Roses that are Looked At

T.S. Eliot was undoubtedly on to something when he pointed out that roses that are looked at have a special air about them.

So it is with music that is listened to: It is completely different from music that has already been heard.  Your thoughts on the subject?

Performing with the Barriers Down

I just played the last of the Classics of Childhood series for a small audience that included people who had never heard me perform.  On the program was a selection of Minuets and Marches by J.S. Bach and C.P.E. Bach, pieces I know well but had not actually performed.  It revealed a whole new aspect of what it feels like to improvise through the repeat of music that I had somehow been led to believe is cut and dried.  As it turns out, no such animal! The improvisation teases are actually written into the compositions--tricky augmentations, ornaments turned written-out figures and vice versa.  I had a wonderful time--more than a bit risky but completely fired.

Another risk taken: I played two Clementi Exercises, essentially scale studies in E minor and E major.  The point of playing them was to expose their inventive rapport with the keyboard and the lyrical feel of the tonalities.  I find these exercises brilliant when approached as organic to the hand, the ear, and the instrument rather than as recipes for turning all three into automatons. 

Two hours after I finished the audience was still animatedly talking about all kinds of performance-related experiences: poetry, dance, music.

Thanks to those wonderful listeners I am in performer's heaven.

Everybody's Doin' It

When people describe their childhood piano lessons they invariably make a face connoting utter tedium, then describe rituals of meaningless repetition--no need to go further, I'm sure.

I recall my bafflement on hearing other children play the piano--children who were far more dutiful in practicing than I ever was:  "Am I supposed to sound like that?" I wondered.  A few years ago my singer/songwriter/improviser daughter told me that she had experienced a similar questioning as a child. 

Then there was Myra Hess.  I was given a ticket to hear her play three Mozart concertos with the Chicago Symphony.  She didn't do anything right: the beats were irregular, the scales uneven.  What was that about?

That raises a new, not frequently asked question:  Given the current standardization of classical music performance, would anyone alive now give her the time of day?

Boredom and the Heads of Pins

Yesterday my attention was drawn to a TED talk the subject of which was whether classical music is boring.  The speaker's strategy was to reduce what was happening to the smallest possible number of events so that they could be grasped and recalled, invoking the AABA' model so fundamental to MuzApp.

My goal is exactly the opposite: to make the listener feel the urgency of so many vibrations all at once that a kind of animal attentiveness takes over, going beyond conscious awareness or any sense of having already been there and done that.

I am reminded of my easily bored ten-year-old student who picked up my pedal technique simply by falling in love with it.  When she played her little study of broken chords it was magical from beginning to end.  One day she came and played it with traditional pedal technique, changing a full pedal at every barline.  "What happened?"

"The teacher at school said I could play it at the assembly if I pedaled that way." 

She soon lost interest in the piece.  How can you stay interested in one sound per bar when there are potentially an infinite number of sounds per bar?

How many angels fit on the head of a pin?

Music as Object

In 1997 there was a three-day conference at The New School called Technology and the Rest of Culture.  To my surprise some of the most insightful papers were on alphabets, stitching fig leaves together, and similarly elemental interfaces that man has developed to objectify experience. 

In the short span of time between then and now even more processes and products have been invented to remove us from the immediacy of listening.  Googling "music" yields CDs.  The "music" that one learns to read is supposed to be the real thing.  But it's not.

The real thing is what holds me rapt in a room where everyone is intent on not missing a hint of a vibration.  This happens mostly in a little boite in Brooklyn, Barbes.  There is a mike, OK, but the musicians use it well, that is, in such a way as to encourage paying attention rather than tuning out.  I have the feeling when I'm there that what I am listening to is algorithm-proof:  it will never again happen quite that way, nor do I want it to. 

You, the Listener

Last night I played, for the first time in my life, Schumann's Scenes of Childhood.  I have never enjoyed listening to it, except for the live recording of Horowitz's last Vienna recital, which I tuned into by accident one afternoon.  So it was as much a test of my listening as of my playing.

Everyone here participated in the listening, most unmistakably.  In allowing those fragile sounds to penetrate fully, each on its own terms, I was sharing with each person the power of paying undivided attention to music at its purest--i.e., never before listened to, completely fresh, and not to be repeated.

In thanking the audience I was expressing gratitude that they would come into an intimate space and allow themselves to be absorbed in a performance that would be impossible in a concert hall, and that cannot be accessed by flipping a switch.

Save the Best for First

The general assumption behind piano lessons is that the notes have to come first--actually, the beat has to come first, followed by the notes, the right ones.  Only after laying down the law does "expression" come up as an extra-added-on, arbitrary aspect of the music.  By this time it more likely conforms to the teacher's idea of how the music goes than to the child's spontaneous feel.

It doesn't have to be this way: Touch, the most expressive aspect of piano playing, can be the starting point if finger technique (based on a generalized notion of the mechanics of the hand) is reserved for a time when the fingers are large enough to fit on the piano keys without canceling out the hand's sensitivity.

Busoni was right to maintain that technical exercises should be given out like toxic medicines.  This is as true for the beginner as for the advanced player. 

After a recent recital in California, I received some praise from the audience on my legato touch.  I believe that legato comes from ear sensitivity to overtones, directly reflected in touch.  This is a proper starting point for children and a source of lasting satisfaction to all who listen to them play.