Irony in Rhythm

Some of the best music for teaching reading are in Schumann's Album for the Young.  Schumann was fascinated by fairy tales and what are they if not situations in which more is going on than meets the eye.

Take Chorale:  All half note chords.  Ah!  But with a melody which, when played legato, produces a kind of beat which becomes more intense as it lengthens.  Ironically the sound decays as the intensity of ear and fingers increases.  

Contrast that with Soldier's March: All (or at least, mostly) eighth note chords with rests in between--the exact opposite of the Chorale.  But here the demand is to finger the chords as if they will be played legato so that one can release and attack precisely on time.  This gets particularly hard (and fun) when, at the end, the movement between final quarter note and the penultimate chord must be achieved with no break at all!

You might say that the subject of reading rhythm in these two pieces is the essence of musical rhythm, which is timing much more than the superficial beat.

Repetition: What Good Is It?

Repetition is over-rated as a learning device, especially on the piano.

The instrument is by definition incapable of allowing repetition--that is, if you include the strings as part of the definition.  The trouble is that all too often children learn to play as if the strings had nothing to do with it. 

In the fifth grade at Ravenswood Elementary in Chicago we were all given cardboard keyboards on which to "practice."  A pretty good idea, actually, since sound had nothing to do with it.   My very wise adult teacher, Hans Neumann, used to suggest doing finger exercises on the opposite forearm, or on the thigh--what a great idea, given the instant biofeedback re touch.

But as soon as sound enters into the picture there is constant variability: the instrument always was incapable of acoustical repetition.

Perhaps that explains the importance of the old concept of rhetoric: finding alternative ways of saying the "same" thing.

Does it Go Up or Does it Go Down?

Direction is everything--much more important than notes.  Going up feels completely different from going down.  The anticipation of rise or fall reveals a lot about the return player will get for daring to make those initial sounds.  

Is it a real rise or is it just pretending to move?   A real rise is continuous for more than two consecutive notes.  If the line reverses direction after the second note it is clearly not committed to rise.  Then what is it?

Turns are always a possibility.  Often they are used deceptively, to trick us into thinking we are going either up or down, only to find that we ended up where we started.

Everything about these distinctions is expressed immediately in the hand even when the player has very primitive finger skills.

Ear-based Sight-Reading

When are piano teachers going to stop teaching children to read music in the manner of those old Fred Astaire Dance Studio charts with pictures of feet in various positions on the floor with arrows?

Equating the lines and spaces with the alphabet is already pretty irrelevant, but attaching them to keys on the piano just makes it all that much harder to get the point: these are not mechanical instructions, but maps of sound.

I am amazed at how much better people read when their natural hearing is engaged before the fact of playing the notes.  There are simple ways to achieve this which I will go into in subsequent posts.

Guitar, Tiple: Better than Piano Lessons

In a wonderful celebration of new ensemble works for guitar  I heard a new sound: The tiple is a South American instrument with 12 strings, doubling the main strings at octaves.  It is an amazing sound, more like a piano than a guitar.

When I commented as much to William Anderson, the player, he immediately began to hold forth against the kind of generic piano playing that I so dislike.  It was fun to have this exchange with him.  The tiple was played together with fine guitarist Oren Fader--the Anderson/Fader Guitar Duo--in a lyrical work by Alba Potes.

I think pianists could learn a great deal about the sound of the piano from guitars excellently played.  Funny how we are so easily led to believe that the technique is the sound.

Other fine players this afternoon: Pianist Thomas Carlo Bo, who did extraordinary work with an ensemble of three guitars and double bass in Titania's Lullaby by Dan Cooper.   I very much enjoyed the refined articulate lyricism of the Alturas Duo (Scott Hill, guitar and Carlos Boltes, viola, together with Melanie Chirigna, flute in Saudade, part of a longer work written for them by Masatora Goya.

But the greatest compliment of all goes to Andrew McKenna Lee, whose virtuoso solo composition Arabescata reached every emotional, pitch, and dynamic extreme, internal and external all at once.

Clementi Sonata in C: Andante movement

Today I did an experiment: I had my young adult with the remarkably exact ear play this slow movement listening for how many things he could hear happening at any given moment.

It was like a miracle of artistic insight taking place before me--entirely spontaneous, entirely beautiful. Then it fell apart.  Of course, because he has no practice sustaining this kind of attention and it is hard to sustain, as is any specifically directed concentration.

He pinpointed the spot where the trouble began and we worked from there.  In the process my respect for Clementi rose yet again a few notches.  The detail!  The clarity!  Why on earth do people use this music as paradigm for law and order when it is such a rich study in how the magic of the piano works?

For one thing, every time there was a conflict between the bass note and the right hand it registered loud and clear in some misjudgment (or mistake) on his part.  This, in turn, revealed, how differently I hear when I ditch all those theoretical explanations for such things as the I 6/4 chord which is somehow supposed to merge seamlessly into the V 7 in root position.  Listened to this way, i.e., noting all the clashes between natural resonances, it quite logically prepares the dissonant cadence that ensues.

There is no substitute or shortcut for listening.

Equal Temperament Is Not The Issue

Some musicians get all tied up in knots about the issue of equal temperament.  I think they miss the point.

Equal temperament on the modern piano is like any other temperament on any keyboard instrument: it is as satisfying as the player understands it to be.

I have heard too many people playing on "better" temperaments who couldn't care less: One player of the fortepiano confided to me that she couldn't, to be honest, tell the difference.

I can tell the difference, as I tuned and played a beautifully in-tune harpsichord for many years and loved every minute of it.  Then, when I took up serious solo piano playing my ability to tune that other way totally disappeared, so I stopped doing it. 

I love the sound of the modern piano, always have.

I keep my ear "clean," so to speak, by indulging in a cappella singing tuned as pure as the ear allows.

Equal temperament became an issue when people stopped listening to the true riches of the modern piano and began to impose some standard-notation-visually-delimited definition of pitch on anyone who would sit still long enough to go along with it, whether orchestral instrumentalists and instrument makers, or choruses.

One can combine sounds of varying temperaments: I have done it playing chamber music and accompanying singers.  Whether it works or not is up to the ear (i.e., the touch) of the pianist to determine.