Ursula Mamlok Brings Out the Best in Us

A gathering of performers, composers, former students, listeners, and friends paid honor to Ursula Mamlok last night at an event which I am privileged to host when she visits New York from Berlin where she currently lives.


It would be hard to imagine a group of more pronounced individuals unified in admiration and affection for a woman whose music and whose message has been transformative for almost everyone who has had contact with her.


As we lingered in a small circle around her the conversation was deeply personal and very candid: about playing, about the "business," about internal and external forces that shape our lives and our music-making -- the things we all most care about.  It was the best kind of tribute to an extraordinary woman who has lived a remarkable life and whose music connects people to one another without the slightest trace of sentimentality.


Bravo, Ursula!  and thank you.

The Best Music Lesson Ever

This morning I ran into a former student out walking on Broadway with her slightly-over-two-year-old daughter.  They were up in this neighborhood to hear the cathedral bells at St. John the Divine.


It seems the little girl misses the quarter-hourly bells that ring in Croatia, where they spend their summers.  The only place such bells ring in New York is at the cathedral, so up they come, every Sunday morning, to hear the bells.


That child is on her way to having a real sound vocabulary.  Rather, that child already has a real sound vocabulary.

Stefan Wolpe Thirty Years Later

Last night I attended a concert consisting of works by Stefan Wolpe and two of his prominent students, Ursula Mamlok, and Ralph Shapey.  It was exciting to hear seasoned performances of these works which were probably never intended to become seasoned, judging from their essential temperament, which is avant-avant garde. 

A commentator, speaking of Wolpe during the pause, mentioned the speed of his mental process.  Now that is a subject I relate to big time, and one that concerns me every moment of my waking life.  But there are different manifestations of that speed, some include other humans and some excluding others.  I cannot help but notice that the moments of inclusion are many in Ursula Mamlok's work, and few, though present, in the works of the other two.

Praise must be given to the Momenta Quartet which performed Wolpe's string quartet with great elan.

Lack of Empathy

One of the skills I find truly challenging is empathetic listening, which I define as listening as much for the intention of the player as to the result of her effort.  I assume that students who have been listened to in this way don't quit when they hit adolescence (or beyond) because it feels really good to know that someone has been paying attention. 

This approach has been dismissed as music therapy by colleagues who cannot imagine the sense of working this way.

It may not, in fact, be good for the professional advancement of piano teachers.  But there is another reward that I could never have foreseen when I undertook this approach.

It has brought me closer to an empathetic understanding of the great works that I play on the piano, in large part because of the deep personal involvement in sound that such students develop; whether they practice or not is fully beside the point.  Beethoven did not think up his piano sonatas as a result of studying music theory.

First Hearings

I am fascinated by the concept of first hearing.  Maybe the fascination began with Hannah Arendt's essays in the New Yorker back in the 70's when, in covering the Eichmann trials, she acknowledged that nothing in her training had prepared her to discern truth or falsehood solely on the basis of what she was hearing.  In other words, nothing prepared her to account for tone of voice.

This observation prompted her to observe that the Jews knew there was a God because they heard his voice.  Think about it: it is amazing.

References to this line of thought were expunged by Arendt's friend and posthumous editor, Mary McCarthy in The Life of the Mind, a collection of Arendt's essays.  But they were there in the originals and they have haunted me ever since as they are so revealing of the difference between first hearing and go-away-don't-bother-me I've already heard that kind of hearing, so typical of our daily lives that we don't even notice it.

"Time Regained"

This is the title of Book VII of Proust's masterwork, In Search of Lost Time in its more recent translation.  Because that work has been seminal in shaping my life and my work I go back from time to time to refresh my relationship to it.

Tonal Refraction, my work on visualizing subjective aspects of tone perception, is named for Proust's use of the word "refraction," to refer to what happens to sensory memory as it is altered by the many subconscious forces that make us who we are.  Are they distortions or are they rather evidence of life as defined by constant change?  Who is to say?

I am looking specifically for references to the hidden dimension of time that is so real to people with sensitive perception systems: the dimension that goes by so rapidly and yet seems so intensely enlarged as it is happening: the nanoseconds during which musicians adjust their tuning, their timing, their orientation to everything past and present even while producing sound: the quality that can keep you on the edge of your chair.
Probably the kind of time to which Goethe was referring in his great line about time: "Verweile, doch, du bist so schoen."  (Rough translation: Please stay with me, you are so beautiful.)

Live - Better than Perfect

The mark of a truly live performer is that you, the audience, are made to feel like part of the act, an integral part, in fact.  Without you, the listener, the performer cannot exist.  Without you, the listener, the art is simply technique.

Transformed by being listened to technique becomes the vehicle of interpersonal exchange, always two-way, never repeated, always new.

Please support live performance.

Learn to distinguish between truly live performance and rehash of recorded perfection - a new genre.  One for which conservatories are now granting degrees, it seems.
You learn the difference by going to hear live music often and in different settings.  Start with your local music school: the students need people in the seats and it is good practice for all concerned.  With a little practice on your end you may soon figure out when it is time to stand up and boo.