Engaging the Audience

When I used to write "program" notes for my chamber group's performances they were actually listening notes.  I sought to involve the audience in the same kind of listening that we performers had to undertake in order to play the music -- we were an unlikely combination of timbres and we had an unfashionable habit of playing music we had never heard anyone else play, whether Renaissance pieces or newly composed works.

By drawing the listeners' attention to the fine points of ensemble rather than to historical or theoretical irrelevancies, we developed their interest in our programming at the same time that we improved their ensemble musicianship.

It worked really well as long as it lasted.

Like all good things, it could not last forever.  The invasion of Sovietized stratification killed the sort of spontaneity that prompted our very existence.  Suddenly you either were or were not good enough and  conformist enough. It was all downhill from there.

Playing from Memory - What's the Big Deal?

Yesterday I heard a young string quartet from France, energetic and sincere and all, but severely restricted in their imagination by playing everything from memory.

What kind of memory, I wonder?  It seems to me I heard every beat, every barline, as though they had committed the printed page to memory, not the actual music.  It happens that I knew two of the three works they played in their showcase performance at the CMA conference.  I know the difference between the way they are written down and the way they "go."  These young people clearly cannot afford to know that difference.

That would entail risk-taking; perhaps an inspired sudden change of fingering or bowing, potentially throwing the others off-guard.

But that is exactly what I crave in ensemble playing: that hint of danger, possible only when everyone has access to a printed score to enable rapid reorientation.

We Are Finally All InterCultural

It was delightful to run into a young dancer in the locker room today, sporting Alvin Ailey sweatpants.  Was she a student, I asked.  Was she new to the program?  Yes.  It seems she just arrived from Japan where Alvin Ailey's dance is well known and much loved.

What a relief it must be to know that it is OK to love whatever you love in the arts.  Times have changed from when I was young.  Now the problem is rather the reverse of what it was 50 years ago: now it is the Classical style that is necessarily on the defensive after decades of ritual murder at the hands of well-meaning but narrow-minded pedagogues.

My work Tonal Refraction has to do with legitimatizing emotional responses to musical elements, primarily tone (or pitch) itself.  I realized this afternoon as I was riding the bus uptown that in many of his compositions Mozart shifts the emotional content of tones so that they are rarely speaking to a single frame of mind or heart.

In learning to name notes and identify tonal functions we risk losing insight into this mercurial aspect of his, indeed, of every composer's art.

A colleague (1/3 my age!) recently said that he thinks the trouble starts when young children are taught the names of notes, as opposed to just listening to them.  Good point.

The Del Sol String Quartet

Based in San Francisco, the Del Sol is a group after my own heart.  They present works by living composers, representing a wide range of cultures, styles, even tuning systems.  They awaken the audience to what "live" means.

In one of their more astounding feats they retune their instruments to truer fifths, much like the vocal intonation I so treasure in a cappella singing. Last night I heard them play a piece by a Cambodian composer in which each player is required to sing as well as to play - at the same time but not the same pitches.  The result is amazing.

Visit their website www.delsolquartet.com to find out their concert schedule.  If you have a chance go hear them!

So Much to Think About

Yesterday I attended the funeral for a superb clarinetist who, at age 80, first enrolled in the people-oriented Chamber Music program I coordinated at Mannes for over 35 years.  Over the years I had developed an unwritten rule, to discourage if not downright refuse participation on the part of individuals above a certain age who played treble instruments--violin, say, or clarinet.   Their traditional role as leader of the ensemble plus the sheer wealth of their experience customarily made it difficult for younger players to enjoy their company.

But this man was different.  The moment he picked up his clarinet to play before the assembled would-be-partners everyone wanted to play with him.  His sound embodied generosity.

It was true that he had played "all" the music in the repertoire, but only up to and not including the 20th century.  And so began a wonderful exploration of music by composers totally new to him and, most often, to the coaches as well.   He stayed in the program for several years, on occasion playing such traditional repertoire as Beethoven's Op. 11 Trio for clarinet, cello, and piano.  Once he participated in a fund-raiser playing Mozart 's Clarinet Quintet with a group of professional strings.  I will never forget his playing of those "standards" for which he set a new standard of warmth.

Julien Ander died at the age of 96 having enjoyed and shared many years of the best kind of music-making.  Thank you, Julien.

Whoa, Bessy!

I recall when I was a student (not undergraduate) how fellow pianists would complain that their teachers obsessed over Beethoven on a note-by-note basis.  This is exactly what I find myself doing with my young computer animator student, who is just now really getting down to the business of seriously reading music -- i.e., reading it in terms not of mechanical physical responses, but in relation to his instinctual auditory life, which is both rich and precise in its way.

Those last three words provide the key to this kind of reading.  For we are all idiosyncratically involved in what we perceive, no one more so than Beethoven in response to the sound of the piano.
This is what teachers fail to point out, or to bring out in their students.  Students are, therefore, understandably and justifiably confused about whose ear they are trying to satisfy.

My approach is to slow my own hearing down to the point where I perceive the interstices between my ear, the student's ear, and what I presume (from the printed score) to have been Beethoven's ear.

This is utterly and endlessly fascinating to the two living parties to this transaction.

Foot Tapping to Your Own Playing

Predicting the beat is dangerous to really paying attention.  Once you get used to predicting the beat you are likely to lose the ability to attend to all that goes on between beats -- where the going is really at its most interesting.

People who complain of melodies going around and around inside their heads are often at the mercy of a rhythmic notion that simply does not apply to real music or to real music-making.

The best place to start curing yourself of the habit is in your own playing.  Make it impossible to predict your own beats.  Hold every note you play as long as you can stand to hold it.  Don't move on until you can't stand it any longer.

See what happens.  Send me a message.