Let's Turn the Page...

A quote I ran across today by Robert Schumann sums things up just about perfectly. Roughly translated, it read:

"The best way to talk about music is to say nothing."

That, of course, was published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a tremendously successful and long-standing publication of music criticism founded by Schumann in April, 1834 and still publishing to this day. He goes on to qualify his statement, in order to dispel some of the inherent irony:

"Consider, however, that we have a responsibility to Chopin [and, by extension, all other composers], and that the great public, seeing our silence, rather than observing our awe of this music, would come to a somewhat different conclusion about us." (Schumann, Robert: Schriften über Musik und Musiker, Joseph Häusler, ed. Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart, 2009. 89-90)

Over the next few pages, he describes the greatness of the task of honoring music with speech. I suppose one could say I have been doing that already, but I think "complaining" about music is more accurate. I have decided, in short, to begin using this blog as a means of publishing music criticism, probably the only thing I know enough about to write a blog on. Unfortunately, I am no position to analyze and comment on new compositions as Schumann so deftly did, but I hope to share the musical ear I have been working for so many years to develop with all of you because when you get down to it, I believe that the current inattention to the so-called Classical Music World is due not to a lack of quality in the art being produced - on the contrary, I find it to be the genre with the highest standard of all - but because of an underdeveloped musical ear in the audience. I will share my thoughts in the form of a review and discuss how I go about listening to music to get the most enjoyment out of the finest performances on earth.

"Let me try this out on you..."

Tonight, on our way to Denny's, I dropped by my practice room to drop off some unnecessaries.  The two young ladies with me, having just learned that I play the piano, wanted me to try something.  Well, the only thing I've been working on seriously solo-wise lately is Scarbo....  why not?  It sounds great when I play it for myself.  So, I set out into it.

As any of us could have predicted, it was a trainwreck.

I've thought more and more lately about why we as humans can play something so well when it's just us around and totally blow it the moment others show up.  It's not always the case, and in fact (I'm only speaking for myself on this one) I observe that the trainwreck is worst on the first run and aligns to what I do alone in the practice room more and more as I play the piece more.

This is all very obvious, still.  Let's get down to some deeper thought here.  Identify the problem and the answer will resolve itself 9 times out of 10.  What exactly happens?

• First, those repeated notes at the beginning were starting to sound like something out of a Dusapin etude... impossibly erratic, never more than 3 out of every 4 notes sounding, as many different dynamics and tone qualities as there were notes.
• It was at least 20% faster than I have practiced it.  Some parts were probably even faster than I intend to ever perform them in concert.
• There were innumerable wrong notes, particularly when the hands are crossed or on top of one another (which is, to my great frustration, more than half of this piece).
• I got lost twice, had to backtrack a measure or two, and keep going.

Much of this was to expected in any case.  You don't perform Scarbo after working half-heartedly on it for a month.  Also, the repeated notes were obviously not together because I hadn't warmed up.

Tempo is a different issue, and its cause is different in different people.  The two main reasons I observe, for example, when my students will bring a piece to their lesson and play it way faster than they have obviously been practicing, are nervousness and pride.  The nervousness comes in both from a feeling of shyness and the "this piece is really hard...gracious sakes I hope I can get through it..." attitude.  If a piece is hard, it gets over faster if you play it faster; also, at least with me, I find that if I don't know a piece of music, it's not going to sound good at any tempo.  So I might as well play it fast.  The pride is not a bad kind of pride; instead, it is that you have worked hard on the piece for a good while and you want to show to your first audience how much progress you've made so far.  This combines with the understanding that it's just a casual run-through, creating the perfect storm.  Sloppiness takes over. Tempo flies off the charts as you try to give your new audience a sense of the piece, and you yourself are incapable of taking it at that tempo... yet. But hey, they all say that if you can play a piece slow you can play it fast as well, right?  Wrong (well, to an extent).

I feel perfectly comfortable playing for myself when it's just me in the room, and sometimes when there are only other pianists there too.  When non-pianist friends drop by to hear my poundings, I somehow lose my mind and end up playing the music the way I played everything four years ago.  Old habits die hard, though.  Especially when the piece is as through-and-through-awesome as Scarbo.

Steps to preventing a repeat offence?  I can't say there's a magical series of cures.  Speaking for myself, I can make some comments.  In my playing, when it's just me who's present, I strive for absolute correctness, clarity of tone and touch, and intelligent structure to the section I'm practicing, regardless of tempo and to a degree regardless of dynamic and other, more polished expression.  There are plenty of times when that alone is my focus - those aspects of music are just as valid as the black dots on the page - it's just that I don't have the mental capacity to critically focus on every aspect of playing at once. So I limit myself somewhat, when I am in the practice room, mostly to just playing the notes well.  Once another person shows up, however, my extreme social nature urges me to focus on communicating.  Well, the mind is like a small plate at a Thanksgiving feast, and so in order to communicate with these fellow human beings, things get pushed off the plate: note accuracy and control/moderation of tempo, first of all.

The important thing this early in the game is to become accustomed to playing well in front of other human beings.  I can communicate naturally, in most circumstances, and I have also learned how to practice that alone.  Maybe I'll post on that someday.  The point is, I need to tell myself that since accuracy and control/moderation of tempo are my greatest difficulties in my art, that these must be my primary focus when I have the opportunity to "try out" a piece on someone early on in the process of learning something.

The ladies left, chuckling to themselves and pointing out how interesting and cool the piece is; they avoided commenting on the execution altogether.

Living Music?

I've spent the majority of the last two months of silence reflecting on how to make my performances still deeper.  I want to deal with the same life issues that the composer dealt with while and by writing the music.  I listened to a friend of mine playing a piece of Mozart awhile back, and all I recall thinking at that performance was that everything was very beautifully played, but it had no life.  Instead, I saw lots of visual expression.  He moved a lot.  Once I closed my eyes, the life seemed to flee.

What puts life into the music?  My piano teacher tells me about crescendi and diminuendi and pedaling and creating a good sound, but I feel like these aspects of performance, while important, only serve to be successively thicker layers of sophistication heaped upon the piece, further disguising the basic lifelessness of the pianist.

My friend felt the music very deeply, but that feeling was not transferred into the music.  I would even say he understood the music deeply, but he failed to convey that understanding to me.

What I consider to be great composers are the ones who deal with serious issues of life with their music (of course, there is still a prerequisite level of skill to be attained): take Beethoven, for example.  The last five piano sonatas are perhaps his most profound response to the difficulties of life, and one can certainly not convey that meaning in the music without first dealing with the same issues (real or imagined) and, as they say in the theatre world, becoming Beethoven.

I can't speak for how well my friend did this with his Mozart sonata.  I don't know if "being" is all there is to it, but it seems to be a major part of imbuing life into the music.

I'm going to stop there, let it soak into my own soul for a few more years, and then maybe I'll have an idea of the next step to take.