The Fuss About F# Major

There is a current discussion raging on the Music Theory Society's on-line talk list-serve about music in the key of F# major.  Initially I thought it was a joke:  Surely everyone with a Ph.D. in Music Theory knows the Beethoven Sonata Op. 78!  To my surprise, and probably everyone else's, a long thread of posts continues to unravel.

Ravel furnishes an excellent starting point for me to make the case I try to make, namely that it is a matter not so much of tonality per se as of instrumental resonance.

Every time I try to point out the difference, however, the terminology is sent back to me skewed away from sound and into concepts specifcying tonal function.  Only one poster mentioned the irresistibly beautiful major third (F# - A#) of that key.

The more involved I become in instrumental sound the less I care about terminology, certainly not about the kind that assumes that theoretical function predominates over sound.

I simply don't believe it!  When I go to play the music I am even more convinced that these notions are not only irrelevant but also destructive of the urge to simply listen, to simply hear, to accept sound as the subject not the wallpaper.

Afraid of Being in the Same Room with Live Music?

Children are exposed to so little live music that by the time they reach adolescence they are sometimes terrified of it:  What is expected of them?  Some special behavior, perhaps?  Some "appreciation" such as is taught in schools whereby all music is reduced to thing-ness?

This morning I saw something positively lovely and loving:   The moment a beautiful live trumpet sounded together with voices and organ a father reached over and touched his small child, as if to embody the gentle warmth of this very special sound.

Lucky child!

What Do I Enjoy Listening To?

I would rather listen to a motivated student struggle with musical elements than go through the motions of listening to players whose contact with musical elements vanished in their pursuit of technique.

What are the elements?  Every aspect of music that is felt is elemental.

• Rhythm:  There are so many levels at which rhythm is manifest that it can never be entirely routine.
• Tone relatedness: There are so many ways to relate one tone to another that, again, this defies routinization
• Touch: How many fingers you have and how you position them on the keys or on the strings makes all the difference.
• Breath:  Applies to and enhances all of the above, over and beyond its direct application to singing and to winds.

Issues of style and form take second place to all of the above.

Vibrato to Mask Vibration

To continue from yesterday's post:

What happens is overuse of vibrato to mask any qualitative difference between one tone and another.  By making all pitches uniform there is no need to attend to the implications of sympathetic vibration.

Violinist Gregor Kitzis and I did a Beethoven Spring Sonata last week (and will do a second performance this evening) that revealed what happens when this kind of listening is unleashed:  It sounds like Webern Klangfarbenmelodie!  One hears a counterpoint of resonant tones traded back and forth between the instruments, playful, lustrous, crystal clear.  Nothing that can be read on the page, but that exists only because it is heard.  At no time did we discuss this.  But I immediately sent a CD to my composer friend, Ursula Mamlok, who is tremendously affected by specific sounds as was Anton Webern.

Bid on The Rugs

I invite you to bid on the rugs and throws on silent auction at www.tonalrefraction.com.  Proceeds from the auction, which will be finalized on June 9, will help defray expenses of my upcoming trip to Seoul, Korea to present practical implications of Tonal Refraction at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition. 

It would be a great way to show your support for my work and, at the same time, to come into possession of a unique (and practical!) piece of fiber art crafted entirely of recycled string passed down to me by a designer of knit patterns.

Miss Twiggy, wool and alpaca, 59" x 32" demonstrating by its irregular shape the extent to which it is truly a String Improvisation.

More pictures : Posts of May 7, 10, 13 and 15.

Melodic and Harmonic Hearing

After hearing countless string quartets and soloists play their instruments distressingly sharp I went to Europe in the early 1980s expressly to hear whether playing out of tune had become an internationally established practice.   I was delighted to find that, thanks largely to the early music movement, it had not.

There was one book that completely took my breath away and I find myself using its insights again and again to inform my ear --  by that I mean, to become aware with greater precision of what I actually hear.
Melodisches und harmonisches Hoeren auf Streichinstrumenten by Christian Heman.   I feel as if it let me in on a classified secret.  I know of no translation into English and I have never heard anyone speak of the book or its implications which are, roughly:

Tones that vibrate sympathetically with the pitches and overtones of the instrument's open strings will have a different quality than those that do not.  For example, A will always have a different tone quality than B-flat.  It is not a matter of intonation, but of resonance.

He gives examples of how different scales on the violin become enhanced, informed, intensified, when this is taken into account.

It seems so simple.  What gets in the way oft this being audible in most string playing?

Standards? Who Sets Them?

Talking casually with a bunch of musicians (not classically trained but musicians nonetheless) the subject came up about the effect of recordings on generations of players.

I know that classically trained pianists bend over backwards to sound like recordings they have heard, even though many of those recordings were made in the days before microphones could pick up bass sonorities.  So there is only treble.

The others were talking about highly skilled guitarists who picked up the details that distinguish their playing by imitating recordings some of which don't even maintain a constant speed.

This technology business is severely life-threatening.

Though I recall a brilliant conference back in the 80's on the subject of "Technology and the Rest of Culture" which treated, in addition to railroads and steam engines, the alphabet and the fig leaf.