Standing on One's Nose

Tonic.  Dominant.  Standard theoretical vocabulary.

Useful terms?  It all depends.

Yesterday the limits of their usefulness were tested so beautifully that I hope I will never recover from the shock.  It came via the natural horn in E-flat morphing from its B-flat, one of its happiest tones, to A-flat, one of its least possible tones, into my entrance on B-flat.

The temptation is overwhelming to enter boldly on what is, after all, the dominant in E-flat, the tonality of the piece.  But yesterday I chose instead to match rather than "correct" the quality of the horn's falset A-flat.  The difference was staggering.

Played on a modern horn this situation would not arise.  A-flat? No problem!  But Brahms stipulated Waldhorn (i.e., natural horn) for his Trio Op. 40 for Horn, Violin, and Piano.  And this must be the reason why:  The acoustical specificity of this most fragile instrument dictates meaning, not the theoretical function we hide behind so that we don't have to listen.

The art of music is, after and before all, listening, not playing.

Why Bother to Recover from Bad Piano Lessons?

There is no single or simple answer to the question.  It is an especially peculiar question to pose when so many conservatory graduates (well-meaning perhaps naive) pass on without any qualms the woefully unexamined achievement of having satisfied the requirements for graduation.

My guess is that Beethoven would not have passed the test, as Debussy did not.

As long as the standard is set by Beethoven and not by the piano faculty there is reason to want to recover.  Go straight to the heart of the matter without the distraction of technique.  Sound, pure and simple, is the reason to want to recover.

Anyone can connect with those sounds, in isolation, perhaps-- i.e., not playing entire sonatas--but nonetheless compelling.

Let the likes of Ludwig set your standard.

Are All Colors The Same?

I was fortunate to grow up in a household in which color figured prominently, though not on the surface of things.  My father worked for a company that made printing inks.  One of my favorite books was the book of color samples: many copies of a single print each in a different color.  I found it fascinating.  Was it the same picture?  Or had the color become the picture?

In a way this might represent a musical problem.  This Clementi Sonatina is in C.  Would it be the same sonatina if played in D, or F? 

This morning a marvelous student gave me a lesson on why that would be impossible.  The piece derives its entire sense from the intrusion of specific black keys into an otherwise consonant white key environment and boy! do they stick out.

First an F#; soon thereafter E-flat.  The second movement calls for B-flat throughout, and then when you get used to the return to all white keys in the third movement, bingo! a pesky F# returns for a brief appearance.

How much more meaningful these intrusions become, how much more playful, when they are not smothered by theoretical analysis, as they were when I first studied them.

Let the ear respond and green is indeed a different subject matter than, say, yellow.

What Price Professionalism ?

Yesterday I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours on a repertoire I haven't played for about thirty years.  It was our first meeting, the soprano and myself.  I had requested that we do Schumann lieder.  She came with the book but a look of puzzlement on her face, as if to inquire, "Why him?"

I would have had the same response of disbelief before my current fascination with Schumann and the incomprehensible.

She chose to work on Liederkreis, a cycle which she had studied as an undergraduate in music school.  Turns out she was trained, as I had also been, to deliver these songs confidently, in a well-organized manner.  But the songs are about alienation, about danger, about uncertainty.

Much of the real content of the song is clarified in the piano writing, which would have been Schumann's own involvement in the actual singing.

So artistry began to seep in more and more profoundly as she heard the accompaniments suggesting the imbalance that evokes alienation, danger, uncertainty.  How much more interesting! How much more demanding!

The Fashion World Has It Right

Lots of attention in this morning's press about a gala evening of high fashion awards.  Judging from the quotes, and the photos, high fashion is performance art at its most immediate.  Anyone can indulge in it; it needn't cost anymore than what you ordinarily spend on clothes.  All you have to do is be yourself.  Stick out.

Hmmm...  Was Beethoven a conformist?  Brahms?  Bach?   Where is the spirit that got them off the ground?

Is it just because their work has been printed, recorded, copied to death, that we are so removed from that zest, that sock-it-to-em drive that has to be what gave rise to such inventiveness?

Is There a Cure for Bad Piano Lessons?

This condition afflicts many people, some of whom think it is hereditary: in other words, they insist on passing it on to their children.

As with all chronic conditions there are nuances in the diagnosis:  Some of these bad lessons were the fault of the teacher as evidenced in lack of concern for the child's good feeling about the enterprise and/or about music.

A prominent jazz pianist told me of his childhood teacher insisting that he correct his hand position.  After having achieved some prominence in the alternative music world he realized that Horowitz's hand position looked awfully familiar to him.

In my case it wasn't the lessons so much as the assigned method books.  If that was music I wanted no part of it, so I never practiced.  Fooling around saved my musical soul.

It is like every other poison we ingest as infants:  with maturity comes the option to recover.  It can be done but it must be desired.

High Praise

It is not every day that I boast of having received high praise.  But last night, after hearing me play the "Moonlight" Sonata a listener said that it was the first time he had ever heard all three movements make sense as an integrated work.

This constituted high praise because he is a professional pianist, because he had given up on that piece, and because he put his finger on the most challenging aspect of the sonata: what to do with that second movement that seems so out of place between the radical first and third movements.

This, I told him, was the last problem I solved, having despaired of ever getting it to happen and knowing that it would not happen all by itself.

I love playing for a small audience who give me such concrete feedback.  I know that the juices are flowing both ways starting with the first note.  What a privilege.