A Couple of Pre-Schoolers Walk Into a Music Room

That's what happened here yesterday (actually, three).  The only rule is that there is to be no speaking in the piano area unless absolutely necessary.  Percussion instruments of various kinds are scattered around and the children are invited to join me in music as they desire.

So I begin--wrong, I did not begin.  The oldest (4 1/2) began rhythmic drumming on the drum she had brought.  So I joined her, playing a modern march for children from Lowell Liebermann's brilliant Album for the Young.  I segued into other less obviously square rhythms, one in 5/4, then a free-wheeling Serenade by Grieg with all kinds of ritards and dynamic extremes.  I pay no attention to the children, only to the sounds they make while I play, and I am continually astonished at the degree to which they are with me--not in the obvious sense of keeping the beat, but responding to highs and lows, registral as well as dynamic.

Sensing a heightened level of attentiveness I launch into Schumann's Geschwindmarsch.  The little girl gets it and, at Schumann's audible invitation, turns herself into a panther, hiding then pouncing, just as the music does.  Delighted, I broke the rule to say so. Meanwhile the two others, younger (one not quite 2) had become quietly fascinated with other objects in the room.  Were they listening?
Who knows?

I suspect they were because one of them announced that he was tired.  (See Sept. 12 post "A Young Listener Gets Tired" -- my most-read blog post ever.) I completely agreed with him that an awful lot had been happening.  So we changed course.

Unable to get them interested in singing Down in the Valley with a pianistic wind accompaniment (invented by a young student years ago), I sat one child on my lap, had him rest his hands on mine and played the Sicilienne by Alfredo Casella which ends, as do many of his pieces, with a tone cluster, played by the child.  Naturally the other older child wanted a turn, so we did it for Casella's Bolero.  Then we wound down and called it a day.

It might have baffled a parent to witness this mildly chaotic environment of active listening.  Listening to good music live should evoke a kaleidoscopic chaos of response.  No one should have to start out on a lifetime of musical involvement by sitting still (heaven forbid!) or even with pre-organized responses, like steady beats (there goes the vitality!).

Insightful Listening IS for Beginners

The first thing that happens to most piano students is that they are encouraged to not listen.  If they did listen (which, despite the teacher's best efforts, they do) they would notice that no two pianos sound the same and this would, it seems obvious, get them all loused up when they go to play an altogether new instrument in a recital.

Not teaching beginners that listening matters rather guarantees that all-too-familar louse-up.

With a confident ear the student can enjoy playing at whatever level of competence he or she needs to attain in order to explore their chosen repertoire.

With no practicing, just occasional immersion in bits of a Beethoven Sonata (Op. 10, #3), my young adult student relishes every nuance as if he is making it up himself which, in a way, he is, since everything happens in response to his uninhibited ear rather than by means of a visual or verbal command.

I learn a great deal about Beethoven from listening to him listen.

The Secret Terms and Tone

The master teacher Karl Ulrich Schnabel, son of Arthur Schnabel, used to describe musical dynamics using the analogy of a stage play in which one character says to another, "I'm going to kill you!"  It matters a lot where the speaker is standing in relation to the addressee, whether within arm's reach knife in hand, or half a room away.

Playing for musicians in the intimate circumstance of my home reveals repeatedly to them and to me the extent to which that distance variable is removed in our approach both to listening and to playing.
Sitting almost on top of the piano they hear things they have never heard before, even in the most familiar music.

Those are the vibrations, friends.  The variability of those vibrations is my secret place in which I move as if swimming in the safest waters.  Playing is not so much a matter of rendering the music as of living inside of it.

Last night I played Grieg's Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 3.  What is poetic is tone itself: Nothing sentimental, nothing "romantic" about it.  I apply exactly the same principles to the tone universe of Mozart with the result, as described by a musician in the audience, that the music seems to speak.

It does speak to me; all I do is let you in on the secret of my hearing.

Your Life Does Depend On It

Teaching Schumann's Scheherezade this morning to an adult amateur brought up in the British graded system of piano training -  beats, beats, beats - who is very aware of the danger of music becoming, in her word, ploddy:

I learn how to read from students like her.  Sustaining interest in this piece is a challenge because of its constant moving eighth notes.  Isolating the top and bottom voices revealed the underlying counterpoint inside of which those eighth notes make real sense instead of driving the work relentlessly forward -- remember that in this case forward is to quicker decapitation.

There is a beautiful right hand slur in which a half note E tied to an eighth note literally slides off onto other pitches.  These are not "real" pitches, but the result of an inability to sustain the high E, which is an altogether different proposition.

Not everything that looks like a rise does actually lead up; the same, naturally, applies to down.

More on Words: Their Affinity With Notes

I have been thinking a lot about Leonard Michaels' Nachman Stories.  Doing so has improved my Mozart playing by encouraging me to notice every single word, not taking any one of them for granted; and to consider always the story behind the story.  Who is this man?  What is he not revealing?  What aspect of myself is critical to the meaning of these words?

Last night I played Mozart's late sonata in F, K. 533 and K. 494.  Huge piece in every respect, it is monumental and intimate, dramatic and confiding, looking forward and contemplating the past; most dramatically, its magic hinges on the difference between rising and falling.  Does it go up or does it go down?  This is often the most difficult musical question to answer.  Nowhere more dramatically ambiguous than here.

The same applies to beats:  Is this an upbeat?  If so, to what?   What is this rest doing here?  Where does the phrase start?  Where is the resolution?

Very often what looks at first glance to be a repetition of material previously played turns out to be variation in the light of all those legitimate, usually unasked, questions.

Da Vinci's "Piano" - Viola Organista

This link has been circulating on Facebook. I heartily recommend listening to the whole thing as it takes some getting used to Viola Organista.  I personally wouldn't describe it, as some musicians have, as "wacky."  It has always seemed to me that the piano was invented to do precisely what this instrument does, which is to activate the strings so that they resonate like the strings of a violin or cello.

It is the sort of sound I strive to make.  The only thing wacky about it is that you have to listen to the whole sound, not get distracted by such upfront details as notes.

Leonardo rides again!

Radical Hearing: Arjomand / Mozart

The piano is a radical invention, always was, always will be.  Attempts to make it less than radical are doomed to fail.  Ask any child.

It is a matter of the conflicting resonance of white vs. black keys.

The piano is an instrument of collision, in a very vivid way.  Its acoustical nature is so complex that composers writing for it as a solo instrument tended also to write for it in combination with instruments of other families--strings, woodwinds, horn.  The specific genius of these compositions has reinforced my conviction that what I sensed as a child in the piano music of Mozart is truly the essence of the instrument.

I think primarily of Schumann: The Piano Quartet, the Fantasy Pieces, without which I would have only a limited understanding of the instrument I play.

Then there is Arjomand, a contemporary, illuminating the action of listening to this radical sound by being more than radical himself.  I will go back to hear him again and again because he makes me aware of what I am hearing and because he does so in entirely non-static terms, non-static in the most literal sense of constant motion.