Musical Accuracy

Accuracy in music is relative.  People who define music as CDs would probably deem accurate any performance that sounded as much like a CD as possible.  For others, those who favor spontaneity, accuracy would be much harder to pin down.

And that is the point.  If music is defined as made with an infinitely variable acoustical mix to be perceived by the infinitely variable human brain, then accuracy is ephemeral, therefore even more to be treasured because, by definition, it cannot be repeated.

I can recall certain flavors experienced once that I will never again taste: the sauce on the quenelles de brochet in a particularly lovely neighborhood restaurant in the 1ere arrondissement, summer of 1959. 

Ludwig Wants Down Off That Pedestal

The thought occurred to me that the reason the three-Beethovens-in-a-row syndrome took hold in the first place is because of the placement of this man upon some mythic pedestal, not just heroic, but supreme, untouched--you get the picture.

The same people who put him up there are shocked at the thought that there is humor in his music, especially in his symphonies.  Beethoven, even at his most serious, was never completely removed from the spirit of irony that underlies so much musical humor.

I recently heard a performance of the Grosse Fuge string quartet.  It couldn't have been a good performance because it was sanctimonious in the extreme.  Sanctimonious and serious are very different things.

Virtuosity and Honest Musicianship

The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive.  All too often, however, I hear virtuosi whose skill seems to create in them the illusion that the elements of the music no longer really matter.

The result is faster and faster tempos; less and less traction within the vibrations themselves.

I have walked out of performances in which that is the primary non-happening as I find it demeaning to listen to it.

But there are viruosi whose skill exists for the purpose of engaging the listener in the fullest possible range of fascination with vibrations soft as well as loud, slow as well as fast.

The model for this will always be for me Artur Rubinstein.

Pamela Stanley: Scientist / Piano Student

Yesterday Dr. Pamela Stanley was awarded a distinguished prize by the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, of which she is a distinguished member.  Her field, glycobiology (simply put, the study of sugars) exists because she asked simple questions to which she determinedly pursued answers.

The fact that I have enjoyed teaching Pamela for a very long time rather amuses me, as piano teachers are known to declare that after a period of time they have nothing more to teach a student.  I have yet to experience this problem because I take as a given that what the student learns from me is only part of the transaction.  Much more important to the working relationship is what I learn from the student.

Is this fair?

What could be more elusive than the pursuit of answers to the simple questions evoked in the works of the masters?  Does an honest player ever stop asking those questions?

Minuets are Back in Style

Quite by chance and trapped in a dentist's chair, I heard the entire Haydn Symphony No. 92, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.  I was fascinated, as I always am by Haydn; and particularly by the minuet, which Bernstein got pretty much wrong.

No wonder!  He was active when people did not yet know that there was more to a minuet than counting to three.  I am happy to report that minuets have come back into style--which means that more and more frequently one hears them rendered as they would have been in the 18th century.

The difference is variation:  What seems to be a repetitive rhythm in strict 3/4 time turns out to be successive contrasts when rendered a la minuet.  For example:
 Long---- short Long---short Long---short Long---  looks like a simple Strong----weak repeated

But in the minuet it would come out like this:
Strong ---Strong weak (Strong on a tie or in a rest!) weak, alternating strong and weak every two beats, whether or not a fresh attack coincides with a strong beat.  (Impossible to render plausible in words....)

This incredibly interesting syncopation is difficult to do, delightful to the ear, and would certainly have inspired incredible dancing.

Close-up Listening Changes Everything

Instead of going on tour I am on tour in my own studio, committed to two performances per month, organized in four month cycles:  I stick with one theme per cycle (currently Beethoven's rhythms) in relation to which four programs evolve, each one performed twice.

The development in the programming, in the playing, and in the listeners' involvement is truly extraordinary.  It is the kind of music making I have always aspired to.  The best thing about it is that the audience is truly part of the enterprise.

They do not come to be impressed but to be let in on music in depth. The location is NYC.  Interested? Get in touch.

Conversing with Beethoven

It occurs to me that, though Artur Schnabel did us a great favor by introducing Beethoven piano sonatas onto the concert scene, it is time for us to outgrow the entire-evening-of-Beethoven-sonatas syndrome.

Why not entertain that great music in exchange with other compositions?  For example, the combination of the Op 10 No 3 with Debussy's Suite Bergamasque and with Brahms's Op. 39 Waltzes has been revelatory in relation to all three works. 

The performance is not about anything but poetry, and not in some flimsy artsy sense.  Sound; touch; immediacy.

Someone listening last night told me she was in tears during the Beethoven.  Whatever she was experiencing was coming straight from the medium of sound.  I do not entertain any emotion whatsoever when playing even the most emotionally charged music:  there simply isn't time.  Too much is happening to be distracted by a nameable state of mind.