Stop Counting

Counting is very much overrated as a tool for learning rhythm.  There are many more reliable and far more life-filled models for regularity, symmetry, sequence, variation--all the things that are more rightly associated with rhythm than numbers.  Let's leave the numbers for arithmetic.

Think instead of clapping patterns:  A good game of Simon Says involving imitation of simple clapping patterns is more fun and potentially far more engaging than any amount of getting from 1 to 4 on time.

Or of moving an object, like a bow or a baton, to conduct a song or express a mood.

My best trick was getting children to draw shapes with both hands at the same time moving in contrary motion on a large sheet of paper.  This is fun, and it is funny.

The hardest thing about beats is that they are too powerful in relation to tone quality.  A child who is sensitive to tone quality cannot objectify time without losing contact with that more important, more elusive, and more deeply personal aspect of hearing.

Like Playing the Guitar

That's how my student described the level she has finally achieved, after many, many years of seeking precisely this, the way she now plays the piano.  It is no longer like dealing with a machine that's out there.  It's much closer to home, much more in control in the best way.

How unusual that an accomplished adult will allow herself to cross that barrier and get to the heart of the matter, which is where she always wanted to be and was never given a clue how to get there.

I asked her what had enabled her to achieve this.  It was a combination of things, she said, among them, watching me play.

That is the best way to learn to play an instrument.  Observe closely someone whose playing you admire.  Without analyzing what she is doing simply go home and pretend that she is inhabiting your body and it is she, not you, playing your instrument.

That is how I learned to play the piano:  Two pianists I have to thank for that:  Artur Rubinstein and Mieczyslaw Horszowski.

Another Dimension of Time

I had thought there were only three:

• the faster-than-fast microseconds during which players (including young-enough children) relish vibrations as if one at a time
• the actual measured musical time which most of us are trained to conceive of as repeatedly counting to four, usually; three, from time to time
• the lifetime of the player / listener associating the tones heard at this moment with tones heard in the past

Now I sense that there is a fourth, harder to define because incorporeal, even more so than sound itself.  This is the time of cultural evolution that alters the definitions of everything by gradually shifting our access to primary sensations.  I had to learn to hear some of the attributes of tone that most fascinate me now because of the intrusion of this element.

I suspect that this element is historically connected to the confusion that arises when the visual symbol is mistaken for the aural reality.

How Can You Hear Afresh a Piece You Know Inside and Out?

The critical words are "inside" and "out".  If music is real only as measured by scientific instruments or as captured thus made inert by recording devices, then good luck.  But if the inner clock by which we live, breathe, and have our being is allowed to influence our mode of listening then it will be impossible to hear the "same" music twice the same way. 

Hearing is, after all, alive.  Let's keep it that way.  Best way I know?  Buy a bell, not a big one, just one of those little brass Indian bells.  Hang it somewhere where you will brush against it from time to time and let it take you by surprise.  We have a small collection of such bells which we used to hang as ornaments on the Christmas tree.  How the children loved unpacking them and hearing them ring!

Some of them eventually lost their clappers.  One of those muted bells sits on a shelf in my bathroom.  Every time I look at it I hear it.  That's music.

What Does It Take to Hear A Piece of Music as if for the First Time?

If I had the answer to that one I'd be rich and famous.  It is not so easy. 

Try condensing all of Marcel Proust into ten words or less. 

Time is a critical element to Proust as it must be to anyone who plays music.  But time is real on so many levels and the temptation is for music teachers to reduce it to a lowest common denominator so as to save ... time.  In doing so, they destroy it.

I can describe the difference because I have experienced it.  One of my complicated students at age about twelve (actually, they are, as are we, all complicated) was struggling through a piece she was not really prepared to play, this is front of the assembled families and myself.  Seated where I could not see her I agonized at every instant over her delayed responses, the wrong notes, imagining what the parents must be thinking.

Turns out they loved it because they got the message: It was not a finished product that they needed to hear, but her struggle and her desire to know this beautiful music.

Years later I found myself watching the video of that performance:  It was stunning how focused it was - not at all the rote-drilled, note-perfect stuff of more conventional learning. 

Several years later, when she had already become fascinated with Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart sonatas I asked her if any of her friends were as interested in classical musical as she.  "No; they all had had it forced down their throats."

Embarrassment at First Hearing

Schumann thus described his reaction on first hearing a Schubert symphony, I believe the so-called "great" C major.  He then goes on to tell of his lingering feelings and specific reactions to such things as Schubert's handling the instruments as if they were voices.

How refreshing.  Imagine: We are not necessarily supposed to have clear responses to what we hear on first hearing.  Let's accept the permission Schumann gives us to be taken off guard, surprised, given something to linger over and chew on rather than feel obliged to make up our minds on the spot. 

Ah, but the first caveat that comes to mind: What does that mean in relation to the sanctimonious environment of most new music audiences today?  Good question.

And the second issue: How does that apply to the tone of what passes for music criticism in so much of the press, which is mostly a rehash of the program notes and a lack of candor about the complexity of the act of listening. 

Less definition; more openness.

Sensitive Hearing

I teach a young woman who has no natural "talent" for the piano: she has no natural feel for rhythm and she has trouble singing on pitch.  Yet her ear is so sensitive that today, after playing the first note of her Clementi sonatina, she stopped. "It sounds strange."

The piano had been tuned since last she played it.  And it does sound completely different to someone with a fine sense of hearing, which she has.

She struggles through the Clementi (she doesn't yet own a piano, having just moved out of her parental home) which she reads at her lessons only.  But the finesse of her responses to every detail is a joy to behold, both to watch and to hear.  I much prefer attending to her ultra-sensitivity rather than listen to quantities of notes fly past without internal involvement.