In November of 1984, 29 years ago next month, I played the organ in church for the first time. The regular organist for our little white church with a steeple was out having a baby. It was supposed to be a two week stint but turned into four after there were complications. I had achieved the grand old age of 13 and had a bit of trouble reaching the pedals, but no matter.
After that I served as a substitute organist to a lot of different churches of various denominations. In the Catholic church I had to sing and figure out which prayer the priest was using. For the Baptists it was enough to raise the roof with an enthusiastic pianistic shout. The Lutherans had their own set of doxologies and prayer responses. And of course the Methodists had more potluck dinners.
Back then there weren't a lot of musical resources available to me. I think I owned maybe two books of organ music, one of which purported to be the music of J. S. Bach, whom everybody's heard of whether they want to, or are able to, play his music or not. I wonder now where that book has gotten to.
Our local music store had things like Mel Bay's Big Note Guitar Method and possibly Mozart's Greatest Hits, but not a lot of organ music. Eventually my mother and I would go up to a large music store an hour away in the city.
But for now it was that little, very edited, book, which contained Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, topped off, I think, with the Little G Minor Fugue. I was pretty lazy, so I didn't bother learning the Fugues, which were harder, and besides, as I mentioned, I couldn't reach the pedals very well anyhow. So I played the things that were easy and required less coordination.
Boy was that a different era.
The little town where I grew up has become a sprawling endless burb and vast resources are available on that newfangled internet thing to anybody regardless of how small their community and I am now completely on the other side of college where I learned to discipline my mind and gained a pretty serious technical command of the instrument--the piano, anyhow, and later on, the organ. It was a long time ago, in a village far, far away.
And yet, here I am again. This week I made a recording of two of those little pieces that might well have been the first things I played on the organ as barely a teenager. I learned the fugues this time, too. I'm quite sure I played them significantly better than I did then, also. I certainly practiced them with more focus. The Fugues are a bit trickier than I would have thought but I still could get them licked in an hour or less.
I wasn't really planning on visiting the past like this. I assumed that past era and its repertoire was gone. I wasn't sure an organist who takes on large works of Widor and Vierne should even be playing these "little" preludes and fugues. But this week is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Johann Ludwig Krebs and I decided to go on another of my musical investigations into a composer I didn't know and it turns out that those 8 Little Preludes and Fugues by J. S. Bach might not be by J. S. Bach after all. Some scholars think, or thought, that they might have been written by Krebs. At the moment, I'm inclined to that opinion myself. I'll explain why in another post.
For now, I'll offer up a bit of the distant past as I experienced it. Pieces that are often among the first for young organists to tackle. It is kind of nice to get around to playing those fugues finally! And I do plan to play all eight of them this time. It's as though I'm finally injecting discipline and method that nobody grounded me in when I was growing up in that little village, playing on old uprights and small electronic organs. I'm finally finishing something I started a long time ago. It's been interesting visiting the past that way. Remembering the circumstances of life at the time, and rediscovering, or just discovering, the music. My entire orientation toward music and everything else has changed in the meantime.
I don't think these are masterpieces, but some of them are not too bad. There are awkward things in them, but they have some nice moments as well. I like them less now than I did then, but I've also found more to appreciate about them because I have a richer understanding of music in general. So I'll save my detailed appraisal of the pieces for another time. Besides, I don't want to be unkind toward Mr. Krebs on his birthday.
I like the fugues the best now. Is there any hope for me?
Prelude and Fugue in F
Prelude and Fugue in G Minor
Friday, October 11, 2013
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.
Monday, October 7, 2013
The Big 3 - 0....0.
Johann Ludwig Krebs turns 300 years old sometime this week.
Are you wondering who that is? (Hey, if there's cake, don't ask....)
Mr. Krebs was a student of a fellow named Johann Sebastian Bach. If you haven't at least heard of Mr. Bach I assume you've been living in a cave or were raised by wolves or both. Or that the aliens just put you back. Krebs, on the other hand, appears to have had some difficulty in securing recognition in life, on his way to becoming a composer whose name I had seen before in my reading but whose music I had never played until a couple of weeks ago when fellow organist and blogger Vidas Pinkevicius mentioned the upcoming anniversary. So don't feel too bad if the name doesn't ring bells for you.
Besides, that means I can introduce you to something new. In the process of investigating Mr. Krebs' legacy I can currently share with you several pieces based on Lutheran Chorale melodies which one generally assumes were written in connection with Krebs' job as a church organist. Krebs himself had a good bit of difficulty getting such a job, according to The Wikipedia, which I shamefacedly confess has been my only source of research to this point. When he actually did get a job, he got paid only in food to feed his family, in lieu of an actual salary. (By the way, getting part of your salary in foodstuffs was actually quite common at the time, although there was generally also a reasonable amount of money involved as well.)
Since I myself am a church organist, and with better luck than Mr. Krebs, apparently, in that I have a job and it pays actual money, I've chosen to play a handful of these works in my church over the next couple of weeks. I've also done what might seem like an odd thing and gone and prepared these works to perform on the piano. Since Monday is generally a day for listening to piano music on this blog that makes it just about perfect.
But why the piano? The beast was only invented about 1700. That means that Krebs probably had heard of one, and may have seen one (his teacher, Bach, tested an early prototype, and later on became a kind of sales rep for an associate who built them), but it's not very likely that he had one at home or was thoroughly acquainted with this newfangled instrument. Besides, these pieces are liturgical in nature, probably meant for church, and that means the organ, because in Europe in the 18th century pianos certainly did not live in churches.
Well, about that....being the impatient type, and with a lot to do these days, I found some scores at everybody's favorite website, the International Score Library Project, printed them out, and, being at home at the time, promptly went to my piano to try them out rather than waiting until I got to church. The first thing I noticed is that they don't have a pedal part. And that they can be played rather easily on one keyboard, so they work very well on the piano. They also sound very nicely on a piano. I wondering if they would perhaps not sound so nicely on the organ. There are some rolled chords and other types of writing that make me wonder, even though I haven't tried them that way yet.
So I wonder, in my non professional-musicologist, not-completely-up-to-speed-on-all-the Krebs-literature way, whether they were in fact intended for the harpsichord, because in my mind's ear they would sound quite well on the that instrument, and also because if Mr. Krebs didn't hold a church position for a good portion of his life, that would mean he didn't have regular access to an organ, a predicament I have grown to appreciate through my wanderings on the web and the comments I have read therein. Did he have difficulty conceiving music that took advantage of this rather unique king of instruments, or did he want something he could play on instruments he had access to? (By the way, the rather secular-minded non-organist-virtuoso Telemann also did not seem too wrapped up in conceiving his chorale-based pieces for the organ, although they do steer clear of specifically non-organistic things; they simply have no pedal parts and are short and uninvolved.)
These speculations will lead me to a rather unpopular conclusion in another week or so when I discuss the provenance of a set of short Preludes and Fugues I'll be playing the last week of October. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, here are a few very nice pieces by that student of Bach. Notice the chorale tune doesn't figure prominently at all in some of them. In others, those that seem to have two parts (most of them actually have three parts in the score, but in some cases I am only playing the first, and in others the first two, parts) a solemn, quarter note melody comes in only in the second verse. In the third part, the hymn tune is played like it would be sung in church. I wonder why he did that. At any rate, you can enjoy the music without being steeped in the tunes.
Krebs: selections from the first part of his Klavier Ubung (Keyboard Notebook):
Sei Lob und Ehr dem hochsten Gut Praise and Honor be to the Most High
Vater unser im Himmelreich Our Father in Heaven
Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan What God does is done well
Jesu, meine Freude Jesus my Joy
Are you wondering who that is? (Hey, if there's cake, don't ask....)
Mr. Krebs was a student of a fellow named Johann Sebastian Bach. If you haven't at least heard of Mr. Bach I assume you've been living in a cave or were raised by wolves or both. Or that the aliens just put you back. Krebs, on the other hand, appears to have had some difficulty in securing recognition in life, on his way to becoming a composer whose name I had seen before in my reading but whose music I had never played until a couple of weeks ago when fellow organist and blogger Vidas Pinkevicius mentioned the upcoming anniversary. So don't feel too bad if the name doesn't ring bells for you.
Besides, that means I can introduce you to something new. In the process of investigating Mr. Krebs' legacy I can currently share with you several pieces based on Lutheran Chorale melodies which one generally assumes were written in connection with Krebs' job as a church organist. Krebs himself had a good bit of difficulty getting such a job, according to The Wikipedia, which I shamefacedly confess has been my only source of research to this point. When he actually did get a job, he got paid only in food to feed his family, in lieu of an actual salary. (By the way, getting part of your salary in foodstuffs was actually quite common at the time, although there was generally also a reasonable amount of money involved as well.)
Since I myself am a church organist, and with better luck than Mr. Krebs, apparently, in that I have a job and it pays actual money, I've chosen to play a handful of these works in my church over the next couple of weeks. I've also done what might seem like an odd thing and gone and prepared these works to perform on the piano. Since Monday is generally a day for listening to piano music on this blog that makes it just about perfect.
But why the piano? The beast was only invented about 1700. That means that Krebs probably had heard of one, and may have seen one (his teacher, Bach, tested an early prototype, and later on became a kind of sales rep for an associate who built them), but it's not very likely that he had one at home or was thoroughly acquainted with this newfangled instrument. Besides, these pieces are liturgical in nature, probably meant for church, and that means the organ, because in Europe in the 18th century pianos certainly did not live in churches.
Well, about that....being the impatient type, and with a lot to do these days, I found some scores at everybody's favorite website, the International Score Library Project, printed them out, and, being at home at the time, promptly went to my piano to try them out rather than waiting until I got to church. The first thing I noticed is that they don't have a pedal part. And that they can be played rather easily on one keyboard, so they work very well on the piano. They also sound very nicely on a piano. I wondering if they would perhaps not sound so nicely on the organ. There are some rolled chords and other types of writing that make me wonder, even though I haven't tried them that way yet.
So I wonder, in my non professional-musicologist, not-completely-up-to-speed-on-all-the Krebs-literature way, whether they were in fact intended for the harpsichord, because in my mind's ear they would sound quite well on the that instrument, and also because if Mr. Krebs didn't hold a church position for a good portion of his life, that would mean he didn't have regular access to an organ, a predicament I have grown to appreciate through my wanderings on the web and the comments I have read therein. Did he have difficulty conceiving music that took advantage of this rather unique king of instruments, or did he want something he could play on instruments he had access to? (By the way, the rather secular-minded non-organist-virtuoso Telemann also did not seem too wrapped up in conceiving his chorale-based pieces for the organ, although they do steer clear of specifically non-organistic things; they simply have no pedal parts and are short and uninvolved.)
These speculations will lead me to a rather unpopular conclusion in another week or so when I discuss the provenance of a set of short Preludes and Fugues I'll be playing the last week of October. But we'll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, here are a few very nice pieces by that student of Bach. Notice the chorale tune doesn't figure prominently at all in some of them. In others, those that seem to have two parts (most of them actually have three parts in the score, but in some cases I am only playing the first, and in others the first two, parts) a solemn, quarter note melody comes in only in the second verse. In the third part, the hymn tune is played like it would be sung in church. I wonder why he did that. At any rate, you can enjoy the music without being steeped in the tunes.
Krebs: selections from the first part of his Klavier Ubung (Keyboard Notebook):
Sei Lob und Ehr dem hochsten Gut Praise and Honor be to the Most High
Vater unser im Himmelreich Our Father in Heaven
Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan What God does is done well
Jesu, meine Freude Jesus my Joy
Friday, October 4, 2013
Glamour Job
Being a church organist is not often thought of as a job for highly talented musicians. That's often a perception of musicians themselves as well as the public at large.
I once received a compliment from a visitor to our church who said that the music that morning was very fine. She went on to say that you don't often encounter churches with good music programs.
I've often gotten the impression that when I tell people I'm a church organist they form an opinion of my musical skills that isn't particularly flattering.
And why not? I happen to have a Doctorate in music in performance on the piano, and can be, and occasionally am, a concert pianist. Over the last several years I've tried to bring my organ playing up to match that. But although there are some extremely fine concert artists at some of the larger churches it is somewhat unusual to find one there. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of churches in America, most of them small or medium sized. And the jobs don't pay very well. How many really good musicians are there to go around and how many of them will want to have a job that pays so little and where the chief arguments are often over whether or not the organist should be listened to respectfully or talked over when he or she plays and whether or not it is actually sinful to pay them anything at all? And if you have to prepare at least three pieces each week and you know nobody is paying attention to them anyhow, you might not give them your best attention. Supposing you are a concert musician and you have a concert on Thursday. Which pursuit is likely to get the most attention?
Regardless of the church size and the salary size, churches are usually not looking for musical excellence in their musicians--it may even scare them. What they are looking for are people who will play the hymns and the anthems and the service music without complaint, who are easy to get along with and have positive attitudes, who work well with amateurs, are consistent and show up on time and basically get the job done with as little drama as possible. Some folks are afraid that a particularly good musician must necessarily have an attitude that will make it hard to deal with them. Not without some real life examples to back up that fear, regrettably.
There's a particularly funny (and painful) sketch Garrison Keillor did several years ago about a little church that strove for musical excellence "and it nearly killed us." They advertise for a music director and manage to hire folks like Stravinksy, Phillip Glass, and Aaron Copland, pretty much a who's who of the 20th century in music (I particularly remember a minimalist introduction to "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in which the pianist never manages to get to the second line). Each time the composer doesn't stay around long for some reason and the church ends up returning to their in-congregation back-up volunteer, Mrs. Palmquist. Keillor sums her up after every one of her comebacks: "She was a good woman."
That is really an indictment on both the musician and the congregation, although Mr. Keillor paints his set-in-their ways, stubbornly average congregations in such humorously sympathetic ways that it is hard to fault them. And, after all, I may have all [musical] excellence and all [musical] knowledge, but if I have not love....
Still, excellence is something that can be achieved, and should be attempted in church. Part of this will depend on our definitions of excellence. And part of this will hinge on whether or not these pursuits are friends or enemies of what your congregation thinks they want. It is a curious dynamic, and I'll explore it in some of the coming blogs.
I once received a compliment from a visitor to our church who said that the music that morning was very fine. She went on to say that you don't often encounter churches with good music programs.
I've often gotten the impression that when I tell people I'm a church organist they form an opinion of my musical skills that isn't particularly flattering.
And why not? I happen to have a Doctorate in music in performance on the piano, and can be, and occasionally am, a concert pianist. Over the last several years I've tried to bring my organ playing up to match that. But although there are some extremely fine concert artists at some of the larger churches it is somewhat unusual to find one there. After all, there are thousands upon thousands of churches in America, most of them small or medium sized. And the jobs don't pay very well. How many really good musicians are there to go around and how many of them will want to have a job that pays so little and where the chief arguments are often over whether or not the organist should be listened to respectfully or talked over when he or she plays and whether or not it is actually sinful to pay them anything at all? And if you have to prepare at least three pieces each week and you know nobody is paying attention to them anyhow, you might not give them your best attention. Supposing you are a concert musician and you have a concert on Thursday. Which pursuit is likely to get the most attention?
Regardless of the church size and the salary size, churches are usually not looking for musical excellence in their musicians--it may even scare them. What they are looking for are people who will play the hymns and the anthems and the service music without complaint, who are easy to get along with and have positive attitudes, who work well with amateurs, are consistent and show up on time and basically get the job done with as little drama as possible. Some folks are afraid that a particularly good musician must necessarily have an attitude that will make it hard to deal with them. Not without some real life examples to back up that fear, regrettably.
There's a particularly funny (and painful) sketch Garrison Keillor did several years ago about a little church that strove for musical excellence "and it nearly killed us." They advertise for a music director and manage to hire folks like Stravinksy, Phillip Glass, and Aaron Copland, pretty much a who's who of the 20th century in music (I particularly remember a minimalist introduction to "Onward, Christian Soldiers" in which the pianist never manages to get to the second line). Each time the composer doesn't stay around long for some reason and the church ends up returning to their in-congregation back-up volunteer, Mrs. Palmquist. Keillor sums her up after every one of her comebacks: "She was a good woman."
That is really an indictment on both the musician and the congregation, although Mr. Keillor paints his set-in-their ways, stubbornly average congregations in such humorously sympathetic ways that it is hard to fault them. And, after all, I may have all [musical] excellence and all [musical] knowledge, but if I have not love....
Still, excellence is something that can be achieved, and should be attempted in church. Part of this will depend on our definitions of excellence. And part of this will hinge on whether or not these pursuits are friends or enemies of what your congregation thinks they want. It is a curious dynamic, and I'll explore it in some of the coming blogs.
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, September 30, 2013
Mr. Gottschalk and I
This is the final installment of the Gottschalk series I wrote in June while preparing for a recital. The series was interrupted while I was on summer break.
Life moves pretty fast, says the prevailing wisdom. You say it. I say it.
Which moves faster, the change or the monotony?
For me last spring it was principally the rapid pace at which I had to adapt to new material. There was new music to learn and play every week. There were rehearsals, concerts, church services (four a weekend), weddings, gigs, people with various projects. There was email to keep up with, blogging and recording, composing, reading and learning, domestic chores---getting tired yet just reading about it?
And then, after a semester of all that, just when things were supposed to simmer down a little bit for the summer (but never did), I decided to throw in a piano recital for the heck of it.
Actually, there was a little more than devil-may-care involved. It had been on my so-called "bucket list" for several years, and last summer seemed like time to do it. Mr. Gottschalk had nearly gotten himself involved in the Battle of Gettysburg, and that Battle was turning 150 on July 1st. So his music seemed to fit the occasion. And, while I wasn't under contract to anybody and could have pushed the recital back a month to give me time to practice, I really wanted to eventually have everything finished up so I could relax a bit before the fall semester started things up again (no such luck, as it turned out).
In a way, that gave me some insight into Mr. Gottschalk's world. He also had to turn it up a notch a lot of times when he was pretty worn out. In fact, the man gave at least one, if not two or three, concerts every day when he was touring, which was most of the time. During his stint in the United States between 1862 and 1865 he gave hundreds of concerts and traveled thousands of miles by train, often barely getting to the next town in time to start the next concert. Forget actually getting to practice.
But that's where our two worlds diverge. And frankly, I've taken the more obscure path, and it's made all the difference.
It can be stressful learning new music all the time, but routine may be the worse tyrant. And Gottschalk was nothing if not the machine on the road. Always playing the same pieces, night after night, able to predict, as he notes in his diary, at what time he would play The Banjo, when the audience would encore Aelian Murmers, when they would be charmed by Cradle Song, when he would receive thunderous applause for his Union, followed by a light supper (he often didn't get to eat until after the concert it seems!) and a few hours of sleep before that @#$% hotel gong would wake everybody up at 6 a.m. and it was time to catch a train to the next town.
Gottschalk could be fiercely proud of his torrential work schedule. He was once mortally insulted by someone who claimed he had traveled 80 miles by rail in the last year. It was 800! he says, indignantly. Any fool could have done 80. He was forever crabbing about the boredom of the road and of concert life. It sounds a bit like melodrama, perhaps: oh, woe is me, I'm a famous concert pianist whom everyone adores and look how hard it is to be this in demand; :sigh:--but I'll take him at least partially at face value. It wasn't as glamorous a life as it looked to outsiders. I've had enough experience with touring to know. By the third city you can't even remember which way to turn the key to get into your hotel room or how to get the water running because you keep having to learn different procedures for the most basic operations. And you never know about breakfast. Gottschalk complained about hotel food plenty as well.
The truth is, at some point we're all going to get pretty fed up with the life we've chosen and any glamour is going to wear thin at least some of the time. And you can pick your poison: I get more control, and more time to learn and grow, think and play, and do a variety of things, for which I pay by having to constantly juggle and balance, adapt and learn on the fly, and get paid less and acheive less notoriety. Gottschalk got to be famous, see the world, and make a niche in musical history, for which the price was boredom, fatigue, and probably wondering whether it was worth it. Then again, he might not have had such a choice. He had a large family to support, his father having died, and several siblings who depended on as big a paycheck as he could muster. This seemed to be the way to get it.
I've found Gottschalk a fascinating travelling companion this summer as I worked on the concert. His "Notes of a Pianist" is back in print and I highly recommend it. It is an interesting read. And his music, though not of the vintage of Chopin and Mozart is, as one writer put it, "frankly appealing." It is easy to get the ears around, and repetitive, but still has some very original things to say. You can hear some of that music here where it rests in the pianonoise archive. In the meantime, it is time to play "The Banjo!" and you can listen to it right here.
The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
I've outlived the man by over two years now. It must have been an exhausting life on the road. I've enjoyed journeying a little with him, but I don't mind that I am someone else. Maybe he wouldn't want my life either. You never know, though.
Life moves pretty fast, says the prevailing wisdom. You say it. I say it.
Which moves faster, the change or the monotony?
For me last spring it was principally the rapid pace at which I had to adapt to new material. There was new music to learn and play every week. There were rehearsals, concerts, church services (four a weekend), weddings, gigs, people with various projects. There was email to keep up with, blogging and recording, composing, reading and learning, domestic chores---getting tired yet just reading about it?
And then, after a semester of all that, just when things were supposed to simmer down a little bit for the summer (but never did), I decided to throw in a piano recital for the heck of it.
Actually, there was a little more than devil-may-care involved. It had been on my so-called "bucket list" for several years, and last summer seemed like time to do it. Mr. Gottschalk had nearly gotten himself involved in the Battle of Gettysburg, and that Battle was turning 150 on July 1st. So his music seemed to fit the occasion. And, while I wasn't under contract to anybody and could have pushed the recital back a month to give me time to practice, I really wanted to eventually have everything finished up so I could relax a bit before the fall semester started things up again (no such luck, as it turned out).
In a way, that gave me some insight into Mr. Gottschalk's world. He also had to turn it up a notch a lot of times when he was pretty worn out. In fact, the man gave at least one, if not two or three, concerts every day when he was touring, which was most of the time. During his stint in the United States between 1862 and 1865 he gave hundreds of concerts and traveled thousands of miles by train, often barely getting to the next town in time to start the next concert. Forget actually getting to practice.
But that's where our two worlds diverge. And frankly, I've taken the more obscure path, and it's made all the difference.
It can be stressful learning new music all the time, but routine may be the worse tyrant. And Gottschalk was nothing if not the machine on the road. Always playing the same pieces, night after night, able to predict, as he notes in his diary, at what time he would play The Banjo, when the audience would encore Aelian Murmers, when they would be charmed by Cradle Song, when he would receive thunderous applause for his Union, followed by a light supper (he often didn't get to eat until after the concert it seems!) and a few hours of sleep before that @#$% hotel gong would wake everybody up at 6 a.m. and it was time to catch a train to the next town.
Gottschalk could be fiercely proud of his torrential work schedule. He was once mortally insulted by someone who claimed he had traveled 80 miles by rail in the last year. It was 800! he says, indignantly. Any fool could have done 80. He was forever crabbing about the boredom of the road and of concert life. It sounds a bit like melodrama, perhaps: oh, woe is me, I'm a famous concert pianist whom everyone adores and look how hard it is to be this in demand; :sigh:--but I'll take him at least partially at face value. It wasn't as glamorous a life as it looked to outsiders. I've had enough experience with touring to know. By the third city you can't even remember which way to turn the key to get into your hotel room or how to get the water running because you keep having to learn different procedures for the most basic operations. And you never know about breakfast. Gottschalk complained about hotel food plenty as well.
The truth is, at some point we're all going to get pretty fed up with the life we've chosen and any glamour is going to wear thin at least some of the time. And you can pick your poison: I get more control, and more time to learn and grow, think and play, and do a variety of things, for which I pay by having to constantly juggle and balance, adapt and learn on the fly, and get paid less and acheive less notoriety. Gottschalk got to be famous, see the world, and make a niche in musical history, for which the price was boredom, fatigue, and probably wondering whether it was worth it. Then again, he might not have had such a choice. He had a large family to support, his father having died, and several siblings who depended on as big a paycheck as he could muster. This seemed to be the way to get it.
I've found Gottschalk a fascinating travelling companion this summer as I worked on the concert. His "Notes of a Pianist" is back in print and I highly recommend it. It is an interesting read. And his music, though not of the vintage of Chopin and Mozart is, as one writer put it, "frankly appealing." It is easy to get the ears around, and repetitive, but still has some very original things to say. You can hear some of that music here where it rests in the pianonoise archive. In the meantime, it is time to play "The Banjo!" and you can listen to it right here.
The Banjo by Louis Moreau Gottschalk.
I've outlived the man by over two years now. It must have been an exhausting life on the road. I've enjoyed journeying a little with him, but I don't mind that I am someone else. Maybe he wouldn't want my life either. You never know, though.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Sabbath
I'm not a big fan of a lot of our Sabbath rhetoric in the church. It isn't that we don't need a rest every seven days, it's mostly that we don't take one, and then we complain about it. In a culture as obsessed as we are with being on the go 24/7, we long for rest, pine for rest, yearn for rest, but don't actually do anything about it. Instead, we like to hear preachers and theologians tell us about the importance of slowing down and letting things be. Which ends up making peace and quiet the top story far too much of the time when there are a whole lot of other things that are more important, like the idea that maybe being part of the kingdom of God actually involves work on our part. Instead, we are so worn out from our day jobs that we collapse into the pew on Sunday for a moment of rest. Religion and rest, both items on the bottom of our lists, wind up in the "someday I'll get around to this category." But we don't, and Sabbath rest keeps on being big rhetoric. It's such a first-world problem, anyhow. If that's the biggest problem in your life, that you are stressed out and worn out, thank God right now you aren't starving or getting shot at. And then figure out how to carpool or tell your kid he can only be on 3 soccer teams this fall, not four. Do something about it.
All whining aside, rest is important. I've got more empathy for the worn out than I ever have had. Back in June, after weeks of wondering, as a first-year blogger, whether I ought to take a break this summer, or just cut back, or keep going, (would my readership suffer?) I decided I would take some time off, write a blog called "Sabbath" to explain my absence, and then knock off for a while. I had just made it through a grueling spring, full of new musical adventures and accomplishments, capped off by a piano concert I threw together in only a few weeks, and I needed to rest from something, particularly as the summer didn't promise the sort of rest it normally does. And then my computer had the equivalent of a massive stroke and died on the 4th of July, and by the time I got a new one we were off to Pittsburgh to attend a conference at a very pricey hotel where they charged extra for going online, so I was effectively blocked from the internet for a couple of weeks, which meant a forced vacation from blogging only days before I planned to take one anyway, and you know what? It was kind of nice not worrying about pumping out a blog three times a week and hoping I would have something useful to say and time to say it in. Suddenly, after publishing every Monday Wednesday and Friday without fail from January through June (even if some of the entries got published very late at night!) it all just....stopped.
And peace reigned. And maybe a few questions. Another dead blog? What happened? Has he given up blogging? Just on vacation. Hmmm.
Actually I imagined very few would notice. I also noted that the spambots stopped reading my blog. And that my blog traffic predictably took a big hit. But I am reasonably confident that the viewers I have left are actual humans (most of them) which is kind of nice. There aren't a lot of you, but it's nice to see you are reading. I hope it's worth your while. There are also just under 100 entries if you need something to do until Monday.
I'm ready to get back at it for another year. I've already begun a new season at my church, programming music new and old, sharing my investigations with my congregation, and hoping to be a resource to my local community and anybody who stumbles into my little corner of cyberspace.
I'm also ready to pick up where I left off. Monday's article will be the last in the series on my adventure with Mr. Gottschalk from June, and then it's back to another year of sharing music and listening tips on Monday, things from the teaching studio on Wednesday, and church music on Fridays. Onward...
Michael
Speaking of rhetoric....
At children's choir on Wednesday, while assigning each child a "fruit of the spirit" to sing each in turn:
Bridgette: I want to sing "self control"
Madeline: (her sister) but you don't have any self control.
Bridgette: That's why I want to sing it.
Me: [trying not to bust up, much as their mother did when I told her about it later!]
All whining aside, rest is important. I've got more empathy for the worn out than I ever have had. Back in June, after weeks of wondering, as a first-year blogger, whether I ought to take a break this summer, or just cut back, or keep going, (would my readership suffer?) I decided I would take some time off, write a blog called "Sabbath" to explain my absence, and then knock off for a while. I had just made it through a grueling spring, full of new musical adventures and accomplishments, capped off by a piano concert I threw together in only a few weeks, and I needed to rest from something, particularly as the summer didn't promise the sort of rest it normally does. And then my computer had the equivalent of a massive stroke and died on the 4th of July, and by the time I got a new one we were off to Pittsburgh to attend a conference at a very pricey hotel where they charged extra for going online, so I was effectively blocked from the internet for a couple of weeks, which meant a forced vacation from blogging only days before I planned to take one anyway, and you know what? It was kind of nice not worrying about pumping out a blog three times a week and hoping I would have something useful to say and time to say it in. Suddenly, after publishing every Monday Wednesday and Friday without fail from January through June (even if some of the entries got published very late at night!) it all just....stopped.
And peace reigned. And maybe a few questions. Another dead blog? What happened? Has he given up blogging? Just on vacation. Hmmm.
Actually I imagined very few would notice. I also noted that the spambots stopped reading my blog. And that my blog traffic predictably took a big hit. But I am reasonably confident that the viewers I have left are actual humans (most of them) which is kind of nice. There aren't a lot of you, but it's nice to see you are reading. I hope it's worth your while. There are also just under 100 entries if you need something to do until Monday.
I'm ready to get back at it for another year. I've already begun a new season at my church, programming music new and old, sharing my investigations with my congregation, and hoping to be a resource to my local community and anybody who stumbles into my little corner of cyberspace.
I'm also ready to pick up where I left off. Monday's article will be the last in the series on my adventure with Mr. Gottschalk from June, and then it's back to another year of sharing music and listening tips on Monday, things from the teaching studio on Wednesday, and church music on Fridays. Onward...
Michael
Speaking of rhetoric....
At children's choir on Wednesday, while assigning each child a "fruit of the spirit" to sing each in turn:
Bridgette: I want to sing "self control"
Madeline: (her sister) but you don't have any self control.
Bridgette: That's why I want to sing it.
Me: [trying not to bust up, much as their mother did when I told her about it later!]
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