Embarrassment at First Hearing

Schumann thus described his reaction on first hearing a Schubert symphony, I believe the so-called "great" C major.  He then goes on to tell of his lingering feelings and specific reactions to such things as Schubert's handling the instruments as if they were voices.

How refreshing.  Imagine: We are not necessarily supposed to have clear responses to what we hear on first hearing.  Let's accept the permission Schumann gives us to be taken off guard, surprised, given something to linger over and chew on rather than feel obliged to make up our minds on the spot. 

Ah, but the first caveat that comes to mind: What does that mean in relation to the sanctimonious environment of most new music audiences today?  Good question.

And the second issue: How does that apply to the tone of what passes for music criticism in so much of the press, which is mostly a rehash of the program notes and a lack of candor about the complexity of the act of listening. 

Less definition; more openness.

Sensitive Hearing

I teach a young woman who has no natural "talent" for the piano: she has no natural feel for rhythm and she has trouble singing on pitch.  Yet her ear is so sensitive that today, after playing the first note of her Clementi sonatina, she stopped. "It sounds strange."

The piano had been tuned since last she played it.  And it does sound completely different to someone with a fine sense of hearing, which she has.

She struggles through the Clementi (she doesn't yet own a piano, having just moved out of her parental home) which she reads at her lessons only.  But the finesse of her responses to every detail is a joy to behold, both to watch and to hear.  I much prefer attending to her ultra-sensitivity rather than listen to quantities of notes fly past without internal involvement.

Amabamboozlzon

If you have any doubt what a......com is and has been and ever will be (alas) up to: check out brainpickers.com.  It looks like the product of such as I, an independent, low-budget, writing and playing for the sake of keeping humanity properly nourished -- even to the point of inviting you / me / anyone / everyone to subscribe, to pay for the single newsletter, to donate.

Scroll to the very bottom of the page.  If that doesn't sicken please tell me why.

This has been their tactic for many years now.  They get away with it because -- well, you figure it out.

I, for one, and I know I am not alone, do not buy A N Y thing from them.

Improvised Listening

Last night provided an unexpected affirmation of how differently we listen to music without preconceptions of what we are going to hear.  One of the listeners to my first-of-the-series Mixed Bag concerts found that her favorite piece on the whole program was the second which was, lo and behold! the Fugue in E minor by W.F. Bach, the same fugue that I had newly discovered when imagining myself listening as she must have, without knowing what to expect.

When pre-judged according to fugues I have known (mostly by J.S. Bach, father of W. F., and a whole different generation) I had never understood the fugues of W.F.  Now I realize that this puts his fugues in the same category with the fugue in Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, according to some people, the most beautiful of all the pieces in that suite.  Again, a highly atypical work.

More listening, less pre-judging, which is to say, prejudice.

One Tone at a Time

The trouble with learning about music is that it gets in the way of just listening, as if "just" listening was not enough.
Each of the composers on The Mixed Bag, my current series of in-house recitals, was a master of composing for just listening, unafraid of the power of a single tone to generate, not so much a structure, as an excited sense of potential. This is particularly the case in their compositions for the piano.

The remarkable complexity of tone on the piano makes of every seemingly single pitch a composite mix of overtones and approximations, an infinitely variable mix because of the compromised tuning of the pitches known as equal temperament.

Without getting too technical: the pure intervals of the overtone series do not provide a practical basis for tuning keyboard instruments unless there are something like 32 keys per octave instead of the 12 we commonly have. The pure intervals are compromised to form bearable approximations of true resonance. But strings resonate as nature intended them, with pure overtones, close enough to the compromised frequencies to cause the tuned strings to vibrate sympathetically with them. The result is a magnificent haze.

Many powerful piano works begin with a single exposed note. We are so used to a sing-along way of non-listening that we often miss that opening note, considering the piece to begin only with the statement of the opening theme. But that first sound is the opening theme generating everything that follows.

Sometimes the less we know the better we enjoy. That goes for myself as player as well as for you, the listener.  The Mixed Bag is an experiment in letting that happen.

What If The Music Part is Part of You?

I hate to say it, but I have the feeling that our culture is breeding a sense of music as something clean, sterile, vacuum-sealed, quantifiable--anything but personal.

If personal, how?  I keep coming back to the same point: As soon as you catch yourself saying "I like it" or "I don't like it", even if you say whichever to yourself in silence, at that moment it has become personal.

But the rub lies in the words: "As soon as..."  My guess is that in the race to produce quantities of notes children are discouraged from noticing the qualities of particular sounds. 

The answer has to be "As soon as you make the first sound."

Alexandra Horowitz, in Inside of a Dog, describes the two-way transaction involved in getting to know a new dog.  Each creature reaches out to the other in a delicate exchange of sensations and expectations.  I think of her description when describing how we reach out to sounds, taking them in, as it were, before they actually reach us. 

In this way music is part of us before it even sounds.

Language as Singing

People are astonished that children of cultures where the spoken language is actually intoned -- China, most notably -- have a better sense of musical pitch than the children of "plain" spoken cultures.

Where is the surprise?  If you were the parent of a singing-culture baby that infant would have heard you singing to her from day one.  Thus the ear develops as a function of the everyday exchange with another human being.

Wow.  Are we getting far from that!

In my experience, by the time an infant is 3 months old it is already too easily distracted to pick up the auditory signal pure and simple.

It would be nice if more people believed me.  I can teach you how to teach your newborn to sing --  no kidding.