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5 Second Rule
posted February 26, 2013
Hello. Now that I have your
attention, I'd just like to say....
Wait! Don't go!....too late!
Nuts.
Well, for anybody who stuck around long enough to read
this sentence, let me just say what a pleasure it is to
have you and thank you for violating the 5-second rule.
It is quite an honor.
If you are scratching your head at this point I should
point out that the 5-second rule as used in this blog
does not refer to how long a potato chip can be on the
floor before it is no longer safe to eat, it refers to
how long you have to get someone's attention in today's
society. I heard that somewhere, and, not unusually, I
can't remember exactly where. Let's assume it holds up.
There has probably been a study done on it.
This is not a rule that is particularly congenial to the
goings on at Pianonoise. Most of the musicians whose
music is represented here probably thought their hearers
would give them more than five seconds to develop what
they were saying.
A particularly good case in point is the offertory I
prepared recently for church by a fellow named Jan
Sweelinck. Sweelinck's piece takes me about ten minutes
to play, which I presume means the world was in less of
a hurry generally back then (c. 1600). If you only
listened to the first five seconds of that piece you
might come away thinking that Mr. Sweelinck had written
a very nice
test pattern. If you
stay a bit longer you might realize that that test
pattern is actually a very long note--the first note of
the tune, actually--and soon gives way to other notes,
which, eventually, make up a slowly unfolding melody, as
well as a few other things.
Many a composer from the past doesn't seem to have felt
the need to capture your attention right up front, and
many of those composers are represented in the listening
archive here at Pianonoise, particularly the section
devoted to organ music. What would it be like to listen
to the first five seconds of each selection alone, I
wonder, deciding which pieces you would like to listen
to based only on that early snippet?
I treat it like an odd thing, when, in fact, I'm sure
many of you do exactly that. I can tell because of the
proportion of hits to a file and amount of memory taken
up by those requests. In other words, most people are
clearly not listening to the entire selection. Or, more
exactly, their computers are not loading the entire
file, which, in the case of fast internet connections
must mean some people go away in a hurry. If it isn't
what you thought it would be, something you were looking
for, something you'll immediately recognize, then our
composer doesn't stand a chance. But even if you're here
with an open mind, prepared to meet the unexpected,
ready for something new (only not too new),
that opening measure had better catch your attention.
Beethoven had a pretty good gift for that. It isn't just
those famous first eight notes of the Fifth Symphony
that I'm thinking about, either. Running through the
early piano sonatas in my head (sorry, but I didn't
think to record them for you) I note that the first few
bars of each are filled with drama and visceral
excitement. If Beethoven can't get you hooked that way,
there really isn't much any mortal composer can do. Ok,
there aren't any electric guitars. Sorry.
Scott Joplin wasn't bad at it, either. Unless you hear
the piano and the slow tempi and decide to turn him off
regardless of whether the opening motive has a catchy
rhythm in there. Now that I think about it, Brahms can
sometimes rise to the occasion too, in his early works.
Maybe these composers were very aware of how badly they
needed to impress people early in their careers.
Besides, it isn't much fun to develop bad material. It
just winds up boring for longer than it would be without
the development. Maybe worse.
People have pointed to great literature with great
opening lines which draw the reader in from the first.
Some of those lines are famous--but how many of us read
the rest of the book, hook or no hook? "It was the best
of times, it was the worst of times." Ok, but why? "Call
me Ishmael." Yeah, maybe we can do lunch sometime. "It
was a dark and stormy night." Anybody know where that
lulu came from?
Ok, so even a fascinating opening line isn't enough
sometimes. It may take on a life of its own, of in the
corner by itself, living its own life aloof from the
rest of the book. And some of the best books don't have
very memorable openings anyhow. "Happy families are all
alike; unhappy families are all unhappy in their own
way." Not bad, I suppose, and I can remember it. I have
no memory at all for the opening of War and Peace, which
I read twenty years go. I seem to recall it starting
with a very long sentence, which didn't strike me as
inappropriate at all under the circumstances. 1500 pages
later there had been a number of great lines and
memorable episodes, and some degree of slogging involved
as well. But it couldn't very well announce itself in
the first page. Tolstoy had something to say that took
1500 pages to say, that's all there was to it. And if
you didn't slow down long enough to find that out, that
was just going to be too bad. You'd never hear it.
Never mind the nature of the content: we know that
activity catches the eye and the ear. Dumping people
right into the maelstrom without an introduction seems
to work, sometimes, unless of course you are looking for
some peaceful bit of soothing noise, in which case that
won't do at all. And sometimes people don't even get
that far. I was a little disappointed last week when
next to nobody listened to the weekly recording, which
was a nice bit of flashy organ music. It had a high
sugar content and a lot of flair and by putting it right
there at the top of the home page for a week I was sure
it would get a few listens the way all of its
predecessor in that spot have fared during their time in
the sun. No dice. Was it because it was organ music?
In fact, month after month the same few pieces on
Pianonoise get a few thousand listens and the rest
manage only a hundred at best. And usually far fewer.
That's because most people don't visit the site at all.
They go on MP3 finders and look for particular pieces of
music. And, for some reason, my renditions of a couple
of famous piano pieces seem to cut through some of the
noise. No idea why. They aren't the best things on here.
But that's popularity for you. And I suppose it's better
than nothing. But a lot of that depends on what you make
of it. I've gotten to know a lot of new pieces during my
time making these recordings, a lot of rare ones, and a
lot of very interesting ones. It's really opened up my
world, and I'd love to be able to do the same for you.
Rhetoric
posted January 10, 2013
The first time I encountered the
term "rhetoric" as applied to a piece of music was on
the back of a record jacket in college. The critic
referred to the "Emperor" concerto of Beethoven as a
"mighty piece of rhetoric." It seemed like an odd thing
to say; I might have even been slightly put out by the
term. It ushers in to the field of music a great deal
that many music lovers wish would be kept out. After
all, rhetoric is not only something which "belongs" to
the field of the written or spoken word, it is also an
attempt to persuade, to argue, and thus it is not the
sort of aesthetic pastime in which a thing may be
appreciated for its intrinsic beauty. Instead it creates
controversy, and it attempts to move outside its frame
and exercise some control over the listener by demanding
action. Can a piece of music change your position on gun
control? Should it try?
The question itself has been debated and fought over for
centuries among music lovers. Plato passed out an
anecdote about how a ruler, roused by a particularly
martial sounding tune on the flute, decided to go to
war. This was not a song with words, mind you. It was
the tune itself that did the talking. Do you suppose the
story is apocryphal?
Medievals, rediscovering Plato, took the story at face
value (as they did so many other things!). It became for
them a measure of their inadequacy (how human). Why
can't we get the same kind of results with our music?
Must be something wrong with our music, they exclaimed.
Especially when it was new and different, and (sigh)
complicated.
But then, while some music and some musicians were
apparently out to control people with the force of
their--uh, rhetoric, there were others for whom music
existed in some sort of untouchable realm, free from the
clutter of daily life, or the messy passions of
humanity. Music that was simply a joy to behold, to
contemplate, to meditate on.
Sound like I'm becoming religious? Because there is
definitely a connection between religious language and
the vocabulary used by some to extol the virtues of
music and its most expert practitioners, particularly
when it is perceived as an end in itself, and needing of
no apologia. Schumann, supposedly, when asked what a
piece of music he had written meant, proceeded to the
piano and played it again. It is pure, it is perfect, it
means only itself, because to mean anything else would
be to lessen it....definitely religious language.
I'm not suggesting, by the way, that attempting to get
at the meaning of those organized sounds we so adore by
means of another system of organized sounds is entirely
adequate, or even seems to come close. Why have music if
you can say it all in words? But the purists down
through the centuries have been willfully ignoring a lot
of evidence for the impurity of music.
One thing that strikes me is how often music has, in
fighting for its existence, sought to justify itself on
the basis of resemblance to other fields of endeavor,
more legitimate in the eyes of those in power. You say
math is important, and our kids need to get better at it
while we cut our school music programs? Ah, but music IS
math, and learning music will help your child excel in
math. What about science? All the smart money is on new
discoveries and new technology, right? Well, let me show
you how music can espouse natural laws, can be
architecturally sound, and can explore new worlds of the
human mind. I'm not talking about 2012, either. Bach
incorporated these things in his music--for which he was
criticized for being unnatural, ARTificial, and unduly
complex. That's the way wars of legitimacy work. While
you are shoring up one side of the argument, trying to
prove your worth by one means, you take fire from the
other side. In this case, from the folks who want music
to be mainly, if not entirely, about the emotions.
Given time, however, and a host of persons with
different personalities, music has been able to become a
lot of things for a lot of people. Heart on your sleeve,
you want? Presenting Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky. Does his
music persuade? Is it rhetoric?
What is the heart of rhetoric, anyway? Is it logic? Is
it emotion? How about both?
If logic is the architectural basis for articulating
anything at all, the discipline to express your thoughts
in a medium that can be understood by others, than it is
necessary for any piece of music to have some coherent,
mindful properties. On the other hand, what is life
without something to express, some passion or other?
And just like that we wander into the tricky terrain of
connection--between the art, the science, the mundane,
the special, the influence of countless persons and
societies and civilizations, hemming us in and yet
giving us freedom. The words are mine, but they are not
mine. They are an inheritance from many tribes and many
thought patterns that have gone before. So with music,
whether people are comfortable acknowledging it or not.
It would be easier if we thought we were listening to
pure Mozart. But he lived in a time and a place, and he
inherited models, and ideas. It is simpler to think he
invented it all, but he did not. And when it came to
saying what he said in notes, was he even aware of what
he was saying?
Take this simple set of variations. This is
the way you are to take a tune and vary it in 1766. And
Mozart learned fast. But what was he telling us as he
did so? Was he telling us that there are logical,
knowable ways to understand the universe? Was he telling
us that there is a universal humming of the planets in
unchanging harmony and that it is best reflected by
choosing your key and staying in it for the duration of
the piece? Was he saying that balance is tranquility and
that tranquility is a symbol of (always benevolent)
authority, which should not be challenged because it
comes from above?
I doubt that Mozart had all this in mind when he wrote
the piece. He was probably just trying to impress people
and taking joy in his own inventiveness--having fun the
way 10 year olds do, except not at all in the same way
ten year olds do!
But he was still writing from a cultural vantage
point--he was still fashioning rhetoric, whether he knew
it or not. Simplify? Why, how's this for starters: One
melody (paired down from a multiplicity of voices), and
one predictable accompaniment? And the pattern doesn't
change. And there are no minor keys to cloud our
enlightenment. And no harmonic tangents to get in the
way of the basic harmonic pillars that define our sense
of up and down. You say they hadn't been invented yet?
And besides, he was only ten? Well, partly. That doesn't
explain everything, but as he got older Mozart did
digress a little. It was up to Beethoven to break the
mold more completely.
A product of his time, and the thoughts of those around
him? Yes. We all are. And, invariably, our society
produces persons who find that sort of thinking
completely untenable, as if it sullies the name music,
diminishes our own personalities if we admit we have
borrowed bits of them from somewhere else, reminds of of
our relative insignificance if we have to breathe air
from somewhere else every moment to stay in this world.
And with every breath we are influenced, and with every
exhalation we influence others. And like the wind, we
know not where those influences come from or where they
go, some of the time. The rest of the time,
musicologists and historians have something interesting
to write about.
Of course, nothing (except unease) will stop you from
listening to the music and simply enjoying it as a
series of nice sensations. Or lauding it as a model of
perfection because you know Mozart wrote it and you need
something to be perfect and this certainly sounds like
it. I wouldn't want to bother you too much by suggesting
that even Mozart was fallible and that, as pretty as
this piece is, it does have its awkward moments, its
melodic ungainliness, a few places he could have handled
the rhythmic motion a bit better--only a few places,
mind you, which is astonishing for a ten-year old--but
still, he wasn't a master just yet. There is still just
enough room for his older-fictional, "Amadeusian" self
to cock his head a little and say, "that doesn't really
work, does it? have you tried..."
Mozart was evolving, but often our listening habits are
static, and calcified. We only hear what we need to, and
want to, and maybe those things won't change, if and
until some other part of our interior universe does. In
the meantime, What you hear as you listen is limited by
your own ignorance, and your ability to keep
'extraneous' thoughts at bay.
But for a few of us, it isn't just a chaotic abyss you'd
be sliding into. It's also quite fascinating....
Resolution
posted December 6, 2012
Practically everybody seems to have
had some piano lessons in their past. Often they didn't
go well. This year for Christmas I'm going to absolve
you.
It takes two to tango, of course, and often the stories
of woe center around the piano teacher. I can't tell you
how many stories I've heard and seen about joyless
and/or sadistic piano teachers who have driven their
poor students to distraction and made them hate piano
lessons and the piano. I can't really tell just how much
of those encounters are actually the teacher's fault
from this distance, but I can certainly imagine them
getting a just share of the blame.
One of the issues is a lack of creativity. Piano
teachers are often said to have no concept of musical
creativity and to just try to kill it in their students.
Many of my teachers in my formative years could have fit
this bill, actually, but not the piano teacher. She was
about the only one, some years, who didn't try to make
me feel bad for changing the assignment slightly or
trying to do something on my own initiative even if I
wasn't really equipped for it. But I can imagine many
piano teachers behaving the same way, and it saddens me.
That's because many a piano teacher doesn't understand
the creative process themselves, and therefore can't
teach it; moreover, they may be threatened by it, and
prefer to spend their time always trying to get the
student just to read the notes in front of them and
leave it at that. Possibly the most depressing story I
read recently is from a well-regarded composer who said
that he had learned to play the entire second movement
of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by ear--just by listening
to it--and presented it at a piano lesson. "That's fine"
said the teacher, "but did you practice your lesson?"
That's fine, she said. I don't usually want to
slap people, but really. All that creative ability and
she just sped right past it, because it didn't really
count. Unfortunately there are always going to be people
who don't recognize the value of being able to do things
differently than they do. She probably said it sweetly
and ever so firmly, primly, because, after all, it is
all about doing your assignment.
Were this young man a student of mine, though, I do have
to add that at some point we would want to make sure he
had practiced his lesson. That's partly because
discipline is very important if you want to accomplish
anything, no matter how much it may chafe and no matter
how often people complain whenever somebody makes
them do something on the theory that they'll be better
for it later. So is being able to play the notes on the
page. There is a pretty fine line sometimes between
creativity and incompetence (and rebellion) and
sometimes it is necessary to stress putting your own
musical whims on the shelf for a moment and
trying--honestly trying--to come to terms with the music
of people who really had something important to say to
us. Still I think most piano teachers tend to err in
this direction. Most students come with some creative
ability and like to explore things and try them out. It
is important to encourage this "goofing around." Because
not only is it fun to experiment, it is also musical
thinking. Maybe it really would sound better
with this note instead of that note. As I mentioned, it
is also possible that the student is changing the notes
because they don't know how to read the ones on the
page, and in that case a judicious case needs to be made
for actually being able to do it. But even that doesn't
need to be without fun.
I can recall many lessons from years past in which
students were surprised that the lesson was over
already. It wasn't because we weren't working hard. But
you can tell jokes along the way and see things from a
funny angle; you can forgive yourself for playing wrong
notes but also practice in such a way that you probably
won't miss them again; you can understand that you won't
get everything to sound just right on the first try and
set about creatively tackling the way to make it better,
and learn to enjoy a challenge. Having fun and working
hard don't have to be opposites, though I noted in
childhood that for most kids that's exactly what they
are. The minute any kind of rule is introduced, an
organization, it isn't fun anymore. Too bad.
And that, unfortunately, is the other side of this
albatross. There are a lot of bad teachers; there are
also a lot of poor students. Piano playing always seems
like it will be fun, but the mirage fades when it is
time to practice. That's true of anything, but it seems
especially true of piano lessons. Why? Well, for
starters, if your kid doesn't do his math homework the
teacher is on him or her the very next day. Your child
probably spends about an hour a day on every subject
taught in school under the supervision of the teacher,
and sometimes two hours every day after school on soccer
and volleyball and the next drama production. By
contrast, the student spends half an hour a week with
the piano teacher and then is expected to practice on
their own for the next six days without anyone making
sure that happens. Unless, of course, the parent applies
a little pressure. But that doesn't happen nearly as
often as it needs to. So, about a week later, when it
turns out that your youngster is not the freakishly
self-motivated exception to the rule, no progress has
been made because sometime during the week mom got mad
and made Susan march off to the piano where she pounded
out a couple of songs once and that was five days ago
and she hasn't touched the piano since. Seem like a
recipe for success to you?
If you've sensed that perhaps you and I are on opposite
sides of the line on this one--after all, I'm a piano
teacher, and you likely are not--we can unite our
frustrations here in much the same way that unites
political argument: we can all blame the system. It's
not really anybody's fault, per se, the system is just
not designed for success.
Alright, it's probably not that easy, but you can see
how if we, as a society, aren't taking music lessons all
that seriously, in terms of spending time and/or money
on it, we aren't likely to get results. Think about it.
Johnny isn't doing so well in math class? The teacher
sends a report home, there's a conference with the
teacher and Johnny's parents (hopefully) and things get
(at least somewhat) straightened around. That's how
things work in a "real" class. Sports, too. You aren't
doing your job? You're off the team. In music lessons,
though, as numerous parents have told me, the object is
for their child just to have fun. And if they aren't
having fun.... Well, I think it should be fun,
too. But if the minute it stops being fun you quit, you
aren't that serious about it. Nobody threatens to pull
their child out of reading or math if they aren't having
fun. You do it anyway.
Now, many of you who have abandoned lessons are living
with some degree of guilt, or embarrassment, or regret,
and I promised I'd do something about that. So here are
our options. 1) I can simply forgive you. As a member of
the profession I can take it upon myself to represent
musicians everywhere, and the muses themselves (why not?
people pull stunts like that all the time) and tell you
it's in the past and not to worry about it. Those
negative emotions are really not so productive, you
know? Why let them control your life, or form part of
your character? Take charge, and let it go. There are
enough pianists in the world that the species won't die
out just because you are not among us. However it
happened, it was your choice. Live with it. Go on. It's
ok. Really.
2) If you feel like somehow this isn't enough, that
there needs to be some sort of procedure involved, I can
suggest one. I can't ask you to say 50 Hail Marys, but I
could recommend you listen to some piano music. Maybe
find 5 or ten pieces on the internet and listen to them.
I mean really listen--don't do anything else with the
music playing in the background. Pay attention. Or you
could go to a piano recital. It doesn't have to be a
professional one. You could go to a student recital and
say encouraging things to the kids afterward about how
nice it must be to play the piano and how you hope they
stick with it. Do for them what you wished someone would
have done for you, perhaps.
And that leads us to the next path: the path of
involvement. There is nothing about this that is a done
deal, permanent, unalterable. You could try taking piano
lessons again. You could also say, been there, done
that, don't really feel the need, not for me. That's ok.
But if you think you might want to have another go, it
is not too late. I've had retired people make wonderful
students. Of course, you'll have to make time, and
you'll have to practice. But don't go treating this like
a New year's resolution where, two weeks into January,
the first time you don't go to the gym, you give up on
the whole year's resolution at once. Get back up on that
horse and give it another try.
But you don't have to be a pianist to be involved in
music. The NFL knows all about this. Every Sunday
afternoon, or Monday night, or Thursday night, or
Saturday afternoon, there are all sorts of people
sitting on their couches watching football. They don't
play football, most of them--maybe they did once, but
gave it up, don't have much talent, and so on, but they
are passionately interested in watching some other
people play football. It is strange that that doesn't
seem to translate to the piano. Practically everybody
has given that a try at some point also. But the
television is not filled with piano recitals, is it?
So here is something you could do if you are able.
Support musicians. Go to concerts, talk to them.
Encourage them. Buy their music. There aren't enough
fans right now and you'd be doing something special. If
you feel like you are lost in the world of piano music
and need a primer, try reading the pianonoise blog with some
regularity. Giving ordinary folks some insight into how
all of that stuff works is exactly what the blog's
about. And if you don't understand something, ask.
That's what I'm here for. (try to be specific if you
can) You could find yourself with a really interesting
hobby, in addition to giving much needed support and
encouragement to folks who could use some.
In any case, don't worry about it. I could have been a
lot of things I didn't turn out to be; opened some
doors, things didn't work out. Sometimes I wonder what
would have happened if things turned out differently.
But I don't really mind how they did. I hope you don't,
either. Happy holidays. I'm going to go play some
Christmas carols at a party. You can sing along.
Marking Time
posted October 15, 2012
Last month saw the anniversary of two seminal
figures in the world of music. Composer John Cage would
have been 100 years old on September 5th. Pianist Glenn
Gould would have been 80. Both of them stretched the
boundaries of our notions of music.
John Cage was a composer who did not see the act of
composition as an act of will, or of personal
creativity, or of making choices. Instead, he sought to
allow unforeseen events to occur--a Cage piece is a
process, and the outcome is never tightly controlled.
Probably his most famous piece is 4'33" in which the
performer (it can be a pianist or a group of musicians)
simply sits at the instrument(s) for the duration of the
piece and allows whatever happens in that space during
that time to be the music. The performer, like the
composer, has no control over the final product. It is
philosophically opposite virtually any and all notions
of musical creativity that came before. Cage's Zen
Buddhism allowed him to see the experience as a letting
go, in which the composer experiences along with
everyone else something about the randomness of the
world around and calls it art simply out of
appreciation--as a priori appreciation of the
mundane--not out of a desire for quality--not out of a
desire for anything. One simply opens up to the world
around.
Still, being so violently out of step with the rest of
the musical world, it seemed as though Cage had a style.
His concepts were certainly unique. One of his pieces
involved several radios tuned to various frequencies at
given intervals of time. The numbers of the frequencies
and the time intervals were all randomly generated--Cage
tried not to choose anything by a conscious act. It
might be that what the radio poured forth was simply the
static between stations. That, too, was part of the
music.
Naturally, a lot of people thought he was off his
rocker. Cage seemed to be playing with the fundamental
idea about music: that it was simply control of time.
Whereas for him it was the act of perceiving whatever
happened to be going on around you as part of the art.
Heretofore, that had simply been the blank canvas on
which the music was painted; now it was the music.
Before, someone coughing in the concert hall during the
music was interfering with the music. Now that was a
part of it, on a equal basis with whatever else
happened. It was total democracy--or total chaos. No
longer was the artist communicating a vision with the
public, leading, persuading, imploring, letting them
into her emotional world, now the artist was in the same
position as everyone else. Let's see what happens.
Glenn Gould was at the opposite end of the spectrum. For
Gould, every note was so finely articulated that it
threatened to break the syntax of the phrase. The other
night, listening to the E-flat Prelude in the first book
of the Well-Tempered Clavier I kept thinking, for the
love of God, Mr. Gould! Play a long line once in a
while! And yet, what clarity! What control over every
single voice in a dense polyphony! How peculiar and yet
how revealing to show us the unfolding structure of a
Bach prelude by subtle adjustments in staccato and
legato. The downside was it made it had to stop focusing
on the idiosyncratic performance and think about the
music. It was a virtuosity that ought to make every
living pianist jealous. But then, what did it
accomplish?
And then, there were the tempi--always extreme. Fast
wasn't just fast, it was world record. It was inhuman.
Which make many of his interpretations seem as though he
isn't really talking about Bach at all, as conservative
as his tastes in repertoire were. He is really giving us
the 20th century with all its machines and machinations,
all its aspirations and all its carnage. It is Gould
like a musical Jeremiah. When it is all over, is that
what Gould was really saying to humanity? That he
retreated from the world into his recording studio only
to fully realize, in the music of the past, the impulses
of his own time, the crisis of living in the mid to late
20th century?
Gould was also a hypochondriac. While Cage seems to have
taken such a healthy approach to living in his
environment that he seems to have had no ego at all,
Gould turned inward and was an obsessive self-analyst.
Even his phobias had phobias. While Cage was turned
outward, exploring life with leisurely acceptance, Gould
wanted to know every tick of his tightly wound clock.
Yet both of them flourished at the same time. It is hard
to conceive of. If you want your head to explode, try
imagining the complete works of John Cage as recorded by
Glenn Gould. (I'll be he manages to articulate the
station changes with extraordinary crispness, and in a
way that really allows you to hear all the radios!)
There is one more fellow I ought to mention, though he
is the odd one out, even here. Samuel Wesley died 175
years ago this month. He was sometimes called the
English Mozart, which is being kind, though I know few
of his works so perhaps I am not qualified to judge.
Even the little Prelude I posted yesterday in the listening room
has charm. I had chosen to play it in church before I
had any idea Mr. Wesley was having an anniversary. I
think it is only the second time I've ever played
something of his. Odd, no? Samuel Wesley was certainly
odd, and, it must be said, the prototype of the badly
behaved "preacher's kid." He caused his parents, the
brother and sister-in-law of the founder of the
Methodist church, a good deal of consternation. But
then, they didn't seem to think much of his vagabond
ways, what with being a musician and all. He still
managed to be a church organist in various churches and
to produce a respected body of anthems and some organ
voluntaries. He also fathered another musical Wesley
(with his mistress) who turned out to also be a rather
odd fellow. But then, not only do odd people make life
interesting, they usually tell us something about music
and about life that the conventionally behaved never
manage to grasp. So let us be grateful.
Ten years ago, in one of the first columns in this
space, I mused on the variety of philosophical outlooks,
lifestyles, and, of course, musical outpourings of the
people whose works were just starting to populate this
webspace. Things haven't gotten any less cosmopolitan
around here. Of course, if you want to hear any Gould or
Cage you'll have to look it up because their works are
under copyright and I'll let someone else do the illegal
uploading. But as I start to obtain permissions from
various living composers I'll be representing our own
era with a bit more thoroughness. Until then, we have
several centuries of musical creativity to keep us
occupied. And the living behind it all--astonishing!
What a strange treasure trove. What a cast of
characters!
Sort of makes your family seem a bit tame, doesn't it?
Music Appreciation
posted Sept. 5, 2012
I've never been a fan of the term
"Music Appreciation," mainly because it sounds like it
has a real PR problem.
I mean, this is the best we can do? Really?
Sounds like we're setting the bar a
little low here, aren't we? We aren't hoping you'll
actually like it, or be passionate about it, we're just
hoping you'll build up a tolerance for it.
And yet, for decades, the
terminology of choice in classrooms around the land to
describe the curriculum to people who are often forced
to have some kind of an encounter with music that does
not come over the top-40 radio stations or is marketed
at teenagers, is that strange little word: appreciate.
It sounds kind of academic, doesn't
it? And just maybe, in the back of your mind, you are
thinking about mom, who made you "appreciate" your
vegetables when you were young or you wouldn't get any
dessert.
Still, sad as that is, it isn't a
unique philosophical use of the term. We are still
trying to get people to appreciate each other, too. And
the lack thereof, of being able to understand and at
least tolerate other cultures, other viewpoints, and
other needs, expresses itself in war and antagonism,
power struggles, culture wars, and general mayhem. So in
a way this apparently pabulum concept, when applied to
music, isn't as bad as it could be--there are more
pronounced symptoms in other areas of life. Getting you
to appreciate something is also about more than just
making some nice professor somewhere feel pleasantly
useful. The stakes are higher than that.
I have a friend who teaches a course
in film appreciation at the university, and always has
to explain, on the first day, the difference between
liking something and appreciating something. Liking
something being what you do automatically, without
thinking about it. You are instantly attracted to it,
because it has properties in it that speak to you at
this moment, where you are, and gratifies your senses,
or your mind, or some temporary need, or jogs a memory,
or sounds like other songs you already like, or gives
you pleasure when you sing along, or your friends all
like it too, or whatever. It may also confirm whatever
musical prejudices you may have, and it gives you a
taste of the familiar without asking you to encounter
something you don't know very well and try to deal with
that.
The problem with only liking or
disliking something is that it has, in itself, no growth
mechanism. You'll never explore any more than is
immediately obvious to you, easily available (and even
hard to avoid), part of your own generation, your own
subculture, the groups you belong to, and so on. You may
eventually grow to like many pieces of music, but they
will all more or less resemble each other. The only way
out of that vicious cycle is to either encounter other
people and their tastes with something resembling an
open mind, or to start with the music itself and try to
figure out why so many other people like it, even if you
don't. The trick with musical appreciations is that as
your musical vocabulary grows, so does your ability to
connect with a broad range of music, and to even like it
in some way, strange as it might be. At first this
ability will not be prominent, but, like compound
interest, it eventually makes you rich. (note:
intellectual interest rates don't go in the crapper like
the ones at the bank!)
Last year one of our choral groups
sang some fairly demanding (and fairly modern)
literature, and the director was met with some
expressions of disapproval for the choice of material.
Of course, a large part of that was due to the fact that
the music was difficult, and whenever people find
something difficult, that first, frustrated reaction is
to blame the music. This stems from the idea that most
people have that the music should come to them, rather
than that they might need to exert themselves, and in
the process become something other than they were, in
order to meet the music, and be changed by what the
composer had to say. It requires us to stop behaving
like little absolute monarchs and pack our bags and
journey up the mountain, trusting that whatever we find
when we get there will have been worth the traveling. Or
if not that at least the travelling will have been worth
the travelling.
I have to admit that at first the
music did not make a great impression on me, either. I
liked parts of it, which is to say that parts of it were
immediately attractive, but having heard a performance
of the entire work at a concert the semester before I
was under the impression that it was rather long, and
too monotonous, that is, inclined to too many slow
tempos in a row. The performance itself may have had
something to do with that impression, of course.
Over the semester the piece grew on
me. This is usually the case with better pieces of
music. Conversely, the ones that are not so great
usually burst on the scene all at once, like gum that
announces itself via sensory overload and then loses its
flavor in five minutes. I usually find that a piece of
music that makes an attractive first impression on me
will wear out within a few days. But a piece that makes
just enough of an impression that I'll want to hear it
again, but no more, might turn out to really have
something to offer for years to come.
I may have gotten a bit of a head
start here. Back in childhood I listened to
Handel's Messiah and did not find the three hours of
operatic singing with large string orchestras and slow
tempi much to my liking (this was before historical
performance research had kicked in so nobody was paying
much attention to whether or not Handel himself would
have performed the piece that way). But I decided the
fault was mine since I had heard that it was a great
work and I was therefore supposed to like it. So I
stayed in my room and forced myself to keep listening to
it. And over time, I started to like it (this is in
contrast to creamed peas, which my mother made me eat
every week for years and I still don't like!). Better
still, I figured out what it was about it that I
couldn't come to grips with my initial childish mindset,
and grew from the experience. My attention span grew
too, which helped, but I was able to concentrate better
because I had something to concentrate on, rather than
just how strange it all was. The amazing thing is that I
not only love the piece, I am able to enjoy new pieces
that I've never heard before from the same era because I
can understand the musical rhetoric behind it--just like
you are reading this article which you have never read
before and understanding it because you know how to read
in English.
I suppose that little exercise in
musical humility served me well as I went off to music
school and listened over and over to works I didn't know
but which had so much to say once I figured out what it
was. I listened for the way the musical argument
unfolded, for the way the tunes were transformed, for
the fascinating details that shed light on the whole,
for the unique obsessions and techniques each composer
brought to the table. That in turn may have helped me to
learn about other cultures and ideas, and open up to
different people. It is interesting how appreciation,
when actively pursued, does lead to liking. It isn't the
upset mother telling her ungrateful child "you'll
appreciate me when I'm dead!" but appreciating proceeded
by stronger adjectives like truly, or wonderfully.
Eventually it can go from merely tolerating all the way
up to experiencing the transcendent in the ordinary.
In the end it leads us back to that
little equation about liking what we know and knowing
what we like, only now there is more to know (better)
and thus more to like, which means we spend more time
liking things and less fighting them off, which I think
makes us happier in the long run.
What I did this
Summer
posted August 1, 2012
I don't remember actually ever
having to write the classic essay on what I did this
summer on the first day back in school. So maybe as
recompense for having been denied this childhood rite of
passage I'm foisting it on you. You get to grade my
paper. Be nice. With any luck what I did was interesting
enough you won't be sorry for the exchange.
I like to travel in small doses.
Some time ago I became convinced that if I tried to earn
my living as a traveling concert pianist I would be
sorry. All of that living out of hotel rooms and being
in a semi-permanent state of jet lag doesn't really hold
that much appeal. But if I stay home too long I get
restless, which is why this summer seems to have held a
perfect balance.
I spent the first part of the summer
preparing for a tour of Europe with a choir in our town
known as The Chorale. I've been accompanying them for a
few years, and this is the first international tour
they've done since I came on board. Normally we go on
hiatus after our concert in early May and resume in late
August, but this year those of us going on the tour kept
up the rehearsal schedule through May and into the
middle of June when we went on the tour. We were in
three central European cities in 10 days, giving
concerts in Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, and spending
every other waking moment trying to exhaust ourselves
and see all of central Europe at once. Although that
could have been merely because my wife came along and
she's an ambitious traveler. There were a few hours in
every day that were not part of the group sightseeing
excursions. Down time, if you will. We weren't.
Like the trip to Taiwan I took over 11 years ago and
still haven't documented, this one has plenty of
archival footage. Between the two of us we took over 600
photographs. Whenever the official tour wasn't
officially touring we braved the public transportation
and our aching feet to get to remote parts of the cities
and see things. There was our adventure at the spa in
Budapest. We also saw an ancient Roman city there. In
Vienna I spent the first morning trying to get to know
the strange pipe organ in the balcony of the Karlschirke
and watching the elevator carry workers up to the
ceiling to restore the fresco. Another Chorale member
and I went jogging on the palace grounds of the
Hapsburgs, which is a touch more scenic than Champaign,
Illinois. Actually, the entire city of Vienna reminded
me of the line from Amadeus where Mozart is complaining
about "people so lofty they sound as if they shit
marble." Vienna had plenty of marble, and they weren't
shy about flaunting it. This was actually the third time
I've been there but I didn't recall seeing so much of
it.
In Prague I concluded my three city
jogging tour by running along the Moldau with the mist
rising off of it. What an effect! We spent some time
outside the doors of St. Vitus trying to listen to an
organ improvisation, and another evening tooling around
the old town trying to find an organ concert before
settling in at a black light theatrical performance,
something that is apparently unique to Prague. On the
day of our final concert I was taken to the church of
St. Francis to play a pipe organ that dates from 1702.
Apparently I wasn't the first musical tourist to tickle
its ebony; some fellows named Mozart and Dvorak tried it
out in the 18th and 19th centuries, respectively. If you
shake my hand you might get a little Mozart on you. This
offer may not last; I've probably already washed my
hands some 100 times since then and the product may
already be a little diluted.
When we returned home in mid-June, I
was ready for a tour of a different sort. Much of July
was spent with a group called the Gavin Stolte Project,
named after its founder. Basically, we're a five-piece
rock band, although we do a variety of styles, cover
some really popular songs, and do several original songs
as well. We played a couple of the parks in
Champaign-Urbana, and a couple of area bars. We'll be
gigging throughout the year so if you live in town you
can probably catch us. I put GSP gigs on my google
calendar along with everything else whether it's a
classical piano recital or a bar gig, or you can find us
on Facebook.
When I was growing up in a little town in Ohio, learning
classical piano, my neighbors would forecast
ecstatically that someday they'd see me playing the
piano on television, and I'd think, "not very likely.
Even if they put a classical pianist on television it
would be on PBS, which most of you guys don't watch
anyway." Probably they had me confused with the kind of
musicians they did see on television, like my cousin,
who always assumed I'd become a keyboardist in a rock
band. He might be surprised (if he were still alive) to
find that these days I actually am a
keyboardist in a rock band some of the time. (We've also
been on local television. But I've been on local TV
stations a couple of times for classical piano as well.
I think I was even on Greek television once but I never
saw it.)
It sounds like it might be quite a
stylistic shift, but if you knew how I spend my Sunday
mornings, shuttling between the traditional and
contemporary services, from Bach to rock sometimes
within 30 seconds, you'd see I've gotten pretty used to
it. I like a challenge.
In the middle of all of those gigs came a concert by the
new Vocal Arts Ensemble of Urbana, directed by
University of Illinois professor emeritus Chester Alwes.
A dozen university students and professionals sang a
concert of art song by Brahms and Schumann. I haven't
been playing a lot of art song lately, although that was
principally how I worked my way through grad school so
it felt like a return to my old stomping grounds. The
concert, in a church on campus and featuring an
unfortunately out of tune piano, was well advertised on
a local radio show. I was surprised to find standing
room only for a concert of art song!
Kristen and I are beginning August
with a short anniversary trip to Madison, Wisconsin
where one of the highlights will be the National Mustard
Museum. They haven't asked me to give a concert there,
and I don't know what I'd play anyhow. Does anybody know
of any good mustard-related piano literature?
That reminds me how we started off
our summer, taking an afternoon trip to Peoria to see
the semi-final round of the World Championship of
Old-Time Piano Playing. It reminds me because between
contestants they were asking about our extensive
knowledge of rags that related to various things like
trains and beverages and so forth. Do I get points taken
off for going out of chronological order and leaving
this till the end?
I've been trying to put together
another piano recital for the and of August but it will
probably have to wait until fall (you may recall I gave
a very challenging recital on my birthday around this
time last year). Meanwhile I've been discovering the
world of flashy French organ toccatas. They are
surprisingly easy and crowd pleasing. They also give a
nice break from the German renaissance literature I've
been dipping into. There is a time for everything.
There is also a time for the weather
to stop hitting the triple digits in the shade. It's
something I look forward to with a return to the fall
schedule. Hope you had a good summer. I'll see you in
September.
Finding my Footing
posted July 1, 2012
You don't want to go to any parties
where there are a lot of pianists. Apparently they only
want to talk about fingerings.
I say apparently because I haven't
been to any hot parties with a bunch of pianists lately
(they don't invite me), and I only have the observation
second-hand from a book I read several years ago. It
seems the temptation to talk shop is just too much for
these knights of the keyboard, and so they spend all
night discussing whether 'tis better to put your thumb
under the third finger or the fourth when executing a
particular passage of a Beethoven Sonata in that
well-known left hand run. I can understand this
specialist geekery because a fellow organist and I spent
an hour talking about the Leipzig chorales the other
day.
I've spent some time in this space
ruminating on the differences between professionals and
amateurs. Perhaps this topic interests me because in
some ways I seem to be on the fault line myself. As a
pianist I am a trained professional, having logged
hundreds of hours of lessons, advanced degrees, and
concert experience. As an organist, though, by training,
I am an amateur.
This is not to say I don't consider
myself a fairly good organist. Since finishing my degree
in 2006, I've probably spent as much or more time at the
organ, tackling some of the most difficult literature
for the instrument, and acquainting myself with the
fascinating challenges that are unique to playing that
instrument. But I've been doing it mostly on my own,
which means trial and mostly error.
The most obvious difference between
playing the organ and playing the piano is that there is
a row of 'keys' for the feet. This pedal board contains
two and a half octaves in range and can be put to a
variety of intriguing uses. Many of the organ's best
composers have seen employing the feet as a necessity, a
challenge, and a love.
My fingers have benefitted from the
experience of several eminent teachers, some of whom
took it upon themselves to make certain I was not doing
taking the path of least mental resistance, just
throwing the fingers up on the keys in whatever order
came to mind, but rather that my fingers were making an
efficient course over the keys, that they knew their
routes well, and that they could be relied upon when
pressure was applied to the psychology of the player.
Out in the wild of the concert hall it presents
additional peril if the player suddenly substitutes a
fifth finger for a fourth while gliding up the piano at
high speed, or finds it necessary to use the same finger
on consecutive notes, rendering an important melody line
disjointed and broken. Hence the science of fingering,
in which one takes the time to find, and to stick with,
proven fingerings, at least until better ones can
be found.
This has served me well with regard
to the organ's keyboards. An additional amount of manual
dexterity is required for an instrument which will not
allow you to sustain a note merely by sticking your foot
on an all-purpose foot pedal, but requires the actual
presence of your finger in order for the note to sound.
Making the music sound well often requires complex
substituting of one finger for another while they are on
the same key in order not to interrupt the flow of the
sound. All of this has been drilled into me by years of
professional attention. But with regard to my
feet--there I have had to go it alone. Well, not quite
alone.
A professionally trained organist
would probably not admit to learning anything by way of
Youtube. The last few years has certainly seen a seismic
shift in the world of the organist. People whom you
might not assume would embrace the latest technology
have been doing it in droves, and the effect has been to
demystify the character of the organist. For centuries
the organist had been hidden up in the balcony, or off
to the side, or, at the very least with his body hidden
behind the console so the congregation could at most see
his head, and now, suddenly, he or she can be seen
everywhere. For me this has meant the opportunity to see
just how the masters of their craft do it.
It's been a bit eye-opening. For one
thing, I've caught at least one eminent organist
stealing glances at the pedals every so often. As a
student you are surely forbidden to ever ever look at
the pedals, this being as big a sin as looking at the
keys. But if you have the piece memorized, why not? This
is akin to the kind of permission-giving that often
takes place at a master class when a famed musician
comes to your school and basically tells you it is
alight to commit various things you were sure were
unthinkable. The payoff in relieved loosening up and
making assured music is incalculable. This by itself is
worth the high price the school is paying to bring them.
I mean, if so-and-so says it is alright, then surely it
is alright!
Another has been in the area of
legato. Smooth pedaling for me has often meant various
combinations of alternating feet, one looping behind or
in front of the other. Or, in the case of notes close
together, placing the foot at a diagonal and playing one
with the heel and the next with the toe or vice versa.
Or even "foot substitutions" (I don't know if that is a
technical term but it is with the fingers) wherein you
hold down a note with one foot, then stick your other
foot on the same note and release the first foot for
further duty elsewhere. It is tricky business if you
have to be somewhere fast.
What happens more often than I would
have thought is that an organist will play several
consecutive notes with the same foot. Part of this, I
think, lies in the fact that many of these churches have
very wet acoustics, and that a tiny space between pedal
notes is not even going to be noticed--it may even be
desirable for clarity. But another reason for it is the
economy of motion with which a good organist approaches
pedaling. If the feet are basically dangling off the
bench, and the toes make only the smallest touch, there
is very little time needed to get anywhere. But woe to
the organist whose feet are planted on the pedals! It is
like being stuck in quicksand. Mine have, alas, not been
as agile as I would have liked--I am about as naturally
coordinated as a park bench, appearances to the
contrary, and so I naturally put my weight too far
forward, and have had no good role models to show me
otherwise. It is amazing what watching a few good
organists can accomplish.
It is also amazing what one can
accomplish without that important tutelage. A recording
I made just a couple of years ago illustrates the point.
Bach's chorale prelude "Come, Lord Jesus, Turn Toward Us"
has a rather involved pedal part. Particularly at 1:11,
where it sounds like a walking bass. I must have pulled
out all my old tricks to get through it--foot over foot,
heel to toe (without the graceful economy wherein you
can hardly tell the organist is doing it), and foot
substitutions. Some of these tricks are practiced by
true professionals, and are the result of different
schools of organ playing. Some of the differences can
also be attributed to the fact that pedal boards are
different sizes and shapes and one method of playing
might not work in another situation. But as always,
increased competence in one area leads to increased
competence in another. My feet now have greater agility
and flexibility and can seamlessly do what formerly
could be done only with a lot of noisy advertising. Even
though with enough will power one can still overcome a
deficient technique, as in the present recording. I
wonder if playing it would be any easier now? Because
when you really develop your technique, it looks easy.
Because it is easy.
Getting it that way is the hard
part.
The Big 1-0
posted June 1, 2012
On the morning of April 18, 2001, I
rolled out of bed and thought to myself, "I'd finally
better get around to registering that domain name." I'd
had the idea in the back of my head for a while, but the
internet was starting to fill up, and, given that
everybody else in the developed world was in the same
pool, I figured I'd better jump on it if I wanted to be
sure that some other strange person hadn't already
thought of the mashed-up word Pianonoise. Turns out they
hadn't.
That afternoon I bought some
software and spent the next couple of hours trying to
figure out this website creation/publication, thing. By
evening, I had managed to publish my first page to the
web. It was a single paragraph, of which I now do not
have a copy. It expressed some surprise that anyone
would have chanced across my little plot of
cyber-real-estate and promised to improve my property
when I figured out what I was doing. Over the next six
weeks I tried to do just that.
On June 1, 2001, the first official
post of Pianonoise.com went live. It wasn't a whole lot.
I'd spent most of that time fighting with my software
over the right size to display pictures and other
formatting issues. The site consisted of a home page
which actually looked a lot like this one except for the
color scheme, already with its trademark banner photo (I
forget of what) and quotation of the month, and that
navigation bar down the left side which already had
clickable photographs. In 2001 it was one of the more
visually arresting sites on the web, which was perhaps
odd for a site dedicated to music. But I wanted it to
look good as well as sound good, and found it sort of
irritating that most of the "how to build a web site"
sites counseled simplicity on the idea that web browsers
couldn't be relied on to display things the way you
wanted them to so you might as well not do anything
interesting. I've never found that an appealing
philosophy.
There were two other pages. One was a page detailing the
interesting concert tour of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The
other was a page called "the music room" and it had a
handful of MIDI files you could download if you wanted
to listen to me play a tinny synthesized keyboard. I was
already having problems with the sound quality but
hadn't just yet discovered that you could actually get
audio recordings onto the web. They would have taken an
hour to load anyway.
That's right, youngins. In 2001 the web was a whole
different place. We used cheesy clip-art then and we
liked it. There weren't any videos. Most of us had
dial-up connections. When I started uploading my first
recordings, a five-minute piece took a half-hour to get
on the web. It feels like a whole generation ago. This
was before blogs. In the early years of the 21st
century, having a web site was somewhat unusual. I
remember a student's mother tell me that my student
thought I was "hotsh--" because I had one. Now everybody
puts everything online and it is no big deal. Although I
have been on several blogs lately whose last posts date
from 2010. A lot of people have gotten into blogging,
had their fill, and retired from the field already. I'm
still here, which seems like an accomplishment. I don't
update often enough, or regularly enough, but keep at
something long enough and you wind up with something:
Over 130 recordings and enough reading matter to make up
a medium length novel (I'm guessing)--and that doesn't
include all of the things I've taken down over the
years.
There was one general idea behind Pianonoise from the
beginning: to share music and what it is like being a
pianist. To that end there were articles about composers
of piano music and pieces of music to listen to. Some
years back a relative of mine observed that what I was
doing was a lot like scrapbooking. Sort of, but not
really. The site is an extension of my personality, and
it does include pictures of places I've visited and
concerts I've given, thoughts I've had, pieces I've
played, but the point is not really to simply chronicle
my journey through life, but to share them with anyone
who finds them of value. This amazing thing called
music, and written commentary about it were the first
two expressions of that sharing. The two were supposed
to go together, although 10 years later I still haven't
managed to coordinate them as well as I meant to. I
think it was 2008 when I adopted the look of the site,
with banners and navigation bars on every page and a
left-hand column with music accompanying many (but not
yet all) of the articles so you can read and listen at
the same time.
Before that I'd done experiments
with different colored pages, different effects when
going from page to page, crawlers, and everything else I
could think of to have fun with and make fun of. I
remember an impossibly long crawler below the banner
once making fun of the length of cable news crawlers,
and another one that had the "stock prices" of various
composers. Once, after some story about how the
government was monitoring the web closely after 9/11 I
wrote to our then attorney general "Welcome, Mr.
Ashcroft" below the banner. That turned out not to be so
funny when I reviewed my web statistics for the month
and found a lot of attention coming from "US military"
until I found out that a friend of mine was visiting her
father who was a retired military officer.
While I struggled with the problem of how to get regular
access to a good piano and not to sound like a chump
while finishing a doctoral degree which meant more
research than practicing, the website started to go in
other directions. I began posting the music I played in
church. This past year I posted nearly everything I
played as a prelude or offertory that wasn't
copyrighted--every week all season. I am not aware of
any other church organist/pianist who does this. No
wonder. It's a difficult deadline to meet every week for
the better part of a year.
I also started writing about things non-musical.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is worth the trouble,
but then Pablo Casals offered up a good quote about
being a "human being first, and an artist second."
Social and political concerns may stir up wrath, but
then they affect people more than classical music,
always a specialist's concern. Most people could care
less about the music. And I've always had a funny
attitude about that. I want them to listen to
it--actually pay attention. It would be easier to just
put it on in the background, listen to the pretty
sounds, and bliss out. But that's not what this site is
about. So charging into the whole of life seems only
appropriate. It has also given me an outlet during those
years when I couldn't make many good recordings--new
sections were born, flourished, got neglected,
experienced a renaissance, lather rinse, repeat.
Sometimes I can indulge various
other parts of my persona, what-ifs regarding directions
I could have gone in life. Sometimes I'll write
something potentially funny. My middle school journalism
teacher thought I was going to be the next Dave Barry
(actually, it was Art Buchwald, but she was older). Of
course, I could have also been a computer programmer (I
spent many childhood afternoons that way) but now I find
I only know enough HTML code (what you tell the computer
to get it to display your web page the way you want it)
to be dangerous. My mother though I could also go into
advertising. True, i could be writing all of those
goofy, whimsical commercials you see out there, but I
glad somebody else is doing it. One thing I have been is
a teacher--philosophically I'm still a teacher, but
there was a time when I had a raft of piano students.
There were meant to be, (and will be) resources or aids
for students, though the teaching section of the site is
currently in stasis. After moving to Illinois, I began
having trouble finding students who minded practicing
occasionally.
There is even a resource for brides having weddings at
our church. They can hit a few play buttons and decide
what music they'd like to hear at the ceremony. Several
brides have commented they like this idea very much. In
return for the ease of the process, I don't have to have
to practice the Pachelbel canon between ceremonies.
Some of Pianonoise's features don't get updated very
often, and some testify to changing priorities,
possibilities and interests. This year I've finally
managed to get some decent piano sound out of my
recordings, but even now there are more organ
recordings. This summer I'm planning to change that--for
the first time. Along with the sound itself, there needs
to be more explanation about how it got there. This fall
I'm finally going to start a weekly blog in which I
share recordings along with what to listen for, what
makes being a pianist so interesting, and I'm even going
to be so bold as to indulge in a little all-important
minutiae like fingering and interpretive issues so you
know what I obsess about in order to bring you the
music. It should be an interesting conversation. This
site was never intended for knowledgeable musicians but
for the larger crowd of people who would like to know
something about art and music if somebody would kindly
let them know what was going on. I'm still working on
that.
Meanwhile, the experiment that is
Pianonoise goes on, ten years later. It now contains
close to 100 pages--some very long pages--of writings,
and over 125 recordings. It has become rich in details,
as well. At the top of every page is a quotation from
something I've read over the last ten years. So, while
the pictures testify to places I've been and things I've
seen and experienced, the quotes remind me of where I've
been mentally, of all of the thoughts that people have
shared with me, living and dead. While Pianonoise is
technically the work of one individual, it is, like all
human products, the result of the efforts and influences
of countless other people.
This year I've noticed a lot of
blogs and Youtube channels that have come and gone,
victims perhaps to one-time passions that have burnt
out, or whose owners have shuffled off this mortal coil
(one blog recently informed me that its author passed
away last year from ALS). But we're still here. Let's
celebrate--music and life.
(This
is) Your Brain on Microsoft
A paen to the pain of
practicing
posted April 18, 2012
"Go practice the piano!" our mothers
would yell. So off we'd march. But once seated at the
instrument, not all sounds gushing forth bore a family
resemblance to the tunes our teachers had actually
assigned. It was easy to fool mom. She was busy chopping
onions in the kitchen and wasn't paying too close
attention, so as long as she heard piano noises coming
out of the living room you were probably safe. Once in a
while, though, you might get a reprimand. "That doesn't
sound like your lesson!"
It has taken me several years to
figure out what I really ought to be doing when I am
supposed to be practicing the piano. All of that goofing
around I did during childhood wasn't all bad, however.
There is a fine line between goofing around and
creativity. Making up passages so your songs would be
longer, or trying to play them in different keys or just
making up something else because you had gotten tired
(oh so quickly) of playing the same one again and
again--all this has actually borne fruit, even in some
of my gainful employment, to say nothing of my hobbies.
But actually practicing is a skill that comes late to
many of us, and to many more, not at all. It is a
discipline, which is to say it is not easy, or natural.
And to teach it in a way that does not make it seem like
the killer of every possible ounce of joy in the known
universe is probably also beyond the ability of most
teachers.
Still, the art of practicing is an
extremely important skill to have if you want to get
anyplace as a musician. At one point I asked myself,
"how do concert pianists practice?" to which the answer
was simply "become one and find out!"
I have since spent thousands of
hours with myself in the practice room, and found that,
while I may not always be the best company, any piece of
music worth the learning has a price--and often rewards
with joys subtle and great at various stages in the
process.
At first, if the piece is not too
unfathomably difficult, I read it through. This stage
can include the joy of discovery, particularly if your
composer has planted little harmonic surprises, or turns
of phrase on every other page so that you feel as though
you are listening to a skilled conversationalist. At
this point you are experiencing all of the effect of the
piece and little of the hard work. But if the piece is
too difficult to make continuous playing practical,
proceed directly to stage two: rolling up the sleeves
and getting to work.
There are a lot of people who don't
like this stage very well. It often means playing the
same measure or phrase over and over until every note,
and every choreographed leap, is just right. The passage
has to feel comfortable in the hands, and it has to make
musical sense. Since a really fine composition will
usually have many simultaneous details, there are a lot
of small things to master. At this point we are also
teaching the muscles what their routes are. I have heard
it claimed that in the course of a piano recital a
pianist will make some 600,000 decisions. The more of
those that can be put on autopilot the better! How do
you articulate each note? How loud is piano
exactly? Forget the tempo, that will come with more
practice. Can you make even a single measure feel like
something you know well rather than something you have
to suffer through each time? Never mind a measure: what
about a single gesture?
Getting this kind of familiarity in
the music pays off--eventually. In the meantime, it can
go anywhere from mildly frustrating to fairly
depressing. No wonder people would rather avoid it.
Whole hours, or days (or weeks) of limping through the
same passages, hardly noticing the improvement (unless,
like myself, you have trained yourself to notice even
the subtlest difference in the way your brain reacts to
the information), constantly missing the same notes
(make a note of those for special attention), spending
all of your energy trying to do what the notes tell you
when, if you ever manage to make the piece sound like
music, it will be you telling the notes
how you want them to sound--this is the pianist's dirty
secret. Years ago a neighbor of mine asked how I
practiced (interesting, because when the window was open
he could probably have listened in). He figured I
probably just played the pieces over and over. Not
exactly....
How long this stage lasts depends
greatly on the difficulty of the piece. But it is always
too long. And there is always a point at which I wonder
when it will be over. I've gotten used to this. I even
plan for it. For a fairly short piece of moderate
difficultly, for instance, it will probably take about
three days to learn. And so on. And at some point (as I
tell myself often) there will come a point when the
details will have assembled themselves with enough
familiarity and control that I need no longer focus on
them so much and I can begin to use my energy to
consider larger issues of interpretation, when the piece
starts to sound like music, and you can try making it
say something instead of merely trying to get the recipe
of notes right. This is a good time to be alive. It is
also a lot less mentally tiring when you have passed on
to this third stage, and you can practice longer without
getting so mentally worn out. You may not yet have the
piece memorized, but it is familiar, which is at least
half-way there.
One of the long-familiar signs of
this earlier stage (and also a sign when it has gone
away) is how tired I get after practicing for even an
hour. If I have been exposing myself to new notes and
new musical information, my brain is practically a hive
of activity. I can almost feel it buzzing about. I have
trouble using words or thinking clearly at times, as if
in a cloud. And I can also get very sleepy. The other
day I ingested an entire short piece at one meal and I
felt an overpowering urge to sleep at the end. It
reminded me of what my computer is always telling me:
you must reboot in order for the latest updates to take
effect.
It might not seem intuitive, but I
think sleep is a very important part of practicing.
After a nap, the notes are always much more clearly in
the mind. This also brings up the importance of
practicing a piece well in advance of when you intend to
play it (something I get to do less often these days
when there is such a volume of music to deal with).
I once did an interesting experiment
in college. I practiced a brand new piece of music very
diligently for two hours. Then my mother came to take me
home to spend the weekend (my parents lived 45 minutes
away from the school). I should note that I did not take
my laundry home. That evening, sitting at home, I tried
to imagine the piece I had worked on several hours ago.
No use. I could barely remember anything. But the next
day, a little bit emerged. By the third day, I could
remember whole passages and see the thing pretty clearly
in my mind. I had not touched the piano all weekend, but
by Sunday night, it was as if I had been practicing hard
for three days. It confirmed a theory I had about the
importance and independence of the brain. It always
seemed to take three days to memorize things. I wondered
how much practice had to do with it. I came away
thinking that the brain can incorporate new routines
without us, provided we've told it what to do, and
convinced it that it is important to learn it by
constant reinforcement of the same regimen and through
repetition. Then you have to wait for the film to
develop! (My apologies to the young folks who don't know
what I'm talking about.)
Once the piece is in the mind and
the fingers it would seem victory is assured. After all,
as I would tell myself, gritting my teeth, "The piece is
already written. The composer can't make it any harder
than it already is, and I can keep working until I get
it. That puts the odds in my favor!" But it always helps
to remember that, nearing the end, there is always a
stage of frustration while the piece, nearly perfect,
doesn't quite come out. At this stage I am usually
playing it through several times a day, trying to get it
to "gel." At that point little errors creep in, or don't
quite go away, little fissures develop in places I
thought were airtight, and often mistakes occur in
different places every time. This used to horrify my
colleagues the week of their recitals because they
hadn't quite prepared far enough in advance, and
hurried, harried, last minute practice has a way of
making the situation seem worse. This indicates that you
still don't know the piece as well as you should, and to
add insult to injury, by this time you are sure that you
ought to be in full command of it by now, that it's
already taken far too long to prepare, and that you
should be ashamed of yourself for not achieving
perfection already for crying out loud!
If you get to the point where the
piece is going very well, there are still three things
to remember: there is a big difference between playing
the piece flawlessly by yourself when you've already
been practicing it for an hour (I call this the
'student' stage because they would always tell me "It
went better at home" and I would say "of course it did!"
with no trace of sarcasm), being able to sit down with
no warm up at all and just nail the piece right away
(also alone), and lastly, being able to play it while
nervous and dealing with distractions, preferably at
what feels like 4 in the morning. This last bit of
honesty helps me prepare to play the weekly offertory at
the 8 o'clock service, and also prepare for concerts in
places with a significant time difference since nothing
makes certainty uncertain like messing with the basic
makeup of your biological clock.
If this whole litany of obstacles
and objections makes you want to go out right now and
practice, you need serious help! And if, by chance, you
found it tedious and dull, just imagine what all that
practicing is like. But then, listeners are spoiled. You
get to hear the end results with none of the suffering.
Sometimes I like to go to concerts (when I can), partly
for that reason. Or even to listen to my own recordings
sometimes, well after the fact. You see, I forget so
easily....
Of All the Nerves....
posted March 10, 2012
Conventional wisdom has it that
there are people who would rather die than have to
perform in public. According to that often quoted study, in which fear
of public speaking is number one and fear of death is
number two, there are a whole lot of you who
feel that way. Which is interesting, because it makes
being a performing musician seem more heroic than, say,
risking death to put out a fire. It does seem a little
hyperbolic to take that kind of accolade, but when I'm
having a bad day, I'll use that to try to feel better
about myself.
I used to tell my students that the
nice thing about playing the piano was that if you
missed a note nobody got seriously injured--you or the
audience (despite all the exaggerated rhetoric critics
like to launch about the detrimental effects of poor
pianism on their sensitive ears). It isn't like figure
skating where you can fall on your tail bone after a
triple axel gone wrong, or gymnastics, where you can
fall on your head. But this kind of verbal soft pedaling
doesn't do a thing for a person facing a stage, and
audience, and an hour or two with nowhere to hide. There
is something in our psychology that is so afraid of
looking bad in front of other people that our bodies get
it confused with a survival response, as if our lives
depended on it. Of course, occasionally, our careers
might. Although, most of the time, most of the people,
don't notice our mistakes. Abe Lincoln was right.
If you are dealing with nerves on a
regular basis, however, one of the things that you start
to notice is that the blamed things aren't consistent.
Some times you will be so full of nervous energy that
everything speeds up. You are listening faster, more
carefully. Rapid runs that have a couple of bumps in
them sound like the world fell apart because you didn't
articulate that c# cleanly in the middle of all of those
32nd notes rushing up the keyboard, but when you listen
to a recording of the performance later, it sounds fine.
Mere mortals don't hear those kinds of mistakes. So long
as no hummingbird critics attend the performance, nobody
else will either.
It's an odd state to be in, but it
seems to help control the subtlest details, which can
make for a nice musical performance, although it
generally feels pretty hellish at the time. I never used
to think my performances were any good under those
circumstances, but there is a simple reason for it: if
the standards are up high enough, nobody's performance
will pass muster. Ever. Hitting the right notes and the
right rhythms is only the beginning. There are a
thousand other ways to not measure up. A hummingbird
performer will notice a thousand details that didn't
make it, and stay up all night after the recital
remembering them all. I should know. If there's another
performance of the same material coming up, I suppose
that isn't all bad. Take notes: refine. Suffer again.
On the other hand, our bodies are
always reacting to a complex of other influences, like
what we ate, whether we slept well, got exercise, are at
one end of the cycle of energy and exhaustion or the
other--keeping the science of being at peak fitness for
a given performance just out of reach much of the time
(besides not being able to schedule everything
optimally). Sometimes the way the body deals with an
upcoming performance is not to speed up but to slow
down. Before the performance one is liable to be tired
and apathetic. Usually that goes away shortly before
hitting the stage, to be replaced by the aforementioned
panic, but not always. A teacher of mine said this is
the worst kind of nerves. He may be right: an apathetic
self-defense may mean you aren't paying as much
finely-tuned attention to all the details that make up a
good performance. It is difficult, however, to judge on
stage whether you are performing well or not.
For most people, the biggest
nightmare about nerves is the debilitating kind: the
ones that make you shake uncontrollably. I've had those.
There is a very interesting dynamic at work, though,
even in the midst of the kind of nerves that cause near
panic: if you know your material well, very very well,
it becomes the one place you can go to seek comfort in
the midst of the chaos around you. You literally hang on
to the piece as it progresses. Your muscles feel good
doing the same things they've done hundreds of times;
repetition of a well-ingrained pattern becomes a refuge
in the stress. Fighting off distractions and living
inside the piece is the only way to make it through.
Sometimes you are hanging on for dear life. You can't
literally do this, of course: one of the most difficult
things about nerves is they can make you seek to control
or constrict your limb movements, and if you are playing
something that goes fast or leaps around, you have no
choice but to let go. You can't hang on. You have to
trust that your hands know what they are doing.
It is always great to feel that you
are in control enough to be in the moment and in control
of the material so that you can react to it as you are
playing it on stage, but a great deal of what comes out
in a performance happened in the practice room months
earlier. Considering each phrase, memorizing each
pattern for the hands and preparing a well-worn
checklist for the mind, then the sheer number of
repetitions of each small movement cause the muscles to
remember their routes well. So well, in fact, that there
have been times when I have absolutely panicked during a
performance, sure that I was going to succumb to a
pianists' greatest fear, memory loss, only to find, a
second or two later, that my fingers were going on
without me, doing what I had programmed them to do. The
feeling of relief was immense, and helped me to reboot
my mind and get it re-engaged in the performance. These
are tiny dramas that the audience doesn't notice because
the flow of the music is never actually interrupted,
though they cause the performer much grief.
Which is why, of course, if you want
to know how to deal with nerves, the best answer is to
prepare, prepare, prepare your material so well that you
can go on despite distractions, or panic, or forgetting
(consciously, at least) half the details. You have to be
able to play without your mind involved, and your mind
has to be able to go on without your fingers. And you
should know the large picture so you can keep going when
the details go out the window, and know the details so
well that they won't. This is redundancy, like having
four engines on a jet in case three fail during the
flight. You should be able to play the piece in the
shower (without moving the piano in there), or with the
score in your lap, or on the kitchen table without the
music, or on all sorts of terrible pianos.
The way to deal with nerves is to
know your message and what you are communicating. I am
often afraid that, notes or not, that I won't have
something worth while to say, which to me is worse than
messing up a few notes. Dry, technically correct,
unmoving performances seem worse than saying something
and occasionally getting your tongue tangled in the
passionate process.
That is also, by the way, why I put
up with the ordeal of nerves in the first place. There
are always people who think that I must not be nervous
(frequent comment after a performance: "You looked like
you were having so much fun up there!"). In fact, I am
nervous most of the time, though, if I am playing for a
small, uncritical audience I may be a bit less nervous
than if I am playing at Carnegie Hall. However, the
difficulty of what I am playing usually has more to do
with that. A few months ago I was as nervous as I have
been in years playing an offertory in church simply
because the piece was quick enough and featured enough
independent melodic lines (blast that Bach!) that I
imagined if I got "off" I wouldn't be able to recover
easily and would probably get completely lost and have
to start again (disaster!) It was the most frightening
three minutes I've known in a while! (Of course, being
eight o'clock in the morning probably didn't help
either.)
That, in fact, may be the biggest
problem with nerves. They focus us on ourselves, and on
our fear that we will fail in our attempt. What we ought
to be focusing on is the music and what the composer
wants to get across in combination with our own
interpretive ideas about we think the piece has to say.
It is a privilege and a joy to be able to share great
music with others, and it is important to do it, early
and often. That is why I go through the ordeal of
nerves. I have done it frequently enough to recognize
the process of being nervous, the kinds of nervousness,
and to even regard playing music while nervous as a
necessary part of learning the music--I expect the
onslaught, and prepare for it. No assuming that if
I can play the piece well when I am practicing that I am
somehow ready to do it on a stage! At the conservatory
we had a weekly class in which we played our recital
pieces for each other to test them before our recitals
in a state of performance anxiety to see how our
renderings fell apart when pressure was applied--it was
like putting pottery in the oven to bake it. These days
if I can't arrange a pre-performance I make a recording.
I am always extremely nervous with the microphone on,
even though I can do several takes and even edit out
wrong notes in many cases. It is an irrational fear (as
are nerves in general) and I use it to my advantage so
that the piece when played live will be better than it
was if I didn't go through ordeal by microphone. I find
it always improves the performance. So do live
performances. The piece always goes so much better the
day after a recital (sigh).
It is the music, in the end, that
makes it worth braving the fire for. Sharing that music,
letting is speak to someone other than ourselves, which
can only be accomplished by actually playing it for
people, will always be accompanied by nerves, even if
you've learned to deal with them. But not to take that
risk is no alternative. It seems safer, but that safety
comes at the price of losing our ability to communicate
with one another, and thus, part of our humanity.
A Brief Survey of "Mom and Pop"
Organists on the Internet
or, will the real
organists please stand up?
posted February 10, 2012
Troll Youtube these days and you
are bound to find endless stores of professional
recordings somebody decided to share from their CD
collection without asking the people who sank all that
time and money into making the CD in the first place,
and in some cases without even telling us who is
playing on the recording. But there is an alternative.
There are people who, of their own
volition, or with the help of friends, have posted
their own recordings from their own church's organs.
Now, we all know that just about anybody can stick a
camera in front of themselves sitting in front of some
instrument in their living room and send forth a poor
rendition of their favorite tunes for anybody who gets
stuck listening to them. Sometimes the camera is at a
poor angle as well and we end up seeing rather too
much of what we would rather not see and trying to
forget the screeching sound of the high frequencies
accompanied by gallons of room noise. But not all
these folks are just some schmoes, nor is the
recording equipment substandard. Some of them are
quite good, professional organists with jobs at
churches with some pretty serious pipe organs. That's
who I'm talking about here. The reason I am talking
about them is I find it unfortunate that the folks
getting all the hits are the ones doing all the
copyright violating when the actual artists
themselves, trying to communicate directly with their
audience (and voluntarily; that is, they are giving
their recordings away themselves without having
someone giving them away for them)--often these folks
are getting very little attention at all. Let me
introduce you to four of them I found on the internet
recently:
Kerry
Beaumont is organist at the Coventry Cathedral
in England. I've never been there (I've never been to
England at all unless you count Heathrow Airport and I
don't) but from the videos you can see what a spacious
place it is. Coventry (like most cathedrals) has two
organs, a small portative and the large main organ
whose pipes are on display on the walls of the
cathedral, which is quite an alternative to hiding
most of them in a pipe room or rooms. Mr. Beaumont's
videos are getting around 200 hits in contrast to the
thousands of hits some of the CD-collection-posters
are getting which makes me think of a mom and pop
store trying to compete with Walmart. The mom and pop
items may be of higher quality but folks are still
going to go to the place with the highest visibility,
which is usually the result of quanitity--CD
collectors post thousands of recordings, which is a
bit more than most organists have time to post in the
average year. The CDs are also going to be of
higher quality, since someone spent years practicing
the pieces, and then they spent a year editing the
thing to make it perfect as well as spending hundreds
of man hours (and dollars) on other aspects of the
product, though very often the sound quality of posts
like Mr. Beaumont's--not to mention the performances
themselves--aren't all that far behind. And there are
things you won't get on the CDs. One is a chance to
see the artists at work; another is the chance to
communicate with them via the comment board. Besides
getting to see all of those pipes you can watch Mr.
Beaumont improvise. He seems to be working his way
through the Psalms (the texts of which scroll by
during the improvisations), although the most recent
post is from last year. Perhaps Mr. Beaumont has
gotten discouraged from lack of attention to his
efforts and has decided not to bother anymore. Or he's
just too busy at the moment. In any case, there are 14
videos up presently and I recommended you take a look
and a listen.
Rob Stefanussen's channel
might be the most flat out interesting of the four,
and he is the only one getting nearly as many hits as
some of the third party CD recording folks. I would
imagine Mr. Stefanussen and I both know that is
largely for non-musical reasons. Rob plays on a
virtual organ he built himself. With the help of some
complicated wiring, four synthesized keyboards and a
pedal board, and software that gives him access to the
recorded sounds of every key and stop from some of the
world's great organs, he is able to sound as though he
is playing at Notre Dame cathedral even though he is
in his own living room. I won't begrudge him this; he
is a very fine organist with the chops to deserve
playing on those organs for real if given the chance.
Meanwhile he is putting out recordings that have a
high quality sound. There may be a certain amount of
extra-musical pyrotechnics involved: for instance, a
recording of Bach's "Wachet Auf" I just listened to
interspersed shots of sunrises and swans for no
apparent reason except to keep the audience from
zoning out, but the playing is first rate so I don't
really mind that much. It is not as though he
surrounded himself with first-rate musicians to make
his own meager playing sound better or spends most of
his time talking about how great he is as many showmen
have tended to do. So if most of the attention he is
getting is because of the unusual parentage of his
instrument, or if his videos play a bit to the folks
who need a visual show because they can't concentrate
on the music, that's not all bad--he deserves the
attention, however he got it. Frankly, as long as the
music is given a chance to speak for itself,
unabridged, unadulterated, and played well, we can
forgive a little magic, can't we, purists? Also, you
can skip the visuals and just listen to high quality
mp3s versions of each video. Mr. Stefanussen has been
featured in an article about his fascinating organ
setup called "Organist is phantom of his own
living room" (please, can we knock off the
phantom comparisons? If the pipe organ makes you think
of the Phantom of the Opera every time you hear it,
you need to get to know it better) and keeps up a
lively correspondence with his listeners on Youtube.
Gerard van Reenen is
Dutch and has a much smaller audience. Where
Stefanussen embraces the latest technology when it
comes to instrument making, and Kerry Beaumont
plays modern sounding improvisations, Mr. van
Reenan seems entirely devoted to music of 200 or
more years ago. He is in possession of a
clavichord, one of the forerunners of the piano
(though less well known than the harpsichord. The
clavichord was made for small rooms only and is
very expressive though it puts forth little
sound). One of the most interesting thing about
his channel is a collection of the early piano
sonatas of Mozart. For many people music and
musicians are like exotic foreign lands. I admit
having this experience while listening to the
clavichord renderings of the Mozart sonatas,
pieces I know well on the modern piano but have
rarely if ever heard on this older instrument. The
interpretations are slow as molasses by comparison
with most modern performances, though the player
explains why they are slow as molasses, and also
why they are so soft (and if you really listen to
them you find that they work well this way).
Generally I wish persons who post recordings would
communicate more about the music and about the
music making process--and themselves. Often with
CD collections posters there is next to no
documentation--so as not to leave a trail,
probably! With artists operating legally there is
a better chance you will learn something of value
about the music, though many performers are by
nature not given to verbal effusions; added to the
fact that the internet is a veritable Babel of
different languages. Mr. van Reenan's remarks are
limited, but his few words are well-chosen (and in
a second language to boot; thank you for that!) It
is certainly worth hearing the wonderful organs of
the north countries as well, and experiencing his
enthusiasm as he plays.
Organist James Pollard (from
Amsterdam) seems to be more reserved about
comments--he has an organist post which I presume is
in Amsterdam, and largely limits his playing to the
standard repertoire--but not quite. I came across a
video that uses Hauptwerk virtual organ technology
to play a wedding march he created which uses "A
Whiter Shade of Pale" during the entrance of the
bride (maybe he and I could exchange stories of
interesting things we've been asked to play at
weddings).
If you thought organists
were technophobes who were buried in the past and
could only play Bach, shunned contact with people,
and weren't friendly, there is something in each of
these persons to challenge those notions, I think.
Who would assume that pipe organists were embracing
the latest technology? Or using the internet. But
here we are.
I'm jealous of all of these folks. Isn't it great?
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