices; music teachers enlarging their own ears to legitimatize the musical expression of the challenged as well as the gifted; listeners enjoying music of all kinds in intimate spaces like cabarets and living rooms.

A few well-intentioned flaws will yield more long-term nourishment than adding to the steady diet of pre-heard, over-processed “music” that has become our era’s standard.  I propose a new post-commercial-recording standard: Better than perfect.

 

That my letter was not included among the published responses was most likely due to the Times's commitment to commercialism -- not surprising in the light of their revenue stream.