Is Correctness a Long or Short-Term Goal?

I have initiated an on-line discussion on whether it is a good or a bad idea to encourage students to sound like everyone else / someone else.  The responses have been illuminating, as people tell of their experiences with students with special needs, and so on.

One responder rightly likens teaching piano to parenting.  But then he goes on to say that it is important to start with getting it right after which the student will grow into having his or her own voice.

Really?  Doesn't the beginner have a point of view from the beginning:  a point of view not verbalized but evident in the quality of their listening and their response?  It is up to the teacher to observe what that point of view consists of and to build on it, since it is the student's own.

As a well-behaved young student I dutifully made a show of doing what I was told, although since I knew I didn't "get" it, I never practiced.  How could music be so puzzling?  How could I feel so incompetent even while being praised? How could the teacher miss the signs of this disconnect?

If I have survived to become a serious pianist it is because I quit piano more than once as a youngster.

Perhaps we ought to look more closely at the potentially positive motives behind young students' quitting piano lessons.

Live and, Again, Live

If I had it my way the power of the media would have been concentrated on making the intimate experience of music and drama accessible to more and more people.  Naturally, nobody consulted me on the subject, though I recall some rare moments in the early days of television when live events were televised in such a way that I, the distant viewer, had the feeling I had been let in on some wondrous event.

Now it seems that at least radio is finally catching on, at least on WQXR in New York (available on-line at www.wqxr.org) where increasingly one hears broadcasts of live performances, some of them available as commercial recordings.  These are far and away my favorite listening experiences.

I test this by tuning in at random, not knowing what I am hearing, seeing if I can detect the qualities that set live performance apart from the perfection-driven studio product.

Now why can't we work at getting the recording model to follow suit with more and more recordings of live performances?  Mine are all live, made on my piano, in my home, before an audience of friends--the best, perhaps the "only" way to play.

Twelve-tone Rows, Of All Things!

Yesterday I butted into a conversation between two theory instructors, one of whom was complaining that his students could not identify the rows in a simple Schoenberg composition.

I resisted telling the following true story:

I used to do music in tandem with a 7th-grade math class at an inner-city school in New York.  I thought the kids would enjoy hearing a composition (Bagatelles for Harpsichord or Piano) which happens to use serial technique, written for me by my friend, the distinguished composer Ursula Mamlok.  I posed to the children the same question I posed to Ursula, the question which prompted the composition.  How would you write a meaningful prelude to the Suite in A minor by Henry Purcell?

One of the kids said right away, "Well, you certainly wouldn't start with A!"  Sure enough, A is the last tone of the row.

Models Are What We Learn, Not Substance

Ever since I was about five and someone gave me a toy plastic sailboat I have had a hunger for the real thing.  Why build a model of a sailboat that has none of the qualities of a real sailboat?  And why, of all the bad ideas, give it to a child?

It puzzled me throughout my formal education that so much emphasis was spent on mastering the models and so little attention paid to what the models represented.

Tonal Refraction is a model, but a model of the real thing, in that it represents what is heard, not the mechanics either of structure or the means of producing the sound.  It models an invisible sequence of events, sensible only to the listening ear, swimming in a sea of resonances impossible to predict or identify.

How many times in making a Tonal Refraction of a composition I think I know have I made the same mistake: i.e., predicted the length of a given tone, or its recurrence in a clearly sequential passage?

We are quickly lulled into the relative passivity of focusing on the active part of tones, the attack, while ignoring that other source of activity, the release.  Part of the art of composition is to use those seductions to arouse attention to the true events.

" 'Taint easy, McGee!"

Superfluous, Read Superficial, Rubato

Random tuning in to the radio can yield interesting discoveries.  Yesterday it was Horowitz playing a Liszt transcription of Schubert's famous Serenade, one of those unforgettable melodies that drift over what seems like an endlessly repetitive rhythmic accompaniment.

Horowitz did the usual thing, emphasizing quarter note divisions on every single beat of every single bar, though Schubert has distinctly indicated not triplets, but sextuples, which go three to the half note, NOT the quarter note.  To avoid sounding repetitive he indulged the melody with shameless rubato, completely unnecessary if the accompaniment figure is set up to produce inherent tension, i.e., interest.

Just now I heard a young pianist playing Chopin's Scherzo in E.  Same problem.  Only here, to avoid the monotony he played faster than fast, thus missing any chance of interest in internal rhythms, and had to play the slower passages slower than slow and more sentimentally than I can tolerate.

Curious the lengths to which musicians go to avoid answering the fundamental question: Why I am so bored playing this piece?

Let's Hear It for Not Practicing

I get in a certain amount of trouble for pointing out that sometimes players who don't practice turn out to be more insightful about music than people who think they know what they are doing because they can play all the right notes.

This morning was another instance of how this works:  A young man who loves the "Moonlight" Sonata, as do I, played through the first 2/3 of the first movement.  Was there any passage that particularly bothered him, or stood out as different from all the rest?  He noted the passage where the piece happens to modulate to the key of F# minor--I say "happens to" because I don't believe in the concept as taught in theory class.

Making the music coherent to him required that I attend to its inner workings, something I had never had to do because I have "no trouble" playing the notes.  But sometimes "no trouble" is trouble in disguise, or at least non-comprehension.  Just because I can get away without noticing what holds it together doesn't mean I "get" it.

I am struck by how often it is the students who lead me to real learning.

Going With the Flow

I am always surprised at how much music depends on sounds that cannot be written down, i.e., on resonance, which you might say is the subject of Tonal Refraction.

This element is often disregarded in training children, though it is arguably the dimension of sound that most intrigues them: just tap on a tiny bell or other reverberant object and see the infant's eyes light up.

This aspect of Chopin's music, properly brought to life, makes an indelible impression.  I will never forget hearing for the first time Rubinstein in Carnegie Hall stopping time with the opening sound of the D-flat Major Nocturne.  It stays with me as the model of how the piano works, and of how music written for the piano works.

Once having learned to ignore this element it is wondrously difficult to bring it to the fore.  To do this I recommend playing pianissimo with half-pedal, never changing the pedal through mistakes and all.  As you feel the vibrations accumulate they begin to make a kind of sense that analyzable harmonies simply cannot achieve.