Last night we aired for the first time the Brahms Horn Trio with Jacob Garniez on natural horn and some superior violin playing by Gregor Kitzis. The listeners were mostly musicians, but not all players of the same instruments or styles. When we finished they were stunned into a kind of silence, which surprised us a bit because the last movement of the work is downright hilarious.
Did we do something wrong? Why weren't they simply overcome with laughter?
Then they began to talk about how marvelous it felt to be in the presence of such a compelling sound.
They had observed, we were happy to hear, that the sounds of both violin and piano were contained within the sound of the horn so as not to force compliance with this "otherness" but rather to allow it to embrace our instruments.
All in all an extremely happy and very promising occasion.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Sight-Reading for Joy
The pressure is on from day one to read music accurately: Play all the right notes and play them in time.
What can that possibly mean when most of the time the pieces that are singled out for instruction at the early stages involve notation that we no longer understand?
Take minuets, for example. Easy as pie. Well, not so fast.
How does a minuet go? If it were a waltz it wouldn't be a minuet. So what exactly is a minuet?
Until you know please don't assign one to your student of any age.
Rather give music written in our time by people sensitive to the difference between sound making sense and notation being readily decipherable in terms of "right" and "wrong." There is so much terrific material to choose from: Kurtag, Bartok, Stephen Covello, Ross Lee Finney, Robert Starer--the list is long. Look into it.
The first sign of joy will be recognition that these sounds correspond to life as we know and live it, which minuets do not.
What can that possibly mean when most of the time the pieces that are singled out for instruction at the early stages involve notation that we no longer understand?
Take minuets, for example. Easy as pie. Well, not so fast.
How does a minuet go? If it were a waltz it wouldn't be a minuet. So what exactly is a minuet?
Until you know please don't assign one to your student of any age.
Rather give music written in our time by people sensitive to the difference between sound making sense and notation being readily decipherable in terms of "right" and "wrong." There is so much terrific material to choose from: Kurtag, Bartok, Stephen Covello, Ross Lee Finney, Robert Starer--the list is long. Look into it.
The first sign of joy will be recognition that these sounds correspond to life as we know and live it, which minuets do not.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
The Ear and Vulnerability
Getting about as deep as I get into the dynamic of hearing leads me to the "still small voice" heard by the prophet Elijah.
Knowing what we know by hearing it is entirely different from knowing what we know by seeing it.
Whence comes the affirmation that what we know is for real?
I can make no apology for that archaic word "whence" since it is all about knowledge in a Biblical sense, as was so beautifully pointed out by Hannah Arendt in a 1975 essay in The New Yorker. The affirmation comes from inside the hearer.
Yes, I really did hear that. The affirmation comes in my having been moved by what I heard.
Ergo music.
Knowing what we know by hearing it is entirely different from knowing what we know by seeing it.
Whence comes the affirmation that what we know is for real?
I can make no apology for that archaic word "whence" since it is all about knowledge in a Biblical sense, as was so beautifully pointed out by Hannah Arendt in a 1975 essay in The New Yorker. The affirmation comes from inside the hearer.
Yes, I really did hear that. The affirmation comes in my having been moved by what I heard.
Ergo music.
Monday, August 18, 2014
I Before E, Perhaps, But NOT in Music
The trouble is that too many teachers, mostly piano teachers, put eye before E(ar). Notation becomes, in that case, merely a set of motor instructions: Put this finger here, that finger there, etc.
Rather than deal with actual sound the teacher proceeds, usually, to supply the sound that is supposed to be heard, usually an imaginary sound implied through over-stimulation of the [teacher's] theoretical nerve. To give the example cited at the Music Perception and Cognition conference, the Bach Minuet in G, the famous one that every beginner plays.
There is a chord in the first phrase, but only one, the opening sound, a full G major triad in the left hand. After that the left hand moves in single tones against the right hand melody. But at the conference a well-meaning graduate student was analyzing the harmonies of the minuet. What harmonies? And who besides me was objecting to this falsification of the score?
Ever since this demonstration I have been re-working the difference between implied and explicit harmony in my own ear. Two tones do not a triad make. The suggestion of a triad is only a suggestion. Imagining it as a full-blown triad distorts entirely the composer's intention, which must have been to imply rather than specify a triad, especially if the composer is Bach (pick one!) or Mozart.
Think about this simple fact: Every major and minor triad is a combination of one major third and one minor third, the difference between them being only which one is on the bottom. A minor third floating around is literally doing just that unless explicated by the missing major third that will pronounce its modality.
Implied modality is the art. What do we accomplish by presuming to fill in the missing third?
Rather than deal with actual sound the teacher proceeds, usually, to supply the sound that is supposed to be heard, usually an imaginary sound implied through over-stimulation of the [teacher's] theoretical nerve. To give the example cited at the Music Perception and Cognition conference, the Bach Minuet in G, the famous one that every beginner plays.
There is a chord in the first phrase, but only one, the opening sound, a full G major triad in the left hand. After that the left hand moves in single tones against the right hand melody. But at the conference a well-meaning graduate student was analyzing the harmonies of the minuet. What harmonies? And who besides me was objecting to this falsification of the score?
Ever since this demonstration I have been re-working the difference between implied and explicit harmony in my own ear. Two tones do not a triad make. The suggestion of a triad is only a suggestion. Imagining it as a full-blown triad distorts entirely the composer's intention, which must have been to imply rather than specify a triad, especially if the composer is Bach (pick one!) or Mozart.
Think about this simple fact: Every major and minor triad is a combination of one major third and one minor third, the difference between them being only which one is on the bottom. A minor third floating around is literally doing just that unless explicated by the missing major third that will pronounce its modality.
Implied modality is the art. What do we accomplish by presuming to fill in the missing third?
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Blog as Conversation
Most of the posts on this blog are actually suggested by conversations of the previous day, sometimes in lessons, sometimes over coffee, sometimes after my in-house recitals, or rehearsals.
I invite you, dear reader, to participate on this level with remarks, questions, suggestions, objections, etc., either posted to the blog or via email to me: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com. The worst thing that can happen is that the conversation will not go anywhere at the time.
Sometimes when I hear a public presentation, as just happened in Seoul at the conference on Music Perception and Cognition, I make a comment that appears to fall flat. Thud....silence. In a later exchange that same comment, slightly varied, may produce a nod of recognition, a smile, or even a stream of consciousness reference to some shared source of insight. At any rate, even the thud will have proved useful.
We are all in this together.
I invite you, dear reader, to participate on this level with remarks, questions, suggestions, objections, etc., either posted to the blog or via email to me: nancygarniez@tonalrefraction.com. The worst thing that can happen is that the conversation will not go anywhere at the time.
Sometimes when I hear a public presentation, as just happened in Seoul at the conference on Music Perception and Cognition, I make a comment that appears to fall flat. Thud....silence. In a later exchange that same comment, slightly varied, may produce a nod of recognition, a smile, or even a stream of consciousness reference to some shared source of insight. At any rate, even the thud will have proved useful.
We are all in this together.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Why Play Minuets?
Why not teach American children to play swing or blues?
Why do so many (thank goodness not all!) piano teachers insist on starting children with music of a bygone era, music that relates to nothing in their world?
The answer is simple: Because it is dead, therefore, like the proverbial wild beast, it can be tamed.
But first it has to be dead.
Reducing music to print was always a bad idea. Socrates had his misgivings about what alphabets and written words would do to thought. Hate to say it, but he was probably right, if you extend his misgivings to music.
Rhythm has to be alive, no matter what era or country it's origin. If you can't find the life in it by all means do not teach it to anyone! And if someone wants you to swallow a lifeless assignment take a lesson from an infant with it's first mouthful of carrots and spit it out.
At the very least recognize in your boredom a question of the utmost urgency and do not stop asking it until you find someone who can and will address it. (I recall once bringing up a troubling passage with a renowned pianist who turned up his nose at the very idea that there might be a problem with an obviously playable piece. This is not a matter of technique, but of liveliness.)
I repeat again and again: I am a passionate performing pianist because I never practiced the lifeless stuff - lifeless because never presented to me in a manner worthy of full attention. Yet I played constantly: imitating every popular idiom, desperately searching out the warm, the jazzy, the convincingly lyrical in whatever form I could find it.
Sometimes I found it by virtue of an attractive picture on the music's cover: That's how I discovered Bartok's Sonatina when I was 13.
Many fine living composers have addressed this problem and given teachers and children great stuff to chew on. Go!!!
Why do so many (thank goodness not all!) piano teachers insist on starting children with music of a bygone era, music that relates to nothing in their world?
The answer is simple: Because it is dead, therefore, like the proverbial wild beast, it can be tamed.
But first it has to be dead.
Reducing music to print was always a bad idea. Socrates had his misgivings about what alphabets and written words would do to thought. Hate to say it, but he was probably right, if you extend his misgivings to music.
Rhythm has to be alive, no matter what era or country it's origin. If you can't find the life in it by all means do not teach it to anyone! And if someone wants you to swallow a lifeless assignment take a lesson from an infant with it's first mouthful of carrots and spit it out.
At the very least recognize in your boredom a question of the utmost urgency and do not stop asking it until you find someone who can and will address it. (I recall once bringing up a troubling passage with a renowned pianist who turned up his nose at the very idea that there might be a problem with an obviously playable piece. This is not a matter of technique, but of liveliness.)
I repeat again and again: I am a passionate performing pianist because I never practiced the lifeless stuff - lifeless because never presented to me in a manner worthy of full attention. Yet I played constantly: imitating every popular idiom, desperately searching out the warm, the jazzy, the convincingly lyrical in whatever form I could find it.
Sometimes I found it by virtue of an attractive picture on the music's cover: That's how I discovered Bartok's Sonatina when I was 13.
Many fine living composers have addressed this problem and given teachers and children great stuff to chew on. Go!!!
Friday, August 15, 2014
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.
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.
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