Practicing May Be Overrated

Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of receiving an email from a student I taught maybe 40 years ago.  He confided that he has become a lutenist and that he practices.  I take that to mean that he did not practice the piano when I knew him. At that time I was not confident enough as a teacher of children to do as I now do: I tell children not to practice and, if they do, to tell someone else.  I do this for two reasons:

• First, I hate it when students begin our limited time together with the confession that they haven't practiced.  I can tell in an instant whether or not they have and besides that is not the critical factor in learning music.  
• Second, I never practiced as a child so why should I require or expect it of my students?  I played all day, but that is not the same as practicing--it is better.

Just like the CD

Late Beethoven is now a commodity to be bought by the set, put on for background to cooking or reading or puttering around in your too-busy-to-sit-still-and-wonder existence.

At any rate, you have heard it all before.  So what is the point?

Now that live performance resembles CD production more than it does real live experience it is so refreshing to hear a recorded performance that is charged with vitality--it really stands out.


What would happen if everyone in the audience demanded that kind of vitality from the player?  Trouble is, the opposite is more likely to be true: if the performance is not like "the" CD it is likely to be deemed inferior.  What we are missing....

Generic Schubert

Is it possible to play Schubert without asking questions?  Is there a composer more deeply involved with conflict, by extension, with irony, with double entendre?

Think about it:  The lied (German song) is a treatment of essential duplicity.  The singer is one voice, the piano, another.  But which is the spoken and which the unconscious?  Is it a static arrangement?  According to the "rules" the singer has the spoken part, naturally, while the piano is in the background.  Really?  Has anyone who has ever performed Schubert Lieder bought that simplistic notion?

And it gives rise to other observations, drunk vs. sober, for example.  Schubert's music is often inebriated, not to be taken at face value because tottering on some brink of imbalance.

What does that leave us, then, by way of definition?  Our own experience of the musical moment--to recall that fine recorded performance by Maria Joao Pires I heard the other day.  Take nothing for granted. 

Listening and Baseball

Why do people go to baseball games: Aren't they all the same?

In my playing I aspire to the level of excitement that accompanies every gesture of the pitcher, every slight shift in the infield, every sign of excitement or disapproval from the bleachers.

Why don't people listen to music that way?  What have we lost?  Can we get it back?

A fine listener mentioned to me his impatience with concerts: After an hour he wants to go home and have the pleasure of playing himself.  This means to me that I am not adequately engaging him in the traction I feel between sounds--traction he may search on his own though it will never exactly match the traction I find.  And I never experience it twice the same way in the same piece.

I have tired of some fine performers' playing because I find their playing lacks this traction after years of mastering speed and agility.  There is nothing left to hold my attention (and, I suspect, their own) except for speed and agility.  Nothing is at stake; I know the score in advance, so why go?

Maria Joao Pires Defines Moment Musicaux

The title received a new definition for me this morning as I listened to a performance of No. 1 by a pianist totally unknown to me.  Every sound came from a place of maximal curiosity.  I hung on every fraction of an instant before during and after every sound.  What could more exactly define a musical moment?

The pianist: Maria Joao Pires.  Look her up on facebook.  There is a video interview with her about Chopin.  It seems she knows that that is how she plays.  Completely extraordinary.

Autism and/or Prodigy in the Family

Music is one of the most powerful familial tools available.  I am not talking about music, the external experience so codified by pseudo-scientific measurements and applications.  Rather I am talking about the internalized music expressed in the desire, not to be confused with the ability, to play.

In one family in my studio there is an autistic boy whose only developable contact with other humans is his musical ear.  When his older sister, who is not blessed with the innate ability to respond in any obvious way to what she hears, expressed a desire to play it was clear that a whole range of emotional changes would result.

Today she confided two things to me:  It took her a long time to realize that she wanted to play not for her brother's sake, but for herself.  She knows that he listens as she struggles through her pieces, though he does so from his room with the door closed.  But, whereas he used to "steal" her pieces by playing them with greater facility than she will ever have, he has learned to respect her musical space.

Naturally in a family with such a needy child everything seems to be dominated by that child and determined by his needs.

She confided also that her cousins and aunts and uncles are mystified that, though she takes piano lessons, she does not perform for them.  But she is clear that that is not her goal.  She plays what she plays as she plays it for herself.  The depth of the work increases with no judgment imposed by the cliche of "piano lessons."

What an extraordinary privilege to work with such a person.

Note Values

This is another of my favorite topics.  Most of us learn note values as an arithmetic function having nothing whatsoever to do with sound or with the perception of tone.  Students get the idea that they must first "get it right" and only then add in "feeling."  But by the time one has mastered the arithmetic the critical germ of feeling has usually been obscured. 

As one brilliant nine-year-old once put it: " It is really hard to count and play at the same time."

Note values should never be taught as absolutes for to do is to rob them of their infinitely expressive capacity.

For example: Today a young adult student was sight-reading a Bartok piece based on a Slovak folk tune.  Just playing the melody she was distorting the note values quite a bit.  Rather than correct her outright I had her comment on each successive tone: Did she like it or not?  Did she want to go on to the next tone or not?  By the time she had read through the melody she noted that one measure in which there are four long repeated F-sharps sounded like a church bell.

Wow!

She heard it.  That very strong response galvanized the entire experience for her and the values took on meaning.