Elise is Not Therese

I once asked a group of 12-year-olds what they would do if they were going to hide the spelling of someone's name in a composition.  "I certainly wouldn't put it at the beginning," declared one wise young man.

The principle sticking factor of Fuer Elise is the maddening repetition of the E - D# tones of the opening:  How many times do they repeat?  Why?  And why are they specifically articulated in rising pairs on page 2 while they had clearly begun on the upper note at the beginning?

To begin with a spelling lesson: In German "Th" functions as a single letter, and E-flat is called "Ess."
So we get, on page 2, (Th) E / (r) E / Ess (enharmonically D#) / E, her name.  Would she have noticed?

Have you noticed?

Doesn't it explain why so much of the piece has to be played softly?

At any rate, the young man was right: the name is not at the beginning.

Specificity Forever!

What a treat to run into a familiar face completely by chance, to realize that I know the face, then to recall a day in a 5th-grade classroom more than 20 years ago when that young person and I had an unforgettable exchange about Fuer Elise.  Of course I remember her;  I have thought about her often.

I was volunteering in a school on Manhattan's upper West side.  Once a week I would come play something on the piano and integrate the experience somehow with their work in Language Arts--fancy word for English class.  The project that week involved the class writing reviews of my performance that day.  (I think we were working on different types of adjectives: descriptive, qualitative, etc.)

This young woman found my playing lacking in expressivity and said so in no uncertain terms, pointing out specifically the absence of dynamics in my playing.

I had the score with me, an Urtext edition, i.e., with no editorial additions.  Most of the piece is, in fact pianissimo, which makes perfect sense once you realize that it is a love letter and probably a secret one, to someone named, not Elise, but Therese. (Beethoven had notoriously terrible handwriting and the misreading has stuck.)

This girl had learned the piece from a typically overedited children's book in which it is assumed that dynamic change is the only thing a child will get interested in.

My question: How come her attention was drawn to this aspect of my playing?  Was she recalling her teacher's insistent "louder!" or was she expecting some surge to manifest itself in my rendering corresponding to a malaise she felt while playing?  Who knows?

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.