In Tune As a Function of LIstening

If the purpose of being in tune is to sound good with others, then the secret to being in tune must have to do with listening.

This, I fear, is the lost art.  Like the well-intentioned singers I mentioned in yesterday's post, too many musicians are schooled to read without listening.  I did it myself for many years before a great teacher caught me at it and made me stop that pernicious habit.

As soon as you listen to the sounds of your fellow players you are more likely to play in tune with them, particularly if you respect the differences between your instruments and decide to go with the flow, which is determined usually by the least flexible of the instruments.

I say "usually" because flexibility is also in the ear of the player.  There is a common belief that the piano is inflexible.  I couldn't disagree more wholeheartedly.  The overtones of the piano are so complex, and the control available via finger and pedal so subtle that I can play so as to block or not block resonance with almost any other instrument.  This is the art I practice and which I find never-endingly fascinating.

Off to Korea

At the time of this posting I will boarding a plane for Seoul, Korea where I am to present my work on Tonal Refraction.  I will be showing examples of a few individuals' progression through stages of visualization of tones, tone-relatedness, compositions.  Some of these individuals' musical lives were forever changed by the process which is condensed into three weekly sessions.  Others refused the intrusion of change into their lives and did not complete the process.

I have continued to explore the implications of committing my sense of the tones in a specific composition to this process, to wondrous effect.  It completely transforms my sense of what I am doing when I play the music.  How it works is not my concern.  That it works is what I know for sure. Why it works I can tell you:  It is because I refuse to ignore the negative emotions aroused by certain combinations of tones that I have to play.  This does not happen in just any composition.  But one thing that distinguishes the work of a master from just another skilled craftsman is their capacity to load specific sounds, the way a poet might load a specific word, in such a way as to arouse the question in the attentive player's mind: "Why do I have to play such a disagreeable sound?"

Professionals are trained not to notice such reactions and are certainly not given guidance on how to deal with them.  I once questioned such a sound to a prominent pianists whose eyebrows promptly went up in disbelief as if to say: You just play the notes, like everyone else. 

During the short week of my stay in Korea I will not be editing blog posts; the posts published this week will have been written prior to my departure and I will not be posting directly from the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition.

What Exactly is "in Tune?"

A very interesting exchange is currently raging on the Music Theory Society's talk line about overtones and tunings.  I know what I know about overtones simply from experience with them.

• The piano:  I know that the piano overtones are extremely chaotic and that this chaos can be troubling in the extreme, or marvelous, depending....
• Unaccompanied voices:  Nothing is more thrilling to me than to be part of an a cappella ensemble; the instinctual tuning of perfect intervals is nothing short of mysterious. (By the way, I find amateurs to be more readily receptive to that level of tuning than most trained professionals.)
• Mean-tone: or whatever you could call the improvised method of tuning the harpsichord with which I experimented for many years before being blessed with the ability to concentrate all my musical strength on solo piano playing - my life's dream.  At the point where the solo piano work resumed I was no longer able to hear the other, relatively purer keyboard intervals, though the vocal tuning never wavered, interestingly enough.
• Just intonation:  the kind of very pure within-the-harmonic-series intonation with which some string quartets, notably the Del Sol Quartet, are now experimenting thanks to composers like Robert Johnston--the first time I heard one of these works I practically levitated to the ceiling, it was that thrilling.  This is what quartets are supposed to sound like!  This is what Mozart's quartets are supposed to sound like!

The joke is that I used to sing a cappella regularly with a group of mostly graduate students in Music Theory and or Composition who simply could not look at a printed score without hearing piano pitch.
They could do the warm-up exercise that will produce perfectly in-tune unisons and major thirds; they couldn't read and hear at the same time.

Curious.

Talk About Pitch Specificity!

Yesterday's rehearsal of the Brahms Horn Trio was a revelation in listening.  Violinist Gregor Kitzis spotted a note in the horn that was crying out for special treatment.  How did he notice it?

I can't presume to get inside of his brain, but I think it's because he was spending the entire rehearsal experimenting with violin techniques that would enable him to better match the horn's timbres on specific pitches, with amazing results.  But here was a problem that demanded special attention:  The horn, playing dotted half notes, one to a bar, moves down a half step.  It happens twice in the movement, each time with spectacular consequences if appropriately listened to and accounted for.

Seemed like nothing at all, until we did it.  We -- and the music -- will never be the same.

Is It Phenomenology?

Imagining that a work of art exists only in the eye of the beholder/listener/reader is an excellent clue to the way I approach performance.  If I can make your hearing come alive the performance is successful, indeed, the work is successful.

I long ago came to the conclusion that the purpose of all art is to make contact between human beings, alive or no longer bodily alive.

If I recognize in any single sound written however many centuries ago a sound that literally "turns me on" then I know I am not alone in the universe.  This was actually what happened to me as a young child when certain sounds in Mozart's piano music spoke to me as if he were there alongside me in the room.

I knew absolutely nothing about Mozart except that he had lived some 200 years earlier.  I had never heard a note of his either on the radio or on recordings -- such things hardly existed in private homes when I was a child.  The radio that did exist was never tuned to a station that played classical music, if there even was such a thing in Chicago in the 1940's.

I stand firmly by this statement about the purpose of the masterworks.  It figures centrally in the presentation I will be making in Korea exactly one week from today.  Wish me luck.

Music To Save One's Soul

A beautiful article about the recently deceased author Timothy Berger quoted him as saying that if he wrote it was to save his own soul and that essentially that was nobody's business but his own.

He couldn't have put more succinctly what distinguishes the real thing from the over-glorified idols created by commercialization.  You do it for yourself; if is life, health, joy, even identity that is at stake.  Everything else is distraction.

Modeling Music

Theorists everywhere seem to be fascinated with the problem of modeling music.  This is not what I do, except insofar as music is a deeply personal, subjective experience and, as such, wondrously difficult to share except in the act of making it happen together with others - like singing hymns, or listening together as some extraordinary music is unfolding -  good jazz in an intimate club setting, for example.

By giving visual form to subjective aspects of listening, Tonal Refraction invites dialogue between two people looking at the same subjectively-generated visual object.  This, in turn, may lead to an otherwise unreachable level of communication about the deeply private act of hearing.  At any rate, dialogue or no, it opens the possibility that one is not alone with what one hears, the way one hears it.

The model too often becomes a substitute for paying real attention.  As I have pointed out before there is an element of disbelief in every moment of true listening:  Did I really hear that?  I have a whole theory of the repeat sign:  It exists so that you, the player, must be sure that the listener is always hearing something for the first time, therefore, the "repeat" sign actually means the opposite of "Repeat!"  It means:  "Whatever you do, do not play these notes the way you did the first time!"