Repetition Again Proved Impossible!

Another session on the Clementi C major Sonatina, Andante movement:  This time the student is hearing the very subtle correspondences between black and white keys in such a way as to be thrown for a loop.

Bravo, say I.  This is exactly what should be happening!  Hearing will always be fresh provided that one's sense of hearing has been opened to take into account every aspect of the sound, not just the superficial aspects of "how it goes."  It doesn't ever go the same way twice.

The more deeply he gets into his own experience of this piece the greater my respect for the composition on all levels.

Up and Down Again

Rereading a recent post it strikes me that many musicians might think they are above having to think about directionality.  I learned how vivid it is when, in a master class with a true master teacher as well as artist, the young professional pianist could not answer the question in relation to a Schubert melody.

The fingers go sideways, it is true.  But the heart?

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.