I've been having some fun with our church organ's new playback system this year. Around Christmas, I pre-recorded the introduction to the doxology. The piece the choir was singing for the offertory ended quietly, with a melting phrase for solo saxophone. Wanting to preserve the stillness, rather than having to rush pell-mell from my seat at the piano which was in the choir loft thirty feet to the organ bench, past the altar, toss on my organ shoes and hope they stayed on, or to allow plenty of dead space which I would destroy even by walking through the front of the church, I decided to buy some time by way of the playback system. I asked my liturgist wife to press a button which began my pre-recorded introduction to the doxology. After about five seconds of silence, the music began softly and over the next 45 seconds swelled to the majestic proportions typical of the doxology. That gave me time to saunter through the sacristy instead of rushing past the altar, and get my shoes on and laced up with plenty of time as I slid onto the bench. The introduction concluded, I played the last phrase live, during with the congregation is trained to stand up, and the doxology proceeded as usual.
This spooked a few members of the choir, who had either not been at my organ recital to see a demonstration of this system, or had had six weeks to forget about it. It was not intended to be a prank, but apparently it had that effect for those who noticed that I was not at the organ when it began to play.
I've done the same thing a time or two since, always to buy time when moving from one instrument to another, and to preserve the mood of the service. One thing I haven't done yet is to play an organ duet with my pre-recorded self. I'll get to that after Easter when the atmosphere is more jovial.
On Thursday I recorded the offertory I'll be playing this Sunday. It is a short choral-prelude by a German composer 20-years older than Bach. I came across it this week on Vidas Pinkevicius' Youtube Channel, which was quite useful for me, since I've had a busy and stressful month or two (as has the entire staff of our church) and didn't really have any idea what I was going to play this week. The piece was easy enough to learn in the half-hour before staff meeting on Tuesday. By Thursday morning I had practiced it less than an hour altogether; enough to feel comfortable with the notes, but not necessarily so that my interpretation would have time to settle.
Here it is: [listen]
Since my first chance to listen to it without also playing it was after I made the recording, I got to second-guess it after the fact, which is often the problem I have when I am making recordings of pieces for church every week: there doesn't seem to be enough time to really think through something interpretively. It seemed to me at the time that I was playing the piece too fast.
Interestingly, when I went back and listen to Vidas' interpretation, I noticed that the time it took me to play the piece was virtually identical, as was the tempo. But I think he has a better sense of rubato and fantasy (not to mention I like the ornamentation). My rendering is too robotic, and thus, even though it is the same tempo, it seems too fast. So I thought I'd slow it down.
There is something very useful about feedback. I hadn't realized the tempo was that fast when I was playing it (being too preoccupied with getting all the details right, no doubt). How would I feel about a new tempo? And how could I experience it without being too busy playing it myself ?--just listening could help me decide. As I listened to what I had played I could wander around the sanctuary and hear the organ as somebody else might.
Using the playback system I was able to do something new. I took the exact same performance I'd recorded at the console and played it for the microphones again. Since it is all MIDI data, there are ways to affect the tempo that I hadn't tried before. In this version the same performance of the same piece is about 30 ticks slower than it was previously. I wanted a chance to listen to it at that tempo and see if it worked.
[listen]
It seems to work, though at this point I am still wandering between the two and we'll see which one prevails on Sunday. Now, artificially slowing down the tempo is dangerous for the recording. Speeding it up can hide all kinds of faults; slowing it down does just the opposite. There is one spot with a late pedal note which is exacerbated in the slower version. Otherwise, the attacks are still together and the articulation is still pretty good. Not bad, I think! It tells you something about my rhythmic accuracy.
It may also make some of us uncomfortable about distorting the human element in a recording with post-production technology. I haven't done this before and don't plan to "cheat" like this again, but it is not an irrelevant tool to have as it turns out. The organ is also equipped with transposer buttons I'll never use (I've got a story about that sometime) which are conveniently not located where they can accidentally be depressed when you are going for a registration setting and miss.
----
The title refers to an episode in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when Captain Jon-Luc Picard is kidnapped by a race of half-machine, half-organ beings called The Borg (as in cyborgs) and becomes one of them. His name is "Locutus." My reliance on a machine to manipulate the second performance suggested the interesting relationship.
Showing posts with label interpretation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label interpretation. Show all posts
Friday, March 20, 2015
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
The Beginning is Near!
Last Friday I mentioned that this weekend is the start of another church year, and if you are a church organist or pianist that might affect your choice of music. The curious thing about the first week of Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas, is that the scripture readings chosen for that Sunday are usually pretty gloomy. Much gets written by church folks about being out of step with the surrounding culture (often but not always that is viewed positively) and this time of the year illustrates that pretty well. While the culture at large is looking for good vibes and happiness during the entirety of the Christmas Season, which has been underway for quite a while already, the church is under the impression that Christmas won't arrive until, well, Christmas Day, and that the season beforehand is actually a rather bleak time. Time for reflection, penitence, giving up things, self-examination--much like Lent, actually, which gets more press. People not from a liturgical church tradition must find this rather odd.
The readings for this first week are particularly dire; signs of the end of days, stars falling from the sky, earthquakes, wars, dogs and cats living with each other (or was that from Ghostbusters?)--so, given the liturgical emphasis of the day, I chose a piece for the organ that is less warm and fuzzy and more apocalyptic.
I bring this up both so you can listen to this hair-raising but wonderful piece, and also so we can have a debate about it in two days. This is the Wednesday portion of the blog, wherein we don't generally discuss matters of religious or church music, but I hope you'll forgive the setup, because on Friday I'm going to be talking a lot about interpretation, which is really more of a Wednesday thing.
I'm going to be thinking about how we play Bach, and what does, or doesn't, constitute a legitimate interpretation, how we think we know, and so forth. I'm also going to play for you three different versions of the same piece I recorded this week and see what you think about them. That's my preamble. Now go digest your turkey and I'll see you in 48 hours!
The readings for this first week are particularly dire; signs of the end of days, stars falling from the sky, earthquakes, wars, dogs and cats living with each other (or was that from Ghostbusters?)--so, given the liturgical emphasis of the day, I chose a piece for the organ that is less warm and fuzzy and more apocalyptic.
I bring this up both so you can listen to this hair-raising but wonderful piece, and also so we can have a debate about it in two days. This is the Wednesday portion of the blog, wherein we don't generally discuss matters of religious or church music, but I hope you'll forgive the setup, because on Friday I'm going to be talking a lot about interpretation, which is really more of a Wednesday thing.
I'm going to be thinking about how we play Bach, and what does, or doesn't, constitute a legitimate interpretation, how we think we know, and so forth. I'm also going to play for you three different versions of the same piece I recorded this week and see what you think about them. That's my preamble. Now go digest your turkey and I'll see you in 48 hours!
Monday, June 16, 2014
So which is it?
This week I'm finally officially cataloging Mendelssohn's second Organ Sonata, part of a project I had this spring to play three of them at my church (in nine separate movements--truly my congregation has had enough Mendelssohn to last a little). I couldn't let it go by without interpretive comment, however. It all has to do with that little phrase in Italian affixed to the head of the movement; that being the tempo marking. It reads: Allegro maestoso e vivace.
Now I love a good musical mystery as much as the next guy. And this certainly is one. We've all got allegro figured out: Italian for fast (actually Italian for happy, but musicians have decided one means the other). But Mendelssohn couldn't leave such a pedestrian description well enough alone and appended two additional prescriptive adjectives, and it is these last two adjective that get me.
Maestoso, meaning majestic, which ordinarily makes one think of proceeding more slowly. I remember observing to a student, "you've never seen a king run, have you?" It's undignified. It's something the peasants do, when they're being chased by the king's enforcers.
Vivace, meaning lively. Just the opposite. Speed that up a little, will, you? Give it some juice.
So what we seem to have here is fast, but a slower shade of fast, but with plenty of movement.
Oye veh.
This is a candidate to be one of my favorite tempo markings, along with Molto Moderato, which I think hails from the Schubert Bb piano sonata. "Very middle of the road" is how I interpret that one. Extremely not very extreme at all.
Anyhow, you can hear the results of my confusion here. I've tried to take what seemed a good tempo, though I think I might have taken it a bit faster if the composer hadn't hamstrung me with the maestoso in there, and also if I'd been playing the piece for more than a few days.
It underlines how hard it is to communicate something as tricky as art, and reminds me as a composer how easily you can confuse your interpreters. If only he'd made a recording for posterity to ignore. That would have been easier.
Now I love a good musical mystery as much as the next guy. And this certainly is one. We've all got allegro figured out: Italian for fast (actually Italian for happy, but musicians have decided one means the other). But Mendelssohn couldn't leave such a pedestrian description well enough alone and appended two additional prescriptive adjectives, and it is these last two adjective that get me.
Maestoso, meaning majestic, which ordinarily makes one think of proceeding more slowly. I remember observing to a student, "you've never seen a king run, have you?" It's undignified. It's something the peasants do, when they're being chased by the king's enforcers.
Vivace, meaning lively. Just the opposite. Speed that up a little, will, you? Give it some juice.
So what we seem to have here is fast, but a slower shade of fast, but with plenty of movement.
Oye veh.
This is a candidate to be one of my favorite tempo markings, along with Molto Moderato, which I think hails from the Schubert Bb piano sonata. "Very middle of the road" is how I interpret that one. Extremely not very extreme at all.
Anyhow, you can hear the results of my confusion here. I've tried to take what seemed a good tempo, though I think I might have taken it a bit faster if the composer hadn't hamstrung me with the maestoso in there, and also if I'd been playing the piece for more than a few days.
It underlines how hard it is to communicate something as tricky as art, and reminds me as a composer how easily you can confuse your interpreters. If only he'd made a recording for posterity to ignore. That would have been easier.
Monday, May 12, 2014
Depends on who's telling the story
If you've ever been to a piano competition you might have noticed that if thirty pianists are required to play the same piece of music, they will often play that piece very differently. How does that happen? In this article I'm going to talk a bit about interpretation.
A couple of weeks ago I made a recording of a Scarlatti sonata--hurriedly, as usual, but except for the distractingly out of tune octave Gs in the treble of the piano, the result wasn't too bad, and I posted it last week on this blog. As I was preparing to post the recording I wanted to check to make sure I got the catalog number right so I checked with The Google and stumbled across a Youtube recording of a pianist named Nikolai Demidenko.
Mr. Demidenko apparently knows how to play the piano, having won some major competitions and toured the world, etc. although to be honest I hadn't heard of him. But it's a big world and I don't pay as much attention to the world of piano superstars as you might think.
What was interesting about listening to his interpretation is that it was quite a bit different than mine. I had made the recording before I listened to anybody else play the piece, so it was enlightening. Mr. Demidenko's approach was largely more graceful and smoother than mine. I remember thinking that I might have captured some Spanish passion with the rendition, although Scarlatti was actually Italian. John Kirkpatrick, whose book on Scarlatti I read years ago, thought that Scarlatti may have been somewhat bold and reckless; there were rumors that he had a gambling problem, that he was a risk taker, and adventurer--all these things might have contributed to the music as I played it. Except for one problem: I'm not so sure that we are so sure that we really know that much about Scarlatti's personality. And although Kirkpatrick believes that Scarlatti's music is somewhat biographical, which is a nice thought, it's hard to know just how far one can safely take something like that. And anyhow, when it comes to storytelling, what you hear, and how you hear it, depends greatly on who is doing the storytelling.
For example, there is a place about 32 seconds into my rendition (or :26 into Demidenko's) where, after a short pause, the second portion of the piece begins. For me, it is loud and boisterous. For Demidenko, it is soft and elegant. Who's right?
If you happen to follow along with the musical score which accompanies the Youtube video it appears that he is. That score is full of dynamics and articulation marks that largely agree with the pianist of the video. The trouble there is that Scarlatti didn't actually write those marks; this score has been heavily edited by someone who is giving us one way to interpret the music based, as far as I can tell, on nothing more than his or her own imagination. Which means that there are really three persons in this drama--myself, Mr. Demidenko, and whoever edited the music that appears with the video (by the way, my edition, edited by Kirkpatrick, has none of those marks in it).
There are times, however, when what Mr. Demidenko is playing is the opposite of what the music on the video shows, which either means that he wasn't using that edition (a third party, I presume, put the video together) or he didn't always agree with it.
At the end of the first section, for instance, both of us--Demidenko and myself--get gradually softer and end piano. The accompanying musical score prescribes a loud ending.
Perhaps the most interesting think about the Russian pianist's rendering is the pacing. In the second section of the piece (by the way, he doesn't take the repeats so he plays both halves of the piece only once) he slows down greatly (1:29-1:56), making the unusual harmonies introspective and brooding. For me, those crunches were exciting, and a chance to build the momentum until the final outburst of joy in F major. Now the score itself says nothing whatsoever about slowing down there. It isn't impossible that Scarlatti himself might have done something like that; partly because composers didn't write in tempo changes very often in the middle of pieces in those days, and partly because, given Scarlatti's mercurial personality (if that is true) he may have relished such a sudden shock to the system. Or not. There is no way to know.
At any rate, Mr. Demedenko does it well. And his storytelling is sure. I went on his website, and of course it is full of publicity blurbs from critics about how well he plays. There was one that said that he had "revealed the astonishing fecundity of Beethoven's imagination." Of course, it is possible that Beethoven (or Scarlatti) might never have imagined some of the things he says they did in his playing--that his interpretive imagination is making things up, in other words. But at least it is convincing. Would the composers appreciate that? Who knows? I'll err on the side of imagining that they would. Perhaps Scarlatti would not be displeased with my version either. Maybe on different days and in different moods he would have inclined to one or the other. I recently explained to a student how composers who lived recently enough to have made recordings of their own works sometimes confound our attempts to be true to their own written instructions by ignoring them themselves! Then there are others who insist on consistent fidelity to the marks on the score. What was Scarlatti like? He only wrote down the notes, and he had one catch-all sign for every ornament. Was he free in his performances?
There is, finally, an element of interpretation owed to the sonata being played on a modern piano. Mr. Demidenko's rendering tends toward beauty of sound and a very legato touch--something that would have been unacheivable on a harpsichord, at least to the extent that the notes melt together. My version, particularly in the second section, is more rustic and vivacious, and louder. However, if you attacked the opening chords of this section on a harpsichord the way I did on a piano, you would break strings. Perhaps Mr. Demidenko's way is better historically? On the other hand, the sound of the harpsichord is hardly smooth and beautiful like that of a modern Steinway. Lovely in its own way, or course, but not so that the tones blend together.
There is room in this world for more than one interpretation. Arthur Schnabel said that great music is music that is better than it can ever possibly be played; one cannot exhaust its possibilities in any single playing. Some years ago I started to catalog the pieces I recorded for pianonoise--hence the number that comes at the end of the file name. I did this so that I could record the same piece again and be able to tell them apart (the higher the number, the more recent is the recording). I haven't gotten around to that much yet, but the internet has evolved to the point that you can hear the various approaches from different personalities with the click of a few buttons. People fight over these details, and it isn't that those things aren't worth fighting over (politely). But it is the differences that teach us something, that make us think, that remove us from our own little philosophical spot on the planet. So here are both of our (or rather, all three of our) efforts. Enjoy!
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k. 518 as played by Michael Hammer
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k, 518 link to Youtube video as played by Nikolai Demidenko
A couple of weeks ago I made a recording of a Scarlatti sonata--hurriedly, as usual, but except for the distractingly out of tune octave Gs in the treble of the piano, the result wasn't too bad, and I posted it last week on this blog. As I was preparing to post the recording I wanted to check to make sure I got the catalog number right so I checked with The Google and stumbled across a Youtube recording of a pianist named Nikolai Demidenko.
Mr. Demidenko apparently knows how to play the piano, having won some major competitions and toured the world, etc. although to be honest I hadn't heard of him. But it's a big world and I don't pay as much attention to the world of piano superstars as you might think.
What was interesting about listening to his interpretation is that it was quite a bit different than mine. I had made the recording before I listened to anybody else play the piece, so it was enlightening. Mr. Demidenko's approach was largely more graceful and smoother than mine. I remember thinking that I might have captured some Spanish passion with the rendition, although Scarlatti was actually Italian. John Kirkpatrick, whose book on Scarlatti I read years ago, thought that Scarlatti may have been somewhat bold and reckless; there were rumors that he had a gambling problem, that he was a risk taker, and adventurer--all these things might have contributed to the music as I played it. Except for one problem: I'm not so sure that we are so sure that we really know that much about Scarlatti's personality. And although Kirkpatrick believes that Scarlatti's music is somewhat biographical, which is a nice thought, it's hard to know just how far one can safely take something like that. And anyhow, when it comes to storytelling, what you hear, and how you hear it, depends greatly on who is doing the storytelling.
For example, there is a place about 32 seconds into my rendition (or :26 into Demidenko's) where, after a short pause, the second portion of the piece begins. For me, it is loud and boisterous. For Demidenko, it is soft and elegant. Who's right?
If you happen to follow along with the musical score which accompanies the Youtube video it appears that he is. That score is full of dynamics and articulation marks that largely agree with the pianist of the video. The trouble there is that Scarlatti didn't actually write those marks; this score has been heavily edited by someone who is giving us one way to interpret the music based, as far as I can tell, on nothing more than his or her own imagination. Which means that there are really three persons in this drama--myself, Mr. Demidenko, and whoever edited the music that appears with the video (by the way, my edition, edited by Kirkpatrick, has none of those marks in it).
There are times, however, when what Mr. Demidenko is playing is the opposite of what the music on the video shows, which either means that he wasn't using that edition (a third party, I presume, put the video together) or he didn't always agree with it.
At the end of the first section, for instance, both of us--Demidenko and myself--get gradually softer and end piano. The accompanying musical score prescribes a loud ending.
Perhaps the most interesting think about the Russian pianist's rendering is the pacing. In the second section of the piece (by the way, he doesn't take the repeats so he plays both halves of the piece only once) he slows down greatly (1:29-1:56), making the unusual harmonies introspective and brooding. For me, those crunches were exciting, and a chance to build the momentum until the final outburst of joy in F major. Now the score itself says nothing whatsoever about slowing down there. It isn't impossible that Scarlatti himself might have done something like that; partly because composers didn't write in tempo changes very often in the middle of pieces in those days, and partly because, given Scarlatti's mercurial personality (if that is true) he may have relished such a sudden shock to the system. Or not. There is no way to know.
At any rate, Mr. Demedenko does it well. And his storytelling is sure. I went on his website, and of course it is full of publicity blurbs from critics about how well he plays. There was one that said that he had "revealed the astonishing fecundity of Beethoven's imagination." Of course, it is possible that Beethoven (or Scarlatti) might never have imagined some of the things he says they did in his playing--that his interpretive imagination is making things up, in other words. But at least it is convincing. Would the composers appreciate that? Who knows? I'll err on the side of imagining that they would. Perhaps Scarlatti would not be displeased with my version either. Maybe on different days and in different moods he would have inclined to one or the other. I recently explained to a student how composers who lived recently enough to have made recordings of their own works sometimes confound our attempts to be true to their own written instructions by ignoring them themselves! Then there are others who insist on consistent fidelity to the marks on the score. What was Scarlatti like? He only wrote down the notes, and he had one catch-all sign for every ornament. Was he free in his performances?
There is, finally, an element of interpretation owed to the sonata being played on a modern piano. Mr. Demidenko's rendering tends toward beauty of sound and a very legato touch--something that would have been unacheivable on a harpsichord, at least to the extent that the notes melt together. My version, particularly in the second section, is more rustic and vivacious, and louder. However, if you attacked the opening chords of this section on a harpsichord the way I did on a piano, you would break strings. Perhaps Mr. Demidenko's way is better historically? On the other hand, the sound of the harpsichord is hardly smooth and beautiful like that of a modern Steinway. Lovely in its own way, or course, but not so that the tones blend together.
There is room in this world for more than one interpretation. Arthur Schnabel said that great music is music that is better than it can ever possibly be played; one cannot exhaust its possibilities in any single playing. Some years ago I started to catalog the pieces I recorded for pianonoise--hence the number that comes at the end of the file name. I did this so that I could record the same piece again and be able to tell them apart (the higher the number, the more recent is the recording). I haven't gotten around to that much yet, but the internet has evolved to the point that you can hear the various approaches from different personalities with the click of a few buttons. People fight over these details, and it isn't that those things aren't worth fighting over (politely). But it is the differences that teach us something, that make us think, that remove us from our own little philosophical spot on the planet. So here are both of our (or rather, all three of our) efforts. Enjoy!
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k. 518 as played by Michael Hammer
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k, 518 link to Youtube video as played by Nikolai Demidenko
Monday, May 5, 2014
Getting the feel of it
How are you this fine Monday morning?
Me, I'm exhausted. I'm probably lying in bed right now aching, and in no hurry to get up. I'll catch up with you around noon, maybe.
The reason for that might have something to do with my weekend. Saturday night I had a concert with one organization. Sunday afternoon was a concert with another group. In between I had the usual four weekend church services, also a dress rehearsal on Friday night for group one, and then on Sunday, after three services and a concert, another (three hour) rehearsal for another thing group one is doing. Group two had their dress Thursday and is now finished for the season.
So I'm probably a little less chipper than my usual Monday morning self. I say probably because I wrote this entry on Thursday night and I'm having it posted automatically at 8 a.m. Monday while I'm likely still in bed, dead to the world, because I'm a musician and I work weekends, but not necessarily Monday mornings.
Now one of the terrific things about recordings is they can capture a moment and play it back for us much later. The recording I'm going to play for you, of a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, was made about a week ago, and I gave it a very vigorous, energetic playing, which is likely the very opposite of what I am feeling right now.
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k.518
John Kirkpatrick, a pianist and person who studied Scarlatti's music quite a bit, wrote a book about it (at least one), and is the reason for that "k" up there (he cataloged all 555 of Scarlatti's sonatas so we could all tell them apart)--John Kirkpatrick once wrote that he thought of Scarlatti's sonatas as "leaves in a diary;" as if the man was capturing impressions, moods, occasions at the court of the king and queen he served, recording the life all around him, and making music of it instead of words.
Perhaps. I say perhaps because there have always been musicians who get uncomfortable around these ideas, particularly because musical story telling and the sharing of feelings can only get a composer part of the way there. If you can't articulate and structure what you want to say, if you can't formulate it using musical formulas and rules and customs, combined with your own idiosyncrasies, if you can't use your intellect to tame and discipline your music, you won't get very far. A feeling, by itself, can't speak for itself. Articulation is the resonator.
Still, it's amazing to what degree human beings can apparently share feelings with one another, impressions, ideas. These are all apparently invisible, inarticulate, difficult to pin down, and yet to some extent we manage to convey these things, through force of will and intellect, even over great distances in time and space. The internet has me amazed at how I can communicate with people from the other side of the globe. Mr. Scarlatti's sonata was written by a man living in Spain, 300 years ago, in a castle I've never seen, in a world I'll never experience. And yet, here it is. You can experience it, too.
Of course, some of what your are hearing might be more me than Scarlatti. It's hard to know. We do know that Scarlatti would have played it on a harpsichord rather than a Steinway. And we know that when the king acquired a piano it was later converted to a harpsichord. I'll try not to take that personally. The harpsichord is a great instrument. And I flatter myself that if Scarlatti heard me play his sonata in this bold manner on this bold instrument, he might even warm to the piano a bit. The pianos of his time were timid customers.
So on this probably cold, dreary morning, when I'm sleeping in, here's some exciting, festival music from a time long ago and far away. What occasioned it we don't know. And if we did know we might be disappointed. The reality of the specific experience probably didn't really live up to the musical memory. But he sure makes it sound like someplace you'd want to be, doesn't he?
Me, I'm exhausted. I'm probably lying in bed right now aching, and in no hurry to get up. I'll catch up with you around noon, maybe.
The reason for that might have something to do with my weekend. Saturday night I had a concert with one organization. Sunday afternoon was a concert with another group. In between I had the usual four weekend church services, also a dress rehearsal on Friday night for group one, and then on Sunday, after three services and a concert, another (three hour) rehearsal for another thing group one is doing. Group two had their dress Thursday and is now finished for the season.
So I'm probably a little less chipper than my usual Monday morning self. I say probably because I wrote this entry on Thursday night and I'm having it posted automatically at 8 a.m. Monday while I'm likely still in bed, dead to the world, because I'm a musician and I work weekends, but not necessarily Monday mornings.
Now one of the terrific things about recordings is they can capture a moment and play it back for us much later. The recording I'm going to play for you, of a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, was made about a week ago, and I gave it a very vigorous, energetic playing, which is likely the very opposite of what I am feeling right now.
Scarlatti: Sonata in F, k.518
John Kirkpatrick, a pianist and person who studied Scarlatti's music quite a bit, wrote a book about it (at least one), and is the reason for that "k" up there (he cataloged all 555 of Scarlatti's sonatas so we could all tell them apart)--John Kirkpatrick once wrote that he thought of Scarlatti's sonatas as "leaves in a diary;" as if the man was capturing impressions, moods, occasions at the court of the king and queen he served, recording the life all around him, and making music of it instead of words.
Perhaps. I say perhaps because there have always been musicians who get uncomfortable around these ideas, particularly because musical story telling and the sharing of feelings can only get a composer part of the way there. If you can't articulate and structure what you want to say, if you can't formulate it using musical formulas and rules and customs, combined with your own idiosyncrasies, if you can't use your intellect to tame and discipline your music, you won't get very far. A feeling, by itself, can't speak for itself. Articulation is the resonator.
Still, it's amazing to what degree human beings can apparently share feelings with one another, impressions, ideas. These are all apparently invisible, inarticulate, difficult to pin down, and yet to some extent we manage to convey these things, through force of will and intellect, even over great distances in time and space. The internet has me amazed at how I can communicate with people from the other side of the globe. Mr. Scarlatti's sonata was written by a man living in Spain, 300 years ago, in a castle I've never seen, in a world I'll never experience. And yet, here it is. You can experience it, too.
Of course, some of what your are hearing might be more me than Scarlatti. It's hard to know. We do know that Scarlatti would have played it on a harpsichord rather than a Steinway. And we know that when the king acquired a piano it was later converted to a harpsichord. I'll try not to take that personally. The harpsichord is a great instrument. And I flatter myself that if Scarlatti heard me play his sonata in this bold manner on this bold instrument, he might even warm to the piano a bit. The pianos of his time were timid customers.
So on this probably cold, dreary morning, when I'm sleeping in, here's some exciting, festival music from a time long ago and far away. What occasioned it we don't know. And if we did know we might be disappointed. The reality of the specific experience probably didn't really live up to the musical memory. But he sure makes it sound like someplace you'd want to be, doesn't he?
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Some more haphazard thoughts about grouping
For the past four weeks I've been fixated on the concept of grouping notes together. To sum up, this is important for both the learning process and for the understanding and communication of music. You've got to take a breath somewhere! but....
Grouping is not the same as phrasing. Groups of notes are usually in smaller packages than phrases, and function more like words or phrases in English than sentences, which might be the equivalent of a musical phrase. They are smaller units. And one doesn't necessarily "breathe" after each group. However...
One needs to be able to breathe mentally. That is, you have to make a mental break between those groups, understanding them as separate units of music. Within those groups, however, it is important not to make breaks.
Here is something from a recording I made yesterday...
listen
Notice how the last three chords sound like one group. They even feel like one group, with a forward momentum that carries them through with one gesture. While my fingers have to play and release, moving up and down three times, my arm is moving forward only once, unifying the disparate motions of my fingers so that to me this entire grouping feels like one motion--toward the piano. This is the physical, technical side of grouping. The audience hears this as well, which makes aural interpretation much easier, since the mountain of material has already been sorted and grouped. It also makes it, in this case, more exciting to listen to, because the contents seem alive. Now I'll play you the whole passage. The musical selection itself will come next week!
listen
Finally, being able to group is an invaluable aid in the learning process. I can remember a 7-digit phone number much more easily if I group it into chunks of 3 and 4 digits. And while a seven digit number has been shown to be a limit for our immediate memory, there are no such limits for our long term capacity, however "Whereas a chain of letters like CBSMTVIRSSUVTNT might be difficult for labile memory to hang onto, once the letters are chunked into CBS-MTV-IRS-SUV-TNT, the task becomes much easier, and what would never have made it into stable memory has a greater chance of consolidating." point out four brilliant authors of "Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation" Anastasio, Ehrenberger, Watson, Zhang, 2012). Full disclosure: one of these brilliant authors is Mrs. Pianonoise.
In the example above, it turns out that chunking the information into 3-digit pieces produces recognizable acronyms. However, in musical interpretation, different players may come to quite different results. (How about if I group them so they all rhyme? CB-SMT-VIRSSUV-TNT! works as a cheer--has a nice chanting rhythm to it--and as a young person I may not recognize CBS anyhow!) Generally, however, the chunks are fairly short, sometimes they overlap (thus the final note of one may also be the beginning of the other) and they can often be found because of some relation they have with the preceding or succeeding material (such as a pure repetition, a sequence, some kind of development, or the start of a new chain of similar cells). Chunking is fun, chunking is a necessity, it is a way of life. It brings order to disparate elements, and ease of understanding. It separates professionals from amateurs, skilled interpreters from people who are just playing notes and don't sound like they know what they are musically "talking" about.
It is strange people didn't spend time talking about this at the conservatory. Still, you can hear an element of this in the practice room, as people take small bits of pieces and play them over and over in order to acquaint their fingers, wrists and arms with their routes. If the mind is engaged in the process, all the better. And all the difference.
Grouping is not the same as phrasing. Groups of notes are usually in smaller packages than phrases, and function more like words or phrases in English than sentences, which might be the equivalent of a musical phrase. They are smaller units. And one doesn't necessarily "breathe" after each group. However...
One needs to be able to breathe mentally. That is, you have to make a mental break between those groups, understanding them as separate units of music. Within those groups, however, it is important not to make breaks.
Here is something from a recording I made yesterday...
listen
Notice how the last three chords sound like one group. They even feel like one group, with a forward momentum that carries them through with one gesture. While my fingers have to play and release, moving up and down three times, my arm is moving forward only once, unifying the disparate motions of my fingers so that to me this entire grouping feels like one motion--toward the piano. This is the physical, technical side of grouping. The audience hears this as well, which makes aural interpretation much easier, since the mountain of material has already been sorted and grouped. It also makes it, in this case, more exciting to listen to, because the contents seem alive. Now I'll play you the whole passage. The musical selection itself will come next week!
listen
Finally, being able to group is an invaluable aid in the learning process. I can remember a 7-digit phone number much more easily if I group it into chunks of 3 and 4 digits. And while a seven digit number has been shown to be a limit for our immediate memory, there are no such limits for our long term capacity, however "Whereas a chain of letters like CBSMTVIRSSUVTNT might be difficult for labile memory to hang onto, once the letters are chunked into CBS-MTV-IRS-SUV-TNT, the task becomes much easier, and what would never have made it into stable memory has a greater chance of consolidating." point out four brilliant authors of "Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation" Anastasio, Ehrenberger, Watson, Zhang, 2012). Full disclosure: one of these brilliant authors is Mrs. Pianonoise.
In the example above, it turns out that chunking the information into 3-digit pieces produces recognizable acronyms. However, in musical interpretation, different players may come to quite different results. (How about if I group them so they all rhyme? CB-SMT-VIRSSUV-TNT! works as a cheer--has a nice chanting rhythm to it--and as a young person I may not recognize CBS anyhow!) Generally, however, the chunks are fairly short, sometimes they overlap (thus the final note of one may also be the beginning of the other) and they can often be found because of some relation they have with the preceding or succeeding material (such as a pure repetition, a sequence, some kind of development, or the start of a new chain of similar cells). Chunking is fun, chunking is a necessity, it is a way of life. It brings order to disparate elements, and ease of understanding. It separates professionals from amateurs, skilled interpreters from people who are just playing notes and don't sound like they know what they are musically "talking" about.
It is strange people didn't spend time talking about this at the conservatory. Still, you can hear an element of this in the practice room, as people take small bits of pieces and play them over and over in order to acquaint their fingers, wrists and arms with their routes. If the mind is engaged in the process, all the better. And all the difference.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Grouping
Last week I suggested that in order to make music effectively we need to know how to group notes into musical gestures. In searching for an example, we compared musical interpretation to the way we interpret words on a page if we say them out loud. This analogue actually lead to two rather different insights.
The first, rather basic, is that small packets of information are grouped together in English as well as in music. Letters grouped together become words. Words grouped together become sentences. Being adept at recognizing words and groups of words quickly makes reading significantly easier then if we were forced to come to terms with e a c h l e t t e r a s a s e p a r a t e t h i n g.
Besides helping to increase fluency, these packets of information rely on grouping for some of their impact. In other words, where you put the information has some bearing on its meaning.
But our little example led inadvertently to something else. Noting that when we read we often lump some words together, such that a non-native English speaker might think we were saying one very long word when in fact it was two or three short ones with no space in between, and that we sometimes pause where no visual indication is given, such as a comma or period, we found that in fact, sometimes an oral interpreter does Not parse elements the way they are presented on a page.
This is a particularly useful insight for music because of the methodically metrical way it is written. In English some words are longer than others; sentences and paragraphs are often unequal. But in music, measures are usually the same length, and notes are grouped together into beats or groups of two or three beats, and these groups are pretty consistently of the same time value. Looking at a page of music we might conclude from the well-trimmed sameness which which a row of consistently distributed sixteenth notes greets us that it was balance that was most important in music, not forward momentum. Stasis.
In fact, publishers go to some trouble to preserve the "aisles" between beats. Let's suppose a sixteenth is followed by an eighth note and another sixteenth. That's one beat grouping, in which the notes are all beamed together, with a break before the next beat. Suppose the second beat is identical to the first. Now imagine that the last sixteenth of the first group is tied to the first sixteenth of the last group. Why? Since the two sixteenths together add up to an eighth why not simply write an eighth note?
In this and many similar cases, the reason something is notated one way and not another, often necessitating ties rather then simply putting a longer note in there, is that this way one can easily spot the division between beat groups. It makes reading that rhythm much easier because you can always located the pulse at the beginning of the next grouping rather than in the middle of some note in the middle of a group. You can practically see it on the page.
However, when we perform we often work against that visual representation. I remember a teacher at the conservatory taking a pencil and re-beaming part of a Beethoven Sonata so that the last three of a group of four sixteenths was beamed to the first note of the next group, then the last three of the next hooked to the start of the following group and so on. The point was to subtly propel forward into the next beat, to keep the music moving, which meant actually rethinking the way the music was written.
Leon Fleischer once made a colleague of mine laugh (he often did at Mr. Fleischer's remarks) by suggesting that music should be written on toilet paper....(pause for effect, glasses on head)...so that it could be unrolled gradually.
You could write it on a scroll, too, but that image just wouldn't be arresting enough to remember years later.
Considering how many divisions there are on a page, it shouldn't surprise that radical countermeasures might be needed. Every 2 or four beats we have a huge vertical slash breaking the music into bits, every beat group is kept separate, full chords often stack the notes high and make us forget the horizontal axis, all working against that forward momentum needed to make the music go somewhere and make us want to ask where.
But you'll notice that that teacher of mine from the conservatory still broke the notes into groups, it just wasn't at the beat but after it. The idea, I think, is not to take actual liberty with the tempo (or none that is very noticeable) but to allow for a mental break--chunking the information, which is vital to the performer's comprehension of the piece, and also crucial to helping the audience "get" the flow of the piece. To give you an example, I've posted a little piece by our Birthday composer (Mr. Johann Friederich Krebs turns 300 this week) in which I make little pauses between groups of notes that I am thinking of as music units--musical words, perhaps. The gaps between the words are larger than I would make in an actual performance, and are designed simply to show how one might break up a piece into little components for understanding, for practice, and to be able to control the movement of the piece. Here it is:
Krebs: Our Father in Heaven
Next time I'll discuss this bit of strategy in more detail.
The first, rather basic, is that small packets of information are grouped together in English as well as in music. Letters grouped together become words. Words grouped together become sentences. Being adept at recognizing words and groups of words quickly makes reading significantly easier then if we were forced to come to terms with e a c h l e t t e r a s a s e p a r a t e t h i n g.
Besides helping to increase fluency, these packets of information rely on grouping for some of their impact. In other words, where you put the information has some bearing on its meaning.
But our little example led inadvertently to something else. Noting that when we read we often lump some words together, such that a non-native English speaker might think we were saying one very long word when in fact it was two or three short ones with no space in between, and that we sometimes pause where no visual indication is given, such as a comma or period, we found that in fact, sometimes an oral interpreter does Not parse elements the way they are presented on a page.
This is a particularly useful insight for music because of the methodically metrical way it is written. In English some words are longer than others; sentences and paragraphs are often unequal. But in music, measures are usually the same length, and notes are grouped together into beats or groups of two or three beats, and these groups are pretty consistently of the same time value. Looking at a page of music we might conclude from the well-trimmed sameness which which a row of consistently distributed sixteenth notes greets us that it was balance that was most important in music, not forward momentum. Stasis.
In fact, publishers go to some trouble to preserve the "aisles" between beats. Let's suppose a sixteenth is followed by an eighth note and another sixteenth. That's one beat grouping, in which the notes are all beamed together, with a break before the next beat. Suppose the second beat is identical to the first. Now imagine that the last sixteenth of the first group is tied to the first sixteenth of the last group. Why? Since the two sixteenths together add up to an eighth why not simply write an eighth note?
In this and many similar cases, the reason something is notated one way and not another, often necessitating ties rather then simply putting a longer note in there, is that this way one can easily spot the division between beat groups. It makes reading that rhythm much easier because you can always located the pulse at the beginning of the next grouping rather than in the middle of some note in the middle of a group. You can practically see it on the page.
However, when we perform we often work against that visual representation. I remember a teacher at the conservatory taking a pencil and re-beaming part of a Beethoven Sonata so that the last three of a group of four sixteenths was beamed to the first note of the next group, then the last three of the next hooked to the start of the following group and so on. The point was to subtly propel forward into the next beat, to keep the music moving, which meant actually rethinking the way the music was written.
Leon Fleischer once made a colleague of mine laugh (he often did at Mr. Fleischer's remarks) by suggesting that music should be written on toilet paper....(pause for effect, glasses on head)...so that it could be unrolled gradually.
You could write it on a scroll, too, but that image just wouldn't be arresting enough to remember years later.
Considering how many divisions there are on a page, it shouldn't surprise that radical countermeasures might be needed. Every 2 or four beats we have a huge vertical slash breaking the music into bits, every beat group is kept separate, full chords often stack the notes high and make us forget the horizontal axis, all working against that forward momentum needed to make the music go somewhere and make us want to ask where.
But you'll notice that that teacher of mine from the conservatory still broke the notes into groups, it just wasn't at the beat but after it. The idea, I think, is not to take actual liberty with the tempo (or none that is very noticeable) but to allow for a mental break--chunking the information, which is vital to the performer's comprehension of the piece, and also crucial to helping the audience "get" the flow of the piece. To give you an example, I've posted a little piece by our Birthday composer (Mr. Johann Friederich Krebs turns 300 this week) in which I make little pauses between groups of notes that I am thinking of as music units--musical words, perhaps. The gaps between the words are larger than I would make in an actual performance, and are designed simply to show how one might break up a piece into little components for understanding, for practice, and to be able to control the movement of the piece. Here it is:
Krebs: Our Father in Heaven
Next time I'll discuss this bit of strategy in more detail.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
How to sound like a human being
I like to have a little fun when I blog, including in my choice of titles. Please understand, if you are a spambot reading this, you are going to come away with nothing useful. But if you are a human person who plays the piano or some other instrument, or it you sing, well, read on.
One of the differences between someone who can really play (or sing) and someone who can only sort of play (or sing) is in their delivery. The professional is much more fluent. This doesn't mean they can play faster, though that is probably also the case, but that the way the music unfolds sounds much more natural, and can be more easily understood by the listener.
Take a basic example. When I was growing up, computers were just learning to talk. They--soun--ded--like--this--pu--tting--ex--act--ly--the--same--space--be--tween--ev--e--ry--word--and--ha--ving--com--plet--ly--un--var--y--ing--tone.
There was no rise and fall in their computerized voices, of course, but there was also something else:
Their rhythm was off.
I don't mean they couldn't keep the beat, I mean just the opp--o--site. They sounded like metronomes. Every thing was exactly, completely, inexorably, boringly on time. Now, I want you to try something.
Read the next paragraph out loud.
Typically, when a person reads in a language, they vary the pace from one word to the next, grouping some words closer together and other words come after a slight pause, as if a boundary line had been drawn between them. Periods and commas are visual indications of when and how to group words, of course, but if you are really paying attention to how you read this paragraph, and if you read well, if you can sound as if you yourself are holding a conversation with someone and are just now thinking of these words and saying them yourself for the first time, you'll note that even when there are no commas, even when the spacing of the words looks exactly uniform, you still don't speak them evenly. They don't get the same rhythmic spacing, nor do the words and the syllables of the words get the same emphasis.
The reason for this insight is that it removes our last excuse for treated music as if it were to be played with mathematical precision even if it is notated that way.
True, four identical looking quarter notes in a measure APPEAR to be exactly the same, but if you play them that way, we are going to get bored fast. That's because in a language there are always more and less important pieces of information, and it is the necessary task of the recipient to sift through the information and determine how the parts lie in relation to each other.
Now anybody who has taken music lessons for a couple of years knows that when you see a slur you are supposed to group the notes together. But a good musician doesn't rely entirely on slurs to group notes: for one thing, slurs haven't been around forever and some of our greatest composers didn't use them. For another thing, a slur can't tell you everything. The truth is that no amount of markings, unless you want the page to look like a complete mess, can account for all of the interpretative grouping that needs to go on in order for communication to be achieved. As I said, that sorting and grouping is the task of the recipient.
But when you are the performer, your job is to step between the sender and the receiver, and, in effect, tell the listener how to listen by how you play or sing. If you don't you not only make the listener's job harder than it needs to be, but you show that you yourself have not understood the message.
To try to demonstrate the relationship between what is printed on the page, and how a performer interprets that printed matter, I'm going to give some examples. Next week, they'll be musical. But for now, I want to take that paragraph you read aloud a moment ago, and try to show you how I might have read it, showing pacing by putting words together, pulling them apart, and emphasizing some of the strongest syllables in bold face:
Typicly, when a person reads inalanguage, they vary the pace from one word tothenext, grouping some words closer together and other words come after a slight pause, asifa boundary line hadbeen drawn between them. Periodsandcommas are visual indications of whenandhow to group words, of course, but if you are really paying attention to howyouread this paragraph, andifyoureadwell, ifyoucan sound as if you yourself are holdingaconversation with someoneandarejustnow thinking of these words andsayingthem yourself forthefirsttime, you'llnotethateven whentherare no commas, even when the spacing ofthewords looks exactly uniform, you still don't speak them evenly. They don't get the same rhythmic spacing, nor dothewords andthesyllablesofthewords get the same emphasis.
That was interesting. For me, at any rate. For one thing, it is quite a strain to accurately represent, or to fully represent, all of the things that were going on in my voice when I spoke the paragraph aloud. For one thing, I was not able to indicate slight crescendi, or accelerandi, or tiny divisions within words in which one syllable might actually be closer to its neighbor and the next farther away, and so on. I comfort myself by the fact that musical language took a long time to evolve such that indications of dynamic variation and speed variation were unavailable to some composers until at last somebody figured out how to indicate it. But even then, there is quite a bit of room for individual variation.
Which brings us to point two, which is, of course, that you might very well have read the paragraph in a very different way. You could have done a rather Christopher Walkinesque interpretation and intentionally stressed odd words and paced things in a very unnatural manner, but even if you adhered to traditional understandings of pace, syllabification, and stress, there is still plenty of room for individual interpretation.
This suggests that there are more and less acceptable ways to interpreted written language, but that there will still be plenty of space for legitimate difference, and also that the written languages themselves do not--indeed, cannot--give us all the information we need to bring them to life orally.
Next week, we'll try this with some music. The point is to notice patterns, points of emphasis, and larger and smaller packets of information. And in turn, to really speak the music, not simply read it.
One of the differences between someone who can really play (or sing) and someone who can only sort of play (or sing) is in their delivery. The professional is much more fluent. This doesn't mean they can play faster, though that is probably also the case, but that the way the music unfolds sounds much more natural, and can be more easily understood by the listener.
Take a basic example. When I was growing up, computers were just learning to talk. They--soun--ded--like--this--pu--tting--ex--act--ly--the--same--space--be--tween--ev--e--ry--word--and--ha--ving--com--plet--ly--un--var--y--ing--tone.
There was no rise and fall in their computerized voices, of course, but there was also something else:
Their rhythm was off.
I don't mean they couldn't keep the beat, I mean just the opp--o--site. They sounded like metronomes. Every thing was exactly, completely, inexorably, boringly on time. Now, I want you to try something.
Read the next paragraph out loud.
Typically, when a person reads in a language, they vary the pace from one word to the next, grouping some words closer together and other words come after a slight pause, as if a boundary line had been drawn between them. Periods and commas are visual indications of when and how to group words, of course, but if you are really paying attention to how you read this paragraph, and if you read well, if you can sound as if you yourself are holding a conversation with someone and are just now thinking of these words and saying them yourself for the first time, you'll note that even when there are no commas, even when the spacing of the words looks exactly uniform, you still don't speak them evenly. They don't get the same rhythmic spacing, nor do the words and the syllables of the words get the same emphasis.
The reason for this insight is that it removes our last excuse for treated music as if it were to be played with mathematical precision even if it is notated that way.
True, four identical looking quarter notes in a measure APPEAR to be exactly the same, but if you play them that way, we are going to get bored fast. That's because in a language there are always more and less important pieces of information, and it is the necessary task of the recipient to sift through the information and determine how the parts lie in relation to each other.
Now anybody who has taken music lessons for a couple of years knows that when you see a slur you are supposed to group the notes together. But a good musician doesn't rely entirely on slurs to group notes: for one thing, slurs haven't been around forever and some of our greatest composers didn't use them. For another thing, a slur can't tell you everything. The truth is that no amount of markings, unless you want the page to look like a complete mess, can account for all of the interpretative grouping that needs to go on in order for communication to be achieved. As I said, that sorting and grouping is the task of the recipient.
But when you are the performer, your job is to step between the sender and the receiver, and, in effect, tell the listener how to listen by how you play or sing. If you don't you not only make the listener's job harder than it needs to be, but you show that you yourself have not understood the message.
To try to demonstrate the relationship between what is printed on the page, and how a performer interprets that printed matter, I'm going to give some examples. Next week, they'll be musical. But for now, I want to take that paragraph you read aloud a moment ago, and try to show you how I might have read it, showing pacing by putting words together, pulling them apart, and emphasizing some of the strongest syllables in bold face:
Typicly, when a person reads inalanguage, they vary the pace from one word tothenext, grouping some words closer together and other words come after a slight pause, asifa boundary line hadbeen drawn between them. Periodsandcommas are visual indications of whenandhow to group words, of course, but if you are really paying attention to howyouread this paragraph, andifyoureadwell, ifyoucan sound as if you yourself are holdingaconversation with someoneandarejustnow thinking of these words andsayingthem yourself forthefirsttime, you'llnotethateven whentherare no commas, even when the spacing ofthewords looks exactly uniform, you still don't speak them evenly. They don't get the same rhythmic spacing, nor dothewords andthesyllablesofthewords get the same emphasis.
That was interesting. For me, at any rate. For one thing, it is quite a strain to accurately represent, or to fully represent, all of the things that were going on in my voice when I spoke the paragraph aloud. For one thing, I was not able to indicate slight crescendi, or accelerandi, or tiny divisions within words in which one syllable might actually be closer to its neighbor and the next farther away, and so on. I comfort myself by the fact that musical language took a long time to evolve such that indications of dynamic variation and speed variation were unavailable to some composers until at last somebody figured out how to indicate it. But even then, there is quite a bit of room for individual variation.
Which brings us to point two, which is, of course, that you might very well have read the paragraph in a very different way. You could have done a rather Christopher Walkinesque interpretation and intentionally stressed odd words and paced things in a very unnatural manner, but even if you adhered to traditional understandings of pace, syllabification, and stress, there is still plenty of room for individual interpretation.
This suggests that there are more and less acceptable ways to interpreted written language, but that there will still be plenty of space for legitimate difference, and also that the written languages themselves do not--indeed, cannot--give us all the information we need to bring them to life orally.
Next week, we'll try this with some music. The point is to notice patterns, points of emphasis, and larger and smaller packets of information. And in turn, to really speak the music, not simply read it.
Monday, April 29, 2013
The Beauty of Interpretation
This is part four of a four part series, all concerned with Robert Schumann's
"Of Strange Lands and People" from "Scenes from Childhood." The first three parts can be accessed here, here, and here.
It's astonishing what one can discover in one short, simple piece of music. For the last three Mondays, that piece has been the first movement of Robert Schumann's "Scenes from Childhood." If you're getting a little tired of it, I promise we'll move on to something else next week! In fact, last week's third installment in what has become now a four part series was supposed to be the last one. But something odd happened last week while I was posting the last one and I had to talk about it.
Things didn't quite work out the way I had planned.
I ask people to use their ears on this blog, at least on Mondays (and sometimes Fridays) which is a dicey business. Some folks probably think they can't hear anything with their untrained ears, and, sure enough, as soon as they can't hear what I'm talking about it confirms them in their notions. Obviously all ears aren't created equal and it certainly takes practice to be able to hear well. That's point number one. Point B (as people like to continue) is that there are plenty of strengths and weaknesses in all of us: things we would be good at hearing and things we aren't. So if you can't follow the argument one week you can always stick around until either you get it, or I explain it better, or we go on to something you can pick up on with more ease, or just music you happen to like. Music is a mighty ocean, not a small pond.
And then there is the self-defeating example I posted last week. The point I was trying to make is that Mr. Schumann did something rather strange, even barbaric sounding, by omitting a particular note (the third of the chord) in one place. But when I listened to my own music example, I couldn't help thinking, well, that doesn't sound all that rude after all.
I have a busy schedule like all of you, and sometimes I record things weeks before I get them posted. And frequently, I make those recordings without taking the time I would like to to live with the music and interpret it in a way that convinces me, and hopefully you. Instead, I have to parse the musical contents on the fly. And apparently, what I decided to do in that spot, when I heard Schumann's "barbarism" was to soft pedal it. I made it as pretty as I could. I slowed down just a bit, and resolved the chord with as much finesse as I knew how. It worked rather well. Except it wasn't supposed to, not after I changed my mind about it!
This is the fascinating world of interpretation. A musician plays a passage the way it seems to him or her. And then the audience feels the passage the way the musician conceives it. Which might not be the way the composer felt it; for that matter, maybe the audience doesn't end up feeling it the same way, either. But the reason no two pianists play something exactly the same way has a lot to do with these myriads of tiny decisions that pianists make every moment about how every phrase contributes to the whole, and how it strikes them in the moment. Sure, the composer leaves plenty of instruction on the page, but they can't cover everything--not nearly.
So, in the moment, that rude chord (why did Schumann put it there?) became gentle just because I decided to be "musical" (which, I am afraid, is code for making everything sound pretty). I wonder if I betrayed the composer a little.
Leon Fleischer has a phrase, "support the composer," which means not to shortchange features in a composition: if anything, exaggerate them slightly (can you do that? Anyway, that unfortunate cataract of words is my own, not his). Don't cheat on the long notes, or the sudden dynamic changes--let everything have its full effect. Maybe I violated this rule.
Then there was the second musical example. I noticed afterward that I hadn't really put the fermata (that musical "full stop") in the right place. Schumann holds on to the pretty G major chord first, and only then pollutes it with an A that doesn't belong, on its way to a passing C that doesn't belong either. The effect might be one of poise and repose which is then slowly exploded, but just before it manages to get out of hand, order is restored in the next phrase. The question is, how messy is that moment?
That's an interesting question for me because I imagine a lot of pianists saw a lot of ugliness in many early 20th century compositions, and that glaring "modernism" (or were they just supporting the composers? :) might have helped audiences tag them as pieces they'd rather avoid from now on. And yet, some of those same ugly harmonies, when finessed by today's jazz pianists, don't sound that shocking at all. Obviously, interpretation has a lot to do with how one perceives a piece. And that gives the interpreter a lot of power.
Mr. Schumann also asked that the tempo be slowed down at that point so that whatever chaos has crept in can do it in slow motion, but, true to form, he never actually tells us when to resume the regular tempo. Is it because he assumes any idiot will know to get back into the regular tempo when the next phrase begins (standard practice, but most other composers put the "a tempo" in anyway at that point)? Or was he thinking something else. With Schumann, who knows?
(aside: Fleischer once dodged the issue when I asked him a question about some dynamic marks in a Schumann sonata by putting it to the whole class, rhetorically of course!)
Anyhow, by the time I get a chance to record the whole set later this spring I hope to spend enough time with it to come up with my own definitive (provisional) answers to some of these questions. Posting a bit of it untimely ripped helps in the process of figuring these things out. And now you know the kinds of things that keep some of us up nights.
Hey, whatever I can do to make you feel normal!
"Of Strange Lands and People" from "Scenes from Childhood." The first three parts can be accessed here, here, and here.
It's astonishing what one can discover in one short, simple piece of music. For the last three Mondays, that piece has been the first movement of Robert Schumann's "Scenes from Childhood." If you're getting a little tired of it, I promise we'll move on to something else next week! In fact, last week's third installment in what has become now a four part series was supposed to be the last one. But something odd happened last week while I was posting the last one and I had to talk about it.
Things didn't quite work out the way I had planned.
I ask people to use their ears on this blog, at least on Mondays (and sometimes Fridays) which is a dicey business. Some folks probably think they can't hear anything with their untrained ears, and, sure enough, as soon as they can't hear what I'm talking about it confirms them in their notions. Obviously all ears aren't created equal and it certainly takes practice to be able to hear well. That's point number one. Point B (as people like to continue) is that there are plenty of strengths and weaknesses in all of us: things we would be good at hearing and things we aren't. So if you can't follow the argument one week you can always stick around until either you get it, or I explain it better, or we go on to something you can pick up on with more ease, or just music you happen to like. Music is a mighty ocean, not a small pond.
And then there is the self-defeating example I posted last week. The point I was trying to make is that Mr. Schumann did something rather strange, even barbaric sounding, by omitting a particular note (the third of the chord) in one place. But when I listened to my own music example, I couldn't help thinking, well, that doesn't sound all that rude after all.
I have a busy schedule like all of you, and sometimes I record things weeks before I get them posted. And frequently, I make those recordings without taking the time I would like to to live with the music and interpret it in a way that convinces me, and hopefully you. Instead, I have to parse the musical contents on the fly. And apparently, what I decided to do in that spot, when I heard Schumann's "barbarism" was to soft pedal it. I made it as pretty as I could. I slowed down just a bit, and resolved the chord with as much finesse as I knew how. It worked rather well. Except it wasn't supposed to, not after I changed my mind about it!
This is the fascinating world of interpretation. A musician plays a passage the way it seems to him or her. And then the audience feels the passage the way the musician conceives it. Which might not be the way the composer felt it; for that matter, maybe the audience doesn't end up feeling it the same way, either. But the reason no two pianists play something exactly the same way has a lot to do with these myriads of tiny decisions that pianists make every moment about how every phrase contributes to the whole, and how it strikes them in the moment. Sure, the composer leaves plenty of instruction on the page, but they can't cover everything--not nearly.
So, in the moment, that rude chord (why did Schumann put it there?) became gentle just because I decided to be "musical" (which, I am afraid, is code for making everything sound pretty). I wonder if I betrayed the composer a little.
Leon Fleischer has a phrase, "support the composer," which means not to shortchange features in a composition: if anything, exaggerate them slightly (can you do that? Anyway, that unfortunate cataract of words is my own, not his). Don't cheat on the long notes, or the sudden dynamic changes--let everything have its full effect. Maybe I violated this rule.
Then there was the second musical example. I noticed afterward that I hadn't really put the fermata (that musical "full stop") in the right place. Schumann holds on to the pretty G major chord first, and only then pollutes it with an A that doesn't belong, on its way to a passing C that doesn't belong either. The effect might be one of poise and repose which is then slowly exploded, but just before it manages to get out of hand, order is restored in the next phrase. The question is, how messy is that moment?
That's an interesting question for me because I imagine a lot of pianists saw a lot of ugliness in many early 20th century compositions, and that glaring "modernism" (or were they just supporting the composers? :) might have helped audiences tag them as pieces they'd rather avoid from now on. And yet, some of those same ugly harmonies, when finessed by today's jazz pianists, don't sound that shocking at all. Obviously, interpretation has a lot to do with how one perceives a piece. And that gives the interpreter a lot of power.
Mr. Schumann also asked that the tempo be slowed down at that point so that whatever chaos has crept in can do it in slow motion, but, true to form, he never actually tells us when to resume the regular tempo. Is it because he assumes any idiot will know to get back into the regular tempo when the next phrase begins (standard practice, but most other composers put the "a tempo" in anyway at that point)? Or was he thinking something else. With Schumann, who knows?
(aside: Fleischer once dodged the issue when I asked him a question about some dynamic marks in a Schumann sonata by putting it to the whole class, rhetorically of course!)
Anyhow, by the time I get a chance to record the whole set later this spring I hope to spend enough time with it to come up with my own definitive (provisional) answers to some of these questions. Posting a bit of it untimely ripped helps in the process of figuring these things out. And now you know the kinds of things that keep some of us up nights.
Hey, whatever I can do to make you feel normal!
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