Go Ahead: Stick Your Neck Out

If classical music is to have a chance of survival in this over-controlled tech world players simply must learn to dare the forbidden.  When is that going to happen if not when the player is young?

Too often teachers take it as their duty to produce students who clone mature performances rather than to nurture confidence in their students' distinctive voices .

Recently I put out the question on an Internet chat list: What piano performances had most affected you?  Only one response cited a live performance; all the others were recordings.

I know that my CDs, which are entirely unedited and which do contain flaws, have alienated some people.  Others have said that they realize there must be mistakes on the CD but that they do not hear them.

One of the latter was a quite rigid musician with whom I used to perform. 

Hmmm.

Which Do You Support: Arts or Ads?

Every time you read a blog post that speaks to you you might consider dropping a dime into a piggybank.  At the end of a month tally up the dimes and send that amount in to support the blogger.

It would be interesting.  I know of a major charity that survived because volunteers painstakingly glued single grains of rice to letters of solicitation, asking that each grain yield a single dollar bill.  It was a lot of work, involving a lot of rice, but the charity benefited hugely from the money and from the public support.

These daily posts are my grains of rice.

See how to respond at www.tonalrefraction.com

When Expression is Not Expressive

For all that I deplore the effect of recorded music on the phenomenon of live listening, I am grateful that, from time to time, I catch a broadcast of a recording I would never otherwise hear.

One such was a recent airing of Itzhak Perlman playing the "Turkish" violin concerto of Mozart, James Levine conducting.  Technically polished, both orchestra and soloist would fall into the category of excellent, without doubt.  The tone of the violin was uniformly high-strung: rapid vibrato to produce a singing tone throughout.

But it is clear from just listening to the music that it is not about singing tone throughout.  For one thing, in the manner of all Mozart, deceptions abound: leading tones that do not resolve, upward wafts that do not lead in that direction, upbeats that do not prepare the following downbeats.  In order to express these deceptions one would have to lighten up on that singing tone quality and allow some air, some transparency into the sound.

Thinking back, I cannot help but contrast this recording with the Rachel Podger / Gary Cooper recording of a very early Mozart sonata played on period instruments.  To be sure there were obvious differences in approach and in technique; but more than that, the resonant environment of this recording was richly intimate, while in the Perlman it presupposed the clean, non-resonating environment of the well-produced (over-produced?) LP.

Maybe that technique of high-strung vibrato is the only way to pierce the sterility of that style of recording technology.  Who knows?  We do know that tempo decisions in Classical symphonies began to be determined by the minutes available on one side of an old 78rpm side.

We should also be aware that a certain uniformity of technological approach is conducive to overall conformity.  All one has to do is listen to a dozen recordings of a richly detailed Beethoven sonata or concerto to realize how little individuality is out there on those mass-produced pieces of plastic. 

Schumann: The Post-Modern Piano

I have long maintained that with the invention of the piano notation should have changed to reflect the vastly expanded world of resonance released and revealed by the new instrument.  Along with that statement I am quick to add that, had composers actually changed their syntax to match the sound, no one would have known how to deal with it and the instrument would most likely have died the unnatural premature death of the arpeggione and other instrumental novelties of the day, of which there were many.

Along came Schumann.  Probably more than any other composer he found ways to require the pianist to connect with sound in an altogether new set of dimensions.  He did this by literally stretching beats to occur over long periods of time, with pre-bar bass notes, grace notes, rolled chords, and other devices (mostly annoying to the novice and to the unimaginative) that cannot simply be played but which demand observation, one tone -- sometimes one partial -- at a time.

Also he explored the difference in resonance between black and white key basses: Just look at the Symphonic Etudes.  Whole pages can be played with full pedal over a low bass, the vibrations cleaning themselves as the music builds.

Add to that his radical dynamics:  long pianissimos, sudden fortes, markings that direct the player's  attention to the sound not the execution.

Even Chopin did not go this far into the new territory.

Criticism

In an editorial in the Sunday NYTimes of Dec. 15 Maureen Dowd expresses impatience with the be-nice culture of never saying anything critical about anything.  She points out that such criticism is essentially dishonest; that it is really thinly disguised advertisement.

I found it remarkable because she is employed by a newspaper whose policy in arts coverage has been to a great degree to print criticism of that nice-whether-you-mean-it-or-not category.  In at least two instances that come readily to mind the critic had decidedly critical things to say about the performance but ended up noticing how many people were in the audience, or how the audience reacted, or some such irrelevant nonsense.

The audience at last week's boring Baroque performance was large and clapped loudly.  It merely indicated to me that they recognized same-old and appreciated not having to pay attention.

The Half-Light and Tone

The notion of the half-heard is powerful.  We find it in the Forgotten Waltzes of Liszt, in the many musical renderings of falling asleep from Vivaldi to Schumann.  It is a quality of sound that cannot be written down.

But Schumann makes it almost impossible to miss, sometimes by his titles, which might be *  *  *  (sorry that I cannot align them properly in this computer program) or by dynamic markings that make no sense in terms of conventional sound because they are simply "too" soft, or because they interrupt what might otherwise be perfectly sensible phrasings.

This morning I was discussing this quality with a casual acquaintance, a professional musician with whose work I am completely unfamiliar.  He described this quality as madness.  I wouldn't put it that way.  For one thing, that makes it too easy to write off as simply the work of a madman--a tendency that people have every time Schumann brings them face to face with something they do not readily grasp.

Text and Tone

Without text some tones are incomprehensible.  In that respect Schumann is very like Bach or Mozart.  But when we read Schumann's titles or consider his literary references we are usually engaged on the level of some kind of literal meaning rather than on the level of imagery.

It rarely occurs to us that the imagery might be in the tone itself, not in the word associated with it.

This was the great lesson of the Jagdbevier (Op. 137) we played the other evening.  As the translated poems made clear we were creating not settings of poems but the actual subject matter of those poems, particularly the Daemmer, the pre-dawn half-light in which everything becomes more real than real.

This is Schumann's environment of musical truth; it accounts for the pianissimo marking in so much of his music, for beats that occur over a stretch of time, and for such tempo indications as nicht schnell, leise.  This music transcends music as we are taught to conceptualize it.

Interestingly the work is scored for four of the most dangerous instruments known, natural horns.  One takes one's life in one's hands with them; to sing with them is an enormous satisfaction.  It makes Waldszenen comprehensible.