Boredom / Frustration

In a recent radio interview British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips was discussing the importance of frustration: acknowledging it, accepting it, dealing with it as important determinants of a fulfilled self.

He might have been speaking of boredom in practicing music.  Some of the most fulfilling aspects of my musicianship have emerged from my acknowledgement of utter boredom, with the Alberti bass, for example, which has become one of the features of Classical style that I most enjoy.

Orchestration and Bartok's Roumanian Dances

Apparently Bartok himself orchestrated the Roumanian Dances about which I was complaining recently.
Curious to explore the issue further, I checked on Wikipedia where there is a link to a recording of three of the dances by the Adelphi Chamber Orchestra (unknown to me).  Listening to their sound I realized that they don't sound like any ensemble I have ever heard, nor would they probably be given the time of day were they to audition for a gig in NY in 2013.  They are clearly playing with sounds in mind with which we are totally unfamiliar, and with a kind of manic energy that simply does not get conveyed in printed music.

So the orchestration is inseparable from the orchestra doing the playing.  Had that been the version to which I was initially exposed things might have been altogether different.  Who knows?

Memory of Things Unheard

Among the strongest influences in my creative life have been two friends, one a visual artist, the other a poet.  In conversation the other day the novelist Jose Saramago's description of the real subject matter of painting came up, specifically that every good painting depicts something unseen.  The question arose whether there is a comparable level of content in music.

I maintain that it is memory: Every musical sound refers to some remembered sound, whether "the same" or not.  Perhaps it is to remind us of this simple truth that so much European music contains quotes from nature and from other sources (I refer to European music because it is the music I know best, not to exclude every other music).

It is a real loss that, in the name of music, so many young children are being force-fed tunes and notes as if that constitutes the blood and breath of the real thing.

Agitato!

The presence of 3s in a 4/4 bar is not always indicated by the actual number 3.  Sometimes its presence lurks in a dotted eighth, sometimes in a three-sixteenth "beat" following a sixteenth rest.  Three of something plus five of something else is as much eight as two times four.  But the feeling is totally different.

The feeling is what agitato refers to, not agitation in our frenetic literal sense of the word, but in the sense of a structured non-structure.

Isometric? Allometric?

Just because a piece is notated in 4/4 does not mean that its rhythmic sense is determined solely by duples.  What is the term that would apply to the simultaneous presence of two meters within one notated meter?

Is it to simplify coordination that we learn to verticalize beats to be sure that the two hands are together at all times?  Isn't it more exciting to take off from there and have one hand play freely while the other keeps the beat?

The idea is not so much to identify a concept as to find the necessity for this multi-layered movement within the body's desire to move the limbs independent of one another and to assert the autonomy of the imagination throughout it all.

A rhythmic concept risks stifling this level of animal vitality.

Haydn: Greater than Great

What pleasure can be greater than playing for the first time a work by Haydn, the master of masters.

In the preface to the Wiener Urtext edition of the piano pieces Brahms is quoted as remarking that Haydn is not understood at his time (1896); that undoubtedly in the future someone will organize Haydn festivals for business purposes.  How right he was and how true that is.

It is remarkable that in a program that features even quite complex contemporary works the composer whose work requires the most painstaking attention is invariably Haydn - I have this from a person who specializes in the likes of Elliot Carter.

Bored Again: A New Definition

One of my students, a scientist, knows that she is bored when she keeps looking at the clock.

In Classical style the equivalent of the clock is the inexorable four sixteenths to the quarter.  Yesterday I revisited one of the puzzling Beethoven sonatas in which what have always felt like agonizingly boring passages alternate with passages of extreme power.  Can't be.  Doesn't make sense.

Sure enough, that sonata (the "Spring" sonata for piano with violin) was composed at the same time as the "Moonlight," 1801.  Both share a fascination with the conflict between four-of-these equal one-of-those and odd numbers of repetitions or groupings: 15 sixteenths where one would expect 16  comparable to the Moonlight's 27 sixteenths where one expects 28. 

There must be more to it than counting in multiples of 2.