Virtuosity Meets Darkness

Last night I heard a piano graduate student play Mozart C minor Concerto, No. 24, first movement with a pretty good mostly student orchestra.  It was striking in that this highly trained soloist apparently had no way of processing the passion and the darkness that meet headon in this taxing and all-too-familiar work.

It brought back memories of my own bewilderment as a high school student playing my first concerto, the Mozart A major.  I will never forget the impact of hearing for the first time instruments of the orchestra play the "same" music I was playing.  The color of their sounds, especially the winds, still moves me.

Yet I, too, had no way of conceiving passage work--arpeggios, scales, etc.--as anything but flashy.  It had never been suggested that such passages were not simply a reason for showing off, but might be pianistic elaborations or particular tone colors.  That an arpeggio might be sad, or longing, or tragic--who knew?

The irrefutable proof that the movement is not about virtuosity for its own sake is the soft ending.

Function vs. Sound

Being quick I figured out function long before I had any theory training: I figured it out as does everyone who wants to accompany singing at a party, for instance. 

I figured it out so well that it made me unable to hear the subtleties of voicing that transform function into something more mysterious, hard to name or define.  Two examples come to mind:

Schubert Waltzes.  How tedious they seemed to me until I freed myself from that pat analysis in which everything is predictable.  How to approach these boring pieces? I suggest playing only the black keys, relishing the odd doublings, only then reconstructing them, white keys and all.

My young student's adventure with a simple Burgmuller etude.  She played it exquisitely, with half pedal throughout so that there were thousands of sounds happening every instant--that is, until she wanted to play it in a program at school.  The music teacher told her that in order to perform it she would have to use full pedal and change it on every bar line.  Being ten she did not, could not, object.  Result?  One sound per measure.  Utterly pointless and hopelessly boring.

By the way, it was her own idea to use the pedal that way: she had heard the older kids do it and loved the sound.

What is wrong with loving the sound?

Words and Music

There is always a strong connection between the two, whether explicit or not, in the instrumental composition of anyone who composed for the voice.  It is as if the word is hiding in there somewhere.

The other day I heard a video of a Dowland song, performed excellently by two outstanding musicians.  Though lovely, there was something unsettling about it: I called it a conundrum.   It being a song I do not know, I looked it up on line, printed it out and worked on it.

At first hearing I had noticed that a particular note in the song needed some emphasis it was not receiving.  The melody uses very few notes, is short, and has a lot of repeats. But the fact that I was constantly tripping over something made it difficult for me to figure it out as I listened.

Studying it revealed the answer: What looks like a repeated bar turns out to be a cleverly disguised variation.  In this case a dotted-half, shortened to allow for a breath at the end of the first phrase, by contrast, at what looks like the corresponding bar at the "end" of the third phrase, becomes energized on the third beat (on the dot!) to elide with the following two bars, causing the particular note that I had heard as pivotal to take on two entirely new degrees of emphasis.  This entirely upsets the song's seeming symmetry.

As much of this period's music is about fickleness I find this very a propos.  

Then There is Bach

Consider how much incomprehensible garbage has been dumped on all of us about just these three composers (Haydn, Mozart, and Bach) and you have some idea of how difficult it is to listen clean and to think clearly.

Take the issue of Bach and the piano. I first came to New York after having spent five years immersed in the organ music of Bach, first at Oberlin, then in Germany, where I studied with Helmut Walcha.  In New York in the early 1960's no one talked about Bach and, if they did so, it was not the same Bach that I had been working on.  In fact, all music written for the piano was considered only in terms of post-Chopin technique.

At that time people still pooh-poohed--even in print!--the idea that pre-Classical musical usage had anything to do with Beethoven or Mozart and virtually no attention was paid to the essentials of articulation, ornamentation, rhythmic grammar, and so on.

I have only now begun to perform Bach on the piano.  I am beginning with the Two-Part Inventions approached, not as over-regimented "Classical" pieces with accentuated barlines and Classical-style meters, but approached rather as Baroque inventions, combining imitative with vocal writing, structured yet improvisatory, as is all great Baroque music, even the most rigorous.

What About Mozart?

Ah!  It is even more difficult to know Mozart than to know Haydn partly because, in the words of one musical thinker, we have been "Mozarted to death." 

I have figured out that Mozart had favorite notes on the piano: the dynamic relationship between C and B.
They are so utterly different that they defy theoretical description, much less prediction.  Forget about function, they seem to say.  Just listen to this!

But the shifts of specific coloration in Mozart are so many and so mercurial that I know I have not yet weaned my memory from having heard some of his music too many times--so many times that I am "hearing" it only passively, in reply, which is not hearing at all.

How Long Does It Take to Get to Know Haydn?

When I consider how I absolutely hated Haydn's music as I heard it played as a freshman in a music school, I would have to say it takes a lifetime minus 16 years.  I have been at it a long time and I am not yet finished getting to know him.

It just occurred to me the other day that he is as fascinated with single tones on the piano as with their potential.  Why else would he begin and end so many sonatas with single tones, sometimes embellished, but often at the discretion of the player?  Why else would he so often end sonatas with "weak" endings? 
It is as if he is expanding and then intensifying our field of auditory awareness exploring the range of auditory space and perception on a multi-dimensional terrain that we are always only just beginning to enter no matter how many times we play the piece.

It is because of Haydn that I have given up on themes and formal vocabulary.  Invention, variability, endless delight--these are my guideposts.

I wish he were alive so that I might tell him this.

What is so Special about G minor?

In the days when I tuned my harpsichord I became deeply respectful of the singular problem posed by the black keys we call F# and B-flat.  Properly tuned in a version of mean-tone temperament, they sound absolutely horrible together. 

Even on a modern piano tuned to equal temperament, this combination of keys will inevitably sound like a major third, never a plausible diminished fourth.

That probably explains why Mozart stayed away from the key of G minor on the piano, as did Beethoven,  with some notable exceptions: The Piano Quartet K. 478, for example, on which my book is forthcoming.

Haydn, on the other hand, has written in that key, and has taken on the problem in highly creative ways, bless his heart.  His trick is to use the ordinarily F# key as a G-flat, thus relishing the major third produced by those particular black keys.

It makes for remarkable tonal passion.