"You Have Taken Away My Laughter"

Last night I heard a truly amazing song cycle by Shulamit Ran, whose music I do not know, Moon Songs, sung by the truly amazing soprano Lucy Shelton, who had collaborated in its writing and who was performing with the Da Capo Chamber Players.

In the verse called "Prayer to Pierrot" the singer begs Pierrot (as in Lunaire) to bring back the laughter.  Indeed, it is a prayer in which I join wholeheartedly.  Where has the laughter gone?

There is hardly a trace of it in a New York concert hall in which new music is being performed and listened to.  I found myself laughing aloud only once:  at a sudden blues chord played by the violin/cello duo.  How did that get in there?

And now, the morning after, I wonder who listens anymore in such a way as to permit the laugh reaction to blurt out or even to cross one's face.  It has all become so sanctimonious; we are all so frightened.  We will not learn to laugh until we forget that we are supposed to know something before we allow ourselves simply and vulnerably to listen.

Pages and pages of program notes only impede this process. 

Performance Practice: The Economics Effect

After hearing my 2nd ever rousing rendition of the Messe de Tournai, a 13th century mass for three voices, I was talking with one of the singers about how much has changed in the way modern musicians regard those early styles of polyphony.

My theory as to why the practice has become so much more lively:  The singers who are putting vitality into the art are not the top earners.  Since they don't make a lot of money they need some compensation for their effort, and that must be their joy and satisfaction when, refusing to be bored, they find the life in the line.

It reminded me of a performance I heard recently which was so tedious that I could hardly stay politely seated next to the friend who had invited me.  The next day, as I wondered how those players could tolerate being so bored I realized it had to do with their being very well paid, indeed. Inevitably the prestige that goes with their conspicuous positions breeds confusion in the audience.  How will they recognize boredom when they hear it, if they 1) have paid so much for their tickets and 2) the players are all reputed to be "top notch."

Go and hear young people. Patronize the less-than-famous.  Take a chance on the unknown.  Let yourself be, perhaps, surprised.

What is More Interesting: The Music or Listening to It?

Judging from the extent to which pieces of music are dissected, analyzed, theorized, literalized, you would think there was nothing intrinsically musical to get interested in.

The mark of a good composition is that it grabs your attention.  Pardon me, I left something out:  The mark of a good composition well played is that it grabs your attention.  If it does not it is not being well played.  Period.

It has to do with paying attention to the living, breathing sound.  If the performer does not do that how are you supposed to do it for her?  I hear too many performances that exude "deja vu all over again," as Yogi Berra so aptly put it.  I much prefer listening to the genuine struggles of amateurs and children than to the sort of lifeless repetition that too often passes for professionalism.

Too Many Right Notes!

I am all in favor of wrong notes!  Today I saw a perfect example of how much more revealing a wrong note can be than all the right notes in the world.

The student, a young woman whose ear is incredibly sensitive; not a facile reader, she has the advantage of actually hearing before she puts her finger on a key what it will sound like.  And she knows perfectly well that, if playing an E-flat with her left hand, she will not like what the right note, in this case, A, will sound like in the right hand.  So she changes it to a more palatable sound, G.

Who could argue with this?  Only a piano teacher fixated on the right notes.  But the note she chose to play was clearly more correct in sound that the one indicated by Clementi.

It is a matter of spices, I told her.  Clementi lived in an era when a certain kind of musical hot pepper we call dissonance was all the vogue.  Put the hot pepper on the beat and everybody has more fun.

Many good things happen when music is approached this way. 

When the Ear is Left Out

Leaving the ear out of elementary music instruction is like teaching art to a blindfolded student.  You are not supposed to react to anything you hear.  Just play it and don't notice anything about it for, if you did, it just might stop you in your tracks, make it impossible for you to count (as it did in my case), or just turn you off completely.

The student who came to me thirty years ago to get "the music part" of playing the piano is just now at a point where she can tolerate how much her own individual response is the music part.  Her reaction to every sound, no matter how exposed, how spare, transforms the notation into a process at the compositional level, in which she is called upon to react one tone at a time.  The resulting precision raises as many questions as it answers.

Thus I spend my life in music.

Why Not to Review Concerts

In The New York Times of September 16 was a review of a chamber music performance in a downtown location.  The first thing the reviewer did was to note critically the absence of program notes, even of movements, in the printed program.

I noticed when I was reviewing concerts how challenging it is to describe the event rather than merely regurgitate the prose in the program.  Has our concert-reviewing become like those elementary school book reports in which we were expected to lift a certain amount of prose from the book we had read, rather than report on what said book might have done to us?

There is one good reason why reviewers do not write about what they experience: It is incredibly difficult.   Four days ago I performed at a public event a work I had never played or even heard before.  Though I started out with a certain approach in mind, the music entirely changed my attitude.  By the time I finished I was making a personal statement for which I was not prepared, so exposed was it and so fragile.

I have been thinking about it ever since.

How did the audience receive it?  I have no way of knowing and, in a way, I do not need to know.  If it haunts me to this extent it must have touched off something in the audience.  I will never know what this might have been or might be, past, present, or future.  To me that is the only review a performance needs and all that a "critic" need notice.

The Experiment in Programming: Already a Success

Having played my first free-association program two weeks ago I have received direct evidence of its success: One listener, who had not previously heard me play, was haunted by the first piece on the program, enough so that she looked it up to find that the extended program note furnished by her research entirely backed up the sensations she had had as "just" a listener.

This is remarkable in every respect.  Not least is my reluctance to get information about a composition as a substitute for getting the composition.  I want to play what is directly present in the music, not filtered by any concepts or named emotions or states of being.

If the composer has done his or her job the content will be clear, not necessarily right away, but eventually, depending on the readiness of the player and audience to receive it.  Sometimes it takes the energy of player and audience combined to reveal the content, in which case, so much the better for all concerned.

The composition in question was by Brahms, composed when he was 18.