The American Urge to Improvise

Native to the American musical impulse is the urge to improvise; all kinds of musics attest to that from Native American to jazz. Does this make the study of classical music irrelevant to American kids?

It shouldn't. Consider how important improvisation was throughout the history of what we call classical music. Why aren't we comfortable letting our kids improv(is)e on music they know from reading? What is so sacrosanct about the printed text?

Mind you, no one is fussier than I am about reading accurately and sticking to the text. But there is sticking and there is sticking. When music is all repetition--i.e., when timing and balance are rigidly pre-figured, there is no traction in the player's or in the listener's ear-brain.

I hear it all too often in the concert hall and see no reason why I should allow my students to think that that is music.

Reading a sonata for fun

Today began with an 18-year-old student reading through a Beethoven sonata with a question in her mind: Where is the song movement?
Working on the premise that a sonata typically has a sonata allegro movement, a song movement, a dance movement, and then a rondo or other sort of finale, this particular piece had only three, which raised the question of what had happened to the song.
To hear her play the piece searching for the hidden song element was to experience it in a whole new light. She had a wonderful time and so did I.
It made me wonder why we approach sonatas as structurally fixed instead of imagining that they explore subject material at itsmost basic.

What is it about Childhood?

I enjoy teaching children, though I consider it the hardest job I have ever undertaken. Assuming that a child's responses are fully resonant I pay attention to them and from them learn more about music than from much prose being written about music these days.
I learn, for example, that formulas are a coverup, an excuse for not paying attention.
I include scales, chord progressions and structural analysis in the category of formulas. The less I teach formulas, the more significant details become in the child's musical experience.
The challenge is to engage the full perceptual awareness of the child at every moment of playing without recourse to a quickly accessible generalization that potentially masks the moment.

The Poet Speaking

The trouble with music theory is that it often interferes with the fragile, vulnerable aspects of sound, apparent only to the unfettered ear: once an objective system of sound or function identification takes over, the details risk being lost.


This morning a student's halting but sensitive reading of Beethoven's Gminor Sonata, Op. 49, No.1 revealed more to me about the work than I had ever known. She heard and relished its strangeness in a way that eludes my theoretically educated mind.


The distraction of a theoretically educated mind has kept The Poet Speaks, from Schumann's Kinderszenen, from speaking to me. Until now. Years of listening to children have taught me the limitations of my over-trained ear.

Schumann's Kinderszenen are much on my mind as I prepare to play this cycle. It reminds me of the Dichterliebe cycle in its intense lyricism.
How would I define lyricism? A distillation of every element of a work such that no instant, however fleeting or seemingly ordinary, is without meaning. In other words, a relishing of the moment.
This might do as a definition of the opposite of sentimentality: a swimming around in the moment, rendering it gross, bloated, meaningless.

Back to the blog!

As of today I will be posting on a daily basis - if the state of my machine and its Internet connections allows me to to so. The subject will be insights into performing and listening, based on my ongoing series of in-house recitals. The current series, Classics of Childhood, has been made up of six differemt programs, each requiring that I (and the audience) revisit our own childhood musical beginnings, and consider works that composers wrote for their own children, as well as explore new works for children, often by composers who have no children of their own.
Today's revelation regards Schumann's Op. 15, Kinderszenen, which I will perform, for the first time in my life, in September. This work has become so overloaded with sentimentalism as to make it almost unapproachable. It is a pity, for now I find it direct, clear, unmistakably lyrical but not at all heavy-handed. Especially moving to me is the way Schumann weaves through the cycle, spinning on the thinnest of sounds: one pitch, or two.
I was fascinated to read that, as a student, Schumann did not enjoy playing Bach on the piano. Yet I think of him as a real contrapuntist. Perhaps it was that the whole notion of rhythm and meter is so entirely odd in comparison to Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert that it seemed to make little sense to his immensely sensitive pianistic ear.

This will be the last post for the foreseeable future. Serious writing deadlines are governing my thoughts and taking up every available word space in my brain. I have enjoyed the opportunity to share and hopefully shake up thoughts on subjects I love dearly.

Nov. 2011: Clavier Companion will publish my article "Can young students learn rhythmic flexibility?"

Fall 2011: Mozart's G Minor Piano Quartet, K. 478: A Player's Guide, the first full-length Tonal Refraction text will be published, available on demand. Anyone interested in a pre-publication copy at a discounted price of $50 please contact me for more information. A deluxe limited collector's edition will also be printed.

All this on the heels of "Experiments of a Chamber Music Coach" published in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Chamber Music Magazine. If you haven't seen it, send me an email and I'll send you a pdf.