Allegro Depending on the Situation

This is my new definition of Allegro moderato.  I learned it from Schubert's E-flat Sonata, Op. 122, last movement.   The 6/8 meter already makes it a puzzle, as allegro is most often associated with quarter-note meters. 

One can sustain a fairly even pace except for special circumstances in which the beat seems to require more deliberation.  Once I caught on to the possibility that this permission might be implied in the tempo indication it was much easier to let the music flow rather than feel obliged to maintain a steady pulse.

A Fine Piano

Today I celebrate the restoration of my century-old Mason & Hamlin AA grand. Short of writing a book, it would be difficult to describe what it means to me to have a truly fine instrument. 

My beginnings on the piano date from the age of 3 or 4 when a neighbor in Chicago gave me unlimited access to her upright.  It was heaven.  I fell in love with the sound, a love that has never abated despite ups and downs of all descriptions.

Needless to say, it is a pure Proustian affair.  I have surely carried around in my head and in my heart that sound transformed.  During most of the intervening years I was not a pianist, having taken up serious organ study when physical limitations made technical progress unlikely if not impossible, and having built my career in New York setting up a unique non-competitive chamber music program for amateurs.  In other words, I had become increasingly committed to the community of people whose desire to play exceeded their technical prowess.  That involvement continues, and now extends to including among my students a severely developmentally challenged, blind, autistic young man.

Trying to avoid the book that threatens this post, ahem:  My first realization in the presence of a beautiful instrument is how easily music becomes imaginary, literally.  This glorious ringing tone reveals a new dimension in every piece I play which, at the moment, includes some of the most intimate piano music ever written: Schubert's Moments Musicaux and the Eclogues of Dvorak.

Listening: "One of the most difficult skills"

Recent posts have been about listening.  In one I described the reactions of a seventeen-year-old upon first reading the Beethoven G minor Sonata.  That very day I received this message from her:

"I took piano lessons from Nancy for twelve years, and over the years I learned much more than how to look at little dots on a piece of paper and press a corresponding lever. Nancy encouraged and drew out from me emotional involvement and conscious thought about music, both in general and specific to certain pieces. Essentially, she taught me how to listen, one of the most difficult skills there is both to teach and to learn."

Recently I asked whether she had any friends who shared her love of Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart.  Not surprisingly, the answer was no, despite the fact that many of them had studied piano.  Her explanation: They had had that music forced upon them.  She had come upon it out of deep involvement with contemporary music and with improvisation.  This girl, at nine, had told me: "I don't practice; I don't have time."   Clearly her relationship to sound was developing at a very deep level.

A Piano Reborn

My century-old Mason & Hamlin has just been blessed with a new action.  It is a very special moment when ideas confront uncompromised acoustical reality.  Many mysteries in Schubert are clarified by this new experience:  the fingers and the pedal have no barrier caused by out-of-regulation hammers and squeaky pedal mechanisms.

It provides a powerful lesson about listening: How easily distracted we are by the mechanical limitations of instruments in less than perfect condition.  If this happens to me I can imagine what my students go through when they practice at home.  (This is perhaps why some of them don't practice.)

Lessons from Singers

The singing on the recording of Mozart's Idomeneo by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, a Harmonia Mundi release, is exquisite: fearless, stylish, convincingly alive.

It was a surprise to find a period instrument recording of this extraordinary work and even more surprising that the recording process did not destroy the vocal colors.

We should all take lessons from singers; by that I mean listen carefully to how they make us feel.  When a singer is truly singing every note is as vivid as the taste of a good chocolate or fine wine.

As true today as two years ago

Looking over prior posts I noted this one from 2010 that somehow was never published.  As it stills rings true and is no less timely, here it is.

One of my students, a woman in her early 20's, is an expert dressmaker. I asked her what is the hardest thing about hand sewing. She responded without hesitation, "Getting even stitches."

I made the analogy between those individual stitches, each one subject to so many variants, and the individual sounds in the Bartok piece she is learning.

She was surprised that, though she can fluently play the piece at home, when she comes here it stalls from time to time. But the variant produced by the difference between her instrument and mine is huge. It caused me incredible angst as a student--even for an accomplished artist managing strange instruments is a huge issue, one that only pianists face.

The intimacy of her response to every sound was incredibly beautiful. Satisfying on every level. Would any conventional teacher have given her the time of day? Probably not.

What I do with students is often referred to as "music therapy" but it is not. I merely strive to legitimatize the ear of the student so that the standard is of the highest possible level of beauty. Execution? Anytime the student wants to spend hours a day practicing to achieve dexterity I happily show them how. In the meantime, realistically, I find that the other option works wonders.

"Hear First; Then Play"

Thus did Artur Schnabel sum up the art of playing the piano.  I used to wonder what he meant:  what exactly was one supposed to hear?  You might say that my musical life has been a pursuit of the answer to that question.

It begins with listening to the instrument--to every particular piano that we play, not to a generic non-existent Platonic piano.  Ideally this begins with earliest exposure to the piano.  Properly nurtured it can lead to depths of insight into the greatest compositions written for the instrument.  Proper nurturing means avoiding theoretical notions until the student is more confident of what he/she hears than of what is printed on the page.  Too much theory is based on visual identification.  Here are two examples of what I mean, both as it happens, concerning Beethoven.

The boy of eleven reacting to an unusually widely spaced harmony in the F major Sonatina: "It looks like an F major triad in root position but it certainly does not sound like one!"

The girl of seventeen reacting to her very first reading of the G minor Sonata:  "It is strange: It looks like it is in G minor but it is not convincingly minor."

Such observations expose a critical flaw in my education: I read the score, identify the harmonies, then try to make the music conform to my notion of the sound, rather than respond directly to the sound itself.