Faster Than a Speeding Anything: Sound

Getting the ear engaged should be the point of any music instruction.  Alas, all too often it is not.
That is because it is not easy to engage the ear of anyone living in a culture in which sound is mostly noise, in other words unwanted, therefore blocked out.

When I say I offer instruction in Music Inside and Out I am amazed at how difficult it is to arouse awareness of that inside part, so busy are we trying to mask what is outside of our ears most of the time.

Bach's Minuet in G

It would not be possible to convey in a brief blog post the test lesson I gave this morning to a young man, not a facile reader but with an extraordinarily precise ear.  The lesson was inspired by a demonstration at the ICMPC conference of the most frequent errors made by young piano students.  That piece, one of my favorite examples of hidden complexity, was given as a prime example of the student errors.

My student proceeded as he has been encouraged to do, by playing the black key in the key signature before sounding the notated pitches.  As a result he played a wrong note, not the one in the conference presentation, but an "error" in the corresponding spot in the first measure -- a far more interesting and musically relevant error.

My philosophy about errors is that people, especially children, do not make them mindlessly, as the scholars would have had us believe.  My position is that errors signal extraordinary departures from expected tone logic.

My student's error proved me right.  In attending to his error and straightening it out I learned a whole dimension of the piece that had previously escaped my attention.

Let's hear it for the vitality of musical elements at every level: I mean e v e r y level.

The Music Part

Internalizing specific sounds is the key to the music part, that elusive goal expressed by so many adults whose childhood training led them to expect that all there was to it was the ability to churn out notes on time as accurately as possible.

When specific sounds are truly heard as such the music part of the player becomes engaged just as the mind of the scientist is engaged in tracking evidence while conducting research.  However many choices one had until that moment are now exponentially increased.  The music part thus defined is the key to what is truly compelling in music, the reason an intelligent person can without fear of boredom devote a lifetime to mastering the art.

That it is enormously difficult affirms the complexity not of musical structures, as the Muz App establishment would have you believe, but of sound and sound perception in and of themselves.

Brahms and the Natural Horn

Writing an email to my friend Ursula Mamlok this morning:

I imagined how sad Brahms must have been to behold the natural horn, an instrument he knew thoroughly and loved deeply, be so readily abandoned by musicians happy to have an easier way to find the right notes, even though those notes, however "right", in no way resembled the sound he had in mind when writing for this highly pitch-specific instrument.

Music sounds so simple.  The trouble is that the music-training establishment has fallen for that piece of nonsense almost more than the general public.  Students are expected to churn out the good stuff at breakneck speed--not just the speed of the actual playing but, even worse, the speed of accelerated learning that leaves no time for comprehension.

How different music is when the player, like the composer, has to account for every single sound.

How different one's sense of purpose is when that is the prevailing standard--how very much more satisfying!

Thanks

First order of business now that I am back from Seoul, Korea:  Thanks to everyone who has contributed in any way to my work.  Without your support I would not have been able to accomplish my work and certainly not to have undertaken that journey.

The support has taken two forms, the most evident of which is monetary.  This can be counted and tracked -- that is the easy part.  The second is more complex in that it has taken the form of responsiveness to my playing, writing, and teaching.  This can be neither counted nor tracked.  Sometimes it takes decades for the memory of an experience to penetrate the subconscious and reveal its power -- we have Proust to thank for substantiating that (as we have Proust to thank for the word "refraction" to name that event), and it may take many years for a pedagogy to yield its true result -- this was the conclusion reached by several of the academics presenting at the conference.

To all of you, including readers of this blog whom I have never met in person, my warmest thanks.

Why Play Music by Dead Composers?

Let's pose the question somewhat differently:  Why is music by living composers always* separated from music by dead composers?

Let's assume there is a good reason for this arbitrary programming:  If you, the player, know that just about everyone in the room is hearing the music for the first time, then you are truly in command of their hearing.  Right?

Well, maybe.  Trouble is the modern listener is so used to multiple hearings of the same music that he or she is not likely to recognize the action of listening unless it is to something already heard at least once.  Thus the resistance to new music on the part of so many listeners.

The rest of the question underscores a huge dilemma facing professional music training.  Based, as most of it is, on repetition (etudes, exercises and, alas, repertoire) very few professionals survive with any sense of tone as a living thing, or the perception of tone as fresh within themselves, much less in the form in which they deliver it to the audience.

What one hears, therefore, coming out of countless violins, pianos, etc. is boredom.

That is the reason NOT to play music by dead composers.  Boredom is, in my view, the enemy.  Recognizing it and refusing it in the light of the enormous senses of humor shared by the likes of Ludwig, Wolfgang, Johannes, Joseph, Franz, etc., is the task.

Good luck.

*Not always, thank goodness! When I started Alaria Chamber Ensemble in 1983, and for as long as I was responsible for its programming, we made a point of including in each of each programs music of every period that we knew anything about, Renaissance through contemporary, that was sure to include unfamiliar music of other eras than contemporary.  The result was that members of the audience learned the skill of listening receptively, some even able to take in newly composed works by the likes of Ursula Mamlok (schooled in serial composition).

Listening Always for the Expected

While praising the extraordinary playing of an as-yet not well known pianist a prominent reviewer comments on positive aspects of the playing, then feels obliged to point out that the player makes mistakes.

Why should he care?  What does it matter?  If the playing is truly persuasive he should not hear the mistakes or, if he hears them, they should not distract from the music's real content.

Does he feel obliged to point out the errors because he knows other listeners will certainly have noted them and that, being a music critic, he can't be allowed to seem vulnerable or unknowledgeable?

Whatever the reason it is a loss.

I have always tried to play and to record in such a way as to challenge that quality of listening, which I abhor.

A colleague reacted to my Haydn / Bartok CD:  "There is no editing, so there must be mistakes?"  "Correct." 
"I don't hear them." 

Just what I wanted.