Ups and Downs - Beats

Today, after hearing a splendid singing of a Dunstable mass, I had a chat with one of the singers who is also a music theorist, on the subject of upbeats and downbeats.

It occurs to me that the problem comes in the training that we receive at an early age to experience these events solely in terms of body movement.  This means that it is wondrous difficult for someone so trained to emphasize an upbeat, especially when short, and de-emphasize the ensuing downbeat, especially if long.

The difficult is not the concept, but rather the physicality of the event.  Twice I have seen violinists incapable of playing an opening downbeat with an upbow, even when it was patently clear that this was the best way to articulate the phrase correctly, affecting also intonation.

One was a rigidly trained 12-year-old Russian student.  He couldn't even bring himself to try it.  He absolutely refused  The piece in question was a  Trio Sonata: by Telemann, who is notoriously inventive when it comes to rhythmic invention (though you might never guess that from the pedestrian performances to which the poor man's music is routinely subjected).

The other was an always-right-about-everything professional in his 40's, also Russian, who would not allow a student to begin a Schubert Sonatina in this way, even though she and I had worked it out,  mutually recognizing that it solved many problems.

So the problem is profound, bringing into question, as it does, solidity at all costs vs. a more interesting if also fragile sensibility.

What's This About Sad Music?

An Op-Ed piece in last Sunday's New York Times was on the subject of sad music.  I confess I couldn't read it.  The notion that any music--any music--is uniformly of one emotion is an oversimplification I no longer tolerate.

Such nonsense has led to the inability on the part of a great many normal, regular folks simply to let music pour into them without labels--prescriptions, as it were.

It also makes music incomprehensible to children whose multi-faceted perceptions do not conform to any particular word or concept, thus driving them away from what I call "the good stuff."

Such discussions always bring to mind the reproduction of an oil painting in the Minneapolis Art Museum, shown at a conference of Music Education people at the University of Georgia.  The painting showed a woman in a wide-brimmed hat seen from behind, seated in a field of wild flowers looking out to the distance.  This, according to the proud presenter, called for gentle, pastoral music.

I hit the ceiling.  "But look at the brush-strokes!"

Let's Hear It for Wrong Notes!

Today I had a revelation.  A young adult student who struggles with reading but whose ear is tops tops tops was making his way through a highly complex Beethoven minuet.  After 16 bars I asked him to show me where he had made errors.  The first one he noticed was not the first one I would have mentioned, but he was right.

It took a few minutes to figure out what had caused his error.  It was the first sound in which A did not appear, the tone which had been continuous in one octave or another since the beginning of the piece. 

I take this as a sign of just how well coordinated this man is in terms of his auditory / mental process, which is one of the hardest things to tap into once one has been trained to do vision-first reading.

Actual and Factual, to Borrow Albers's Precise Terms

The distinction may be applied to everything that exists at once in the scientifically measurable world of vibrations and in the sensibility of the perceiver.

Josef Albers applies the terms to color.  In Interaction of Colors he provides countless demonstrations of colors as actual, as they affect one another, in other words, of their mutability.

My work, Tonal Refraction, seeks to do this with tone.  Though, as Albers also notes, color and tone are analogous, in one respect they are entirely different.  A musician responds to tone specifically, i.e., in terms of a particular instrumental timbre, context within a key, and also memory and association.  Every single time the musician plays a given tone all of those factors come into play but never in a predictable comixture; every action of tones is subject to constant variation.

Add to this the remarkable power of a given composition to utterly transform a tone within the range of the composition itself--perhaps one reason why sonatas and symphonies have to have several movements.

Thinking About Time

Vibrations are not the smallest possible units of time but they will do as concrete experiences of the very small, since we have 16,000 vibrating hair cells in each cochlea with which to perceive them.  Eternity is somewhere on the opposite side of the spectrum.  Music inhabits both extremes at once.

The time in between -- what musicians call tempo / rhythm -- may be confusing if the time of vibration interferes with objective measurements of actual time.  The best analogy for this is the bedside heart monitor in the hospital: Marked off in seconds, the regular pulsating heartbeat is no problem to track.  Ring a doorbell and all hell breaks loose.  You are not going to tell me that one can possibly equate the seconds of regular ticking with that level of chaos!  

And so it is with musical vibrations.  Children perceive them in precisely that detail unless it is brainwashed out of them at an early age.

As for eternity, back to the Messe de Tournai.

Consonance Fixation

I fantasize about our culture's tremendous need for consonance, such that we find it difficult to accent non-chord tones, and to end phrases on unstressed beats.  Maybe it is all due to equal temperament: now that everything is more or less out of tune we crave anything that gives us an impression of being in tune.

Back in the pre-equal-temperament era, when instrumental intervals were closer to vocal intonation, people could take delight in the off sound just as they delighted in melancholy, these days a distinctly out-of-fashion mode of existence.

The great Anna Russell's blues lyrics come to mind:
"I was so happy when you made me miserable. Come back and make me miserable again!"

Children Listening

What expression of ecstasy can compare with the face of a young child entranced by the magic of vibrations?

Next week I begin a series of family gatherings in which young children will be improvising freely on percussion instruments while I play some of my favorite music on the piano: not "kid stuff" but the real thing -- lyrical works by Dvorak, Grieg, Brahms, Chopin, even Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Stravinsky, Henry Cowell--you get the picture.

Parents of very small children are invited to hold them on their laps while they engage in very light sounds to participate in the whole enterprise.

We will sing into the piano, lid up and pedal down.  Children may sit under the piano and play, if they so wish.

Nothing regimented.  All ear-play.

E-mail for more information.