Awakened by a Note

Not just any note: This is the all-too-familiar yet totally baffling first note on the violin of Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata, Op. 24, subject of Vol. III of Tone Perception Visualized.  Why does it wake me up?

• It is too long
• It is difficult to tune
• It doesn't really go anywhere
• Yet it eventually becomes four closely connected As in unison with the piano
• Later to turn into trills, also in unison with the piano

No wonder it wakes me up.

Is there a possibility that Beethoven is telling me something I hadn't thought of before?  I had known that this sonata is about the difference between tones that are stable and tones that move, usually by sliding rather by articulated motion.  But this is a kind of tone motion I had not yet figured out.

Visualize What Exactly?

The more I think about it, the more convinced I become that the slur is the critical marking in music, but that different kinds of slurs mean different things.

For example, a slur over two notes indicates a slide from the first to the second, usually down, but not always.  The note value of the sound produced is the sum of the two slurred notes.  So a half-note slurred to a quarter becomes a dotted half-note, or a half-note that slides onto the quarter-note pitch.  Also, it is important to note that the release of that quarter note will not coincide precisely with the beginning of the following beat, as it is weak rather than emphatic.

The three-note slur may be an indication of an ornamental slide familiar from the Baroque period when a curved line before a note indicated such a lead-in to it.  These are not actually rises to the top note, though that note may be notated with a longer value than the two leading up to it.  Rather, it is a weak pulling away from the lowest tone, which must remain the most "real."

More problematic are the slurs over several notes, of which I can cite two problematic examples:

In the case of four or more notes of like value I check whether the last note is higher, lower, or the same as the first and feel that overall direction as the point of the slur.  Hardest by far is when the notes match and I must "move" without going anywhere.  (Schumann: Einsame Blume)

When there four or more notes of unlike value the problem is more difficult..  I have in mind the opening of Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata for Piano and Violin, which opens with a half-note slurred to eight sixteenths that seem to fall.  But how can a line convincingly fall from such a sustained value through so many quick values?  I maintain that it does not fall, but rather that it is wisped away, so to speak, at the end of the upbow, permitting the true counterpoint of the melody to assert itself.  In the sense of "like goes to like," then, the half-note A goes via the wisp to the half-note C and so on.  It makes sense when you think about it but only if you imagine playing the entire bar without counting to four.

Chopin and Beethoven

I am not the first person to notice close connections between these two giants of piano composition in the early 19th century, though that connection might be hard to discern in the overly self-indulgent virtuosity that seems de riguer in the hands of certain players.

Just looking over some of the Preludes while giving Beethoven some extremely detailed study reveals similarities I never noticed before: For example

1. A fascination with multi-level meters:  what look like repeated eighth-note chords actually going against the grain of the quarter- and half-notes they accompany
2. Figures that repeat odd numbered groupings within duple meters
3. The indication to play lento or sostenuto when "nothing" seems to be happening

The last one is by far the most revealing when it comes to measuring the distance between visual and auditory response.  As a student I was a fast reader at the expense of being a good listener.  An observant and wise teacher (Hans Neumann) caught me at it and knew how to change it, for which I will always be grateful.   It seems these two activities occupy the mind in opposite direction, the one ultra fast, the other even faster though on the surface ostensibly slower.

The trouble is that most of our education relies on quick responses to visual information, in fact everything in our multi-tasked environment suggests that this is the way to go.  But listening, though it seems at first to be passive, is actually attuning one's mind to the speed of vibration, than which nothing is faster.

The ear signal requires the ability to open the mind to peripheral vibration, the parts of the sound that cannot be written down, and the parts that vary from piano to piano and from room to room.

This is definitely the hard part.

Listening for Meaning

We encounter markings in printed music that are difficult to understand, ranging from notes that are marked as if to be played staccato but with a slur over them, to peculiar tempo indications, like rubato.  I don't recall where I found out that those slurred staccato notes indicate a very specific touch on the piano.

But yesterday I was overjoyed to find them in Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata, which I am exploring with Gregor Kitzis, violin.  Four repeated unisons, in both instruments, once marked crescendo, at other times with no crescendo indicated.  If played correctly there will be no pedal used, but rather a touch that permits the hammers to restrike the strings without the dampers reducing the vibrations in between hammer strokes.  The result is a very specific overtone ring that can be attained only in this fashion.

Gregor had to move so that he could savor the result and savor he did.

I think this is the reason why these sonatas are for piano and violin, not the other way around: their acoustical world is generated by the sympathetic vibration of the piano strings.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

There is simply no way for me to get you to hear as I do.  None.

I know this from watching the YouTube video of my performance of a Haydn piano sonata.  Following the playing on the original tape, I commented that, for the first time, I noted while playing that the piece is occupied with C#.  When I listen to the tape I cannot detect that detail, probably because my ear is so conditioned to tonal listening that I can no longer allow my mental ear to pick up the peripheral sounds that would potentially skew a traditional interpretation.  While playing, however, this is exactly what I am primed to do!

Interesting, isn't it, that something can be so vivid in the act and become so subject to ordinary intake at a time of more disengaged listening!

So there is more than a semantic difference between hearing what I hear and hearing as I hear.  And this is the subject of my new teaching initiative, Music Inside and Out.

What Might Happen to a Tone?

I recall a certain amount of annoyance in Music Theory class (granted it was a long time ago) when we were rewarded for identifying the functionality of a note in terms of its place within a harmonic progression.  How extraordinarily dull!

In the tone circles I devised for the tones in the Mozart G minor Piano Quartet lies a much more to-the-point image of what must concern us as players and as listeners:  what happens to this tone, or that?

There are many ways in which a composer may call attention to the volatility of a given tone, the most obvious being to change it soon after introducing it, as Mozart often does with C, turning it into C# soon after the opening of a movement in C major.  Another, more subtle way, is to do as Mozart does in K.478, to invert its logical placement by descending, rather than rising, to D.  Whereas the rise would affirm G as a reliable fundamental, that critical descent does the opposite.

There are so many subtle ways to untune a tone.

Let's Hear it for Music Librarians

I just returned from my first ever Music Librarians Association Conference - 4 days of very interesting conversation about the newly published Tone Perception Visualized: Mozart's G Minor Piano Quartet.  To my surprise many are already deeply committed to visualizations of various sorts, many seemed open to the notion of a graphic presentation of a musical work, and many were generous in their response to my invitation to try it themselves.

Asked to visualize even primitively the opening phrase of My Country, 'Tis of Thee produced a splendid variety of shapes and colors, exactly the sort of thing I recommend in learning to orient to the text.

There were those, of course, who couldn't get themselves to abandon the idea of sound being discrete as the symbols we us to represent it are discrete.