Two of these equals ... ?

Wouldn't we all read music better, even as children, if it were clear from the outset that it is not arithmetic?

I have learned this primarily from my young students.  I would teach them by ear a simple two or three-note figure with appropriate fingering and inflection.  They would invent phrases to fit the music.  My favorite for a simple mordent was : "Who are you?"

Adult students are plagued with the equations of subdivisions that literally tie them up in knots, produce tedium on every page of every composer, often missing the point entirely.

 

Improvisation and Reading

Increasingly I see the profound connection between improvisation and effective sight-reading.  If invited to rearticulate, rephrase, rewrite the material rather than render it note-perfect or meter-perfect the student will inhabit the material first and be motivated to render it "correctly" with active involvement.

Emphasis on perfect reading first time around inhibits auditory involvement and delays musical instincts. 

It works with Bach Inventions, of all things.

Ma non troppo

A beautiful example of what this might mean is the C# minor Exercise by Clementi in Preludes and Exercises - a truly magnificent source of lyrical insight into the piano, the hand, tonality, you name it.

The exercise's meter is 3/4, the tempo  Allegro ma non troppo.  I maintain that this means that the quarter note is not the structural metric unit, except perhaps when it is.  There are seven, count them, seven quarter notes in the whole piece.  The measures are either clearly divided into halves (dotted quarter plus six sixteenths) or some marvelous unlikely combination of asymmetrical rhythms like 6 eights in one hand plus ten sixteenths after an eight rest in the other. 

I propose playing such an unlikely measure as two groups of three eighths in one hand, with two off-beat quintuples in the other.

This was for a student whose rhythmic command is far from reliable.  He played better the more complex the task.  More important still, he had a blast doing this impossible coordination.  

I had him play in strictly emphasized quarters just to feel the difference. 

Such a piece convinces me that Allegro refers to a metric proposition wherein the quarter note has distinct structural function.  A modifier like ma non troppo indicates that the quarter note is theoretical only, not actual.

Hilarity and Boredom: The Connection

Perhaps, just perhaps, boredom is the quintessential classical music question.  If you stop to think of it: How can Beethoven be boring? 

Perhaps, just perhaps, the point is that boring means you don't get it.

Get what?

Hmmm.

I am rereading short stories of Leonard Michaels, who claimed he knew nothing about music.  But his stories, some of which are two sentences long, are fundamentally lyrical in a most contemporary yet totally classical way. 

What's the Hurry?

There is a vast chasm separating the overly predictable pop music that surrounds us and the seeming chaos of the serious contemporary music I have been hearing recently in concert settings.

I wonder which more closely resembles the typical listener's impression of classical-period music?

The more I play that repertoire the more rhythmically complex I find it and the greater my dismay that children are led to believe it epitomizes orderliness.  Once you buy into that scheme it is hard to hear what is actually taking place, particularly in terms of the endlessly inventive variations on a four-beat bar.

The hurry seems to be inflicting that order on young learners without the slightest trace of wit or irony, much less variation.  What's the rush?

Tolerating, Even Cultivating Boredom

I will try to be more polite and call it tedium rather than boredom, though I always experience it as boredom.  Unlike doing the dishes, which is tedious (repetitive, always more or less the same, unavoidable), making music, which is also repetitive and which I do every day, simply cannot be boring--by definition.  Whose definition?  Mine for sure.

But isn't Beethoven sometimes boring?  One might think so in passages here and there if the words you use to describe his music do not include a sense of humor, a fascination with apparent contradictions.  A four-note broken chord figure, which he often uses, over and over again under a quite square right-hand theme will often turn out to be repeated five times.  Aha! a multiple not just of 4 but also of 5.  Played in sets of 5 the figure becomes hilarious.

Or maybe, as in the Presto agitato movement of the Moonlight, one of my favorite examples of his profound sense of number play, he fills 7  beats with sixteenth notes in what look like sets of four against left-hand eighth notes.  But wait!  that would make 28 sixteenths, whereas he begins the passage with a rest, leaving 27 sixteenths--not a multiple of 4 but of 3.  Played in 3s against the left hand produces agitation for sure.

When played in 4s it leads to boredom.  That's why it gets played faster and faster by pianists who can tolerate the notion that only fingers need to move fast.

When played in 3s it definitely leads to agitation on the part of both listener and player with the result that it feels faster than most conventional readings.  One notes, then, when the composer has distinctly differentiated figures in 4s from those organized otherwise.

So what does presto refer to if not speed?  In this as in other sonata movements it refers to the character of the movement being established in its smallest note value, in this case, the sixteenth.  These are not dictionary definitions, to be sure; they are common sense musical definitions. 

Signs of Boredom

Classical music so easily becomes boring when the signs are either ignored or entirely misinterpreted.  Take the bar-line, for example.

It is common knowledge that bar-lines indicate downbeats.  But not in the hands of an uncommon composer, pick one: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms....the list is too long for a single post.
The bar-line-downbeat is often counterindicated by a slur over the bar-line, indicating a weak beat where the downbeat was supposed to be.

Another, less readily understood counterindication is the sforzato on the strong beat.  If the first beat were really a downbeat the sfz would be redundant.  So what is it doing there?

Yesterday I was puzzling out for the millionth time the on-beat sforzati in the last movement of the Moonlight Sonata:  these bars are so boring when all the beats in left and right hand line up and then are accented on top of that.  But if the left hand is parsed in three's despite the obvious four-note grouping of the sixteenths then the sforzati become positively mesmerizing, which is what the sign indicates.  They also become incredibly difficult.

Difficult is never boring.