What Makes Mature Playing? Part II

The other young man of comparable age with whom I work is extremely sensitive, has a highly cultivated ear and a powerful sense of logic.  We have been working on sight-reading as an act not of facile pronunciation but in order to experience understanding of the piece.

He reads well enough now that he can hear right away when a piece is amusing.  So, on his choice, we have moved to Beethoven.  D major, Op.10, No. 3--one of the most difficult sonatas in Book I. (He likes D!)  This is a piece I had always shied away from because, though I could "play the notes," I had no grasp of articulation or metric subtlety.  What a different experience to hear the music without an assumption that facility is the point of playing / sight-reading.

Detail.  Content.  Substance. 

What Makes Mature Playing? Part I

For the past several months I have been working on a profoundly lyrical Bartok piece with a young man whose physical and mental coordination is severely challenged by blindness, autisim, and other development issues.

Today I found myself describing to him that what makes his playing of the piece grown up is the fact that he can exercise choices about how he plays each phrase.  In his case the choices are extremely specific: hand in this position, use those fingers, play louder than you are comfortable playing, let go of the sound before you want to--that sort of thing.

I stopped myself in mid-sentence as I was going to say that children do not have the option of making those choices.  I would have been mistaken: I have heard children do just that.

On the other hand, I have heard many mature musicians who seem not to notice that they have choices as they play.

A Great Sound Can Make Us Listen

For several days I have been reliving my profound emotion on hearing Horszowski play a recital at the Metropolitan Museum over 50 years ago.

It is curious that at the time I had no conscious idea of what was "good" playing.  Did he play well?  Don't ask me.  Was his Bach good?  His Beethoven?  Ask someone else.

All I knew for sure was that my life had changed.  Sound so compelling that I would not stop working on it until I figured it out.  How did he do it!

I can't tell, of course, whether or not my playing in any way resembles his: I refuse to judge by recordings for all kinds of reasons.  But I do know that people express to me reactions very similar to those I felt on listening to him so long ago.  

The Piano Police

The more I think about the NYTimes critic pronouncing on the last movement of the "Moonlight" sonata the happier I am that I can play that movement the way I think it really goes without fear of being derided in the media.

It is a multi-media whammy: First the midguided recordings, some by acknowledged masters of the piano (though not necessarily profound musical thinkers, therefore only human), then the printed word out there for all to read.

I prefer my small responsive audience, right there, live and in the moment, giving me the feedback the music deserves and that I regard as essential for continued growth.

Teachers and Students

I was enraged yesterday to read in print a list of names purporting to represent a progeny of teacher / student mastery.

Why enraged?  I am enraged by the assumption that because a musician has studied with another musician (presumably older) he or she has merely soaked up the master's wisdom and not thought things out for himself or herself.

This is a totally false assumption, although it does happen all too frequently.  One of the names listed was a truly great performer whose name has come up on this blog as being a one-of-a-kind original thinker and pianist.  I know that he did not teach his students to play as he played, otherwise they would be doing so and they clearly are not.

I had one -- count them -- one lesson with this master in which he not only affirmed the validity of my idiosyncratic path but also discouraged me, most wisely, from aspiring to get onto the beaten path.

I know also from a year spent with a master who is often named as a source (I, too, name him in my bio) that what he taught was what he was expected to teach and not what corresponded to his true art.
He told me as much.  He spelled it out.  He demonstrated.  If you really wanted to learn from him you had to listen to his playing and listen very carefully.

And there you have it. 

It's not the name or the succession.  It is compelling artistry and the ability to listen attentively. That is the only true succession of mastery. 

Presto agitato: What Might It Mean?

In The New York Times of Wednesday, July 17, 2013 I read in a music review by Zachary Woolfe:
"...his control seemed to wane only slightly in the [Moonlight Sonata]'s finale, when the beat should underlie even the most furious passages."

Really!

Here is an example of how recordings have come to "be" the music.  You can listen to as many recordings as you can readily find of this great work without finding one that seriously questions the meaning of either word, "presto," or "agitato."

But there is plenty to question:  Presto does not necessarily mean as fast as possible.  It might indicate a tempo set by the smallest note value, a meaning consistent with Beethoven's other uses of the term which are, by the way, infrequent.  (In one piano sonata he uses it clearly ironically: "Presto a la tedesco," i.e.. Presto in the German manner, which must mean not fast at all.)

Agitato cannot mean fast: There are many more accurate indications of speed that Beethoven would have used, according to Koch's Lexicon, a 19th-century musical dictionary.  I observe agitato to indicate the pronounced presence of 3's within a duple meter.  Why else would Beethoven so clearly distinguish between the arpeggiated sixteenth-note figures when they appear in sets of 27 (count them!) as opposed to 28 notes?

My question to Mr. Woolfe: If someone were to play the movement in a true agitato would you even be able to take it in or would your only recourse be to listen comparing it to recordings you know and love so well?

I played The Moonlight Sonata in a series last year and one musician's reaction was that he had never heard it played so fast.  Interesting.  It was not, metronomically speaking, fast at all.  Being agitato it felt fast.

Accentuate the Negative - Why Not?

As powerful as the child's response to magic -- another word for beauty -- is the child's response to the unpalatable, the first experience of carrots on the tongue.  Yuck.

I recall the feeling:  How could Mozart do this to me, after giving me such a beautiful sound on one beat to expect me to play the exact opposite just one beat later?

I love to draw children's attention to their negative reactions to specific sounds, which are as important to the musical health of the child as having plots in the books they read.  I wonder what would have happened to my musical life had someone pointed out that the vast disparity between consonance and dissonance was essential to the whole business.

I wonder how many children/teenagers quit because of just such "negative" feelings never acknowledged, never attended to.