Rhythm: In Youth My Weak Point, Now My Strength

If keeping the beat (whatever that is) were really the most important element in music I would never have persevered to become a musician.

As a young player dealing with notated music of other eras I simply could not keep a beat on the piano.  (It was a problem I never had on the organ, interestingly.)  When I was playing music written in my time, by Gershwin or Morton Gould, for example--music that corresponded to what I heard on a daily basis--there was no problem.  So what is happening here?

I have grown to understand that the inherent tension between sonority and duration is so dramatic that it defies notation or theoretical explanation.  An example:  I play a chord in Beethoven that sounds absolutely wonderful.  I love it and want it to last forever.  But Beethoven specifies that I must let go of it, after a mere eighth-note duration.  But why should I when that goes against all my instincts? 

That is the drama I am talking about.  It could be that the essence of rhythm in classical style is better conveyed by dealing with release than with attack.

Hearing Incorrectly

The sound that most people call music is so filtered by the time we hear it that I question whether it is actually music and whether it is possible, in fact, to truly hear it.

Listening implies a kind of vulnerability, openness to whatever it might turn out to be.  Music is too often a fait accompli:  it's already been done; I know how it goes; it does not require my attention in order to unfold.  (Been there; done that.)

We need to relearn how to hear incorrectly.  Tonal Refraction gives permission to do exactly that.  This freedom has been life-changing for many people whose vulnerable hearing was never given room to develop within the context of music.  Such people may actually develop negative responses to that restrictive approach: stage fright, muscle tension, even focal dystonia.

All it takes for most people is three private sessions to unlock the floodgate of unfiltered hearing--so profound is it within us.

Virtuoso Improvisation

A week ago at St. Ignatius of Antioch on Manhattan's upper West Side, the communion antiphon had me literally transported into a realm I experience only rarely.  A new voice in the choir, Ruth Cunningham, was improvising on the chant as was James Kennerly, the parish's brilliant young organist.   Sounds you cannot imagine coming from two consummate musicians who are inhabited by a music spirit that is rare in any place at any time.

Go out of your way to be part of this extraordinary moment in the history of music.  Who knows how long it will last! 

The church has a website on which will be posted the music schedule for the year.  Do not miss it.

All About Allegro

This is the subject of this week's musical conversations involving audience, myself, and whatever scores or pieces are proposed by any combination of the above.

Then this morning my attention was turned to the Allegretto middle movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata.  Last week I thought it was improperly labeled, since, to my view, that marking denotes an eighth-note-based meter and the predominating note value here is definitely quarters.

After last night's Symphonie Fantastique I realized that Beethoven might here be implying a hidden meter: eighths or even eighth-note triplets within each quarter.

This caused me to re-examine the tempo markings of the first and third movements, both of which rely on an alternative reading of quarter notes.  In the first movement, the pulse is half-notes (cut time); hardly a quarter note to be seen.  In the last movement Presto indicates a pulse of sixteenths, again with hardly a quarter note in sight.  Why shouldn't the middle movement require a subtle reading of pulse?

Conclusion: there is no "all" about Allegro.  It must be interpreted in context. 

Symphonie Fantastique

Every once in a while I review a performance on this blog.  Here goes.

Last Friday night I was invited to a Mostly Mozart festival concert featuring the Berlioz, a work I have never enjoyed, though it is referred to constantly as seminal in the unfolding of the symphonic genre.  I dreaded yet another boring, dutiful rehash.

Much to my surprise I was on the edge not just of my seat but of my very ear as every extreme of articulation, intonation, dynamic, and tempo was turned into orchestral magic by the extraordinary musicianship of conductor Louis Langree and the festival orchestra, which turned in a virtuoso performance.

Key to the success was reading between the notes: finding movement where the conventional reader finds only a job to be done, detecting cutting irony by pushing extremes of association, causing the familiar to become the unknown.  The classic example of this is Berlioz's use of the Dies Irae chant in the last movement: always funereal, except as transformed in this performance into a macabre death dance of the most life-affirming sort.

Not a trace of sentimentality in any of the movements.

Bravo!

PS: In The New York Times of August 18 the performance was as panned as panned gets by a reviewer who did not get it.  She faulted the articulation, the intonation, the frenzy of the percussion and the brass, indicating that they teetered on the fine line between the "lurid and the ludicrous."  Indeed, they did not teeter, but crossed the line so consistently as to reveal the work's deeply ironic potential. 

Happily the audience did not miss it.  Where was she?

A Completely New/Old Sound Experience

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.

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.