Now They're Intent on Murdering Color! What Next?

In today's paper I see notice of an App called Interaction of Color, Josef Albers, no less--not the App, but the source of the remarkable series of silk screen prints meant to be savored, one at a time, to demonstrate his point about the dynamic nature of color.

So another murder by ear plug, so to speak.

The Albers is so vivid that, when I first looked at it, it had been handed to me upside down and the first print I saw, meant to be the last, caused me to burst into tears.

How likely is that on a mobile device?

I invite you to join me in the world of real vibrations.

Murder by Earplug

Worse than being bodily stabbed to death by the innocuous little buggers is the death we endure every time we plug ourselves in: the death of tone.

At least there is an actual corpse to show in cases of bodily murder.  Who is the victim in the other case?  Well, Mozart, for example.

When are music teachers going to own up to their own insensitivity to tone and stop inflicting "easy" Mozart on their students?

Yesterday I heard two different students play two different movements of the Piano Concerto in A, K. 488, which I first played (with orchestra) at age 15.  I retain memories of the piece's agony.  I did not know when I played it that it was agony, but I felt the agony of the sounds--not the themes, the sounds themselves.

I had a chat on the way out with a self-taught singer/songwriter about the key of A major as an embodiment of physical pain.  Turns out she had found herself plus other musicians in the studio two days before having to transpose a song from B-flat to A.  It was so entirely altered by the change of key that they had to rearrange the whole thing.  She knew exactly what I was talking about.

What does it show?  Ear  Ear  Ear    no plug   Ear  Ear  Ear

Empfindsam

Playing the five early Mozart Piano Sonatas in the ear-environment of C.P.E. Bach is a tremendous adventure.

Note that it has taken me months to "get" the right combination of ear and finger touch to do full justice to the non sequiturs on which hang so much of the humor and the pathos of these pieces.

I would propose that as a working definition of Empfindsam in describing this style.

Watch Out!

Schumann's Album for the Young is a brilliant treatise on how music works at the piano, presented in small forms with the utmost precision as to articulations, phrasing, etc.

Then an editor gets hold of it, puts his name on it, collects royalties.  For what?

For misusing such words as Moderato (one of my favorites, remember?) for Melodie, where Schumann has indicated a clear and decisive nothing as a tempo marking.  This absence of a directive can only mean what my teacher, Hans Neumann, used to call "watch out!" or "pay attention." 

As if that weren't enough the editor in question proceeds to change articulations, fully distorting the truly waggish (schalkhaft) originals in the Sizilianisch. 

Watch out!

(Actually that is a quote from a great Schumann lied: "Huete dich!  Sei wach und munter!"

Lessons from CPE

What a pleasure to run into a real live person with whom I could have a lively conversation about C.P.E. Bach!  The work of this inventive man have gone largely unnoticed by the musical establishment as it is hard to read them without knowledge of the pre-Classical.   The orderly succession of bars and progressions that we learn as children and, alas, later in music school simply do not apply to this music.

I am discovering a whole new work, W. 62/10, assigned to me, as it were, by one of my audience for my next program.  It is hilarious, therefore insightful as to the clash between orderly and not.

If he did nothing else for posterity he bears as one of his middle names, perhaps the crucial one, Phillip, the name of his godfather, Georg Phillip Telemann.  If J.S. admired Telemann sufficiently to name a son after him, well....figure it out.

Where the Poetry Enters In

It is self-defeating to be rigid about rhythm with young children -- or anyone else, for that matter.  The inability to keep a steady beat may be the beginning of a truly poetic sensibility regarding movement, yielding a rare insightful fusion of body and imagination inaccessible to most body-bound types who cannot imagine leeway within a 3/4 bar.

Leeway is in danger, folks!  Appreciate it! 

Cantabile

Like most words musicians use, the meaning of cantabile has changed a great deal over time and from one side of the Alps to the other. 

To modern pianists it seems to conjure up bel canto opera arias.  To a Baroque-trained singer, however, it is quite the opposite.  Baroque vocal style relies heavily on a sense of the center of the voice and of the vowel.  Notes are not generic, pitches and range are functions of the animal organ that is our voice and we should make no effort to gloss over them.

The cantabile instruction that Bach gives his son Wilhelm Friedemann in his preface to the Inventions makes sense only in Baroque vocal terms.  It is plenty difficult to discern nonetheless.