Attention Span Getting Ever Shorter

In moments of total fatigue or desperation I sometimes play Solitaire on my iPhone, the game subject to intermittent interruptions by unwelcome ads.  Try as I may I cannot locate the SkipIt button in time to avoid at least 3 seconds of flicker.

I am astonished at the amount of activity/change/implied plot can be contained in those 3 seconds.  They attest to an ever decreasing span of attentiveness to the moving image and, I suspect, to every other form of content.

Perhaps the hardest form of motion to take in is the vibration of living sound.  Everything conspires against noticing it and taking it seriously.

I knew back in the early 60's before TV had ironized its grip on us all that this would be a challenge for anyone in the performing arts: How to program so that people would notice time passing rather than assume it in pre-packaged durations, like one side of a 33 rpm record.

So I began purposefully to program chamber music recitals which alternated not only styles but durations with works as long as 45 seconds juxtaposed with others more traditionally 45 minutes long.

The danger doesn't decrease.

Support! Support! Support!

Yesterday I received the smartest bit of fund-raising in the mail: An invitation to commit to a yearly gift of $25 to my alma mater, in recognition of which pledge the Trustees will contribute $500 to the school. 

What could be simpler?  What could be more indicative of my gratitude that a place existed where I could be exposed to genuine inquiry and concern, where I would form lifelong friendships?

Why not do it for this blog?  Tonal Refraction is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, an arts services organization; contributions to Fractured Atlas designated for Tonal Refraction are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.  If you have ever found yourself thinking twice about one of these posts I invite you to go to tonalrefraction.com and match your response to my commitment to music, to learning, to my audience, you.

Martha Graham Illuminates the Ups and Downs

Actually Martha Graham illuminated the agonizing tension between forward and back, analogous in many ways to the musical rise and fall.  She had a characteristic gesture of the arms and face yearning to move forward while the solar plexus pulled in the opposite direction, making a graphic body image of the soul torn between outward and inward movement.

I think of this often, as one needs to know absolutely nothing about dance or movement or the body to grasp the power of the gesture.

The 19th century seemed to recognize only one direction, up.  Onward and upward was the battle cry.  Progress!  Valhalla!  Arrival!  Manifest Destiny!

Have we recovered yet?

The Piano in Your Own Room

Imagine having the piano entirely to yourself, for no ears but your own.  Imagine cultivating your own feelings about its magical sound and the incredible music composed for it without always the fictional audience or critic listening from outside, most likely criticizing.

Everything would be different.

One of the best things that ever happened in my family was when a wonderful wise friend gave us his old Steinway upright.  It went straight into my daughter's room where she played with it completely on her own for years, developing a sense of its sound that is unlike anything I have ever heard.  Now that she is going public with that artistry it is like being let in on a secret - a beautifully worked out secret.

Get your piano out of a public space and into your child's room, or your room.  It will change your life.

How Come Amateurs Can be More Exciting Than Professionals?

This is an increasingly urgent question as I observe more and more amateurs falling for the trap that confuses sounding polished with being impassioned.  As long as the going professional standard is to sound polished no matter what, amateurs will find it harder and harder to give their unconscious musical selves permission to show much less flourish.

The trend has been growing steadily more pronounced.  It was already evident when I began coaching amateur chamber musicians in 1975.  It has most definitely become more problematic.

The essential question in chamber music always has to be "Why does it take three (or however many) people to play this piece?"  As long as three people are trying to sound as though they represent some fictional single point of view the question has no meaning, nor does the music.

In the case of solo playing it is a matter of the amateur having the courage to address the music inward rather than to what Emily Dickinson called "an admiring bog."  Being let in on the innermost musical instincts of anyone is for me the highest possible privilege, no matter how skilled or unskilled the player.

If Sight-Reading, Why Not Ear-Reading?

The discussion rages on an Internet group how best to teach sight-reading.  Most of the techniques touted as effective are all visual aids, only rarely does anyone mention the need to attach any of the alphabet or number devices to actual sounds.

Today I was describing to a colleague how difficult it was for me to learn to listen without looking at a score for as soon as I look at a score I know what I should hear, rather than having any awareness of what I am actually hearing -- there is a big difference.  If I analyze in advance what the student should be playing I deprive the student of my attempt to understand what he or she does in fact hear, so I am stuck with a categorical right note/wrong note approach, rather than with the far more interesting "Ah! I hear how you understand this passage and can now show you what alternatives the composer has suggested."

It was not easy to learn to listen this way but the rewards have been great both for myself and for my students, both in piano and in chamber music.

I went to this trouble in order to demonstrate the validity of Viktor Zuckerkandl's insights into the innate logic of the musical mind and of the unfailing bodily sense of following that logic even into the realm of the conventional wrong note.*

Without that kind of listening I would never have noticed that some tonal works are conceived so as to distort the reliable tuning to the tonic triad or even to the instrument's innate resonance (like the violin's A or the cello's G).  When I have heard that happen it has been stunning to identify the event and then be unable to discern it by visually studying the score - so overpoweringly inhibiting is the conceptual world represented by standard music notation.

*Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World, published by Bollingen Press, 1956

The Body and the Ear

For many years I have been testing Viktor Zuckerkandl's insight that musical logic brings about certain subconscious responses that indicate a kind of innate common sense.  Today, once again, I had ample and convincing proof that he was right.

It is a young woman, currently living without a piano, with no particular musical "talent," but whose ear is astute as it usually is in people for whom results do not come easily.  I have invented an exercise in which the student plays the same note an octave apart with the two hands, pedal down.  Then, at random, without changing the pedal, the student plays two other white key pitches, returns to the first pitch, and continues in this manner.

It was fascinating to observe the number of instances in which she gravitated to consonant intervals -- she has a pronounced preference for what she calls "right notes."  I know this is no accident because I observe it in others, including myself.  I used to be able to do this exercise myself but can no longer.  It is as if an involuntary measurer takes over and I go to octaves and fifths whether I "want" to or not.