"I Hate Beethoven But I Laughed Out Loud!"

This is a quote from a musician and teacher who came last night to hear the "Spring" sonata as played by Gregor Kitzis, violin, and myself, using the shared resonance of the instruments as the subject matter of the piece.  It was truly a blast.  She wasn't the only one who laughed aloud.  So did Gregor, and so did I.

Now this is one of those notoriously long and difficult works that are overplayed without questioning, so overawed are we poor souls in relation to the overblown notion of Beethoven's greatness.

Sound is endlessly fascinating.  Let a genius fool around with it whose mind is entirely occupied with vibrations and you will get something like this sonata that evokes humor and engagement at so many levels that words cannot do it justice.

Another audience member -- also a musician and teacher as well as a composer -- chose rather to miss a train than a movement ...

Learning to Swim in Sound

The hardest thing in learning to swim is trusting that the water will support the weight of your body.

The hardest thing in music is trusting that sound is a real medium that will support the working of your body and your brain, releasing a level of response that is beyond interpretation.

The trouble with playing from memory is that it supports the false security of the already heard, rather than encouraging the real security of working with actual sound experienced afresh every time, always changing, always challenging--most importantly, never boring.

I Hear Therefore I Change My Technique

Having once heard the dialogue between different instrumental resonance as a structural fact in the works of Schumann, Brahms, et al, I knew I would have to change my technique so that others would hear it as well.

The first time I did so was in the Schumann G minor Piano Quartet, the one in which the cello has to tune the C string down to B-flat during one movement so as to resonate together with the piano's black keys. Cellists do not enjoy this as they are used to hearing all of their strings resonate sympathetically with that lowest fullness.  Changing it to a B-flat means that they cede that resonance to the other sound, the piano, and specifically to the piano's black keys--the closest the piano gets to the fullness of the open strings of stringed instruments.

Then there is the strange passge in all flats.  String players cannot find the sound of all those flats, so foreign are flats to the resonance of their instruments.  I found that if I play that passage with complete finger legato, no breaks, and NO PEDAL, the resulting clarity of piano resonance draws unto itself all of the string sound, unifying and rebounding it back into the string cases, thus creating an aura of oneness that is unique in the repertoire.

A guest violist with whom we played that piece when I was still playing chamber music on a regular basis, said that he had performed that piece hundreds of times in his career but never until then experienced that passage as meaningful.

Charitable Purposes

Now that all of education, including college level, is being rated in terms of monetary value, I feel compelled to connect this to another item in the news--the increasing use of heroin in our culture.

What is value?  What is worth living for? Where does the motivation come from to get up every day and pursue something of lasting value?

That must be where the arts come in. 

That must be where the people who do live in order to make money encounter the obligation to provide, not charity, but support for that other working population who devote themselves to the business of giving meaning, i.e., hope to the broken.

Support!  Support!  Support!

And if you can't, get someone you know who can to step up to the plate.

Buy a book from a small independent publisher; buy a ticket to a new off-Broadway play; go to a private recital (!); support this blog. www.tonalrefraction.com

Thanks.

To Simply LIsten, To Simply Hear

There is no such thing for a trained musician as "simply to listen."  We cannot do it.

Once we have learned the grammar of tone function we are like Adam and Eve driven from the garden, in this case, the garden of auditory delight.

How did I learn to simply listen?  I set myself the task when I first began to teach in the 1970s: I would listen to students without looking at the score.  This would require of me that I hear as they heard, not as I thought they ought to hear.  The difference is both huge and fascinating.

Among the more memorable lessons I took away from this experience was of how certain composers made it a central feature of their work to focus attention on the shifting of resonance from one instrument (say, the piano) to another (strings, or winds).  My first overwhelming experience of this was through listening to some Mannes Prep students learning a chamber work by Robert Schumann. I came to realize that the point of the piece was not so much to get the strings to play in tune with the piano as to have each different sound-source become a potential resonant partner with the other.

Later I realized that Schumann was merely spelling out what he had heard in the music of Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn. 

The Fuss About F# Major

There is a current discussion raging on the Music Theory Society's on-line talk list-serve about music in the key of F# major.  Initially I thought it was a joke:  Surely everyone with a Ph.D. in Music Theory knows the Beethoven Sonata Op. 78!  To my surprise, and probably everyone else's, a long thread of posts continues to unravel.

Ravel furnishes an excellent starting point for me to make the case I try to make, namely that it is a matter not so much of tonality per se as of instrumental resonance.

Every time I try to point out the difference, however, the terminology is sent back to me skewed away from sound and into concepts specifcying tonal function.  Only one poster mentioned the irresistibly beautiful major third (F# - A#) of that key.

The more involved I become in instrumental sound the less I care about terminology, certainly not about the kind that assumes that theoretical function predominates over sound.

I simply don't believe it!  When I go to play the music I am even more convinced that these notions are not only irrelevant but also destructive of the urge to simply listen, to simply hear, to accept sound as the subject not the wallpaper.

Afraid of Being in the Same Room with Live Music?

Children are exposed to so little live music that by the time they reach adolescence they are sometimes terrified of it:  What is expected of them?  Some special behavior, perhaps?  Some "appreciation" such as is taught in schools whereby all music is reduced to thing-ness?

This morning I saw something positively lovely and loving:   The moment a beautiful live trumpet sounded together with voices and organ a father reached over and touched his small child, as if to embody the gentle warmth of this very special sound.

Lucky child!