Bored Again: A New Definition

One of my students, a scientist, knows that she is bored when she keeps looking at the clock.

In Classical style the equivalent of the clock is the inexorable four sixteenths to the quarter.  Yesterday I revisited one of the puzzling Beethoven sonatas in which what have always felt like agonizingly boring passages alternate with passages of extreme power.  Can't be.  Doesn't make sense.

Sure enough, that sonata (the "Spring" sonata for piano with violin) was composed at the same time as the "Moonlight," 1801.  Both share a fascination with the conflict between four-of-these equal one-of-those and odd numbers of repetitions or groupings: 15 sixteenths where one would expect 16  comparable to the Moonlight's 27 sixteenths where one expects 28. 

There must be more to it than counting in multiples of 2.

The Ear is a Mind at Work

It would take a historian of some discipline I cannot imagine to discern what happened to our respect for the ear as a mode of thought.

Yesterday a person new to me described perfectly, it seemed to me, the frustration of having been passionate about the piano as a young child yet unable to pass the tests for admission to a special arts high school.  She told me a bit of what the tests consisted of: naming intervals, singing the separate tones of a chord, etc. 

But before she told me about this past she described very much in the present her experience of listening for a specifically intense event in a Mozart violin concerto, an event she described with the clarity that only a truly alive and energized ear could muster without recourse to theory or other abstractions.

Hers is the kind of ear that musical children are born with and which is denied in most musical training by pasting over it notions about sound that oversimplify and do not apply to that other, fuller hearing.

Tones are not discrete.  Even the keys on the piano, which are discrete, though they have names, do not produce discrete sounds.  Their total resonances are magical, mysterious.  Because they defy identification we go in pursuit of them again and again.   Many children who are told they cannot carry a tune are actually swimming in a sea of vibration so powerful that they cannot break it down into component parts--a skill necessary to carry a tune or identify tones within a chord, but not essential to the enjoyment of sound in its fullest manifestations.

Don't Orchestrate Piano Pieces!

Among the piano works popularized in orchestral versions are Bartok's Roumanian Dances.  That is how I first heard them.  It has taken me years to appreciate the destructive distortion visited upon these masterful gems.

First, the beat.  In order to coordinate an orchestra someone has to give the beat.  A look at the piano score indicates such subtlety in the articulation of beats that it is hard to imagine an orchestra or conductor sensitive enough to make them come alive as the composer has indicated.

Second, the sound.  Drunk on the rich resonance of the piano the "dancer," me, turns into a veritable gypsy.  Everything is motivated by the sonority, not by a genre or a title. 

The difference is so vast that the listeners last night commented on it right off without my having said a word.

How do you know when you're bored?

For player and listener alike the answer is the same: When your mind wanders, or simply turns off.

What "mind?"  This is the interesting part.  We have all kinds of minds.  The one addressed by Music Appreciation is not, to my taste, relevant to playing or listening to music.  Identifying themes and subthemes is a distraction from other mental activities that define listening.

A good example comes readily to mind: Last night I was listening to the radio.  Strictly by chance I heard announced a recording by the Belcea string quartet of Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet.  What were my first reactions?  a) Recordings are not my preferred listening   b) Another cliche reading of that over-done piece?  c) Yes, but the Belcea is a very fine ensemble.  So I listened.

It took less than a minute to realize that the Belcea was giving me no choice but to listen for every nuance of their superior playing:  Not a trace of a cliche; every single note intoned purposefully, every event personal without a trace of sentimentality.  The piece flew by, a new important definition of paying attention.

For all their virtuosity they played as if they had never heard or played that work before.  No trace of boredom there.

Reading the Program

I love to instruct people on how to read a concert program, giving short definitions of what the words might mean: structure words like sonata, symphony, minuet, and tempo words like allegro or adagio.

Then there are the keys: Some people disassociate themselves from this altogether as if the key didn't concern them since they neither play in the orchestra or have perfect pitch.  But just about everyone has sung My Country, 'tis of Thee or The Star-Spangled Banner, and has some memory of their own vocal comfort zone.  The orchestra tuning to A invites every listener to internalize that reality in relation to their own voice.

One of the most interesting aspects of a program is what happens between movements of a sonata or symphony.  Unlike most CDs, in which this is dead space, a truly musical performance will use the that time to build tension in the transition from one key to another and from one mood to another.  In fact, most fine composers effectively compose those silences to contain extremely important information.

One of my favorite teaching memories involved some 7th-grade classes I had taught about how to read the program and how to get interested in the music in a highly participatory way.  The first thing was to figure out whether the piece was serious or humorous--very important.  Next was to figure out when to clap.

After a few weeks of class I invited them and their teachers to a recital in which I deliberately programmed a variety of serious and tongue-in-cheek works.  When I finished the Mozart sonata that trailed off into nothing the kids burst out laughing, much to the embarrassment of their teachers, who were extremely surprised when I then congratulated the students on their response which proved that both I and Mozart had succeeded in getting a point across.  The teachers apologized to me on their way out. 

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.