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The Piano Teaches Us How the Ear Works

I have long been convinced that the reason the piano occasioned such a burst of compositional genius was that it revealed as no other single instrument ever had (with the possible exception of the viola d'amore) how the ear works.

Having learned to interact with the natural horn, exploring Beethoven's Op. 17 sonata for natural horn and piano, I am more convinced of this than ever.

It is a matter of sensitivity to the coexistence of natural overtones with unnatural mixtures of unpredictable clashes and blends for, because of its mechanics, the acoustics of the piano was always about that coexistence--from day one, regardless of the temperament to which it is/was tuned.

A not-so-funny affirmation of this is that pianists, young and old, professional and not, often attempt to mask the unnatural aspects of its sound by always playing with soft pedal and with the lid down.  I did it for years so I know what that is all about.

Close-Up Listening

We are all so accustomed to listening from a great distance that we have forgotten how to listen close up--we have, in fact, forgotten how to play to a close-up audience.

So much is lost in the process.  It is as if sound has had to be enlarged even to be audible (translated: children have to bang) and we listeners no longer know that it is the edges of every sound that make it meaningful.  (In this regard I always think of the burred lines in Rembrandt etchings.)

The most close-up listening I do is when I sing a cappella with singers whose ears are not wedded to equal temperament -- yes, there is an audible difference; when I accompany singers on the piano--an art I practiced for several decades and very much loved; and when I play chamber music with genuine artists who match my listening.

I am in the midst of just such an experience, this time working together with my son, Jacob, on Beethoven's Sonata Op. 17 for natural horn and piano.  The instrument joined the family a couple of years ago. I had never worked closely with it and find myself in the rare privileged position of getting to know a sound together with my son, who is an avid amateur horn player.

We hear and respond to overtones, not just the notes.  The music evokes a constant state of discovery.  Demonstrations of the sound will open the Tuesday programs in my forthcoming series on Mozart: The Radical Ear, to take place third Tuesdays and followings Thursdays October through January.  E mail for more information.

The Piano Makes the Theory Canon Obsolete

I mentioned something to this effect (specifically that the piano was from its very beginning a post-tonal instrument) to a senior member of the theory faculty at Indiana University, whom I met at a conference on the Musical Ear.  "Yes," she said, agreeing with me.  "It's out of tune."

The piano was always out of tune for two reasons:

• Sympathetic vibration: More pronounced in this instrument than in any other, this would have set off a bewildering array of contradictory overtones regardless of what temperament was used to tune the instrument
• Key leverage: The relatively short black key levers, usually struck at the tip, would have released a more resonant sound than white keys struck at mid-point.  This would have made some major triads, D major, A major, E major, clearly dissonant.

Thus notions of tonal harmony as practiced during the Baroque era would no longer apply, especially if the black keys were disposed so as to aggravate their dissonant potential -- by doubling them, or placing them in conspicuous registers.  Had the syntax of composition favored that radical acoustical shift it is highly likely that the instrument would have gone the way of many other inventions of the time, the arpeggione, for example.  So the trick was to disguise the innovation and trust that people would hear it.

Instead, visual analysis took over.  The hearing of generations of musicians has been conditioned to death by the reduction of just about everything to triadic functionality.  If our hearing is now flawed it is not so much the result of equal temperament as of this stifling pedagogy.

Once having learned Mozart as a composer of tonal harmony on the piano it is wondrously difficult to return to the piano's elemental acoustics as the source of his insights and the inspiration for his many sonatas for piano solo or for piano with accompaniment of the violin -- for that is what those duos are, not the other way around.

I base these observations on my initial shock at encountering Mozart's black keys as a child, on a later shock playing harpsichord for the very first time, and my ultimately clarifying shock when, in my 50's, I returned to intensive solo piano playing and could identify the phenomenon.

"She Hears The Way I See"

Joan Farber, exceptional artist, dear friend (drawings/watercolors: local-artists.org/user/4069), thus describes the connection between my ear and her eye.  Thinking about the way musicians hear in advance of sound I realized that she sees the movement of color and line and that is why her work seems so compatible with mine.

It is a way of not just taking in the aura of sound, the aura of what is seen, but of participation in it.

Perhaps you might say we are both committed to the as-yet-unseen, unheard. 

Tone Perception Visualized

I celebrate publication of Tone Perception Visualized: I  The Mozart G Minor Piano Quartet, the first in a projected series of Tonal Refraction publications.

Tonal Refraction is a method that permits an individual to visualize her perception of tone in a given composition on a given day: not attempting to be definitive, it gives permission to notice that one's experience of tone is infinitely variable, both acoustically and emotionally.

Color is a readily accessible means of depicting emotional association, but may also reveal acoustical resonance in interesting ways.  I might use blue for a particularly warm tone and find myself radiating out through greens toward yellow to explore its upper overtones, and through purples to red for lower resonance.

The grid allows for subjective responses to rise and fall.  Not every note that appears to rise actually conveys rising motion.  Just because a different finger on a higher key is needed to produce the notated pitch on the piano, for example, does not mean that the intention of the tone is to lead the ear upward.  Perhaps it is an ornamental tone, perhaps a kind of yodeled harmonic--the call is subject to subjective response which very much affects the way the music is played.

Tonal Refraction arose in my dreams upon my return to serious solo piano playing at the age of 57 after decades of being an organist and chamber musician.  To celebrate I programmed a recital that included Mozart's G Major Sonata which I was assigned at age 12.   It was as if the deeply troubling responses I had had as a child had remained frozen in my subconscious and now compelled visualization to give them substance.  Those responses informed my playing of the G Minor Piano Quartet, one of the most troubling works I encountered as an adult.

Tonal Refraction might therefore be said to be the work of a child.   It is why I take so seriously teaching children.

Reading Inside of the Sound: Schumann Once Again

The Album for the Young contains some of the most masterful insights into reading music -- properly reading music -- at the piano.  When reading is strictly a matter of eye / motor response much of this music makes no sense or quickly palls.

Already in the interaction of the quarter notes and eighth notes in Melodie (piece #1) the essential sound is either utterly boring or completely compelling, depending on whether or not the ear is activated.  Trallerlied, of a similar texture, makes an even stronger case for the necessity of attentive listening by the insertion of some subtly discordant measures that I never liked until I learned to quiet myself down sufficiently to pay them heed on behalf of an adult student who is quite determined to get to, as she puts it, "the music part."

Determined to explore the actions and reactions involved in sight-reading I turned to Scheherezade in whose rolled chords and meandering eighth-notes Schumann stops time to spin out every sound.  According to the story it is a matter of life and death.

Fascination vs. boredom.