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music |
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Wilhelm Kempff - Beethoven Moonlight Sonata Mvt. 3 |
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It took me many years to realize that music is not an exact science.
I used to think that those who successfully performed music practiced until they got every note perfectly right. That's because people who know how to perform know how to miss half a thousand notes and sweep it under the rug, and that in turn is because there is no "exact" in music.
Missing or wrong notes.
When I watch pianists play, these days I generally have come to know the music well enough to pick out all of the missed notes. It's been somewhat of an epiphany for me to watch videos of masters of the piano, and observe all the missed notes. I don't really try to catch missed notes, I just notice because I just do.
I never perform anything and fail to miss a note. Never. That's a nugget they never taught me in college. Maybe if they had, I wouldn't have burst a blood vessel half the time trying to get all the right ones.
I emphasize that my students learn the notes. I always learn a piece by being absolutely certain what all the notes are, first, but during a performance, note accuracy takes a lesser role behind musicality.
Tempo and metronomes.
Tempo is important but not important. If playing like metronomes was desirable, we'd simply program our entire piano literature lexicon into a computer and let synthesizers play for us. At certain times, I encourage my students to play with a metronome, especially in early baroque or baroque pieces, or if they're struggling with note values, and always during technic exercises like Hanon. However, the masters vary in tempo broadly in their performances. The trick is the listener doesn't notice.
In my opinion, tempo also takes a lesser role behind musicality, and beside accuracy.
Musicality.
This concept is everything. I give my students incredibly vague and abstract concepts to digest, and usually they just stare at me blankly, but I can't really help it; if I know it, I want to pass it on. From the beginning, I tell them a note is a word; a phrase is a sentence; a song is a statement. What are you trying to say? How can you say it to the audience? I tell them music is like the ocean, that it is like painting, or like (a recently baffling analogy) turning a doorknob. I use a lot of metaphors because I can't seem to explain anything in plain words anymore.
I've alluded before that I believe that music is a higher, greater language with more hues and values and subtleties than any spoken word alone. With music you can fill the room with the abstract; with concepts no one can put into words, but everyone feels.
I can see this, now, in any great performer. Above accuracy, technique, tempo, and everything, is the statement. The reaching out across the strings of the instrument and speaking directly to the soul of whoever might be there. I play best when I concentrate on becoming a window to the statement, or rather in being transparent and a non-entity and letting the music be the only thing that exists at that particular time. I try to tell my students this. They struggle, and worry, and fear they'll look bad if they miss a note.
Music is like any power in the world. It can be used two ways: to give and to take. If you take, you're in it for your own glory. This is always followed by the fear of humiliation, which self-preservation in turn dims a performer's ability to perform. Turn the focus around, however, entirely on to heightening the experience of those listening to the music, and everything changes. It becomes not a matter of impressing anyone; it becomes a matter of creating atmosphere, giving, creation. I tell my students that separates the people who play the piano from the people who play the piano.
Another thing I'm constantly beating my students over is apologizing to the piano. Maybe you've heard it; a person sitting at the piano begins to play, and they play so blandly and quietly it seems like they're hardly pushing down the keys. It makes no impression. It's just somebody playing the piano. I tell them to take the piano by the horns and make it do your bidding. Too many pianists (and I haven't had a student yet who isn't) are intimidated by the piano, an inanimate object. The day I realized I'd entirely tamed the piano and, frankly, owned it, was the day I really became a musician.
I've no idea why I've listed all of this, except to record it in my journal. I've done a lot of teaching over the years and enjoy it a lot these days, even though I only take less students than I can count on one hand. I do that because I can really care about four students; any more and I start to lose my edge. I train them to be musicians, I try to instill in them a love of music, and of playing the piano. Those are my first priorities. They have to love it... And in more detail, I heavily emphasize the classics, and very rarely foray into anything pop or broadway or jazz, etc.
I get the same feeling when I play a Beethoven sonata that I get when I read Thoreau. Here lies truth; thoughtful, painstakingly crafted truth about the human condition.
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purnicellin's journal
