What Good Is a Dictionary?

I was more than a little shocked today researching the term "moderato" in scholarly works about Haydn at the extent to which the word is accepted as meaning something like "medium."  Come on...  really?  Medium what?

I want to know who used the term first to mean what I think it means, which is lyrical rather than metric.  What a later era might have called "tempo rubato." 

It seems fairly clear to me that written music in the 18th century had to conform pretty much to standard practice; if there were to be deviations in terms of timing they had somehow to be hinted at but not made so explicit as to turn everybody off.

The trouble is that we are still being taught that the standard practice corresponds to real content when I think that has to be questioned as often as not.

Variability vs. Getting It Right

There is far too much emphasis on getting it right these days, as opposed to staying alive, staying interested, refusing to be repetitive or predictable (same thing). 

Isn't it positively shocking that in the F minor Two-Part Invention Bach uses contradictory articulations for the same figure?  Or , as I found this morning in a learned book of essays on Haydn, that he articulated the "same" material differently in different autographs of the sonata?

Recently I heard a fine presentation of the concept of rhetoric as applied to music making:  Constant variation was the name of the game, always finding an alternative way of articulating the essence of a passage or device.

My rule is simpler: If I am bored I am doing something wrong.  And I get bored easily, or at least I used to.

Sensory Input and Metric Regularity

I have often wondered how young people can stand the unrelenting uniformity of beats that accompany much pop music these days.  The answer may lie in the unrelenting uniformity of electronic signal that bombards the brain now in more than one frequency: First there was television, which ramped up our sensory-processing systems seriously interfering with attention span. 

Now I suspect that computer signals are wreaking their own brand of havoc. 

I see effects in the work of a student who is working full-time as a computer animator, and who has also been a quite sensitive improvisor at the piano.  We are working on bringing together his reading skills and his innate musical sense.  It is interesting to observe what is now a highly disciplined visual system drowning out a sensitive auditory life.

Words, Words, Words

Touch: A good example of a word.  What does it mean?  What is it exactly?

Re-reading an earlier post it strikes me that many people--many pianists--have no clue what it means.  Having never been encouraged to distinguish between active and passive aspects of touch many pianists approach touch as a function of muscular activity, as in light or heavy touch.

But the kind I refer to is more nuanced.  It has its origin in respect for the life of tone, especially for the quality of vibration at the edges of tone, so to speak: the place where the vibrations of one tone commingle with those of the succeeding tone.

Today I rode up in the elevator with a strange dog.  Getting acquainted was more like an exercise in touch than most technical exercises at the piano.

"I Want Them To Hear What I Feel About the Music"

This was the response of my young adult student describing how she plays at our class/family get-togethers in which all the students play something of their own choosing.  She attains, without fail, a high level of artistry even at her level of limited technical advancement.

What astonishes me is that she knows how good it is.

She is the student who will not play for relatives no matter how they beg her.  She plays for herself, she tells them. 

What is the difference between an audience of class/family and an audience of her relatives?  The relatives listen for an abstract result of her piano lessons, while the class listens to her.

Ramin Arjomand: A Singular Contemporary Pianist-Improviser

Last night I heard an evening of improvisation by a young pianist whose description of his work might easily be mistaken for mine.  We have in common many concerns, among them, the vital link between language and music, and between vocal and instrumental composition.  Add to that our shared passion for improvisatory as opposed to "formal" composition.  We are, it would seem, closely related artistically speaking.

Yet we are also miles apart.  First of all, he has dazzling technique of a kind of which I cannot even begin to dream: such speed, agility, range of motion both spatially and dynamically, octaves, trills, tremolos--stamina and to spare.  It felt as though I was listening to a reincarnation of Liszt in this 80 minute improvisation.  (He says that people describe his work as a cross between Scriabin and Cecil Taylor.)

I came away exhausted but engaged.  He had succeeded in doing some things to which I aspire in my playing and in my programming, most specifically, leading attention to the specific resonance of all-white keys, then altering that resonance by the addition of one black key at a time.  He accomplished all this within an essentially non-tonal framework.

The main thing that separates us is that, being young, he lives in a louder world than I do.  In order to get the audience to hear what he wants them to hear he engulfs them in quantities of sound that feel like "too much" to me.  I prefer to go the opposite route to achieve that result.

Go hear him if you get a chance: Ramin Arjomand.

The Family of Music

As a young child I felt isolated with my music; it was not a fascination I shared with anyone--anyone living, that is.  For certain sounds of Mozart, which I stumbled on at about twelve, seemed to connect me to him in a most familial way, for want of a better term.  Though he had lived 200 years earlier the sounds he had composed made me feel connected.

I contrast this experience to that of my own children who grew up in a household in which music was the main occupation--to the extent that every babysitter I hired had to play an instrument and practice while  on the job so that the children would learn that "everyone" played music.

The results of their experience differ, of course.  But one of them is an entirely contemporary musical soul; she loves but does not crave attachment to music of the past.  She composes and performs music that speaks to her most present reality.  The other is an avid amateur horn player whose love of the orchestra takes him however far back in time the orchestra goes.

All three of us connect viscerally to one another's music.  What a blessing.