What Is a Dance?

A listener raised that interesting question after a program consisting mostly of dances:  a Bach partita, polonaises by W.F. Bach and by Chopin, and waltzes by Chopin and Liszt.

As soon as one is no longer actually on one's feet, however, the dance becomes, as does all other music, a function of memory, fantasy, dream or, as in the case of the Liszt Valse Oubliee, something utterly intangible, unimaginable, ephemeral, fragile beyond telling.

These elements cannot be written down, they must be lived.  Or they may have been imparted in the artistry of, say, Artur Rubinstein, whose playing of that Liszt positively knocked me down when I first heard it in 1961 and has remained my instruction ever since.

Of course one must start somewhere.  At the beginning it makes sense to teach young learners that dance has to do with balance, with some kind of rhythmic regularity that keeps the dancers from falling over.

Dance: Where is it's Heart?

We think of dance as being of the body, but there must be more to it than that. What if dance is a synonym for body: is there anything simple about that? 

As children we learn that dances have to do with beats, regular beats so that the dancer does not fall flat on their face.  But what about adults remembering dancing, dancing while drunk, while in love, etc., etc.,?

The imagination takes over and we find ourselves, again, at the mercy of forces too diverse to name and too fleeting to contemplate.

"Beethoven Never Used 'Moderato' " - Really?

In Schubert: A Musical Portrait Alfred Einstein goes into considerable and admirable detail on the meaning of moderato in Schubert: it concerns, in his words, a "lyrical quality."  He points out that Beethoven never used the term.  (Haydn, on the contrary, used it very, very frequently; it could be that Haydn was Schubert's source for the sense of the word.)

Never, except for the Op. 17 Sonata for natural horn and piano, which I have been playing with great delight together with my son.  The sound of the horn is instructing me why Beethoven would use that term for two of the movements in this piece.  The sound is itself so lyrical, so not homogenized, that it requires special timing, special attentiveness.  To play the work as if that is not central to its concept is to do it a great disservice.  In fact, it renders the piece trivial, which is why so few people even know (about) it and those who do turn up their noses at it.

Satisfaction from the Details

Skimming through may get you into a music school but it won't get you through life.

My young adult amateur student is learning to savor Beethoven through his very sophisticated not-at-all-theoretical auditory sensibility.  His eyes light up and so do mine as he savors literally every note--the details you would have to brush over in your rush to achieve the required (i.e., commercially viable) tempo.

Teaching Artistry

Great artists do not teach their artistry: how can they? 

But a great teacher can teach the artistry of each student by recognizing its intention and reinforcing its effectiveness, in other words, by selfless listening, or what I call empathetic listening.

My colleagues wonder why I don't teach advanced professional pianists.  The answer is really simple: For the most part they are entirely unprepared to be taken seriously on their own merits.  They want to be encouraged to imitate what the teacher does because all their training has been to that end. 

I much prefer dealing with children and with amateurs who have no technique behind which to hide.

Imagining Again What Chopin Heard

"Bach and Sons: Listening for the Future" is the theme of my current recital series.  Along with selections by the aforenamed I am programming requests from students and audience members.  This month's request was for Chopin waltzes.  What a tremendous gift that request has turned out to be!

It has caused me to imagine Chopin having heard CPE Bach and WF Bach in addition to his well-known admiration for Bach pere.  I hear in the waltzes, especially the A minor, direct connections to keyboard techniques used by the two Bach sons:  it is extraordinary what a difference it makes in recreating a sound universe.

I feel privileged to have had an organist's training with so much emphasis on articulation and touch--it occurs to me that every keyboard musician of that time would have played many different instruments each with a distinctive action, tonal coloration, and touch to match.  I can only imagine JS Bach sitting down at a fortepiano and realizing that this was a whole new animal, therefore not presuming to write for it just because it was there.  At the same time I can imagine his taking to this new creation had he but world enough and time.  I see no logic whatsoever in emulating Baroque keyboard sounds, whatever they may be, on the modern piano.

Music Notation: Does It Make Sense?

It is tempting to be in a hurry to get children to read music.  There is no way to speed up the process except by dumbing it down to a tabulature system in which this symbol stands for that specific key on the piano or fingering on whatever instrument.

But the auditory sense of music cannot be written down because tones that are visually close together are often farthest apart in terms of resonance or sound quality, while those that are acoustically so close as to be almost indistinguishable from one another appear on paper to be considerable distances apart.

It is a matter of subtle coordination but it can be taught.  It just takes time.