Presumptions of Normal

A letter to the editor of The New York Times on August 29 caught my eye:  Referring to a recent article about the dangers of eating too much salt this gentleman remarked that without overconsumption of salt he risks dizziness and other unpleasant if not dangerous side effects.  When he reaches for the salt shaker at restaurants he is sometimes criticized by complete strangers for his lack of concern about his health.

Such things happen to me all the time.  I have learned to ignore the questioning eyebrows when I ask (politely, I hope) for a seat on the subway.  I may not look as though I need to sit but I do. 

As a child there were many things I simply could not do: simple things that required the reflex that I later learned is the crawling reflex: right arm / left leg diagonal coordination.  The presumption was that, since I was smart and also gifted, I should be able to do as others did.  Not so.  I found this extremely frustrating, especially as I had no way of saying "I can't do that!" 

Perhaps that explains why I am so fascinated by people whose inability to imitate is the gateway to the depth of their desire. 

Ironically, people who listen to me play have no notion of my ever not being able to do it.

Variability: The Essence of Variation

If the media had not so misled us into thinking that reliability in the sense of utter predictability was a good thing the quality of our daily lives might be altogether different. 

Today in the paper was a featured article about how high school kids no longer rely on clothing to "distract" them but use the latest tech gizmos instead.  What is this distraction business? 

I do recall boredom being a major fact of life when I was a child.  I lived right at the dawn, you might say, of the media-centered era: TV was invented while I was in grade school and started to invade the U.S. household before I hit high school.  Recordings, still a cumbersome matter of 78 rpms, of which 4 or 5 were required for a symphony, were transformed by the invention of the LP.  The end was in sight.

The end of what?  Of variability.  As soon as I heard something once I knew it: I knew the timing of every sequence of tones, not just the formal surface of the piece of music.  This was the enemy, that much was clear to me.

And I was right.

Now that I strive to put elasticity back into the experience of every tiny musical element I see how right I was.  Now that I realize how problematic this is for even some highly gifted young listeners (people in their 20s and 30s young) I am saddened beyond words.

From Note One

Where is note one?  Do you really think you walk around without notes already playing in your head?

Can you imagine what is happening inside your memory/imagination/fantasy/dream world as you sit in anticipation of what you will actually hear once the music begins?  It would be next to impossible to figure that out.

But I am fascinated with the power of first hearing, and that includes the power of the sound that breaks the silence.  In my case I have become aware that I recall the experience of utter surprise when I first heard sounds that "spoke" to me, isolated sounds in the piano music of Mozart--not the music, but isolated sounds.  I never expected to hear sounds like those coming from a book, so to speak.

That is the experience I crave when I listen to music of any kind - that surprise.

I once knew a concert pianist who had never been led to deal with the overtones of the instrument.  Every time he had to break the silence he was in agony, as he put it.  I wonder if his audience could tell.

Music: A Question of Definition

I have begun reading a memoir by a distinguished news-media celebrity who describes his taking up the piano as an amateur after decades of not playing.  I am reading it out of curiosity to discern whether I can tell what on earth he is talking about when he refers to "music."

It is clear from the beginning that we are not talking about the same thing.

He seems to take his definition largely from 1) his mother; 2) piano teachers he has known and .... ; 3) recordings; 4) prominent pianists whose definitions of music may be as far off of common experience as his own definition of reading.

In all his attention to his pursuit of what he calls the "impossible" he has not so far mentioned listening as the essential factor, except as it refers to listening to recordings, not at all the same thing as listening to the sounds one makes oneself.

Tones in Changing Context

We learn to read music as if tone were something defined, discrete, spellable.  Having learned that visual skill it gets harder and harder to trust that what we actually hear when we process tones has a broader reference.

Having learned the rudiments of music many proceed on to theory classes.  Here we are taught to identify complex sets of tones by giving them chord names and then to specify their functions with a system of Roman numerals.  Those Roman numerals are based on an assumption of tonal hierarchy which may or may not apply, depending on the instrument producing the sounds and sometimes on the skill with which a composer unhitches the chords from their traditional hierarchical stability.

I think of much of the piano music of Debussy and Ravel:  It belongs to a white key / black key world, not simply to a world of specified tonality.  I think also of Schubert's great B-flat Piano Trio where he goes to considerable pains to produce a tonal system in which the minor triad on the 2nd scale degree is entirely unrelated to the tonic triad.

Burdened down with an inflexible system it becomes harder to hear and to trust that hearing is the key to understanding music.

"Opera: Placido Domingo"

The blind, autistic young man I have been teaching for many years, now in his early 20's, loves Bartok's For Children, I and II.  At first it was a struggle to get him to accept dissonance into his musical world, though I was determined to give him access to more than just a superficial experience of sound.  He is, though severely mentally and physically disabled, a human being with a full range of emotions which he is unable to express verbally.

Yesterday I was teaching him a new piece - as he does not read Braille, this entails his learning it by ear.  As I played the melody for him he responded: "Opera!"  then "Placido Domingo!"  I was overwhelmed.  It turns out he has a CD of Domingo singing arias, but surely not this Hungarian folk song.  That he made the connection is all the indication I need that I was right to insist on this wide range of music being central to his life.

Beats and Bar Lines

Standard pedagogical practice gives primary importance to bar lines and counted beats, usually quarter notes.  By emphasizing this visual convenience much is lost -- so much that no one has bothered to tally the resulting destruction.

The student is bound to lose interest as soon as he or she can count to three or four.... What else is there to do?

Arithmetic, in other words, is not the point.

This loss of interest is coupled with lost curiosity about entire centuries full of magnificent music rendered unbearably tedious by predictability.

When tone comes first rhythm is enlivened the way the hand of the sketcher is enlivened when producing a rough draft.

Let's hear it for rough musical drafts rather than starting off with the student painting, as it were, eyelashes.