Play!

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of hearing a harpsichord master class by Skip Sempe.  At one point he said that of course players of the late Renaissance period (Frescobaldi, Castello, etc. ) would not have played the same meter at the same time with both hands.  This struck me as self-evident: aren't keyboardists  like babies who want to wriggle every extremity at once?  During my many years as an organist I was often inspired by this physiological observation.  But when I shared Sempe's insight with a former student, now a Ph.D., he wanted me to cite a source.

My embodied imagination is the only source I require, my desire to move in every way imaginable to match the variability of what goes on inside of brain and body.

This perhaps epitomizes the difference between the scholar and the artist.  Knowing I would be tempted to pin it down like a captured butterfly kept me out of graduate school and at the piano. 

A New Canning Process

It was quite a revelation to attend an early music concert in the company of a friend from the swimming pool.  Ordinarily I go to concerts by myself so that I don't have to be polite while enjoying myself, or not.  This woman, who avowedly knew absolutely nothing about the music on the program, had had a wonderful life as an impassioned actress.

Her astute ear detected the underlying affect of melancholy in the sound of the viols.  "How different from the Italian opera-inspired violin!" she remarked.  But the real astonishment was her observation that this group played like students.

Indeed.  I know the style and can tell when a hidden counter-meter is missing; I know the ironic twists that cause melancholy to take off its mask, for just the tiniest peek at real life.  But she could hear the caution; she could feel the absence of derring-do.

So now I add the PhD to the list of canning processes, this one having the effect of phreezing.  (Question: Who is more paralyzed in the process: player or reader of the program notes?)

Classical Music Twice Removed

The phrase "second cousin twice removed" always fascinated me.  Now I know what twice removed might mean.  Take Classical Music.  When it was new it wasn't classical, it was just music. 

We are removed from it because we are not there as it is being created--time has removed us.  Classical music is, as it were, frozen.

We have been twice removed by the canning process whereby durations are determined by the dimensions of LPs and CDs and the sounds subjected to the distortions of microphones and speakers.

Can we restore the missing elements?  We can unfreeze it by exposing our ear to immediate sound sources, i.e., live, close-up playing.  Actually that will also let it out of the can, so to speak.  

This involves taking some risks: Intimacy, for one.  A feeling that this music really does concern you as an individual as much as it touches the player who is playing for you.   

The Inner Ear

Referring again to the combobulous effect, I will never forget the look on the face of the five-year-old to whom I was reading that Edward Lear story.  He couldn't believe his ears and, when the word was finally over, his wide-open eyes conveyed an important message that I have been living with for decades.

That was a word, no doubt about it!  It began, it ended; it had its ups and downs.  I loved every suspenseful instant of its unfolding. Was I supposed to understand it?

A quintessentially musical experience.

How Did I Get Here?

When I play I want to know what causes every single sound to come into being, not in terms of fingering, but in terms of the continuity or discontinuity of vibration. 

Continuity is vital because when overtones melt together we have pure legato, which is a terribly difficult technique to master when considered as simply a technique to master. 

Discontinuity is equally vital because energizing shorter or longer spaces between sounds can be as amusing as pronouncing my favorite word: Edward Lear's com-bob-u-lous, as in combobulous cauliflower. 

Play with it: it will teach you something you didn't know you needed to learn.

Conscious Listening / Seeing

A close friend, a painter / amateur recorder player, commented on how hard it is to listen consciously to an extended musical structure.

I recalled an exhibition of Canaletto at the Met, to which I dragged her a few years ago.  There was a huge canvas of the Grand Canal in which one could easily get lost. Rather than try to take it in she chose more politely scaled works on another wall.  Staying put with clouds, reflections, the Venetian scene with its many busy, little people, I noticed in the lower right-hand corner, a facade that jutted out from its neighbors sufficiently to allow a man to piss against the wall.  Amused, I went to call her attention to this detail, then wandered off.

After a few minutes she fetched me back to the Grand Canal, positioned me directly behind the otherwise offensive figure, and pointed out that this was the proper vantage point from which to take in the entire gigantic panorama.  

My untrained eye had spotted the joke; her trained eye knew what to make of it. 

Noise

There are very few places where one can listen to music as inhabiting silence.  Talking about this with a student in his early 20's I was struck by a couple of powerful impressions: He has been inventing music all his life, improvising.  To me and to many other trained classical musicians this represents the utmost self-confidence at the instrument.  Yet he is extremely protective when it comes to being listened to when playing composed music and, to my great disappointment, he comes only reluctantly to hear my performances.

During our conversation it struck me that one of the goals of my current performance strategy is to perform in circumstances in which silence is both natural and unthreatening.   It seems to work wonderfully for older listeners but perhaps it is too intimate for people of his generation.  Perhaps his only access to silence is internal.  Perhaps that explains his gift--rather, his passion for improvisation.