I Bet You Haven't Heard This Before!

If I have one fantasy about Mozart's playing it is that he played with that attitude, and with the skill to pull it off--every time. 

The reason people are afraid to go hear his music is that they have heard it all before, mostly played as if it exists to have been heard before.  As some would say, "Pullleeeze!"

What would be the point of that?

Within the past week my playing received two of the most meaningful possible compliments, each from a professional musician in response to a different Mozart sonata:  To the G major: "It sounded as if you were making it up as you went along."  To the late D major:  "It hardly sounded like a sonata."

Thank you.  We are taught to analyze these works until they lose all possible vitality; we are not taught to let them speak their own distinctive language which, by the way, is crafted so as not to be repetitive, however repetitive it may look on paper.

You should have been there.

One Angel at a Time

I often talk about perceiving music one tone at a time, but that needs some clarification, especially about that use of "time."

Time perception itself is hugely enlarged in the action of playing music.  The ear picks up on millions of vibration events, either taking delight in them or being horrified at their range and intensity.

The trouble is that listeners not engaged in the activity of performance take in that kind of time awareness only subconsciously.  Music teachers suffer greatly from that kind of listening over-simplification.  Needless to say, time is far easier to deal with when it is controllable, i.e., predictable, reliable, tedious, boring.

The essential difference lies in the bass notes and the long tones.  These are what inform and enrich the life of vibrations on the piano.  Attending only to the melody just does not allow room for that level of auditory magic to occur.  That magic is the essence of the time I am trying to describe, a time that seems so out of time.

Top voice only; right hand principally--these are the basic rules behind much piano training, to this day.

This post got its title from a certain pin head.

Schumann: Arabeske

Here is a truly puzzling piece, perhaps for that reason given that title.

A young musician asked me once why the bass notes are staccato in only part of the A section.  Interesting question, especially in the light of standard performances of this work, in which beats are accented, both top and bottom.  If read properly, i.e., in the manner of the notated articulations, however, and in the light of Schumann's lifelong fascination with beats that precede themselves, so to speak, and if played truly pianissimo, as indicated, the relation between top and bottom is completely transformed.  The staccato notes simply emphasize that point of clarification.

In the contrasting sections various contrasts are stated, also loud (i.e., forte and fortissimo) and clear, with beats shared equally by the two hands.

People who heard my performance of the Arabeske last night were astonished at how much more interesting this was than the standard interpretations with which they are all too familiar.  I could never get interested in it played in the conventional manner.  This way, however, I can't begin to describe how fascinating it is.

Go Ahead: Stick Your Neck Out

If classical music is to have a chance of survival in this over-controlled tech world players simply must learn to dare the forbidden.  When is that going to happen if not when the player is young?

Too often teachers take it as their duty to produce students who clone mature performances rather than to nurture confidence in their students' distinctive voices .

Recently I put out the question on an Internet chat list: What piano performances had most affected you?  Only one response cited a live performance; all the others were recordings.

I know that my CDs, which are entirely unedited and which do contain flaws, have alienated some people.  Others have said that they realize there must be mistakes on the CD but that they do not hear them.

One of the latter was a quite rigid musician with whom I used to perform. 

Hmmm.

Which Do You Support: Arts or Ads?

Every time you read a blog post that speaks to you you might consider dropping a dime into a piggybank.  At the end of a month tally up the dimes and send that amount in to support the blogger.

It would be interesting.  I know of a major charity that survived because volunteers painstakingly glued single grains of rice to letters of solicitation, asking that each grain yield a single dollar bill.  It was a lot of work, involving a lot of rice, but the charity benefited hugely from the money and from the public support.

These daily posts are my grains of rice.

See how to respond at www.tonalrefraction.com

When Expression is Not Expressive

For all that I deplore the effect of recorded music on the phenomenon of live listening, I am grateful that, from time to time, I catch a broadcast of a recording I would never otherwise hear.

One such was a recent airing of Itzhak Perlman playing the "Turkish" violin concerto of Mozart, James Levine conducting.  Technically polished, both orchestra and soloist would fall into the category of excellent, without doubt.  The tone of the violin was uniformly high-strung: rapid vibrato to produce a singing tone throughout.

But it is clear from just listening to the music that it is not about singing tone throughout.  For one thing, in the manner of all Mozart, deceptions abound: leading tones that do not resolve, upward wafts that do not lead in that direction, upbeats that do not prepare the following downbeats.  In order to express these deceptions one would have to lighten up on that singing tone quality and allow some air, some transparency into the sound.

Thinking back, I cannot help but contrast this recording with the Rachel Podger / Gary Cooper recording of a very early Mozart sonata played on period instruments.  To be sure there were obvious differences in approach and in technique; but more than that, the resonant environment of this recording was richly intimate, while in the Perlman it presupposed the clean, non-resonating environment of the well-produced (over-produced?) LP.

Maybe that technique of high-strung vibrato is the only way to pierce the sterility of that style of recording technology.  Who knows?  We do know that tempo decisions in Classical symphonies began to be determined by the minutes available on one side of an old 78rpm side.

We should also be aware that a certain uniformity of technological approach is conducive to overall conformity.  All one has to do is listen to a dozen recordings of a richly detailed Beethoven sonata or concerto to realize how little individuality is out there on those mass-produced pieces of plastic. 

Schumann: The Post-Modern Piano

I have long maintained that with the invention of the piano notation should have changed to reflect the vastly expanded world of resonance released and revealed by the new instrument.  Along with that statement I am quick to add that, had composers actually changed their syntax to match the sound, no one would have known how to deal with it and the instrument would most likely have died the unnatural premature death of the arpeggione and other instrumental novelties of the day, of which there were many.

Along came Schumann.  Probably more than any other composer he found ways to require the pianist to connect with sound in an altogether new set of dimensions.  He did this by literally stretching beats to occur over long periods of time, with pre-bar bass notes, grace notes, rolled chords, and other devices (mostly annoying to the novice and to the unimaginative) that cannot simply be played but which demand observation, one tone -- sometimes one partial -- at a time.

Also he explored the difference in resonance between black and white key basses: Just look at the Symphonic Etudes.  Whole pages can be played with full pedal over a low bass, the vibrations cleaning themselves as the music builds.

Add to that his radical dynamics:  long pianissimos, sudden fortes, markings that direct the player's  attention to the sound not the execution.

Even Chopin did not go this far into the new territory.