Hearing, Really Hearing

The ephemeral nature of hearing is what makes it irresistible, tantalizing, overwhelming.

Think about it.  It might explain that mysterious musical marking, the repeat sign.  "Did I really hear what I thought I heard?"  If properly played, the answer would be, "You'll never know!  Because this time I will play it differently!"  At least, that's how it would have been done until visual analysis took over and enslaved us all into thinking that repetition (i.e., reliability) is the point of Classical music.

Someone asked me the other day whether printed music was really necessary since so many people play by ear.  Good question.  My reply was that, had it not been for printed music I would never have stumbled upon those sounds in Mozart sonatas that convinced me, a 12-year-old kid in Chicago, that I would never again in my life need to feel isolated: a person who had lived 200 years previously understood me!

I would go so far as to say that the need to rely on the visual symbol is a way of denying the volatility of hearing.

This was beautifully expressed by Hannah Arendt in her extended essay On Thinking (The New Yorker sometime in the 1970s) in which, after covering the Eichmann trials, she observed that nothing in her schooling had prepared her to take in knowledge gleaned from listening, pure listening. She was referring to what she knew to be the truth not so much from what Eichmann said as from his tone of voice.  She went on to observe that the ancient Greeks knew  truth because they saw it, while the Hebrews knew God because they heard His voice.

Nothing small here.

Marshall McLuhan and the Piano

If McLuhan was right when he said that all new media should go first into the hands of children, then it is not too late to get the piano, that radical sound medium, into the hands of children without spies in the form of people who already know what you "should" be doing with the instrument.

All of the great music for the instrument was written by people who discovered it for themselves: Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Bartok, Schumann, the list is long and still not finished.

Get into the instrument by getting into its sound on your own terms.  Is it right? Who knows.  Is it wasting time?  Certainly not.

It will heighten your awareness of every sound you hear whether practiced or not, whether professional or amateur in origin.

Beethoven the Experimenter

With all the pianists in conservatories encouraged to learn as many pieces as possible within the shortest possible time little room is left to value the experimentation of Beethoven.  There is no time to notice that counting to four gets to be boring; doing so saves a great deal of time, you see.

But there are so many instances in which counting to four completely destroys the creative impulse, not even to mention the underlying wit of the master.  How often does he take four note figures and compound them into sets of fives?  or threes?

This morning my young adult computer animator student coaxed groups of threes out of the four-note broken chords in the "Moonlight" Sonata, third movement.  It took some doing, as it is, at first, counterintuitive.  I let it take as long as it had to take for him to "get" it, at which point the sense of it was so evident that it would now be inconceivable to approach it any other way.

Questions?

Sometimes people who follow this blog contact me with questions or observations about some of the posts.  Nothing could please me more, considering the time and thought that goes into maintaining this connection with all of you out there, whoever you may be.

Yesterday a former student emailed me to the effect that she often does not understand the musical references I make.  How could she; she is just starting out on her independent musical life.  But for every arcane reference there is probably a much more accessible one lurking somewhere.

She brought up the issue of slurs, one of my favorite subjects.

I would refer anyone curious about them to consult Fuer Elise, another of my favorite subjects.  The opening tones, E and D# alternate, but when they return just before the "return" to the opening material after the "B" section, they are slurred in pairs: D#-E / D#-E / D#-E. This implies a completely different spacing of the tones and a definite upward motion repeated three times.

It is also a covert spelling of the real dedicatee's name: Therese.  Th in old German is one syllable, thus:
D# (consonant) E (the first vowel in the name)/ D# (consonant) E (second vowel) / D# (which is the enharmonic spelling of E-flat, which in German is called Es, pronounced like the letter "S", third consonant) E (third vowel).

I love it.

Attention Span Getting Ever Shorter

In moments of total fatigue or desperation I sometimes play Solitaire on my iPhone, the game subject to intermittent interruptions by unwelcome ads.  Try as I may I cannot locate the SkipIt button in time to avoid at least 3 seconds of flicker.

I am astonished at the amount of activity/change/implied plot can be contained in those 3 seconds.  They attest to an ever decreasing span of attentiveness to the moving image and, I suspect, to every other form of content.

Perhaps the hardest form of motion to take in is the vibration of living sound.  Everything conspires against noticing it and taking it seriously.

I knew back in the early 60's before TV had ironized its grip on us all that this would be a challenge for anyone in the performing arts: How to program so that people would notice time passing rather than assume it in pre-packaged durations, like one side of a 33 rpm record.

So I began purposefully to program chamber music recitals which alternated not only styles but durations with works as long as 45 seconds juxtaposed with others more traditionally 45 minutes long.

The danger doesn't decrease.

Support! Support! Support!

Yesterday I received the smartest bit of fund-raising in the mail: An invitation to commit to a yearly gift of $25 to my alma mater, in recognition of which pledge the Trustees will contribute $500 to the school. 

What could be simpler?  What could be more indicative of my gratitude that a place existed where I could be exposed to genuine inquiry and concern, where I would form lifelong friendships?

Why not do it for this blog?  Tonal Refraction is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, an arts services organization; contributions to Fractured Atlas designated for Tonal Refraction are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.  If you have ever found yourself thinking twice about one of these posts I invite you to go to tonalrefraction.com and match your response to my commitment to music, to learning, to my audience, you.

Martha Graham Illuminates the Ups and Downs

Actually Martha Graham illuminated the agonizing tension between forward and back, analogous in many ways to the musical rise and fall.  She had a characteristic gesture of the arms and face yearning to move forward while the solar plexus pulled in the opposite direction, making a graphic body image of the soul torn between outward and inward movement.

I think of this often, as one needs to know absolutely nothing about dance or movement or the body to grasp the power of the gesture.

The 19th century seemed to recognize only one direction, up.  Onward and upward was the battle cry.  Progress!  Valhalla!  Arrival!  Manifest Destiny!

Have we recovered yet?