It's Not What You Listen To, But How You Listen

The media are feeding us a lot of garbage about Mozart and the brain.  I hope you are spitting it out, as babies spit out the carrots that feel so foreign on their tongues.

Let's talk about those spitting babies as the models of proper attentiveness.  When infants are engaged in real listening, that is, listening attached to human involvement, there is no limit to what they will take in.  The human involvement has to include a warm body, preferably with a face that has moving parts, like eyebrows, and a smile or a frown--any sign of life will do.

Too much Classical music is about the notes, the structures, and not about that spitting baby's hunger for the real thing.

This morning, once again, it was my young adult student with the Trio of that Beethoven Minuet in Op. 10 # 3.  Played as I always used to play it before I started paying attention, it is simply a matter of triplets in one hand and punctuating quarters in the other.  Not so fast, say I.  Where, exactly, are the downbeats?  Surely not where the barlines would have us believe they must be, for otherwise why are there so many dash staccatos -- remember those marks indicate strong ambiguity about ups and downs, and recall also that minuets are hemiola territory, par excellence.  Then, what might we have?*

We might have hemiolas intersecting other hemiolas, as was common practice back in the day when musicians were not so tied up in knots about counting as a linear procedure.  And we might have triplets played not in threes but in multiples of seven or five, i.e., constantly against the predictable beat.  Try it.  It will get you up in the morning, day after day, and you won't be able to repeat yourself, not ever, not once. 

(See my book, What Might It Mean?  An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious, with entries for hemiola, minuet, and dash staccato, among others.  Purchase one at www.tonalrefraction.com.)

Limited by Notation

We have begun work on Tonal Refraction II which treats Schumann's Waldszenen (Forest Scenes).  The first problem is how to notate the printed score.  I have a master engraver working on it and his questions reveal again and again the limitations of music notation, especially as revealed by in-depth visualization of the actual sound of the piece--two entirely different things.

I had noticed that, in making the Tonal Refraction of the score, I wanted to account for the underlying tension between duple meters and triple rhythms.  That was the first "inaccuracy," perhaps inconsistency is a better word, that turned up in comparing modern typographical usage with the 1887 edition on which he is basing his copy.

Schumann was always pushing envelopes.  His notation of internal rhythms is never easy to decipher and keeps many pianists at bay -- I am tempted to say, thank goodness.

Singularity Needs Company

Continuing my thoughts on Ursula Mamlok: She affirms again and again that she is mindful of the audience when she composes.  What a fascinating thing to ponder in the light of the difficulty of some of her music.

It is through her solid base in the sensuality of sound that she succeeds in arousing extraordinary attentiveness from musicians which, in turn, communicates directly to the audience.  It is the most direct form of communication, not dependent on any learned responses but "simply" from the gut.

Perhaps that is why she describes composition as being such a battle for her.  It is as if with every note she must struggle against the temptation to conform to some pre-existing formula for juxtaposing sounds.

I as a musician empathize with that struggle.  Am I a pianist? Yes, but only in a special sense, not according to the going stereotypes of playing the piano.  I am not a piano player.

In the film about Ursula (Movements, by Anne Berrini) there is a brief clip of her seated alongside me as I play a snippet of Beethoven's Variations on Rule Brittania.  There she is, listening, respecting fully that I play as I play, not as a cliched interpreter but as the musician that I truly am irrespective of fashions and conformities--very much like her, in fact; decidedly informed by her, and in the warmth of our friendship.

Movements: A Film by Anne Berrini on Being One Self Within Two Cultures

In her splendid film about the life and character of Ursula Mamlok, Berrini succeeds beautifully in presenting a multi-layered portrait of the dilemma of all modern music and musicians, not just of her subject.

The Yellow Submarine we all inhabit is always multi-cultural, and increasingly so.  Not all of us have experienced forced displacement from our native land.  Yet for many American musicians defining what is native can be a real dilemma.  We are assigned Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart as if their music is the real thing on which our musical identities depend.  Well, maybe.   But maybe not so much.

Rather than define this dilemma, Berrini, with the insightful collaboration of Bettina Brand, has observed it playing itself out in a kind of reverse action: The German-born young Mamlok, newly arrived in America at age 16, has devoted a lifetime to finding her voice, affirming her voice, becoming a world citizen whose identity spans not just an ocean but centuries of the musics of profoundly singular minds.  That she is completely at home in their company is evidenced in the splendid performances her music evinces whenever and wherever it is played. 

Mamlok and Real Neo-Classicism

Theorists and critics like to use the term Neo-Classic as a great compliment to a composer: To Prokofiev for his Classical Symphony, to Stravinsky for his numerous works based on 18th-century and earlier composers.

Ursula Mamlok's Neo-Classicism is of a different category, less a matter of formal emulation than of instrumental insight.

In the pursuit of formal clarity it is possible to assume notes while constructing themes, subjects, motifs, procedures.  Mamlok, by keeping the attention on the tones themselves and on the refinement of every rhythmic instant, evokes the essence of Classical style, not its surface.

Last week, in a concert of her works performed by some of New York's top players, it was a privilege to watch them, one by one, fall in love with their instruments anew, invited by her sonorities, yielding to the power of her musical convictions--much more deeply sensual than themes.

I came away from that concert with several vivid moments.  Thank you, Ursula.

The Board/Bored Book Approach

In last Sunday's NYTimes, on the front page no less, appeared an article about a new market in board books for little kids, the kind of book usually used to teach ready identification of numbers, colors, animals, alphabet letters, and so on.

The title?  Moby Dick no less.

What have we come to?  Where is wonder?

There are only numbers, pictures to be identified, quantitative entities and an occasional quote, if you're lucky.

One of my all-time favorite experiences of literature at its most profound occurred in a rowboat in the middle of a pond in the Catskills.  Every day I would row my children out together with a copy of Don Quixote, the real deal.  I would read to them a chapter a day.  One day, at the beginning of a dialogue between the Don and Sancho Panza, my daughter (then 8) and my son (5) burst out laughing and declared, both at the same time: "I know what he's going to say!"  They had him and it down. They knew it was hilarious.  Bless them.  Bless children.

Do NOT dumb down.  What would Moby say?

That Minuet, Again!

Once again my young adult student and I enjoyed an extraordinary level of insight into the Menuetto of Beethoven Op. 10 # 3, this time involving the articulation of two specific bars.  Different in the two hands, the right hand seems, as the student, unaware of the depth of his insight, put it, "not to move," while the left extends across the full two bars preparing a clear phrase ending.

Rendering those subtleties audible would constitute a terrific reason to practice at the same time as it would epitomize the entire minuet: Paying such careful attention to detail, to the tension underlying interweaving inner voices, reveals the essence of the movement.

Our anti-minuet bias may be rooted in our having had to learn minuets while children.  Bo-ring.

I will never forget sitting beside a quite known avant-garde pianist at a children's recital at Mannes.  Some poor boy was banging the bejeezus out of a Haydn minuet.  "Can you imagine," remarked I, "that teachers are still giving children assignments like that?"  (I, who do not enjoy a reputation as an avant-garde pianist, begin all my students with 20th century music --I wouldn't dream either of visiting minuets upon them or them upon minuets.)

Her reply: "That's my student."