Mental Foot-tapping

One of the hazards of public listening is the possibility that someone in a nearby seat will be beating time.

Most of us learn at some stage that rhythm is based on body movement, so it is natural to express it with bodily movement.  I say it all depends.

Some rhythm is decidedly not based on body movement: the rhythm of song, for example, is subject to flights of whimsy that would cause a moving body grievous injury.  And there is the rhythm of the mind at play, many times faster than either the quickest body or the most mercurial lyrical impulse.

Sometimes when I play I make a semi-conscious effort to keep my listeners from even thinking of tapping their foot of otherwise slowing themselves down.  I want every vibration to be heard and felt.

Impromptu: A Musical Moment Under Another Name Perhaps

It is striking how removed from actual, close-up, live listening our culture has become.  As I recall the exciting CD of Maria Pires's playing I marvel at how close-up it feels, how little like something reproduced or reproduceable.

Having been trained to recognize forms we seem reluctant to let go of them and just listen, though by now several generations of contemporary composers have tried hard to get us to do just that.  Now that we have heard Schubert's G-flat Impromptu  can we really listen to it?

Today I am struck by the oddness of the composer's articulations: they certainly do not match the versions of the piece that I have heard!  I wonder if I can engage listeners in the unlikely proposition that they have never heard the piece before?

On the Brink

A student asked me how I know when music is inebriated.  Good question.

A related question: How do I know that something called "March" is not really a march but a spoof?  (Schumann's "Soldier's March" from Album for the Young, e.g.)

Doesn't all good music teeter on some kind of edge?  No one needs balance more than I do; I strongly dislike the sensation of being on an angle or tilted.  This bodily craving for many years took musical form in my pursuit of reliable successions of downbeats and upbeats, and for resolutions both melodic and harmonic.  Needless to say it was not a time of meaningful growth.

As a performer I inhabit the infinitesimally small units of time between beats and vibrations during which I wonder just when and where the next sound will or won't occur--I say "won't" because rests form an important part of that way of moving music.

As a listener I detect in much playing the performer's need for resolution in the lengthening of cadential note values and in the failure to observe articulations that indicate resolutions promised but not delivered.

I no longer play from memory because I know how easily I slide into these taps* and I want the composer's intention to be more present than my own needs and tendencies.

*A fascinating Freudian slip: I meant to say "traps" but rhythmic taps are, in effect, traps, as I point out on a post that will appear soon.  Stay tuned.

Practicing May Be Overrated

Yesterday I had the rare pleasure of receiving an email from a student I taught maybe 40 years ago.  He confided that he has become a lutenist and that he practices.  I take that to mean that he did not practice the piano when I knew him. At that time I was not confident enough as a teacher of children to do as I now do: I tell children not to practice and, if they do, to tell someone else.  I do this for two reasons:

• First, I hate it when students begin our limited time together with the confession that they haven't practiced.  I can tell in an instant whether or not they have and besides that is not the critical factor in learning music.  
• Second, I never practiced as a child so why should I require or expect it of my students?  I played all day, but that is not the same as practicing--it is better.

Just like the CD

Late Beethoven is now a commodity to be bought by the set, put on for background to cooking or reading or puttering around in your too-busy-to-sit-still-and-wonder existence.

At any rate, you have heard it all before.  So what is the point?

Now that live performance resembles CD production more than it does real live experience it is so refreshing to hear a recorded performance that is charged with vitality--it really stands out.


What would happen if everyone in the audience demanded that kind of vitality from the player?  Trouble is, the opposite is more likely to be true: if the performance is not like "the" CD it is likely to be deemed inferior.  What we are missing....

Generic Schubert

Is it possible to play Schubert without asking questions?  Is there a composer more deeply involved with conflict, by extension, with irony, with double entendre?

Think about it:  The lied (German song) is a treatment of essential duplicity.  The singer is one voice, the piano, another.  But which is the spoken and which the unconscious?  Is it a static arrangement?  According to the "rules" the singer has the spoken part, naturally, while the piano is in the background.  Really?  Has anyone who has ever performed Schubert Lieder bought that simplistic notion?

And it gives rise to other observations, drunk vs. sober, for example.  Schubert's music is often inebriated, not to be taken at face value because tottering on some brink of imbalance.

What does that leave us, then, by way of definition?  Our own experience of the musical moment--to recall that fine recorded performance by Maria Joao Pires I heard the other day.  Take nothing for granted. 

Listening and Baseball

Why do people go to baseball games: Aren't they all the same?

In my playing I aspire to the level of excitement that accompanies every gesture of the pitcher, every slight shift in the infield, every sign of excitement or disapproval from the bleachers.

Why don't people listen to music that way?  What have we lost?  Can we get it back?

A fine listener mentioned to me his impatience with concerts: After an hour he wants to go home and have the pleasure of playing himself.  This means to me that I am not adequately engaging him in the traction I feel between sounds--traction he may search on his own though it will never exactly match the traction I find.  And I never experience it twice the same way in the same piece.

I have tired of some fine performers' playing because I find their playing lacks this traction after years of mastering speed and agility.  There is nothing left to hold my attention (and, I suspect, their own) except for speed and agility.  Nothing is at stake; I know the score in advance, so why go?