What is the Subject Matter?

Response to tone is the subject matter.  To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the song is not in the robin it is in us. 

Because a child responds to tone I listen.  Out of that response grows curiosity about how others respond to tone.  Out of that comes the ability to listen empathetically, and the desire to learn how the people we call composers have dealt with tone. 

Learning to read that caring quality is not easy.  But it can be done if the first step is recognition that the individual's response to tone is the necessary element. 

Bach and Haydn:Variations

It is a trip to turn on the radio and listen at random to whatever there is, try to identify the performer.  Last night I had quite a revelation: Organist Simon Preston was playing Bach's variations on O Gott, du frommer Gott,  a piece I used to love.  Listening last night I could see why: It could almost have been composed by Haydn, so lively is it and so impulsive.  The spatiality of the organ suggests antiphonal variation in the organ registration between sections, but Preston goes far beyond that to include differences between vocal and virtuosic variations.

In a couple of weeks I will be performing Haydn's Capriccio in G, a piece I have never heard performed.  It is ecstatic--in that way much like the Bach.  Ecstasy is apparently hard to notate.

The Ghost of GG

Again, on the subject of random listening: I tuned in to the middle of a performance of a Bach keyboard concerto that was new to me.  Sounded like Glen Gould, I thought.  But the recording technique was too modern to be him, and I know that he recorded only two of the concerti, anad this was not one of them.  The playing was so Gould-like that I had to listen just to satisfy my curiosity.

It wasn't Gould.  So then why play as if one were?  The only rationale is the master-oriented approach to instrumental performance.  Questionable whether Gould is the master to choose in the case of Bach and the piano.

On one of his first concert tours Gould endeared himself to the audience in Finney Chapel at Oberlin by announcing that we did not want to hear the scheduled program nor did he want to play it.  He sat down to play the Goldberg Variations.  It was one of the first acts of seditious concert behavior.  For that I am grateful to him.

Haydn Points to Bach

After many years of reluctance to play Bach on the piano the Two-Part Inventions are pulling me back with increasing force.  They epitomize all that has been wrong with the notion of playing Bach on the modern piano, as the emphasis in teaching the piano to young learners (to anyone, actually) has been technique--not at all the same as music.

As soon as the ear is actively engaged touch becomes an extension of the imagination, not the product of muscular coordination.  Muscular coordination is instructed by the inner ear directing line and impulse, singing through the finger tips almost literally. 

Bach's music, so often identified with order and procedure, is as lively as music gets.  A look at the B-flat Partita (No. 1 of Part I of the Clavieruebung) has me planning a move in that direction.

I thank Haydn for it--not that he was directly influenced by J.S. B., but because his piano writing yields insight into the difference between modern approaches to the instrument and those of the 18th century.

Let Go; Let Flow

As a child my sense of a regular beat was completely at the mercy of my awareness of the piano's incredibly rich sound.  Relating to both at the same time was literally impossible, for the beat demanded control while the sound longed for its opposite.

In mid-adolescence, having given up on this impossible task, I "stopped" serious piano study to take up the organ.  "The" problem disappeared, you might say.  But it turns out that the problem is not generic, but for me, as for many individuals, specific to the acoustics of the instruments.

Given my rhythmic unsteadiness, much of the emphasis in my childhood lessons had been on keeping a regular beat.  Later, when told that a passage was improvisatory I froze: After all those years drilling in the mathematical ratios of quarters and sixteenths how was I to stop counting and let the line simply move as if on its own?

It is a question of chickens and eggs, since the two are obviously so closely intertwined.  But not everyone can accept their close intertwining.  The more fragile of the two elements is surely tone for it is a quality separate from pitch, and cannot be written down.  Almost everything in our culture conspires against awareness of the specificity of tone quality now that we have succeeded in digitizing almost everything but not the piano. 

Kurtag's solution to rhythm notation in the early stages is to use a kind of shorthand: this symbol is more or less long, the other, short.  That symbol is a pause, the duration of which is up to you.  This way the child is free to feel rhythmic relationships within a context of tone logic and the flow is neither threatening nor confining.

License

Where do you get the license to interpret, say, Haydn?

Nowhere is it printed on the page that license is required , called for, or recommended.  The need for it comes from the ear.  That is why active, live listening matters so much.  It is not the ear of repeated hearing that gives the permission--as in, so-and-so played it this way on the CD so that must be how it goes--but in, gee! that was really interesting!

When the mind starts to wander and the music to be repetitive it is the sign that the ear is not engaged.

Time to get a license!

A Scientist and Music

One of my most determined students is a scientist--a world-class scientist, in fact, who came to study with me because she wanted to know where "the music part" is.  She could play well enough to pass a pretty high level in the British system of grading but she was aware that it did not match some quality of what she heard in my playing.

What exactly did she hear?  That, of course, neither of us will ever know.  But I have some insight into what the difference is between her preferred experience in the lab as opposed to at the piano. 

The essence of a successful experiment is that it can be repeated with the same results by anyone, anywhere.  In order to produce that successful experiment the responsible scientist must maintain both an open mind objectively observing deviations from the hypothesis, and detailed records of every step forward and back.

The essence of successful music-making is, in many ways, the reverse.  "The music part" consists of the never-ending search for infinite variability, both in the quality of the sound and in the sense of the sequence of sounds that we call the composition.  It has taken years to arrive at the place where she is sufficiently confident of her tolerance of this iffy state of being to actually enjoy not repeating herself--or allowing Haydn to repeat himself, which is much more difficult.