The Opinionated Arpeggist

To My Readers From Twitter

2009-10-03T10:44:00.000-07:00

Thank you for coming! I've decided to seek your Collective Wisdom to revitalize this blog.

Why?
As you can see, it's been a long time since I've blogged here. This because even when I was posting more often, the number of comments I got was...minimal.

What was wrong?
Some guesses, in no particular order....

1. It started before social networking took off. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Delicious.

2. Following #1, there weren't enough good ways to bring it to the attention of potential readers.

3. Perhaps my posts were too detailed? I tried to change that, with no appaent effect.

4. Not snazzy enough? Doing a blog through Blogger limits you in what you can put up here.

What solutions?
1. Take advantage of social networking (#1 previous section).

2. Use #1 and #2 (previous secion)to make more noise!

3. Stop using greasy kid stuff (Blogger). Get my own domain, fire up WordPress.

4. Import some of the content from here to the new blog, keeping in mind any comments you have on #3 (previous section).

How can you help?
1. Nose around. Consider my points above, and feel free to add to them.

2. Tell it like it is. You can't offend me.

3. Be practical. Saying "you need more oomph" isn't practical unless you clue me to how I might get the oomph.

What do I promise?
1. I'll consider each and every comment carefully.

2. I'll reply to each and every comment here.

3. I will act on as many as I can.

4. I will acknowledge your help in my new blog.

5. I will be ever so grateful!

I look forward to your thoughts.

OT: Hey, Mac People -- You're Not in Kansas Anymore

2009-01-25T17:32:00.000-08:00

Precisely.

I had an experience which proves it.

The issue devolved on a wonderful mp3 program, Audion. Best encoder going, bar none. Same for editing and playing. Mac only. What's not to like?

Just one thing. After a computer restart, the thing wouldn't open. Froze solid. Took a "force quit" (Mac-speak) to get it gone. More than annoying. Worse, all the usual remedies didn't work: trash the preferences, repair permissions (more Mac-speak).

Time to crawl into the ductwork. The Mac OS X operating system is based on Unix. A wonderful, aesthetic, intuitive interface. But underneath is Unix. Just like older versions of Windows sat atop DOS. And therein lies a tale.

Unix is not user-friendly. It's user-hostile. At least. It extends a hand which really grabs you...in all the wrong places. DOS comes from Unix, which explains many of its charming quirks. You see where this is leading.

I've spent 20 years on DOS/Windows systems. You've got to be able to crawl into the ductwork and fix things. Or you're dead. And that's what I did here. It was an obscure issue of how Unix handles passwords. Don't ask -- it only affected Audion. I found it by a process of elimination.

So I'm up and running with Audion. I don't regret all the time I spent on DOS/Windows. Would never have been able to fix this otherwise.

As for all you Mac Cult people out there. Your beloved Leopard, under the hood, is no better than Windows, or as you snidely call it, Windoze, used to be.

Naxos Music Library: Feast for the Ears

2009-01-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the kindness of the good people at Naxos Music Library, and Joe Pisano of Mustech (see my entry for 12/19/2008) I've been having a tryout of the Naxos Music Library.

It's better than I could have imagined and, to quote Harrison Ford, I can imagine quite a lot.

For example, want to follow up on my Sibelius suggestions (my entry for 12/21/08 )? Head to the site and stream the BIS recordings of his piano music? Got Scarlatti on your mind (who doesn't?)? Stream the Naxos ongoing series of the complete sonatas. Want to remedy your ignorance of Medieval music (the case of The Arpeggist)? Stream Machaut.

You get my point. You want it, you can hear it. In a couple of clicks.

It's not free. But very affordable.

A full review is coming soon....

OT: The Apeggist Goes Green

2009-01-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

As in screw-in fluorescent bulbs. All the nattering about quality of light kept me back. But when a bulb on a light that's on all the blew, I took the plunge. That was a 75 watt. The replacement puts out 100 watts of light, with a 23 watt current draw.

Better. It lasts for 11,000 hours versus 1200.

Best. The light quality is great.Better than an incandescent.

What's not to like? It saves energy, it's green, it's great light, it's cheaper to run.

Next move. A 500 watt output from a 100 watt draw. For the light by the piano. Know how hard it is to get that much light, and a fixture that can handle it? Just right for aging eyes.

Try it. You'll like it!

Sibelius Piano Music: Treasures

2008-12-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

Aaah, you probably think you know about Sibelius. Finlandia. Maybe some of the symphonies and Valse Triste. Piano music? Either not, or "undistinguished, ineffective, salon" (to cite some critics' adjectives). Wrong. You've been missing something. Make that "missing a lot."

As a whole, their quality easily tops Grieg's. They've got all the hallmarks of Sibelius' style, in theme, harmony, and counterpoint. They've very "Sibelian" and, best of all, available to pianists.

There's just a couple of practical problems. There's a lot of them, so how to choose? And how to find them? Editions of a complete opus aren't exactly easy to find. Rest easy. This is Q. E. D., which as everyone knows is not Quod Erat Demonstrandum, but "Quite Easily Done".

Finding it. Most of it is on IMSLP. And there's a new complete, urtext edition underway from B&H; granted, a bit pricey. And there's the Dover collection.

But I want to suggest two pieces you should look at right now. First, his Song Without Words 40.2, which is in Classics to Moderns, the "intermediate" volume. It's what got me into it. Second, the Novellette 94.2, and easy read and often profound and always great fun; get it from IMSLP.

To explore more, get the Dover volume; the first Sonatina is a keeper. So is the composer's transcription of Finlandia. Better music than the orchestral version to these ears. The bass tremolos sound a bit cheap with an orchestra, and the orchestral percussion is just...annoying.

Finally, try this workaround. His complete piano music has been recorded on BIS. Head to Amazon or iTunes and start previewing. Here be riches!

Still not convinced? Perhaps you should consider becoming a pastry chef.

Left Hand = Two Feet

2008-12-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

Weary of trying to learn Chopin's Revolutionary Etude (Op.10.12)? Or of trying to listen to it?

Jealous of Carl Tausig having "two right hands"? Of Dreyschock playing the LH in octaves?

It gets worse...or better. Try this at home:

Arpeggist Plays the Palace

2008-12-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

Without using a keyboard!

MusTech.Net has had a campaign to get one hundred music bloggers. There were five spots left and over ten submissions.

This here blog comes in at number 95.

Head over here and join the celebration! And check out some of the other blogs; I've found many I would have missed.

When are Variations not Variations?

2008-12-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

A poser. Ahem!

We're talking about what are usually called Brahms' Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 35. Yes, those variations. Finger-busters. Problem is they're not. Not variations, that is. Still finger-busters. Observe the title page of the first edition:

Of course you see "Variations". But look at the just above it: "Studies for the Piano." And it's a historical fact that Brahms always referred to the work as his "Paganini Studies." Got very cranky if anyone called them otherwise. Not that he needed more to get cranky about.

Why should we care? Brahms was meticulous in all matters musical. His other sets of variations are called just that, nothing more. He did write his famous 51 Exercises (Uebungen). But nothing else in his Opera Omnia is called "variations".

Studies/Studien translates the French Etudes (in its English usage the initial accent mark has dropped out). And that's the key to what it means for us as listeners or performers.

There's no easy Brahms. All of it makes definite technical demands. Including the variations. But here's the difference. Each of the Paganini Studies makes a couple of demands and relentlessy pushes them. Consider the first variation from Book One. First few bars look not impossible, RH sixths might seem amenable to taming with some practice. But then look at what the LH gets to do: some very nasty LH thirds. Which just keep coming at you and at you, along with the sixths. Did I say these were finger-busters?

Makes in much like the Chopin Etudes. Same principles exactly.

What of the 51 Exercises? An amazing number of them deal exactly with the demands of Op. 35. Brahms wrote some 30 other unpublished ones, now available in the new and excellent Wiener Urtext edition. Exercises, not studies. For Op.35 we can go with Brahms' preference for title, or weasel out by saying "Piano Exercises: Variations on a Theme of Paganini."

Whatever. I'll go with Brahms. And rest my case.

OT: iMac Matters aka Think Different

2008-11-15T06:20:00.000-08:00

OT as in "Off-Topic". Fairly well-known acronym, but amid the ever-deafening Internet Cacophony, best to take no chances.

OT posts here will not be as common as PNotes. They will be relevant to music, but in a wider sense. So, with no further ado....

The Arpeggist got an iMac. Between that, teaching, and practicing there's been a time sink which has swallowed the blog. No more!

Let me explain. Wintel has been good to me. I would never knock it, or question anyone who preferred it. But I take the larger view, which comes from having started doing Fortran on mainframes in the 1970s. Yes, I've actually heard a harddrive crash; they were big in those days, and the sound of a platter crashing was deafening. But when you've knocked around the computing world this long, posted on Bitnet (that's pre-Internet) and used "fast" modems of 2400 bps, you start to get a sense of What Really Matters.

A few years agoI bought a PowerPC, a 7200. I loved it. What kept me on Wintel were programs I had to use in my profession, and which would never be ported to the Mac. Along came OSX with Boot Camp, and that changed everything. So here I am.

Apple isn't kidding. There's a whole different ethos using a Mac. For me, very much a right-brain matter. Visually appealing, intuitive. A universe where programs can, and often do, appeal to that side of the head. Word processing in progams that aren't all clones of Word, or viceversa. Organizing which frees you fom directory trees, drive partitioning, although if you want that, there's always the Unix command line in OSX,

You just feel good using a Mac . You don't waste time battling the software and hardware at every turn. You get more creative. Creative things you want to do are easy, and the whole ethos encourages your creativity. Programs run better; iTunes is a viable music managing system on the Mac. It was always a pain on Wintel.

What's not to like? There was a snake even in the Garden of Eden, so lest you think The Arpeggist has gone blind, a random list:

1. The keyboard. If you're used to the nice clicky feel of traditional IBM keyboards. You have a problem. Although you can get one of those to work on the Mac without too much trouble.

2. Many Mac users. Smug. They make it ideological, "you say you use Wintel? you must be a real Witless Troll." Wrong. They're the trolls. The smugness is even more annoying than... Jar Jar Binks.

3. Hiding things. If you really need to get into the infrastructure, it's command-line Unix. And Unix is the ultimate user-hostile operating system.

4. The Mindset of many Mac users. Passive. Something goes wrong, they just writhe and hope Big Daddy Apple will save them. I miss the Wintel can-do attitude.

But that's about it. If you're a music person, a creative person, a right-brain person then do yourself a big favor. Head to an Apple Store and kick the tires. They encourage you to do that. A lot. But if you want to purchase, and want modifications...you may want to purchase from elsewhere. Ask The Arpeggist for a consult when you get there. Notice I wrote "when" and not "if"

PNotes: Your Mind and the Need for Speed

2008-10-04T07:29:00.000-07:00

Working on the fourteenth variation of Book One of the Brahms Paganini Variations got me thinking about speed and my readers. For that variation to sound right, the thirtysecond notes have to, well, whir. The time signature, incidentally, is not 6/8! I did a rough timing, and it's about 7-9 notes per second. And this took me back, way back, to when I first thought about speed.

It was the C. P. E. Bach Solfeggietto in C minor. Yup, that one. Almost everyone has had a go at it. A nifty little piece, a crowd-pleaser. And fun to play. But it wasn't any of those things back-when for me.

Speed. It seemed impossible. "Presto" terrified me. Every time I tried to speed up just a few notes, out came...gloop. Obleek. Not pretty. Not nifty. Yuk. A crashing downer. And this seems to be pretty common; I see post about it, regularly, on the various piano fora I haunt.

So The Arpeggist says this. He feels your pain. And he's going to do something about it. Now.

You've probably read, or heard from your teacher an alleged confidence builder like this:

"Take your two hands. Go from LH5 to RH5, hit them in sequence on the table, or keyboard as fast as you can. See? You've got the mechanical speed. Now get back to practicing."

Sorry. Didn't work then, won't work now. The interpretation is true, but it doesn't make anyone feel better. Except the person who intoned it. Why? Because that little demo has nothing to do with playing the piano except at the most gross level.

Now try this. Get a watch with a second hand, and reading or speaking normally, say a sentence; see how many words you comfortably say in one second. You may have to repeat this. Or you can try what I used, compliments of the F train of the New York City subway system while returning from my lesson yesterday:

"It's the one we take"

That fits into a one second interval. Now, count the sounds, or phonemes it has. You'll get 15.

Hah!

Let's run the numbers. Your can think and say 15 sounds per second. The mind and the mechanical. Go back to the Brahms example above. 7-9 sounds per second. The mind and the mechanical. You can think and say at a rate faster, much faster, than you need to play the Brahms.

I rest my case.

What it means is this. In the speech your mind isn't thinking about the sounds. You're forming words. The sound-formation is an unconscious process. But if you've ever learned a foreign language, you start by having to think about each individual sound. Then it becomes...unconscious. Now....

In playing the piano, it's exactly the same thing. You start by thinking and doing the mechanical. You have to make the mind the unconscious process. And your fingers deliver. Just like speaking.

Did I say I rest my case?

Feel better? You should. Because it shows you you can do it. If you can speak, you can play at speed on the piano. You've just got to go through the same thing as learning to speak.

Finally, speed isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Trust The Arpeggist on this one. A later note will explain why.

♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫♫

The statistics idea came from a review of linguistics book by N. J. Enfield, in The Times Literary Supplement, September 12, 2008, p. 11. More on this in a later post, and if you can't see the separator in the space above, please turn on Unicode in your browser. It will be worth your while.

PNotes: Fingering and Doing a Serkin

2008-09-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

Rudolf, not Peter, although he's a fine pianist too. In an interview, Rudolf Serkin remarked that sometimes when playing a concert he's change the fingering of a passage on the fly. I recall thinking "Is he crazy?". No, he wasn't.

I hadn't looked at Mozart's A major Sonata K.331 for ages. Let's just take the first bar (supra). Although I'd initially fingered the LH A with LH4, I ignored it now and used LH 3; since I have Broder's unfingered edition, not hard to do. Amazing. I'd never liked how I played that bar. Not enough control over the sound, important for Mozart. Incidentally, please ignore those dynamic marks in the image. Second bar had been no better.

But now it worked. I got just the sound I wanted. And the whole rest of the section improved enormously.

So what gave? Every edition you'll see has a LH 4 there, and in the next bar. Seems logical, but isn't. You need control to get the sound gradations you need for Mozart. And using The Evil Fourth Finger (as Rachel puts it) and a 1 is just asking for trouble. Thumbs tend to play too loud, and 4s are...hard to control. Sometimes no other finger will do it.

Why didn't anyone question this? Because there's fingerings and fingerings. Many are done by hacks. Even those by the Big Shots won't necessarily work for you. Arrau's Beethoven Sonatas comes to mind.

Take away message. Trust your fingerings. And only them. Others may be useful, and may even work for you. But when you get a sound you don't like or a hard passage never gets easier, there's an excellent chance you've got a fingering issue. And it's easy to miss really simple ones, like this one. Four to three makes all the difference.

If you're not at the level of working out your own fingerings, your teacher should at the least give you some choices. And help you fidn what's best for you. There's always a best for you, and always alternatives. They won't make you into Pollini, but the will affect your playing for the better.

Did I say to trust your fingerings and only them? Believe it. Please

What's Happening Soon

2008-09-19T07:11:00.003-07:00

Making good on my previous about using shorter, non-essay entries. Here's the plan.

I'm going to start a series of PNotes. P for both "Piano" and "Practice". PNotes will be:

1. Short.

2. Not without larger ideas, but with the emphasis on things I've thought about while practicing.

3. I realize my readers come from all levels of experience. So I will try very hard to make PNotes something for everyone.

4. Many will have something you can take to your keyboard and use.

5. There will be musical illustrations, now that IMSLP is back and JPEGs are easy to get.

6. The PNotes will be numbered. And they will have labels.

7. I do requests for a PNotes on...whatever (musical, that is).

P.S. I've already planned and started on PNotes #1

The Arpeggist is Back!

2008-09-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

At the end of this entry I'll have a brief expansion on the headline. That's about reinventing myself. But first things first: reinventing my blog. There have been some changes, with more coming. I've pondered the feedback I've gotten on my "Anybody Out There?" entry. With the following results....

Appearance Changes
1. Tweaked Links List. A long inactive blog deleted. Gave my teacher a more accurate description. And with great regret but an "INACTIVE" on the "Must-Read Practice Blog." I say that because it's so. The owner (Waterfall) has a more general blog which used to have regular practice news. Note the past tense. Alas, practice news is notable by its absence. I remain optimistic that this will change; Waterfall was a valued reader her, a great email friend, and an excellent music blogger.
2. Added a "Followers" option. The difference between that and "Subscribe" is this. For the latter you can have any feed-reader and email account. And no one knows but you that you're a subscriber. For the former, "Followers" option you subscribe via a Gmail account; you do have one, do't you?. My number count of readers increments. I get a list of readers, a list which stays with me and only me. Everyone's welcome here, of course, but I do hope you'll stand up and be counted!
3. Added more music details on the sidebar so my readers can see what my fingers are doing. They'll be updated as the change; ten days ago it read, for "Reading" that I was reading WTC II. Finished that, and on to Scarlatti. This is all in the interests of making this blog a little more personal and a bit less long essay format.

Conceptual Changes
This follows from the previous point. I will still have long essays. But there will be more, short entries. No, I'm not going to wear my heart on my sleeve. But I am to have it a bit less removed from me and who I am musically.

Why? More than one kind reader told me that the key lies with more frequent, more personal entries. Gotta give the people what they want.

Arpeggist Changes
At last! I had a rather peculiar physical malaise for the last seven months or so. Some days I couldn't even work, let alone practice or blog. Some days I could. Had to prioritize. So work and practice and keeping myself together required twenty-four hours. Of course, we all know that there are twenty-four hours in the day, but if that's not enough there are always the evenings. But there was only so much I could do. As for the malaise, let's just say that it wasn't life-threatening, wasn't disfiguring, and didn't hurt my hands. So I got out easy.

It's meant that while I did keep up with the piano as I could, lessons became irregular; Rachel (my teacher) was wonderfully supportive and kind throughout. That's just one of the reasons she got a more accurate description in the "Links List".

But it's true what they say about the ten year mark. I passed it earlier this year, although I wasn't really counting. And things started getting easier and better. A combination of gradual and all at once. I wouldn't have believed I could do what I started doing. But here is a paraphrase of the dialogue she and I had over the summer:

Rachel: You choose your next piece. Anything you like. Anything at all.
Robert: Anything? Do you realize what you're saying? You're offering the keys to the candy shop. Are you sure?
Rachel: Anything.

And that's why you see my new piece in the sidebar. That Paganini Studies (that's what Brahms always called them) aren't exactly five finger exercises. Rachel called them "monumental". I calls them "Mt. Everest." Because you can take an elevator or the stairs to the top of a monument; you do get there. Everest can kill people. But the Paganini Studies are the most wonderful piece of music I've studied. And they do simply remarkable things for your technique, and confidence too.

In Conclusion
Expect more details on all the news, especially the previous section. Expect frequent short updates. And, as always, expect opinionations.

Anybody Out There?

2007-12-30T07:55:00.000-08:00

As they'd say in the Navy, "Now hear this". Or in the Army, "Listen Up".

My last post was back-when July 2007, although I tweaked it as late as September. It was making good on my post of June 9, about what I'd learned from a rather wild ride through the Land of Advanced Students. That post generated a lot of comments, and email too. Eveyone wanted me to make good on it. So I did.

It took some time, but that July posting was intended to be the first installment. Several people had requested that particular item from my June 9 list. So I went to work in musicologist mode; remember, I'm a practicing academic, so although musicology isn't my day-job field, I know how to get into it. Same amount of work I'd put into a short article for print. I dare to say, it met my academic standards. It was good.

The silence was deafening. Nothing from those who requested that topic. Nothing from nobody. There are several other people who I thought might have responded (you know who you are). The silence was deafening.

It really stripped my gears, and brought out all my prejudices about this online world, if you can call it a world (I prefer to think of it as a universe of anti-matter). I waited. I bided my time. Did I say the silence was deafening?

I thought about just taking this blog down. On the principle, "what do they want?". Because it seems that the classical music blogs that get all the links and comments fall into several categories. Random ramblings by musicians who are fine musicians, but who clearly have spent more time in practice rooms than English Comp classes. Gossip blogs. "What I did today" blogs. People seem to want stream-of-consciousness, and find it more exciting that someone looks at Haydn sonatas while sitting on the toilet than contemplating an honest discussion about performance traditions.

Sorry, people, but I'm not going to tell you what I read on the toilet (hint: it isn't Haydn).

So I thought I'd give it a last go. To break the chain of "I won't post if they won't respond vs. I won't respond if he won't post."

I'm willing. I'd love to. But I need some evidence, right now, that going through the rest of those items from the June post won't fare as badly as my first stab at it in July.

Don't make me feel like I'd be casting false pearls before real swine.

Please?!

The Truth Is a Three-Edged Sword (III-A)

2007-07-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

10. Performance traditions are often stupid.
Note that I said often stupid. Not always. But if you hit the stupid ones as a student, it can be very bad. Here's a very modest list. I've given selected musical examples; literally dozens are possible. Both of stupid traditions and musical examples.

Nineteenth Century

1. The composer's metronome marks are sacred. No way. Pianos were rather different then, with a lighter action and and a combination of more reduced and subtle sound than the modern grand. There's considerable dispute about Beethoven's metronome marks, based on piano differences, but also on the kind of metronome he probably used. His metronome marks merit consideration, but you have to research it and make up your own mind. Using his metronome marks rigidly simply won't work. Schumann's metronome marks were inserted by his spouse, Clara. They're a guide to how she played, which is important, but they're not the composer's. Chopin's earlier works do have metronome marks, but the later ones have far fewer. If you try to play many of his works at the metronome tempo, you risk getting muddy sound. And a piece which sounds...too fast.

2. The composer's dynamics are sacred. Same point as above on piano differences. Consider the opening of the Brahms Paganini Variations 1.9. marked fpp with a sustained LH tremolo. You simply can't get that on a modern grand piano. Heed composer's dynamics, of course. But heed some other things too.

Eighteenth Century
This gets really nasty.

1. Bach shouldn't be played on the piano.

2. Eighth notes in the LH should either be staccato, or in groups, legato followed by staccato.

3. You should use terraced dynamics.

4. Every voice in a counterpoint piece should be heard. You should practice the voices individually and in various groupings while you're learning the piece. In performance, you and your audience should hear all the voices, all the time.

In order:

1. Huh? Bach only specified which keyboard instrument, a two manual harpsichord, for the Goldbergs. And, obviously, an organ for the...organ pieces. WTC and the other keyboard pieces assumed you'd use the keyboard you'd have available. From all our evidence, Bach was something of a showoff; consider the Toccata of the D minor Toccata and Fugue (the famous one), or the Prelude and Fugue in E (BWV 566) sometimes referenced Toccata in E. It seems certain that he'd have welcomed later keyboard developments. Put differently, when one noted modern performer was asked if he'd play an 18th century piano, he replied "sure, if you get me an eighteenth century audience." Correct. Trying to recreate the sounds the composer would have heard is futile; our ears are different than theirs, our whole mental outlook and expectations are different. That's not to say that it's irrelevant to know about period instruments. Or even to play them. But to insist that it's only authentic if played on period pieces in period ways just won't do. Period.

2. Wrong. The extant treatises on playing don't make a hard and fast rule. This one is a favorite of piano teachers, who heard it from their teachers, and so on. It's a misguided attempt to make a piano sound like a harpsichord. Because the harpsichord doesn't have the sustaining power of a modern grand, and given its different action, detached eighth notes come out staccato by default and it's almost impossible to change that. Further, if you examine Bach's orchestral and vocal works, clearly he didn't notate for eight note staccato passim. If it had mattered so much, he would have.

3. Same point as #2. With a two manual harpsichord and stops, terraced is all you can get. Again my orchestral point. Terraced dynamics were all he could get from a harpsichord. That doesn't mean he required them.

4. Another favorite of teachers. It's probably the looniest of the traditions. First, contrary to the current rage about multi-tasking, humans simply cannot. They may think they can. They can't. The nervous system isn't wired for it. There's an enormous amount of neurological research on this point. It's settled. Rather, what today calls multi-tasking is really task-shifting, shifting attention back-forth. Don't believe me? Try listening to three conversations at once. So no audience could ever hear all 3 voices of a fugue at once. And Bach clearly didn't expect it. The organ pieces are written so that in most cases one voice will be dominant in sound; BWV 566 (supra) is a very good example. The organs Bach had at the time of the composition of BWV 566 had a profusion of reed stops, and he clearly exploited them for a full sound. As for practicing. Once you've learned a fugue, tracing voices constitute a valuable practice technique. But at the learning stage, tracing voices is all wrong. Even if you keep the fingering you'll use when playing all the voices, your hand will inevitably be in different positions and will lack the interplay with the other fingers and muscles in your hand. You'll be getting all the wrong gestures into your fingers. In short, a misguided attempt to accomplish what JSB would never have wanted you to do.

That's why they call him "opinionated".

Delivering on Three-Edged Sword

2007-07-21T07:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's been awhile. And no, it's not been a time crunch. I don't buy into the media nattering about "our busy lifestyle" and "our time-stressed society." For one thing, I think the media have taught people that's how they ought to feel; when you hear the continual drumbeat of phrases like those, thanks to Internet, you start to believe it. For another thing, do you really need all that connectivity? Does email need checking every twenty minutes? Do you need to text someone that you're walking down Main Street scratching your rump? Do you need to check the weather forecast every hour? If you do feel such needs...well, you're probably too much into a busy lifestyle to be hanging around here, let alone playing the piano.

It's something quite different. I've been working on a draft of an explanation of item 10 on performance traditions. But I've been taking pains to think it through, make it logical, gather my evidence, write it well. And make it accurate. This contrary to the instant "I wrote it, I'm publishing it, go read it" mentality of Internet. Where accuracy and literacy go by the board. You shouldn't be here if you want to read random ramblings. You should be off texting, or twittering with someone. The Arpeggist stands for literacy and accuracy.

Why? Because in his Other Life, he's a publishing academic. As in traditional print media. He checks his footnotes against the original sources, and he writes a lot of long footnotes. He endlessly tweaks his phrasing and logic. after all, once it's in print, it's there. Forever. Now it's true this isn't print media. More's the pity. But that doesn't mean, for the Arpeggist, that standards of literacy and accuracy matter less. Indeed, they matter more in this Wild West of Internet blogging.

They don't call him "opinionated" for nothing.

The explanations of Sword will come. And worth the wait they will be (slipping into Yoda-speak).

Update: Addition to Three-Edged Sword

2007-07-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

Why an addition since I've not yet delivered on the original thirteen items? On the latter, the next entry will clarify. On the former, because the item is worth it. So without further ado:

14. You teach yourself to become a pianist; the more advanced you become, the more you need your teacher.

Sounds counter-intuitive, yes? You might think that the more advanced you become, the less you need your teacher. Wrong. Very wrong.

I'm going to leave this as a teaser. And maybe offer a valuable prize to anyone who can figure out the following. It's my to-do list for today's practice, and maybe several more beyond that. Again without further ado:

Widgetize Chopin
Arpeggiate JSB
Reverse Scherzo

"Chopin" is 25.12, the etude aka "The Ocean"
JSB is the fifteenth of his Three-Part Inventions.
Scherzo is Chopin's B minor, aka No. 1

For those who take up the challenge. I suspect you'll probably be able to figure out JSB. Maybe take a guess at the Scherzo, although it will be wrong (it's limited to the first and last two pages). And you won't be able to figure out Chopin at all. Just think "valuable prize."

Interruption: sidebar change

2007-07-12T05:57:00.000-07:00

Just in the interests of accuracy. I've had to change one word in my sidebar "The Arpeggist Up Close and Personal". "ot" has become "nni" (obviously, without the quote marks in real use). You notice I don't use the e-word here. Can't be too careful with those harvester bots around.

Don't give up hope on the next posting!

Learning from swimming

2007-06-19T05:39:00.001-07:00

Sports don't turn up often here. And when they do, they're about individual sports. Recall what we can learn from the tennis crowd in my Federer Moment post of 3-20-07. Here's something new, from a NY Times piece on an amateur receiving coaching from an Olympic medalist (7-07):

"The best time to fight old habits and make corrections is when you're going smooth and slow. Really think about what you're doing during warm-up or warm-down or easy swims between hard sets. But when you're doing hard sets or racing, turn the brain off and just let your body go on its own."

This is what the swimming pros do. It's also what the piano pros do. If you're not doing it, you should. One caveat. You have to have done some spade work first. Abruptly changing the metaphor, you have to put black on the boots before you can start polishing them.

The Truth Is a Three-Edged Sword (III)

2007-06-09T06:50:00.000-07:00

Enough intermission; Part Three is here! I'm listing thirteen things I've learned since The Great Leap Forward. Some may seem obvious, but aren't. Some may seem obscure, but aren't. The title may seem obscure, but...you decide!

I would add, for right now, that some of the items will work for any piano stage someone is at, several could be downright dangerous unless you're rather advanced. Put differently, "don't try this at home." But I'll be clear as I discuss the items which are which.

My subsequent blogging will go into these items in detail....

1. Your teacher is a collaborator, not a divinity.
2. You're the Factory; your teacher is Quality Control.
3. Trust no fingering but your own.
4. Learn to play fast by playing fast.
5. Welcome "wrong" notes; seek them out.
6. "Wrong" notes originate at least a measure earlier.
7. Never have a practice routine; change it daily.
8. There are an infinite number of ways to practice a passage. Use them all.
9. Nothing ruins a piece faster than a metronome.
10. Performance traditions are often stupid.
11. Some of the best music ever written is seldom played.
12. Your piano is a part of you, not your gymnasium.
13. Use your head but trust your instincts.

Intermission feature redux: the need for speed

2007-04-22T08:02:00.000-07:00

Worry not, the Roman Numeral series is not on hiatus. My next installment (III) will be a collection of quotes, advice, and things I've learned. An unlist. But I had a lesson last week where, once again, my reinvention (of myself, of Rachel) seems to be working. So here are selected highlights.

Scale. I did C major. At the interval of a third. We all know that contrary to street talk, that's the hardest of the scales, since you've got no black keys to bail you out (unlike, say, B major). My regular version has always been pretty good. But in the time leading up to the lesson, I thought I'd put my work with gestures and Federer moments to use and...go for broke. So I did it. The four octave standard with the two contrary motion sequences. Around 144. I was pleased. There was a silence. And then Rachel kindly opined that she'd need to practice to do what I'd just done. Wonderful encouraging from one's teacher, although I pointed out that there were a couple of things Rachel could do on the piano which I couldn't do even with practice.

JSB 3Part 15. I'd been working on it in bits and pieces while I was devoting most of my time to Chopin 25.12. But decided to take it for a spin, not slowly but not totally up to tempo. What happened? All that remains is for me to speed it up some more. All the technical and interpretational points are in place. Whee!

Chopin 25.12. I've had it memorized for about a month, but have spent my time making it more solid, and practicing playing it continuously at one tempo. I didn't take the whole thing at tempo, but it was hardly one note at a time. So then I was asked to play it significantly faster for the first page. I did. Then "just play it as fast as you can; don't think about speed, just trust your fingers." I muttered along the lines that it wouldn't be pretty. Ahem. The first page went by in substantially under one minute. A Federer Moment -- my hands seemed t o be moving very slowly and I was totally relaxed. And very very few dropped notes. Whee! So what's to do? Just like JSB, "the only thing you need to do is get it all up to tempo." Whee! Serious business.

Mendelssohn. I'd been doing an experiment. Working on one passage honestly. But I also worked, for five minutes a day, on about four bars from the beginning of Chopin's B minor Scherzo. Why? Because recognizing how much 25.12 had done for me, I wanted something which built on that and expanded it, as the Scherzo obviously does. I felt before playing (HS) that I'd accomplished more in just ten days of five minute practices than in all the 30 minutes practices I've been doing on Mendelssohn. And could play it better, faster, sooner. Talk about taking a chance! But I'd called it right. Mendelssohn goes on hiatus. Start working seriously on the Scherzo while I'm speeding up 25.12. Whee! Serious business.

Serious business indeed. I come away with the assignment of to speed up a 3 Part Invention, speed up a Chopin Etude, and start work on a Chopin Scherzo. If that's not a payoff, dunno what is a payoff. Side benefit that it keeps me from going too much into the Candy Store, although I think I am going to, off the clock, take a tad of time on something.

What I'd stress is that this isn't a case of having a run of feeling that everything is going well, by contrast to regular practice. That last maybe a week or so. This has been going on for over a month.

Besides, that Scherzo is great fun. I'm definitely looking forward to that chromatic run at the end.

Seems like a corner has been turned. And who deserves it more?!

Intermission feature: candy store

2007-04-15T07:59:00.000-07:00

Yes, there's a III and a IV, at least, coming. But this blog not only has my thoughts on practicing, but varia on what I'm playing. This Intermission Feature addresses both considerations. By way of background, last Thursday's lesson (end of last entry) did not happen. Because of a combination of terrible weather but, more significantly, because of a truly hellacious week. Long-term readers of The Arpeggist will recall the claim that the biggest barrier to being an adult student is having an adult life. Which just descended on me last week. At the same time, I wanted to keep musically busy. On the Thursday, in no good mood because of the non-lesson cricumstances, I decided to read some pieces. And therein lies a tale, along with the explanation of the candy store....

I pulled some music and started reading. Brahms 118.1 and 118.3. Then the third movement of Beethoven 31.2 ("Tempest"). Then Schubert 90.2-4. Why so much? I hadn't planned it that way. Thought I'd read through a piece or two and then see how I felt. So I did, but I wasn't quite prepared for the results.

The first Brahms moved right along; the LH figurations seemed almost like five-finger exercises after what Chopin 25.12 has put me through. I noted that, but thought I'd try Brahms where I couldn't rely so obviously on Chopin-gained chops. Same thing happened with 118.3. I found myself thinking that if I had two weeks to work on either one I could...take them to a lesson. The Beethoven I'd tried reading about six months ago; it hadn't gone badly, but slowly and didn't really sound like Beethoven and, most importantly, wasn't that much fun. This time, it went faster, was much fun rattling through the broken octaves, and sounded like Beethoven. It was the same with the Schubert; 90.4 I'd studied part of when I first started with Rachel, but the others I'd tried reading, haltingly, maybe two years ago. Same thing happened.

No smoke blowing about here. These weren't at concert tempo but they weren't slow, and they weren't note-perfect. And it's not like I was reading the Liszt Transcendal Etudes. But the floor wasn't littered with the wrong notes, and in all cases I had the same distinct feeling of "with a couple of weeks' work I could take to a lesson." I tested that observation a couple of times by take four bars and just working them hard for ten minutes. They picked up even more. What a kick! And great for the self-esteem.

Friday I worked JSB15 and Chopin hard; or should I say I worked the oligodendrocytes hard and they worked the pieces hard? I like Friday afternoons for just that, a great TGIF in a very relaxed atmosphere. Then yesterday I decided to let the hard work settle in and went to...JSB. The ones of his 2 Part Inventions I've not played. Same thing -- what a kick! Finished with the Liszt Liebsträume 3. Same thing. Besides, playing just one piece of JSB after the other is excellent for the soul, and a couple of places of anatomy as well.

Candy store? It's a terrible temptation. There's an enormous amount that I can go after now, pieces I've heard and wanted to play all my life. At the same time, there's nothing like sustained hard work on a tough piece. I can't deny that Chopin 25.12 has started paying off big time. But onwards and upwards. No pain, no gain. I'm saving the candy store for just that, an extra treat every so often. But I admit I sometimes cringe when I walk by piles of music I could be reading. Still, quite an experience. And this is precisely why one needs a teacher!

Cursed by perfection (II)

2007-04-08T06:41:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start my second installment with something about my student days in Classical Studies. Not a gratuitous digression; you'll see a world of meaning start to appear.

In learning Latin and Greek, one of the big classroom traditions is sight reading. You start translating a passage aloud and just keep going. The idea is to gain skill in automatically recognizing the verb tenses and, especially, the inflections of the nouns (subject, object, object of preposition; five cases for each Latin noun, singular and plural; five different noun declensions too). Sight reading was the bane of my student days, and that’s why I don’t require my language students to do it. Some of my classmates could sight read readily; mangled syntax, goofy translation didn’t faze them as they forged ahead. The floor was littered with dropped adjectives, misconstrued nouns, but they kept going. Me — I found mangling even a phrase a painful experience. As Kid Latinist, I wasn’t worth a damn at sight translation. Now fast forward to “fully qualified professional.” I sight read well. Very well indeed. I may need to use a dictionary if I’m reading some very technical work (Galen’s medical treatises, Frontinus on how to build an aqueduct). How did I get here from there? I relentlessly mastered the technical — the syntax rules, the declensions, the verb conjugations, the word order which is very different from our English. And it seems to have worked. Either because it was the best way for me to learn, or because it provided the psychological confidence. Either way, same end result. This is not a recent theory. I’ve had it for a long time. And tried it on any number of people who were piano students and also had classroom language learning experience. It always resonates.

My writing parallels this end result. I have no problem writing rough drafts, with mangled syntax, sentence fragments, split infinitives. I just keep going. Then I go back and polish. Fix things. Make the footnotes work. In short, my mindset seems to be that I can “just keep going” when I feel confident about the end product.

The music connection should be fairly obvious. Wrong notes, bad phrasing, chords not properly voices literally cause me some physical pain. Thus I've tended to approach music studies the same way as language studies. Scales, arpeggios, exercises. Master the basic technical matters and the rest should follow. But it didn't in the Mendelssohn debacle (entry for 2-01-07). That much sight reading, that many manglings led to total system collapse, if you'll recall. But talk about a Catch-22 situation. If I waited to play the whole thing until I'd worked out the technical details, it could take...forever (remember, I had three other pieces going). So it led to a profound crisis on how to practice and, specifically, how to practice best to serve my musical goals.

And this gets back to my previous (I) installment. When one isn't an Advanced Student, there's no practice issue. Teacher lays it all out. I went back through my notebooks, and there it was, in each and very case. When to spend more on one item, less on another along with precisely how much more and how much less. You get into the mindset and thus you're totally unprepared for being told, paraphrasing Rachel, "I can't recall anyone at the Conservatory telling me how to practice." I went a little crazy. Make that a lot. I had to fix things, but my teacher told me how I fixed it was my decision. If you're in the mindset (supra), that's system overload. Panic. But it turned out she was right. Very right indeed. It forced me to do some thinking and experimenting. What I did was reconsider each and every aspect of my practice routines, along with learning about the relation between practice and skill aquisition, especially on the neurological level. And it seems to have born fruit. So here, briefly, are the results; I'll expand on some of them in further posts, and I'll be glad to expand on anything if requested by my Loyal Readers.

Flexibile Routine. At the Advanced level, it just won't do to have a set routine like "thirty minutes Mendelsson, thirty minutes Chopin, 20 minutes Bach." You have to twiddle it on a daily bais in context of how things are going with the pieces. But this means you have to pay attention to how you're playing and where the difficulties lie, like never before. In short, you have to take charge of your musical future. This makes your teacher less the authoritarian figure, and more the collaborator, albeit one who's quite aways beyond Advanced. You have to learn to stop asking for permission every step of the way and instead learn to start asking for advice when you need it.

Flexible Pieces. If you'll recall, I had four: Bach 3Part 15, Chopin 10.4, Chopin 25.12, Mendelssohn Op. 14. For two hours a day that's too much if one wants some measurable sense of progress. So I settled on Chopin 25.12 for the majority of piece time, along with fifteen minutes or so of Mendelssohn. Play through JSB every so often and work on a hard place for a few minutes. Technical work to be done in rotation. Some days scales but no arpeggios or exercises. Other days different combination. Some days just Chopin 25.12. All of this in context of how the individual items are going in practice. Chopin 10.4? Resting right now, but it will definitely be back. Temporary hiatus, not a drop; I'm far too fond of it ever to drop it.

Flexible Piece Practice. Everybody knows the basics of this. Break the chords, turn passages into chords. Play in rhythms. But here's where it gets crucial. If you just do that as a routine, you'll accomplish far less than if you determine where the difficult lies and come up with a method of addressing them. For example, in some of the transitional passages (which I call "widgets") in the Chopin there are hand crossings. So I came up with just moving the crossed thumbs up and down over their notes, then the crossed thumbs with the first note which hangs off them. Worked wonders. If I'd just been doing them as blocked chords or rhythms, they'd still be problems. You have to keep listening, keep thinking up new routines which address your particular hands and physiology. In short, the best practice methods cannot be taught; the best practice methods are the ones which you devise just for you.

Help Your Physiology. This builds on my "The Magic Word...." entry of 3-20-07. Those numbers only work if you're doing what's called purposive pratice, exactly what I've just described. That's what gets the oligodendrocytes working to capacity. Those little o-words are the things which solidify the neural connections; the more purposive practice you do, the more they solidify the connections and expand them with redundant connections. They do their most work in the twenty-four hours or so after practice. That's why it's important not to fuss with a passage off-and-on all day. Give it a shot of concentrated work and let it alone. Go back to it the next day to see what you've accomplished, and what you'll need to do to solidiy it connections more. This return to the passage is imporant, because if you don't go back and strengthen the connection and keep strengthening it, your initial practice will have largely been wasted. Won't two wires have a more reliable connection if they've got twenty turns of electrical tape holding them together rather than one turn? Precisely. This oligodendrocyte matter gets really fastening, and I hope to revisit it in a later posting.

Know When To Rest. After about ten days of working Chopin 25.12 really hard, I took a day off from it. Did technical matters,played and worked on JSB. It was clear to me that I needed a day off the Chopin to solidify what I had. And that was precisely what happened the following day when I sat down with 25.12 again.

You Can't Beat Slow Practice. By this I mean practicing slowly but with the gestures and motions you'd use for playing at tempo. Every so often you have to try the section at speed to see if you've got the gestures right. But I'd say for every minute I play a passage at tempo, I'll have practiced it for several hours. Everyone knows about this, of course, but it pays bigger dividends than you'd realize. It led to what I describe in the very next paragraph here.

And what are my results? I've got 25.12 memorized, and one part at target tempo. I found just the other day that another part had speed up all on its own, or so it seemed. As I was playing it I realized it sounded like it was supposed to sound, but I'd made no conscious decision to speed it up. Just happened. What about Mendelssohn? Aaah, there's been much thinking and observing, and I have some conclusions. But testing those conclusions is one of the main roles a teacher can fill for an Advanced Student, in this case Rachel for me. My next lesson is on Thursday (4-12), and then I'll report. But there's no wrong result which can come from our discussion. And maybe that is the most important conclusion of all.

“Advanced student, virtuoso pieces” — who, me? (I)

2007-03-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

We're finally getting to how I got to where I am now (previous two posts). I'm doing this in sections with my usual teasingly evocative titles; to make it easier to follow this thread, I'm numbering the pieces in parens at the end of the title phrase. So let's get to it.

The two quoted phrases come from Rachel responding to one of my plaintive emails back-then. The latter in characterizing the two I was writing about (Mendelssohn Op. 14, Chopin Op. 25.12) which I felt were eating me alive. The former in answering my query about how to practice, namely that it really just didn't happen for a teacher to tell such a student what kind of a practice routine to have. Such a student has to work it out; it's very personal. Turned out she was absolutely right. The problem wasn't her knowing me, it was me knowing me. But before it turned out....

"Advanced student" was a shock to the system at first. And I think this may be common to many adult students. Let me get at that by way of a kid-pianist. A kid-pianist will start having lessons without any sense of what lies ahead. Without being either scared of a big piece, or wanting to play a big piece and not being able to (or allowed to). Kid-pianist just progresses. And gets to the other end (remember the Magic Number of ten?) with the skills but without the baggage. Even at that stage, Teacher says "play this" and kid-pianist does. Doesn't know that the piece may be a doozy of difficulty. Kid-pianist has become a conservatory-level student without ever being intimidated. So much for kid-pianist.

On to adult-pianist. We've often had interruptions, sometimes for quite a period of time. So while we've been piling up the actual time practicing, there's a sense that we're forever mired at the beginning or intermediate stages. It's like five years spread over fifteen; it may have only been five years of study, but because of intervening time making the total fifteen, it seems like fifteen years of study. At the same time, things are happening, even if adult-pianist doesn't know it. And when adult-pianist hears those title-phrases, it's a shock. It's what adult-pianist has wanted, but adult-pianist has been so used to thinking in terms of "perpetual intermediate student" that adult-pianist gets serious cognitive dissonance.

Put briefly, adult-pianist has a self-image problem.

Now to the personal. In my professional life as an academic, I don't think of myself as who I am. Rather, there are things I want to write and work out. And I proceed. The most I tend to think is “fully qualified professional.” That is, in my whole career I’ve spent virtually no time thinking of my self-image. If I had to, and this is very hard to do and even harder to write here, it would go along these lines. Degrees from the very best programs in my academic field; would surely be in a list of the half-dozen “names” in my academic specialty; frequently quoted and often influential. Whew! I just don’t think or operate that way. Perhaps trying too hard to avoid what Oscar Levant said to George Gershwin, “George, if you had to do it all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?” Not false modesty, just a matter of how I’ve always conceptualized my persona.

You can see where the problem arose. The combination of the issues of adult-pianist along with how I've led me self-image life just wasn't prepared for the confrontation. To accept that I was no longer treading the nice, safe, calm path of the perpetual intermediate student. The pace was quicker and the path twisted.

What to do about it? Clearly, it wasn't just a mental issue. My practice methods had worked fine hitherto. But no longer. Progress was glacial. I felt like I was doing high-end five-finger exercises. Certainly I had no sense that I was making music. And what to do if there are no rules for how an advanced student practices? How to cut the Gordian knot?

The Magic Word, The Magic Number

2007-03-20T08:35:00.000-07:00

Of course you all know that "please" is the Magic Word. But now that I've got your attention, Ten is the Magic Number. For musicians, that is.

I've been doing a lot of research on the dynamics of how long it takes the pros to become pros. All the tales of prodigies, from Mozart onwards. There's a lot of dross and urban legend floating around. While there is a case to be made for talent, it appears that it's not quite all that it's cracked up to be. Important, yes. But not the determinant.

The more major role is that of practice. How one practices, the teachers one has. The most bang for the practice buck (er, hours). The prhase used by those who study this is "deliberative practice". It's got a number of fascinating stages that may be worth another post. For right now, an enormous amount of empirical evidence, and anecdotal (in the case of Mozart) suggests that Ten Years is the determining factor. Not that it means that's the end of studying and practicing. But it's when one is...an "expert" (the term those who study this use).

So I did some adding up. Luckily, I've got all of my notebooks from teachers past/present with dates. On a conservative adding up I get...8.5 years as of right now. Aha.

That explains a lot. A lot of what I've nattered about earlier this year. Things are changing, and have been changing, and my head has been struggling to keep up. Since I'm a cerebral sort, make that struggling to keep up with the changes going on at other levels.

At the same time, it's heady stuff. Instead of seeing a distant Heavenly City, I can now see that what I thought was a lock on the city's gates is now...just a door knob. All I have to do now is get close enough to grab it, turn and....

Finally, it's humbling. I have worked, and am working, incredibly hard. But whatever success I have had, am having, and may have...could not have done it alone. I've had some very ungood teachers who didn't last long. A couple of good ones. And two who just happened to come along at the right time. Dimitri, from the last time I had lessons. Sometime soon, he's worth a blog entry, even though he's almost vanished from the face of the earth. Which means he went back to Greece. And Rachel...you all know about Rachel by this time. Definitely on the face of the earth. Right teachers, right times...talkabout good luck. Like I said, humbling.

The Arpeggist had a Federer Moment

2007-03-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

Mystified? As to whom I'm talking about or why I'm talking about him? Roger Federer, as some of my readers will know, is the top-ranked men's tennis player. Top-ranked for a very long time. More mystified: why is the Arpgeggist talking sports? Especially when I add the information that I have no time for football, and even less for Monday Night Football, and likewise for any number of team sports. Although I do run regularly and make time for the Olympics. Final mystified: has the Arpeggist found yet another way of putting off writing about his piano doings and reinventions these past eight weeks or so? To answer the last one. Not at all. When I'm writing about now has everything to do with it. Is one of the results. Next up, I tell you how I got to such results.

A "Federer Moment" is when he does something during a game that seems beyond human capability. And, most importantly for me, how he does it. He does it because he's got the time to do it. To get the precise angle of his serve/return, velocity, body position. Time? Consider that many men's serves clock at 130 mph or so. Which means just under .5 second to reach him. The time of two eye blinks.

Aaah! Here's how a lengthy article on Federer in the 8-06 New York Times put it. "It will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. That is, you won’t experience anything like the (empirically real) quickness and skill that the live audience, watching tennis balls move so fast they hiss and blur, will attribute to you." Or as I once heard someone describe it, the ball just seems to hang there in front of you and you've got the sensation of all the time in the world to have your way with it exactly as yoy want. I've also heard more than one pianist remark on the musician's version of this phenomenon, that you know at some level your hands and fingers are moving incredibly rapidly, and yet with the sensation of their barely crawling along the keys. It's kinesthetics, where the neurons and muscles outpace the mind, and the mind reacts by seeing...slowness amid incredible empirical speed.

That's what I had two days ago. I was doing my warmup...arpeggios. By way of background, since I decided to give them double the time of scales, it's paid off. Every one of them is at at least 120, most are at 144, and some are at 160. So I had just done one at 160 (that's for 16th notes, by the way). And decided on the next iteration to just see what I could do along the lines of "faster."

And then it happened. I was well over 160. And yet as I looked at my hands, they seemed barely to be moving. I saw one finger about to strike a black key just a little off-angle, and corrected it. Or that my RH fifth finger wasn't going to quite hit the top note squarely, and I corrected it. You get the picture.

Wow.

I did it with a couple other arpeggios. Same thing. What a turn-on. This is how the Pros do it. The next day (yesterday) I decided to see if it was a fluke. Nope, still with the arpeggios. So I took it a step further. The first page of Chopin 25.12. And there it was. Very slow hands, and speed...well, it sounded like it was supposed to sound.

Yes, I've been practicing a lot, and the practice is both cumulative and produces non-linear results; everyone knows that. But I've also been looking for ways to optimize specific practice methods for the neurophysiology of it. And maximize the syngery between the pieces. But however to explain it, it's here. And I'm incredibly grateful.

No, I'm not adding Chopin 25.11 and Liszt's Mephisto. I've used music with my Federer Moment which I know well. Very well. But still...it's a huge step towards getting at my traditional Big Issue: playing well at speed for more than a page.

I highly recommend the Federer article I referenced earlier. Just google "Federer Moment" and it ought to come up, at least for now. So next is some details on how I got here precisely, the neurological insights and excites.

iPod Friday

2007-03-10T12:38:00.000-08:00

That would be yesterday. I did it. An 80G, white. The dock (Apple's), and a cable to connect with my Bose. Case? Coming. What most stores sell are contraptions at best, useless for protection at worst. Had it all researched and likewise the whole question of what I needed to purchase in addition to the basic iPod. Process took about a half hour.

What are my impressions? None, yet. I'm very particular about how I set up hardware. Do it right at the start, and you've got odds for a trouble-free experience. Do it wrong and you will experience, in the words of Jack "24" Bauer, "Pain I can't even describe." So I've been reading my third-party documentation and plotting my next moves.

Why? I didn't want to do this while I was working through "stuff." Might have been a good move, but for all the wrong reasons. You're feeling bad, you do not throw $$$ at it. No, nohow. But I had a lesson the day before, and was mired in a typical I-78 traffic jam, making me about 45 minutes late for the lesson, although Rachel's kind flexibility enabled a recovery. But sitting on a bus that's inching along, I felt trapped. Reading won't cut it. Crosswords won't cut it. I needed to zone out with some music, or perhaps Free Cell (available for 5th generation iPods). It became absolutely clear to me on Thursday that Friday would be...you-know-what. And so it was.

Aaah, yes. I had a lesson. Done with reinventing me and the piano. Done reinventing Rachel. She knows, by the way, that she was reinvented, that this implies no criticism; I think she liked being reinvented. Less pain from her NAPS. The lesson went rather well; put differently, I couldn't have played any better than I did.

The reinvention includes rethinking me in relation to the piano, how I deal with practice issues, how I deal with motivational issues, how I think about me, how I feel about me. Came up with some new practice strategies (which work) as a side benefit. It enabled me to play all of Chopin 25.12 at the lesson. No, not at concert tempo. Yes, there were parts which were quite unpretty. But I was satisfied and I think my teacher was...more than a little surprised. So expect more on all of this. Soon.

Aaah, you're wondering what I'm going to put onto my iPod first. That's easy. Read my February 4 entry "Drop Dead Gorgeous". Aren't you glad you asked?

Drop Dead Gorgeous

2007-02-04T08:27:00.000-08:00

That's how one the the New York Times music critics characterized Mozart's Divertmento, Eb, K.563 (sometimes referred to as "String Trio"). She wasn't kidding. Wow. You know my feelings about Mozart from my earlier entry here. But this is really serious stuff, even by my standards. Everything I love about Mozart is here, in profusion. Such profusion that it's a downright aural wallow.

The recording I got was the Kremer/Kashkashian/Ma. I think it's always important for us piano people to remember that there's a lot of phenomenal music out there which does not have a piano in it (piano reductions don't count). If you don't know this wonderful work, do yourself a big favor. Start getting to know it. Soon. Would The Arpeggist steer you wrong? Would these fingers lie to you??

Incidentally, what I consider the two most phenomenal pieces of music don't have pianos in them. Although I hate making lists of "The X Greatest" variety. But still, for me, there are these two and then everything else classical. Anything ranked with them is misranked.

And now the envelope:
Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, and the last act of Wagner's Götterdämmerung.

Had enough?

got iPod?

2007-02-04T08:13:00.000-08:00

I don't. Yet. Maybe never. And therein lies a tale; the gang around here may help me make up my mind.

For the last month or so I've been fixated on getting one. Not for my bloated collection of mp3s of 60s pop music. But for some of my more-than-bloated collection of The Great Composers. And my fixation has been all the worse because The Gramophone (magazine) has a regular section on classical downloads.

What would I use it for? Not for running; I like to hear the sounds of nature and be alone with them and my thoughts. Not for walking; same point, sort of. For travel, especially returning from my lessons in Park Slope. Not for the inbound leg; I need that to relax, get my thoughts together and not have Pollini's playing ringing in my ears right before I've got to play. The trip, either way, is about two hours. But it can be longer; a month ago there was a wicked traffic jam outside the Lincoln Tunnel exit and it took almost four hours to get home. The tension was palpable, even though I had plenty of reading material. Music would have made me less tense. Ditto for traffic issues going in; a couple of times I've gotten to my lesson so tense that my playing was seriously affected.

At the same time, there are confounding issues. Everyone seems to have them; by "everyone" I'm referring to my students. And it's a toy. An expensive electronic toy. Boys like toys. I'm a boy. Rachel doesn't have one for some of the reasons I've listed above, even though she admits to a strong interest in...electronic toys. Still, my sales resistance is weakening, but I'm feeling guilty. Conflicted.

Opinions? Whether you use one or not, but especially if you use one?

If You Build It....

2007-02-04T07:36:00.000-08:00

Traffic here is up. Visible traffic, that is. Excellent comments are proliferating every whichaway. Unclear why this is so, but everyone who reads Homer knows that one doesn't question what Zeus and Allgods bestow. So I'm anxious to make it worth your (plural) while. A few additions this very morning.

You can now reach The Arpeggist in another way; look over at the right below the subscription invite. I've had to translate the address into a format which you (plural again) can read, but which those there Harvester Bots can't read. Like the Romans wondered about barbarians in the later Empire, "Where do they come from, do they have a written language?". Note especially the "calm" part; I cribbed this, and the format, from the Collaborative Piano Blog (more below). I'm not trying to offload from the comments in the blog, but sometimes there's a need for one-to-one exchanges. Use it if you feel the need.

There have been some link tweaks. With great regret I had to flag as inactive one blog which has shown great promise. Couldn't bring myself to kill the link. Still hoping it may be back. You may have noticed the link to "Must-Read Practice Blog". That would be my pianist cyber-friend Waterfall. If you go, you'll notice a post hiatus. Not an unsubtle diss, especially since The Arpeggist has been known to go on hiatus. Rather, if you want to stay current, visit her "A Sort of Notebook" linked to her practice blog. There are piano reports, and a whole late else. And, geez, can she write! The Arpeggist does not say that casually, given his profession.

Then there's the new link to Collaborative Piano Blog. I happened on it rather by chance (read: "Google Search of blogs"). Don't be misled by the title. It's good on collaboration, of course, but it's also good on piano, period. So are the links. Incidentally, I was that 10,000th visitor celebrated there on January 28.

I'm giving a separate paragraph here to Jeremy Denk's blog. It's the first link I've put up to a regularly on-stage-everywhere pianist. But I must admit I'm of two minds about it. When I first found the link, I positively salivated at the thought of what such a person might have to write about how The Big Pros view their calling. That's not what I found. There are comments about his practicing and learning music, but I can't understand much of them. There are comments about the music he knows and loves; same reaction. There are comments about his travels and dining habits, which I can't understand at all and which, frankly, don't much interest me. (Aside. Do you really care what The Arpeggist is having for dinner tonight?). On my not understanding, remember that I'm in a line of work where I'm paid to sort out very obscure, crabbed texts. If I'm having problems of comprehension, there are problems of comprehension.

To his credit, Jeremy Denk has degrees both in music and a non-music subject (Chemistry). He's clearly thought about things and is very articulate. But I can't help thinking that if he's spent even a tenth of the time he spent practicing on learning about writing clear and logical prose, his blog would be a Barn Burner, to The Arpeggist's ever-tolerant eyes, of course. Still, it may have to do with concept of blogging. I don't think the world needs to know all of my musings on everything, fascinating though those musings be to me. Others may differ. His blog for me is one of unfulfilled promise, but others may find it delivers on their concept of blogging. Hence the link.

Another reason for the link. There are other blogs by Pros around, but they either have little or are inactive, or both. Lang Lang's for one. Emanuel Ax's for another; he's one of my favorite pianists and a very literate, well-schooled sort, meaning he could have The Killer Blog if he chose. And there's one Pro who could have The Ultimate Killer Blog. Charles Rosen. But he's published so well and frequently...let's see, what we be the polar opposite of "gild the lily"?

Finally, an expansion of the "on-stage-everywhere" phrase above. There's an apocryphal story about Herbert von Karajan (one of my all time favorite conductors) getting into a taxi:
Taxi driver: "Where to?"
von Karajan: "Doesn't matter; I'm wanted everywhere."

Pigeons: A Warning to the Curious

2007-02-01T08:03:00.000-08:00

Not a typo for pidgins. Not an off-topic avian ramble. It has everything to do with my long-promised blogging on my tweaking my practice routine for me, reinventing it as it were. More on the other tweakings soon. This is not an entirely upbeat entry as the coloned text indicates.

My Monday practice went very, very well. Tuesday, after doing my warmup routine I took a notion. A Mendelssohn notion, aka Op. 14 which has been...a simian on my dorsal. Specifically, the notion was to read through the thing. The whole thing. I've actively worked on the Andante, and a total of some four pages of the Presto. Why? To get an overview of what the whole piece felt like to play. More than one teacher, Rachel among them, has suggested doing this when starting a piece. Since I'm way past starting the piece, it seemed to be time for reading it through.

I planned a glacial tempo (probably 30something, although I didn't turn the metronome on) with a tad faster for the Presto. This made sense since I've never read through the E major section, although I have worked on a few bars. I figured 25 minutes or so would do it. Hah. When I had done the piece, or the piece finished doing me, would you believe...42 minutes?

Some details:
1. I began by trying to observe most of the dynamics and articulations. Thatstopped somewhere in the E major section.
2. I started getting very tired, also somewhere in E major. This means simplify the chords by grabbing the outer notes, or the inner notes, whatever. Forget about fingering anything, just keep going.
3. Wrong notes littered the floor, but I expected that.
4. As I was getting two the final pages, I stopped caring, other than keeping going and finishing. My mind was shutting down, and so was my body. I was never so glad to see a double bar line as I was at the end of the piece. The Pearly Gates couldn't have looked better. Or the door of a prison cell swinging open.
5. It left me totally, 101% zonked. Zapped. Bottled. Heavied out. I still had my other pieces to practice for Thursday's (=today's) scheduled lesson. Even though I took a good long break, that was the end of piano for the day. Was tired as if I just ran 10 miles. Or did four hours of writing and researching footnotes. On this latter, would I recover enough to do my Weds. morning teaching? After all, that is my profession.
6. In short, very rough. "For people who can't take a joke" as Mussolini reportedly remarked.

Some Observations:
1. I've played longer. The last two movements of Mozart K.414, but you get to rest in a concerto. When I've been on a reading kick, entire Beethoven sonatas. Mendelssohn at the glacial tempo and with the notes all ingratiatingly under the hand shouldn't have been a problem. Except that it was.
2. When my mind starts working again, a downer. A warp speed downer. Not just for doing it when I did; the smart move would have been to practice my other pieces first, but I felt I could do it and wanted to when I was fresh. The bigger downer: it's going to take longer than forever to learn. Pathetic.
3. There are two upsides. I didn't get injured. And I survived. Hello? Are those upsides?

Settling Dust.
Yesterday, Weds. I was incapable of even going near the piano. Mental exhaustion, although it hadn't interfered with my teaching; doing my usual class pizzaz did, however, require far more effort than usual. It became pretty clear pretty fast that doing a lesson today wasn't in the cards. I was, and remain, grateful to Rachel for the understanding. I did go for a three mile run, always good in these circumstances, and then the dust settled some more and the pigeons moved in....

Pigeons at Last!
Many things are still whirling at the subconscious level. A little has reached the cognitive level.

I'm a little worried about all of this in terms of the negative reinforcement. Think B. F. Skinner and his pigeons. When a strongly negative physiological reaction is associated with doing something, there forms a wickedly hard connection to break. The conscious mind wants to break the connection, but deeper levels of the bodyand mind refuse. And not just for pigeons. If you ever got ill after a meal and found you could never again eat what you'd eaten, you've been there and done this.

You see the negative reinforcement pattern here, but the meaning isn't yet clear. Here are the main options:

1. I'll be able to go back to the piano in few days. No problem. Case closed. Ideal outcome.
2. #1, except that I won't be able to bring myself to play that particular Mendelssohn piece. Not totally ideal, maybe a blessing in disguise. I had been considering putting it aside for awhiles, a good long whiles, until I could learn it all in six months, maximum. A loss, but not a major loss.
3. #2, except for applied to all of Mendelssohn. This would be a pity. There's things of work I'd like to play. But I thought for the longest time I'd like to play Op. 14. Hah.
4. Worst case. Piano aversion. This would be heart-breaking. But at least I didn't bet the farm on my pianistic progress.

Which will it be? I've no control over that. It will reveal itself when it reveals itself. If it turns out to be one of the problem outcomes (2, 3, 4), it is a fact that sometimes such aversions go away with time. Not often. But more than rarely. Further, I suspect that there will be other groups of outcomes which haven't reached my consciousness.

You see why I subtitle it "A Warning to the Curious"? If you really want to see, read the M. R. James tale of that title.

My next entry will either continue this in detail, or start on the long-promised multi-parter on rethinking my practice routines.

Decision

2007-01-29T12:59:00.000-08:00

The perfect title would have been "I'm The Decider". But I want to save that for a later post. This blog will continue. My thanks to jazzy (see her/his comment on my last post) and Waterfall's email for significant help on figuring this out, and several others who wish to remain anon.

I'm organizing the glut of material I've got. Some new links, some new books, some memorable quotes and, of course, the Unending Drama. But it's actually in the writing stage.

And my teacher, Rachel, has linked with a really nice characterization of what this blog's about. Better than any I could have thought up. If you've not visited her web site (see the links list to the right), you should. If you have, you should again because she's tweaked it nicely; The Arpeggist lurks in her Links section.

RSN!

Cancelled due to lack of interest?

2007-01-08T06:01:00.000-08:00

That's a question, not a statement of fact. I'm giving thought to taking down this blog. But marry in haste and repent at leisure, so I'm seeking some feedback. So some of the considerations I'm having....

Is it serving a purpose?
I'm not at all clear that it is. The number of messages it's generated has been minimal. Waterfall has done almost all of them (thank you, Waterfall!), but she and I do email, so we don't need this blog to stay in touch. Others may be reading it, but with one exception (you know who you are) I'm not aware of it. Of course, I could slap a site meter on, but I've looked at them, and they raise privacy concerns for me.

Have I blog-promoted enough?
Of course, given all the bleat in blogcyberspace one has to promote. I've told people about it, asked them to tell people about it. I've put a link to it in my signature when I post on the two piano-based web sites I frequent. Several people have offered to link to it, but only one (you might have guessed, Waterfall again) has actually done so; as for the others, you know who you are.

Is it serving a purpose for me?
If you look at my very first entry, you'll see that I'm not doing this to see myself in pseudo-print. I can see myself in academic hardcopy anytime. As a way of keeping a journal? I can just fire up MSWord, or pull out my Moleskine notebooks. As a way of bouncing ideas around? Cf. the first section on Waterfall, although I have directed my teacher to a couple of entries.

Too much pain, not enough gain?
The previous sections might imply this. My mind is open. Leave me some feedback. I'm not going to make a decision immediately, but a decision is not at the bottom of my to-do list.

Red Alert Redux

2006-12-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

Yup, it's been a long time. A very long time. In cyberspace, an eternity. But there's a reason.

There's been some massive rethinking of practice strategies and lesson strategies. Not a solo rethinking, but a pas de deux of myself and Rachel. I've come out the other end, and I think we've accomplished some things. Some important things. So I'm readying an update, an Executive Summary of what's what.

Don't give up hope!

Red Alert?

2006-11-04T06:06:00.000-08:00

I once saw a bumper sticker which read "Don't kick my tires if you're not going to take me for a drive." Precisely. I realize it's been some time since my last entry. But I've not been idle. Far from it. I've had much good counsel, and I've put it to work. Definitely not idle. Ergo, I owe all my kind readers an update, and a positive (for a change) update. Soon, just as soon as I can get permissions from those who wrote me so helpfully so's I can quote some memorabilia dicta. It will be worth the wait.

Meltdown musings

2006-10-08T06:57:00.000-07:00

Awright, I know, the metaphors got mixed. Frozen (last entry) and now Meltdown. Not mixed if I wanted to imply improvement. Mixed if I don't. Caught in my web of words, clearly. By way of introduction, this continues the previous entry. I had it all composed in my head before I read the typically excellent, typically beautifully written, comment by Waterfall. So I think best to go with what I've got, leave a comment on her comment, and then see what's what. Remember, "anything goes."

Now, the further details on the "lesson". First up, the pieces which didn't mess up because they weren't far enough along to go badly. JSB 15 (Three Part Inventions). I'd worked through the whole thing for fingering and continuity. I can play it all at a slow tempo, complete. Including a couple of really thorny places, one involving crossed hands and a new (read "good") fingering from Rachel. It sounded and went like I expected it to. Large charge. Next up, Chopin. 10.4 is my crabwise piece, working HS, couple of bars at a time maximum. Get the gestures right, get the notes right. Memorize, work on speed gradually. The gestures for the new RH figure were just right, and ditto the one I'd worked out for the LH "rumble" which repeats the opening motive. I didn't even think about trying to take it up to 144, where I've got it reliable for everything except the new RH figure. It felt shaky even for the figures I've got bulletproof; rather, as bulletproof as anyone except a pro can have a Chopin etude. So no wow factor. Another large charge. Likewise 25.12. I had taken it about six bars further, half memorized, the other half involving a fingering change (nasty even for Chopin) still at the "reading" level. Gestures all seemed okay. Not even close to the equivalent of 144 for the other etude. So not much could go wrong. Large charge redux.

Before that came the technical. Despite all manner of practicing, Bb minor still hadn't been going. In fact, Rachel and I were rather bemused that it had gotten worse. By "not" go I mean that about half my scales are reliable at 160something, and this means the usual four octave pattern with two CM sections (you know the drill). But it went even worse than the not-so-good of practice. Double thirds, my previous masterpiece: LH 4-2 wasn't sounding. It has always sounded. Yuk. Arpeggios not bad, but no wow factor.

Then to Mendelssohn Op. 14, which came after the disastrous JSB 1 I wrote about in the last post. I had been feeling pretty good about it. The mini-gestures we'd worked on at the previous lesson had paid off in practice. It really rattled for two lines up-to-tempo, and later lines were on the way. I'd gone so far as to be able to read, and slowly, about the next two pages (including the soupy chord legato section which comes just before the first RH arpeggio section. Double octaves (at the end) up to tempo and sounding good. What came out? The gestures went haywire and it didn't sound anything like practice. I didn't even try to take it as far as I'd read. The double octaves just fell apart, I was looking at my hands in all the wrong places. I'd previously written Rachel that I was warming to the piece, that there was something to be said for making a big, fast racket with notes which lie well under the hand. Again, hah.

So my readers can put this all together. The actual lesson order: technical jerks, Chopin, JSB 15, JSB 1 (previous entry here), Mendelssohn. You can see, I think, why "gimme air" became the operative thought. And why I almost left my music behind as I made like...a combination of Judge Crater and Mario Andretti (or Danica Patrick).

Now, as for what's happened since, and then some larger thoughts. You recall Friday I was feeling "I don't care." So I read, I wrote, I did a five mile run (in forty minutes). Saturday actually felt a little better. I actually uncovered the piano. Did some reading (Scarlatti). Decided to find some new ways of working Bb minor, and found them thanks, again, to Mark Westcott (he of up-nine-down-eight fame). Some built on a suggestion Rachel had made, some didn't. But all different, and I went to work. Just did the various practicings, no attempt to see how it was working (always better to wait a day for something like that; muscles need time to learn). Spent some time with the extra piece I'd been going to play after the JSB 1 disaster, and it sounded pretty good, and what didn't sound quite good got fixed with new gestures. And then....

JSB 1. Can't cop out with bus ride and travel stress. Calm, relaxed, and things hadn't been going badly. But notice that I cooked the metaphorical books so things couldn't go badly. Let's put it this way. Relaxation, breathing not a problem. But notes went haywire at places they've never gone haywire. No rhyme or reason. I tried working on them and other things went wrong. Not good. Because I've kept this piece up. Playing it through every other day or so, trying different interpretations, sometimes slowly, sometimes at speed. Fixing places that felt the least bit unsteady. And I've only been at it since...the spring. And it's been flawlessly memorized (I've checked this) for several months. And (last "and"), while it's not easy, it's hardly the roughest JSB in BG. If I can't keep up a piece like that, of quite limited duration to play...you see where this leads. Not good.

I wrote last time that kids have the edge, but not for the reason people usually think. And it's not what my entry "Adult Students...." posited, although I think that does constitute a reason. I think about myself. Even though I do university-level Greek and Roman history, it comes from languages; to do anything in Classical Studies professionally, you need languages. Good languages. And I think about my experience with them as a kid. In the 6th grade, in Italy, I started Italian. In the 9th grade, Latin and French. In the 12th grade, Greek. I'm omitting the couple of other languages I know. Now even though qua vocabulary and practice my Italian is my weaker language, it feels innately comfortable. As if I know it on a level which can't be reduced to vocabulary and practice. At various times the last couple of decades, it's been unexpectedly called upon. And I've been able to scramble and rise to the challenge. The language feels...like I don't know where it ends and I begin. Latin is probably my favorite language. I use it all the time. It feels (along with French) almost like Italian, but not quite. Greek I also use all the time (that's ancient Greek, of course), and I definitely know where it ends and I begin. Mind you, I'm a fully qualified professional in the field, so it's not a matter of not knowing vocabulary, syntax, and the like. I can read a chunk of Greek or Latin, any Greek or Latin, without thinking about it. But look at the chronology. Six years makes the difference between total identity with a language (Italian) and acquisition but no identity (Greek). That's why kids have the edge. You learn young, what you learn is you. You learn just a tad later, what you you learn is a possession of you rather than a part of you. Add the physical factors of piano playing, the the bottom line is inescapable. Ease of total identity you will not have. You may well acquire even better technique than those who learned as kids, and play more musically besides. But you will never have that total identity. Period.

And I've had a new thought. In my April 15, 2006 entry I praise Westney's The Perfect Wrong Note. I still do. His point is that people tend to think of wrong notes as bad. Au contraire, wrong notes constitute valuable data that something isn't right with hand position or fingering or whatever. Valuable data to use as one learns. Incredibly persuasive, incredibly right. But what to do when you're getting continuous data (read: JSB #1) that something's not right? Especially after a period when everything has been right? The more you attend to the wrong note data, the more you get more. Hercules never had it so bad with the Hydra of Lerna. There may be a cognitive way out of this; after all, Hercules did slay the Hydra. But so far...not good.

What's next? Dunno. I admit to feeling curious about what all that scale work did. But I'm not feeling curious at all about JSB (either piece) or Chopin or Mendelssohn. The first two I really like and the last I've come to like. But not what happens with them. So there's no point in thinking "maybe I should get a big motivational piece." Something that right now, per Rachel, I'd need two years for. The same thing could surely happen again. And, besides, my recent music past has a few too many pieces started but not finished. I don't think I could bear to go through that with...Chopin or Brahms.

Do the words "anything goes" mean anything to you?

Two hours which froze Park Slope

2006-10-06T07:26:00.000-07:00

Not a cheerful title. Nohow. Perhaps I should have cribbed John's (aka "Mr. Savage") line from Huxley's Brave New World: "I ate civilization." It goes beyond head-shrinking or, borrowing from my previous phrase, cutting you down to size when you think you're Pollini. This is going to take some time to get just right, so here's an appetite-whetting (or -destroying) overview and preview.

You practice hard for two weeks. There are always some issues, but you feel pretty good about what you've done. Time to show your works-in-progress. And then...no pastry chef in our galaxy would have you as an apprentice. Not even a pastry chef in the Andromeda Galaxy. Instead of some issues, it's all issues, all the time. Real issues, real fast. The only exception being pieces which aren't far enough along to have issues. Not to worry. Issues come to those who wait, and practice.

Now there was a confounding factor. The bus ride usually takes two hours. Yesterday it took three. Road construction, gaper delay, wondering if you're even going to get in in time to have a lesson. As it turns out, I did, thanks to some very kind and very creative time shuffling from Rachel. But I've had bad bus rides before. Can't make too much of the confounding factor.

Let me give two examples which epitomize it.

First Epitomizing Example. I had planned a JSB mini-performance, the finished first three part invention, which drew such praise the last time I played it. I'd been working more on relaxation and interpretation. And I planned to follow it with a modest encore, an encore not earth-shaking but nonetheless compelling. Started playing. Broke down after three bars and couldn't recover. Started playing again. Breakdown after four bars. Started playing the third time. Went well until three bars from the end, which I know better than any three bars in the piece. Total breakdown. Something snapped. I just stopped and moved the music to one side. Paraphrasing Rachel: "Aaah, aren't you going to finish?" Quoting me: "No. Mendelssohn. And I'm not doing the extra piece I'd planned." Couple of points about this. First, I heard myself using a tone of voice I don't hear often, and which Rachel has never heard. She looked a little disconcerted, and rightly so; I felt bad, but being disconcerted seemed to be the common lot. Second, the boy with Prussian roots never does something like this. I'll iron-will the ending, or start yet again. Something just snapped.

Second Epitomizing Example. As I was getting up to leave. Halfway to the door. And there was my music, all of it, on her piano. I cracked something about a Freudian could make serious hay with that, but also about the Master's famous aphorism "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." But as I thought about it later, sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar. In this case, the truth of the symbolism seemed, and seems, patent to me. Something coming from the depths saying "lemme out of here, gimme air."

Why do I think there's something to these two exempla? First, remember that there had been butchering of other things, details (alas) to appear here all too soon. Second, two feelings I had which I've never had in all my trips to-and-fro Park Slope: almost physically ill, and definitely on the verge of tears. Usually when I get home I unpack, putting my music on the piano. This time I took care not even to brush against the piano, difficult in a small room. As if I were trying to avoid some noxious growth in the garden. This has never happened despite the usual student downers I've experienced over the years. I'm usually very touchy-feely with a piano. Not this time.

About a day later, and the sensations and my view of what happened haven't changed significantly. I'm still struggling to make sense of it all. But certain things seem given. First, kids do have the edge, but not for the reasons people usually give or you're thinking right now. Second, I've undertaken a hideously, hellaciously hard row to hoe, and it's not clear I'm even close to keeping the weeds in check. Third, it's silly to talk with Rachel about the Brahms Handel Variations (this was going to be a blog entry). Fourth, I've probably gone from head enlarging to head-shrinking. Not down to size. Down to thimble size. No, make that pea size. Put differently, I feel like I've been an imposter of myself. The imposter thought he'd been making serious progress, that he was definitely on a roll of substantial duration. Wrong.

It's true, of course, that the body is not a machine. I've seen that any number of times, both with piano and running. One day, or a number of days, everything connects. And then...crash. The body needs time to assimilate, to forge new connections and consolidate with the older connections. Nothing to worry about. But that's doesn't seem to be the case here. It's not a circumstance in which I intone "buck up, little camper." No, no, no.

The details are coming, and the explanations of the allusions. Right now, there's a lot of dust which has hardly begun to settle. Usually I devote the day after a lesson to going over what we did and making sure I know what to do. Today a voice keeps saying "I don't care." So as to where the dust settles and what the picture becomes, I quote from a different genre of music: "Anything Goes."

As for right now. I've got articles to work on, a book review-article to finish. I'm very grateful to the gods that there's something around...I'm good at.

Difficulty Rides Again

2006-09-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Precisely. After the three part invention on difficulty, it would be nice to be done. But I'm not. Something new came to my attention. But I can't make it into a Four Part Invention since it would spoil the metaphor and sound like the ravings of an insane counterpoint student.

The "something new" is a book. Trevor Barnard, A Practical Guide to Solo Piano Music (Meredith Music, 2006). In 140something pages he grades an enormous amount of piano music. But ever so slightly idiosyncratic. "Early" keyboard music doesn't turn up; no Purcell or Rameau, although JSB gets very full treatment. Very full on the major composers such as the other two Bs, Chopin, Debussy, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Mozart. Good selections from many others such as Granados and Liszt, and more than passing mention of a host of others who may well be new to many eyes and hands. Because of the grading, infra, there's nothing on the beginner pieces; you won't find Cornelius Gurlitt, for example.

I think teachers will curse this book, and students will both love it and curse it. But to understand that, you have to understand the grading. It's in four levels. Intermediate Standard: for those already fairly proficient (Chopin 7.2). Second, similar to the first, for a first year piano major (Debussy, Arabesque 1). Third, More challenging, in the reach of the more dedicated or talented student (Schumann's third sonata). Fourth, virtuoso (Islamey).

So I did some random paging. Starting with Islamey. What else is level 4? Chopin 10.2. But Scriabin's "Black Mass" sonata is level 3. A little odd. Because Chopin 10.4 and 25.12 are also level 3, and I'm studying those. While I have no desire ever to play, or hear again, the Scriabin, I would like to play the Schumann F sharp minor sonata and Liszt's Mephisto, and both are level 3. Does this mean I should take them to Rachel? Hah.

What about our friend from the previous series, the Moonlight sonata? Level 2. But will anyone who's level 2 be able to handle the third movement? Hah. In fairness, the author says he's taken an average for multi-movement works. But will a student know that? Supposing he/she is studying Debussy's Sunken Cathedral -- is the Beethoven in the cards? Certainly not the whole sonata, and yet many may think it is.

Here's why I gave my guess on teacher and student reactions. Students will read and think "aaah -- Piece X is in my level." And take it to their teacher. And the teacher will ever so suavely have to teach them one or two things they don't know. Luckily I have the sense to know not to take the Schumann to Rachel...yet. But many won't. As for the ambiguous student reaction. On the one hand "wow, I can play Piece X." On the other hand "thunk, I can't play Piece X." False hopes and all that.

In fairness in overview. It's probably designed more for teachers than students; teachers will use the grading as a basis for selections based on their students' capabilities. Still, I stand by my previous examples.

A bit more on content. Bare bones; composer names, dates, pieces accurately identified. Occasional help with editions. A good reference, in short. Different from the other grading systems I've discussed. Inspirational but dangerous. It even started to grab me until I caught myself. Definitely useful, but to be used with caution and magno cum grano salis.

Adult Students: The Real Problem

2006-09-16T07:58:00.000-07:00

Everyone has it wrong. The issue is not "is it too late for me?". It's never too late, and I use myself as Exhibit A. The issue is not "will I get the technique I need?". If you've got the talent, you will, and I use myself as Exhibit A. The issue is not "will I be able to play as easily as a kid?". You may need to work a little harder to achieve the ease, but you can...and I use myself as Exhibit A. But enough of exhibits. What is the real problem?

It's what being an adult entails. Kids, especially these days, may have competing demands. But they don't have to do all sorts of things that adults do. A car breaks down. A spouse gets sick. A cat gets sick (more on ths infra). It's all on the adult. The combination of time and stress can take a toll. Kids may be affected by all those issues, of course, but they're not the ones who have to make it right. They may be distracted, but such events don't just crash in on top of them and kick their practice time into a neighboring star cluster. They can still stay on schedule.

Recent events here have led me to this startling conclusion. One of our cats got very sick with pancreatitis. I'll spare all the details except to say earlier this week I rushed her to our specialist, she was there all week. I picked her up, in excellent shape, at noon yesterday, but the whole process, including a trip for compounded medications, left me eating lunch at 2 PM and totally, totally out of it. The combination of the time and the strain took a toll. The strain was cumulative; I'd had to cancel my Thursday lesson because my hands, literally, wouldn't stay on the keys. I think you see the connection with the previous paragraph.

But I was able to pull something out of it. After lunch and some well-earning zsss, I found myself with about an hour of time late yesterday afternoon. What to do? I didn't have the concentration or the coordination to start working on issues with my various pieces. Or even my scales and arpeggios. But I wanted to accomplish something, not be idle and definitely not depress myself. So I dove into...fingering. I took some fingering I'd wanted to work out for about a page of a piece, and went to work. It was good because it required concentration. I was good because it required playing small chunks of music slowly, and then a little faster, to see how the fingering was working. It was good because it needed doing (I think). And it was especially good because it kept me connected with the AF, and I was able to accomplish something as opposed to crashing and burning if I'd tried to do a more traditional practice.

As for what I fingered. Let's just say I didn't try anything crazy, like Chopin 10.2 or 25.11. No, it was more modest, but still substantial and rewarding. Besides, it's not nice to mess with your teacher's sanity. Even though (on 10.4) two weeks ago she opined "you don't need my permission to add more." Strong stuff, but not a license to go crazy.

Incidentally, about the Other Maurizio (if you've been keeping up with this blog, you understand). After he won at Warsaw, he just went into seclusion for a couple of years and emerged the titanic pianistic force he has since been. So that's how a pro dealt with adult distractions...just shut them all out. Us non-pros don't have that luxury, but what I wound up doing isn't so different; find something I can do on the piano that will shut down all the swirling around me for awhiles. Will this make me a titanic pianistic force too? It's a long road which has no turns -- whoops, better rewrite "it's a long piece of Mozart which has no turns."

Two hours which shook Park Slope

2006-09-03T06:51:00.000-07:00

Now to end the cliffhanger of the yesterday's entry. And the ending is, shall we say?, happy. But I'm getting ahead of myself. As usual.

I always make a point of not looking over my music on the trip to Park Slope. This after I did it once, decided to change a fingering, to worse than merely indifferent success. Nor do I think too much about how things went on the previous day's practice. And, this is the hardest, banish two kinds of thoughts. Never, ever think "I played so badly yesterday that Rachel will suggest my becoming a pastry chef." Even more, never, ever think "I'm going to blow her straight out the door and high above the East River." In short, empty mind. Insofar as a cerebral professor can do that.

No, I did not play everything flawlessly at super concert tempo. If I could have done that, either I had pieces much too easy for me or I should have my own piano studio, or...see the end of this entry. But I had some serious success. Here are selected highlights, with paraphrased Color Commentary by Rachel and me:

G major in double-thirds. "I love your double-thirds."

Chopin 10.4 small chunks of RH and LH from the first page. Came out exactly like I wanted, and I pushed the tempo to around 144. Felt good, especially about the LH (that's m.5). "Nice. Accurate, right touch and sound. When you want to add more, go ahead; you don't need my permission."

Chopin 25.12 HT mm.1-6. I've been on this awhiles. The issue has been from practicing in chords to "closing the deal" and breaking the individual notes out. It had gone rather well in practice. In fact, it worked on my spouse; see previous entry here. I was rather pleasantly surprised at what came out. It's on the way. "Very fine. Keep working on accents at the start and end of each measure. Add the other measures practiced as chords. Start others as chords."

I am omitting comments on Mendelssohn Op. 14 because that's a special case. Stay tuned.

Bach Three Part Invention #15. I'd done the first half HT, and about the last six bars likewise. Worked the arpeggios pretty hard. It came out like I wanted. "You've done more on this in the first two weeks than you ever have with Bach before. Wonderful fingerings."

And my memorized, long-practiced Invention #1. Let me put in this way. I heard myself making touch corrections on the fly for the difference between Rachel's piano and mine. When I got to the end, in a nanosecond the thought "I did it. I dadgummed did it. That was good. I'd stack my interpretation up with anyone's." What was the Color Commentary? "Robert, I am so impressed...."

Strong stuff. Serious business. I felt entitled after such compliments to remark "That's why they call me Maurizio." Bear in mind that I listen to my playing the same way I listen to The Pros. Relentlessly. So when I know I've done something good, I know I've done something good. As for the Color Commentary. Rachel is a very supportive and creative teacher, among other virtues. But she won't hesitate if you've made a mess of something, even though she has that rarest of attributes, criticism which doesn't make you feel like...a pastry chef. She doesn't toss superlatives gratuitously. They mean something. You start thinking...maybe I actually can do this like I want to do it.

So I view this all as a very successful pas de deux. I've worked very very hard at this, and not just since I came to Rachel. She's worked hard with me, harder than I fully realize...and I've put her through a fair amount (read: "plaintive emails"). We both deserved this.

It gets more interesting. It woke me up the next morning way too early for a teaching morning. First thought: "What have I done?" Second thought: "I worked her piano like it was nobody's business." That second thought really sumarizes everything I've written.

And you know what? The practices since then have been...like what I reported in the opening paragraphs of my previous entry. So what's a boy to do? I see several choices:
1. Sign on with ICM to manage me.
2. Send my Bach fingerings to Angela Hewitt.
3. Wait by the phone for James Levine to ask me to do the Brahms D minor with the BSO.

Problems, problems. I bet the Other Maurizio never had them as bad.

The Runup to...

2006-09-02T06:36:00.000-07:00

My loyal readers have surely noticed some inactivity here; alert ones may have posited a connection with the last post. But I have not been idle but, rather, so busy with practice and not blogging that I risked tempting The Gods Of Blogger and their spamblog seeking bots.

Usually the day after a lesson I take practice just a little easy. Go over my notes on the lesson, make sure I understand what I wrote and that my fingers do too. But the day after the last lesson was different. It was one of those practices when you seem incapable of doing anything wrong. I wound up doing well over two hours of practice. You gotta be open to what your fingers and body are telling you, and they were telling me to run the table (or keys). Take full advantage of the moment. But it gets even more interesting.

Next day the same thing happened. And the following day. It went for seven days in a row. I accomplished more than I would have thought possible. For example, after I was done practicing my chunk of Chopin 25.12 I tried taking it up to tempo. Not only did it go far better than I would have guessed, but my spouse commented "it sounds like a stormy ocean". Now let me explain that Linda has a fine ear and loves music, but she comes from a different musical background. There was no way in the world she could have known that many in The Business refer to 25.12 as "The Ocean Etude". Strong stuff.

But on the eighth day...I rested (resting on the seventh day was taken long ago). Went down to practice and simply could not. Realized my body was telling me "back off. all your work needs consolidation." So I rested, and the partially the next day (worked out some Bach fingerings). When I got back to practicing after that, things went very very differently. Much more like "ten fingers, eighty-eight keys, no problem". Whatever was going on, I liked it.

So the day before my lesson (8/31) came. I usually do an abbreviated practice then...run through things, check on the gremlins. Consolidate, but don't do anything stupid like refingering or taking on a new section. Aaah. I got up in the afternoon after a hard morning's teaching. And I felt...on the edge of being physically ill. Could hardly move, let alone play. Panic. If ever there was a lesson I needed, this was the one. Tried everything. Panic. Why is this happening? Not because of the first week of fall classes; I've been in this business long enough so while I'm tired as a result, I'm not disabled. Finally, I sent Rachel a warning email and decided I'd just have to see how things looked in the morning. Things looked much better in the morning. Whatever it was, was gone. So off I went to Park Slope. And what happened as a result of a most promising two weeks? "Runup to..." what? The saga continues very soon....

“Awesome”

2006-08-16T08:11:00.000-07:00

That's not me talking. That's my teacher, Rachel. In honor of that, I've jacked html coding around to give it true typographic quotes. Don't get me started on that. I'll take www publishing seriously when it's possible to use true typographic quotation marks as easily as typing; fie on these straight thingies which only a typewriter could love. But I digress....

I've tended to talk peripherally about my own practicing and lessons. By choice. For me, the world doesn't need my psychological interior decorating, nor does the world care about it. But there are exceptions.

The quote came from my lesson yesterday. But you need some background. When I came to Rachel about 15 months ago, I'd been doing a few scales in double-thirds. When we got to the end of the lesson I enquired "what about scales in double thirds?" Her reply "later" we negotiated to I would ask again in a year if she hadn't raised it again by that time. So in June the year was up. I asked again. This time the reply was "sure." So off I went. Chased down fingerings from the several choices possible. Started to work on G major. Very slowly to get the fingering down and to get the gestures down. Every two weeks I'd show what I'd done, and I'd get advice on the gestures, especially on playing them legato. You get the picture.

Why did, and do I care about scales in double thirds? It would be too easy to say "I never met a scale I didn't like." So, in random order. They introduce new issues in coordination and scale playing. Great for strengthening fingers and for sight reading. Thirds in pieces start sounding better. Everything sounds better because I have a tendency to play too fingery; fingery and double thirds scales just don't mix. Yeah, I know, you could practice thirds when you need 'em...while I do believe in getting a lot of technical work from pieces (now; I didn't used to), there's some work that needs to be just technical.

So about a month ago I started working on speeding the double thirds up. Using the single note scale methods. Rhythms. Groups with accents; groups of five are especially hellacious and hence beneficial. And the up-nine-down-eight method of practicing single note scales becomes an Experiment in Terror with double thirds. You get that picture too.

Yesterday I played 'em. Two octaves up and down. Legato. MM 50something. They really rattled nicely, to my ears, as I was playing them. I stopped and there was a silence. Whoops? And then I heard...the A-word. Wow. Rachel knows how to praise, and she's got a good vocabulary for it (n.b. she's got a very suave vocabulary for when you've played like a jerk). But I'd never heard the A-word before. And she expanded on it...legato, evenness, hand position, speed. All there. Wow.

In my 7/16 post I said lessons were great for when you felt you were Pollini and needed to get real. Now a success like this should not make you feel you're Pollini. Don't go there. But on the continuum between absolute beginner and Pollini, it does make you've taken a little step closer to his direction. Strong stuff. Serious business.

One Sentence on Difficulty

2006-08-09T07:26:00.000-07:00

I urge all my loyal readers not to miss Waterfall's wonderful comment on my final "Difficulty" entry (8/2). In just one sentence, she did what took me three laborious entries to accomplish. Brevity, truly, is not just the soul of wit. And her one sentence is:

"I finally decided that everything is hard."

Precisely. Ahem. It explains why the pros will labor endlessly over a piece which might be graded as intermediate. It also explains why us non-pros should too. There's as much JSB in one of his Little Preludes as there is in one of his Partitas. Each is worth infinite effort. Because in both cases, you're connecting physically with a genius. Aside alert! In my line of work I connect with geniuses...Aeschylus, Plato, Vergil come to mind. But there's a difference. That connection is intellectual. Nothing physical. Unlike the JSB example. There is an intellectual connection, of course, but there's also a physical one. Geez, you've got JSB right in your hands! Doesn't get any more intimate than that.

But why, then, do us non-pros care so much about difficulty levels? Shouldn't we be content just to connect with genius? By contrast, I gave an overly facile answer as to why the pros didn't worry about difficulty. They have the keys to the kingdom. The can play the hellacious things, so they have the confidence that enables them to...go slumming. Up to a point, true. But I recall an exchange my teacher and I had earlier this year. I'd turned up the music to Kabalevsky's transcription of JSB's Toccata & Fugue in D minor (not the famous one but the "Dorian" one). She looked at it. "I wouldn't play it" quoth she. And further, to the effect of "too much pain, not enough gain." This from someone of quite formidable skills, and this from a listener who's possessed of a relentlessly critical ear. And I recall Charles Rosen remarking of the first version of Liszt's Paganin Etudes that it was probably unplayable by anyone today. That is, there are some things that give the pros pause.

At the same time, the pros can do more. As well they ought. But us non-pros, much as we value the connecting with genius, need constant validation. More than even the most generous teacher could provide. We see all these things we want to play, that we know people play...and we want it all. Yesterday would be preferable, but right now will do. So we're constantly measuring our progress, seeing how much closer we're getting to Big Piece X. I don't think Waterfall and I should apologize for it...but enjoying what we've got has a lot to be said for it. If we could only silence that nagging little voice "how long until we get to play...Big Piece X?".

Back to the start. As you know, I'm an academic. That's a very specialized kind of prose I write. Logic, arguments from evidence...you get my drift. Editors relentlessly delete almost anything which makes the prose lively; well, most editors. So what you read here isn't academic prose, fer shure, but it still has...an academic smell about it. I'm also of Teutonic background...Prussian to be precise. Not a help in these circumstances. You'd probably think that given that I must love Max Reger. You'd be right. Even though his Telemann Variations are not on my Big Piece X list. I once heard Serkin play them...but that is another story.

I'm grateful to Waterfall for coming in and getting right to the point. You are reading her blog, aren't you? It's the "Must-Read Practice Blog" in the links. Non-pros: a fellow voyager. Pros: you get to see what us student types are thinking and which we're probably not telling you.

Measuring Difficulty: Part Three (Numbers)

2006-08-02T07:40:00.000-07:00

It's time for the long-promised "numbers" approach to difficulty. I've spent considerable time researching this, because rating pieces on some sort of numerical or verbal scale is very, very common. Students pay attention to it, teachers pay attention to it. But is it worth the attention? And what does it all mean when read with my two earlier entries on difficulty (7/1, 7/8)? So let's get going!

I want to start with a programmatic example. Fear not, we will not be talking about this piece later on! Maurice Hinson, whose book on piano repertoire I so shamelessly plugged earlier (4/15) has also done Music for Piano and Orchestra (1981, 1993). Now consider Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme By Paganini. Hinson rates it as D(ifficult), his highest category; similarly rated are the Beethoven Fourth, the two Brahms concerti, the two Liszt concerti. But at the end of his description of the Rachmaninoff appears something doesn't appear in the descriptions of those other pieces: "Only for virtuosos." Say what? Does this mean it's harder than the other pieces? If so, are there other concerti that get this description? Nope. I read "enormously demanding" (Bartok's Second), "severly taxing demands" (Busoni). Does this make them as hard as the Rachmaninoff? Or harder? What's happened to Hinson's four categories? You see the point, I hope, that any rating scheme has to be tweaked. But perhaps the issue is Hinson's four categories. So let's descend from the summit of Olympus.

Take the Beethoven "Moonlight" sonata. Everyone, it seems, wants to play it. The first movement is always turning up in various simplified arrangements. Sometimes, too, the second. But the third movement...ahem, an arpeggist's delight. So how does the sonata get rated? Let's start with Hinson. In his repertoire book he uses four grades: Easy, Intermediate, Moderately Difficult, Difficult. But he doesn't grade everything, and not this sonata. He refers to "fiery broken chords" but that's about it. James Friskin and Irwin Freundlich, Music for the Piano (1954, 1973) don't using a formal grading scheme, and of this sonata's last movement "a well-developed technique is needed." Finally, there's Jane Magrath, The Pianist's Guide to Standard Teaching and Performance Literature (1995). Her work covers pieces from absolutely beginner through "early advanced" and is on a scale of one through ten. She gives the sonata a ten, but then adds for the third movement "requires a mature pianist and presents enormous technical difficulties". So should it be a ten? Doesn't sound that way, since the other two agree on that last movement. So why is it there if her target range of beginner through early advanced can't handle the last movement?

You see the problem, I hope, from these three examples. Any numerical scheme can and will break down; not all sections of a work are always of equal difficulty, whatever "difficulty" means. What's a student to do? Can probably handle the first two movements relatively early on. I put it that way meaning play in tempo, observing the composer's markings, with enough control to bring a modicum of music-making to the enterprise. Of course the pros also play these two movements, and more than one has remarked that it is far far harder to play softly and slowly than loud and fast. Which, incidentally, explains why many of the younger crop of super virtuoso younger pianists leaves me cold: they've got the loud and fast, but where's the expression? Where's the idea? Glittering speed is tremendously important, but it's not the only thing a pianist should have. I omit many other examples such as repertoire lists from conservatories, rating systems in various other publications, and online chatter. They're all of a piece with what we've just seen. Now, to repeat, what is a student to do? Here are some opinionations (there always are, they always are).

Talk to your teacher. I have been amazed, constantly when I have done this with my good teachers, past and present. A piece you didn't think was anywhere close to your future suddenly materializes. Something you thought would be a snap goes far into the future. That why you have a good teacher, among other reasons, isn't? She/he has been to music school, has been living, breathing and eating piano music. And as a good teacher, knows how to diagnose student needs and abilities. You definitely want your teacher involved before you get crazy ideas about what you can, and can't play. There's a really practical reason too. If you get into a ferocious piece and start meeting its ferocity with ferocious practicing, you could injure yourself.

Talk to yourself. With what I just wrote in mind, don't be afraid to explore. Be unresonable, but not too unreasonable (cf. just above on injuries). Be reasonable, but not too reasonable...the object is to safely stretch yourself. Any number of things I might have proposed to my teachers have, as a result, just...vanished. But any number of pieces have landed in my lap.

Dialogue with your teacher. There's a conceptual difference that even the very best teachers may not realize. Let me speak first as a professor. It's a constant struggle for me to remember there was a time when I had to struggle with the ablative absolute (Latin) or when the chronology of the Peloponnesian War seemed a total mess. Going along with that...I can read any Latin or Greek text I choose without any problem. But sometimes I'll pull down Julius Caesar (yes, that Caesar) to read; his works are often read at the intermediate level of learning Latin. They are stylistically excellent, models of Latin prose. But suppose I've got an eager student who wants to move on to a really hard author like Tacitus. If I tell this student "let's really polish up your prose by reading some more Caesar" that student will feel she/he is getting sent backwards. Demoted. I've experienced those feelings as a piano student. I was once asked to consider some of Clementi Op. 36 as a way to work on my phrasing. I saw the logic, but I felt...demoted. Going backwards, when moving forwards was what I have in mind. Luckily, my teacher had an open mind, good will, and we dialogued about it.

Teacher's point: "Sometimes I play the Bach Two Part Inventions."
My reply: "Yes, but you can also play the Brahms D minor Concerto."

Or, on another level, Horowitz used to play Schumann's Träumerei as an encore. But he could play...everything. Those of us that are still climbing Parnassus have a different take on it. The result, returning to that dialogue, was no Clementi, but a really good alternative emerged which satisfied the both of us. And time changes things. The other day for myself I was playing a Schubert waltz, one which I'd studied in college at what might be the early intermediate level. I didn't feel I was going backwards. I had a great time with it. Incidentally, William Kapell used to play it...I learned that from my then-teacher, who was a student of Jerome Lowenthal who was a student of Kapell. But I can afford to; I'm currently doing Chopin 25.12 and choosing one of the big romantic concertos to study. With my case I rest my case.

Links: Practice Blog and Urban Legend

2006-07-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

I'd planned on getting my long-awaited conclusion to my "Measuring Difficulty" series up here now. But I've just found two new links of substantial interest.

First is the "Promising New Practice Blog". Usually I check out a link thoroughly and wait a bit before graving it into stone with three chisels. But this was such an excellent and interesting start that I forwent being hidebound. The author was inspired by Waterfall's blog which appears in my link list as "Must-Read Practice Blog". Remember, it was Waterfall's blog which got me back into this here music blogging after a substantial hiatus. Waterfall, you seem to have started something!

As for "A Piano Urban Legend". Ahem. One might not think that our subject is the stuff of urban legend. But this one turned up on a newsgroup, and it's too choice not to air. The alert will notice the absence of a K.-number for the concerto. Among other things.

From the Student's Bench & Professor's Desk

2006-07-16T06:52:00.000-07:00

An even quirkier title than usual. As usual, there's a reason. I had two recent piano student experiences which I'm going to turn around and look at as a professor (teaching is part, and part only, of my job description). Starting as student....

Fingerings. I may be more compulsive than most about them (I am an academic, remember?), but I've got a terror of drilling the "wrong" one into my neurons. Every time I've had to change in such cases, the results have been distinctly un-fun. It's true that Serkin (père, not fils) remarked that he changed fingerings during a performance, but he could also play, brilliantly, Reger's Telemann Variations. Two of my issues came from Chopin 25.12; one was what my teacher had given me which didn't seem to work, the other was in a new section where I had nothing to go on. The third came from Mendelssohn, Op. 14 where my edition's staccato fingering just wasn't giving me the "snap" I needed. So off went emails to my long-suffering teacher seeking confirmation of what I'd devised. Back came a confirmation of all three. I was pleased, obviously, to have the confirm. Ahem.

I should have thought a little first, though. Back to last winter when I questioned a fingering in Rachmaninoff 23.5, and my solution was confirmed. And here's the larger point. Even the most patient and supportive teacher shouldn't be expected to solve all of your problems. When you've advanced to a certain point, you have to acquire a certain amount of confidence in what you know, what you've been taught. This doesn't mean you don't need a teacher. But it does mean you've got to start trusting yourself, and sometimes think of yourself as a pianist rather than a student-troll. Precisely my point to my advanced students; if I've been doing my job right, they can take an active role in solving their difficulties. They should become junior partners in the subject we're studying. Moving back to the piano, obviously this only works if you've a teacher of that mindset as opposed to "be reasonable, do it my way. my way or the highway." Luckily, that's not an issue; I run fast from authoritarian teachers.

Performance. Lessons make great head-shrinkers. Your practice goes along well, you start to think you've...Pollini. I had my Bach Three Part Invention in what I thought was pretty good memorized shape. Time to put some stress on it. After rides on the bus and the F-train, we'd see. I didn't expect flawless, but I did expect something semi-reasonable. Hah. I couldn't even finish. Skipped measures. Floor littered with dropped notes. Not pretty. There was an additional stress factor I'd not considered. Heat. Here in the Northeast we're having a typically vile summer. At home, not an issue with central a/c. My teacher's studio is not, er, climate controlled; this is not, incidentally, because she loves the heat (she definitely does not). Now it gets really interesting. I had a tempo idea about Chopin 10.4, and asked her if she could do the first few measures at the tempo in question. Despite the heat, out the measures spun, as flawlessly and wonderfully as ever.

Of course, I'm a student and she's a pro, but there's more to it when I jump over to my professorial side. I have to perform in the heat regularly in the fall if I happen to get classrooms without a/c. I don't love the temperature conditions, but the lectures just spin out like they always do. Aside: I don't read lectures, and have zero tolerance for academics who do. If you read, why are the students there instead of their recording devices? There's only added value if I...perform the lecture. Now here's the link between my teacher as professional and me as academic professional. When you've spent all that time mastering your trade, you go on auto-pilot. When I lecture, I don't worry about what's coming next...I know that it will come just as it should. I suspect it's the same way with piano pros. The trick, I think, is to try to bring some of the ease I have as a professional (academic) into myself as a student (piano).

Insights and excites! Why didn't I realize at the time? Dunno. Why didn't I take my own medicine? That one's easy. Because I'm a real doctor, Ph.D. rather than M.D.

Measuring Difficulty: Part Two (Still Philosophical)

2006-07-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

This will definitely be at least a three part invention; don't get nervous, since I didn't say "mirror fugue". This is where the philosophical starts to meet the practical. But I'm going to start in my ever unconventional ways. Ths time with two anecdotes.

One pianist when asked why he played a piece so incredibly fast replied "Because I can". Another pianist was playing another piece incredibly fast; someone asked the pianist's friend why he took that tempo. The reply "Because he can't play it any faster". Notice one thing immediately: both pianists are men; the significance of that will reappear.

Now, let's leave the world of the concert stage for our difficulty matters. In theory, if you took a slow enough tempo, you could play any piece. It might not sound like the piece, you might injure yourself, but with all the time in the world you could do it. I recall once, a very very long time ago, trying it with the opening of the Tchaikovsky concerto. You don't want to know how long it took; nevertheless I was thrilled. I'd actually felt a smidgen of this piece in my hands. But I did not keep going! So we've got the extremes of playing something way way too fast and way way too slow. And therein lies enlightenment.

Difficulty is often perceived as a function of speed; although a cousin once remarked that "the blacker a piece of music looks, the harder it is". So let's take the case of the first of Bach's Three Part Inventions. If you look at the chart in Palmer's edition, you'll see quite a wide range among the thirteen figures he give. Most fall into 69-96 with the exception of Glen Gould at 132. Now this is probably the hardest of that group of pieces, and if you play it at GG's tempo it's getting insanely difficult. But is that the right tempo? It's not the one I'm using, and it's not based on herd instinct but, rather, the one which brings out the lyricism, keeps the counterpoint flowing; it just so happens to fall into the usual range, but it wouldn't bother me a bit if for musical reasons I played it more slowly. Nor do I feel I'm losing pianistic face by not playing at GG's tempo; I've not even tried to, nor will I. So just how hard is it? We can't really judge by raw tempo but, rather, by the tempo which fits your musical conception. You have to be really honest with yourself. There was a time, a long time ago, when I couldn't have played this piece at any tempo short of the Tchaikovsky one (supra). It was plainly too hard back-when, since I could not take a tempo which fit my musical conception.

That's really the tempo point. You aim for playing at one which fits your musical conception. If that's faster than most, fine. If that's slower than most, also fine. But if you've made an honest decision, and, say, chosen a slower tempo, the piece is not too hard for you. This also rules out the Tchaikovsky one(ditto supra) because no one with the least musical sense would say that taking two minutes to play each chord represents music making. I'm not saying other considerations don't matter, but the tempo hangs over all of them.

But what about the composer's intentions? I can only give a brief answer now, because I'm in the process of studying metronome markings and manuscripts and the like. But it is a fact that composers often take highly fluctuating tempos with their own works. I recently heard Rachmaninoff playing his G minor prelude (23.5). Most recorded performances are pushing triple digits. He takes an eightysomething tempo. Numerous anecdotes about other composers confirm this. Metronomes? It's a fact that composers don't use them to compose, but they're more an afterthought. Even when we have them by the composer, and there's no controversy (so I'm omitting Beethoven for now), pianos were different then. Chopin's metronome marks were designed for pianos with much lighter actions and much less sustaining power. If he writes Presto and gives a metronome of 176, on today's pianos it's likely to sound like...a whirring buzz. With loss to the music. Again, all too many Bach performances today seem to me much too fast. You get the whir, you miss the counterpoint, you miss the music. That he didn't intend WTC or the Inventions for performance, that you can't find tempo indications in them, should be cautionary.

All this talk about speed...go back to my observation about men and the introductory anecdotes. As I've said before, and say again, there's a pervasive macho element in the piano world. How big are your hands, how fast can you play? Like a competition in a gymnasium. It's a boy thing. I'm not saying the masculine is bad or irrelevant. But neither is the feminine. Two halves make a whole, as Plato pointed out a long time ago in his Symposium. But testosterone poisoning should have no place in music making. Period.

Now for some practical points. You often hear it said that you can only play a piece as fast HT as you can HS. It's more complex than that, for two reasons. First, two hands and the body act as one; playing HS at any speed is really much harder since one of the supports is knocked out. Just try this with scales HS as opposed to HT as you'll see really fast! Second, the hands "cue" each other to various groupings of notes; same reasons as previous. You also hear it said that you should practice a piece maybe 20% faster than your final tempo. That might appear more reasonable. Not so! First, supposing you're doing Mephisto. How many on-stage pianists could do that? But let's be reasonable. Supposing the tempo for a piece is 144, so this would mean practicing it around 176. If you do that, the gestures and finger work and coordination will be significantly different. So you'll be getting the physical for playing at 176 into your system, which just won't work when you're doing 144. I'm not saying practicing faster isn't useful. It is. A great way to test your memory. But holding yourself to the 20% rule is...delusional.

But these aren't the only delusions. Remember, the third voice of this Invention is coming soon to a blog near you.

Important New Link

2006-07-08T07:34:00.000-07:00

I haven't had a posting specifically about one link, but the one I just received deserves it: Pianist Historical Archive. It comes from a good professional (academic) friend, Andreas. He's a remarkably acute and learned scholar in the field we share; I've found over the years that his approach to music has the same virtues in equal quantity.

It's the entrance to the very remarkable piano archives at the University of Maryland. And it's not just for researchers. They have summaries of their holdings for a large number of past pianists, accompanied by fine biographies. And some more than fine; do yourself a favor and read the one on Jorge Bolet. Don't know about Jorge Bolet? Learn now! Think this is all irrelevant to making music? I've got two pieces of advice for you. First, go back and read my entry for April 15. Second, get a copy of Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists. If this doesn't convert you, nothing will.

Measuring Difficulty: Part One (Philosophical)

2006-07-01T08:09:00.000-07:00

Here's the start of what I promised two entries back. I'm doing this as at least a two part invention, and it may stretch to three. There are simply so many considerations that to do one mega-entry would be mind-numbing, and not just for my Loyal Readers. This entry will raise some conceptual ideas. The next one, or two, will crunch some numbers.

Why such a topic? Look back to my very first blog entry (you have been reading them all, haven't you?). Professional pianists may well find much of this obvious (to say the least) or bleat (to say the most), although if they teach they just may learn a thing or two in dealing with us non-professional adult types. Of course professionals are aware of degrees of difficulty. But they do it from a position of strength. In determining whether to learn, or perform say Chopin 25.10, the issue will not be whether they can play an enormous number of double octaves at high speed. The issue will be, rather, how does this fits their comparative strengths. Just getting the notes and close to tempo (at least) won't be an issue. Given that they've been playing...forever, they may have trouble recalling a time when they couldn't play fast double octaves in quantity. Of course, there are digrees of difference even at this level. I recall the review of a relatively recent NYC recital by a faculty member at one of the better-known conservatories. On his performance of the Brahms Handel Variations, the reviewer said (close paraphrase), "not a wise choice'".

Us adult non-professionals are different. We're still on the basic learning curve. We may not even be to the stage of playing fast double octaves, let alone in quantity, let alone what Chopin does with them. We definitely can remember a time when we didn't know how to surmount any number of technical issues. We've not been professionals most of our adult lives, and many of us are all too aware that while there are many pieces we can play, time is not entirely on our sides. There may well be some pieces we want to play but will never be able to play as a function of still being on the learning curve. Some which we may be able to play if we...practice with power and vigor (to borrow from JFK). And we want to know where we are on the curve. How far we can look ahead. How we're doing in a world which is inhabited by adults like us, and adults like the professionals. Talking about enquiring minds wanting to know!

Brief digression. I totally understand the position of the professionals. Because in my professional career, I really have to work hard to remember when the most tricky piece of Greek or Latin syntax wasn't...obvious. This in connection with my own teaching, trying to put myself back into my students' positions, when I didn't know or understand, say, the chronology of the Peloponnesian War. It's really hard, and I mess up, probably more often than I realize. I say this because if you think your teacher has forgotten the time of not-being-able, do, please, cut her/him a very big break.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming! No one would quarrel with characterizing the first book of Bartok's Mikrokosmos as easy, or with Ravel's Scarbo as incredibly difficult. But then its starts to get fuzzy in the middle. I did a little Truth And Soul with my teacher recently. Incidentally, that's a characteristic of a good teacher, the willingness to help with some soul-searching, provided it's not ad nauseam. Right now, if I really jumped up and down, I could have the Chopin G minor Ballade -- but I'd have to be willing to spend a couple of years with it. I'm opting to wait until some technical matters are more in hand...more Chopin Etudes, more other composers. But it's an important positive point, that it's at least on my horizon. And it's a big, ferocious piece of Chopin. Gives me an anchor and some peace of mind to know what I know. Of course, you can't be extreme. For example, some day I would love to learn the Brahms D Minor Concerto. I wouldn't dream of even thinking about it for at least five years. I'm sure that if I mentioned it in a sooner to my teacher she would be very nice and explain that it just wouldn't be appropriate to think about it right now. And she'd be right. Totally right.

You start to see, I think, why measuring difficulty can be some important to some of us. We want to ensure we're progressing as well as we can, and that we may reach at least some of our goals before time runs out. Me,- I'd like to think that if I don't get to the Brahms D minor in this lifetime, I can spend a chunk of eternity learning it with Brahms himself...but there are no guarantees. It's the here-and-now.

Nevertheless, although we're adults and we're learning, probably faster than we ever could have decades ago, we've got to realize we can't be totally cerebral about difficulty. For example, I'm learning Chopin 25.12 right now. A serious bear, to save the least. When I'd mentioned it offhand to my teacher, I was more than totally surprised when she said "go ahead". Talk about being careful what you ask for! Turns out that it involves one specific technique (you guessed it! arpeggios!) that I'm not so bad at. I would have never guessed, even though I have a high regard for my arpeggios (but you knew this).

At the same time, I don't think there's anything wrong with looking at all sorts of things, if you're careful. Way-back-when, I discovered my mother had played the Tchaikovsky concerto. I had a lot of fun doing one line of one hand for a few bars, or trying just to fit my hand onto one of those opening chords. But I didn't spend too much time on the latter. Why? Does the word "injury" mean anything to you? That's why I'd never try to practice the Brahms D minor on the sly...repetitive stress could strike all too easily. But, with all that in mind, I've nosed around in an incredible number of places, places where I may well not be for quite some time, if ever. It's a good thing I don't want to play late Scriabin sonatas!

In short, it's a kind of syergy. An inspirational teacher can keep you on track and pleasantly surprise you. But you need to do some nosing, too. Just, please be very careful. Less is more. Especially when it comes to big handfuls of notes.

But we've still not addressed that enormous middle ground between the Bartok and Ravel extremes this entry started with. So stay tuned for some number-crunching in Part Two.

Be Careful What You Ask For

2006-06-29T07:41:00.000-07:00

My lesson had been scheduled for Tuesday. My Park Slope (Brooklyn) based teacher was going to be returning from a relative's; as we were emailing on lesson possibilities I jocularly mentioned that she could always stop off here, a twenty minute detour, and do the lesson on my AF. With the warning that she might start regarding her Steinway as a lawnmower. [Brief aside. We have a friendly long-standing faceoff on our pianos]. Ahem. She accepted.

Hence my title. Perhaps more explanation before details. A lesson on one's own piano means the great student cop-out goes out the window: "but I can play it perfectly on my piano". On the upside, not having to get up with the chickens, brave the bus to Manhattan and the F-train to Brooklyn. I thought you'd like the results. Especially because I've not written much up-close and personal so far, although given the superior practice blog (links column) Waterfall does...why even try to reinvent the wheel?

I think everyone gets nerves before a lesson, but this time it was different. Usually as a result of my traveling I arrive at Park Slope...wired. Ready to go. Ready to blow her out the window and high over the East River with my scales and arpeggios. How was I going to get my edge? Turned out to be a non-problem. A lesson is an event. Make that Event. So as the time drew near, my system reliably shifted into trans-warp. But not quite the same. Would I sound as good on my piano with an audience as I sound alone? In fact, I got so jittery that I totally lost my nerve and didn't ask her for a rendition of Chopin 10.4 on my piano (in my April 13, 2006 entry you can read why). Dumb, dumb, dumb.

But this Little Drama definitely had a happy ending. I was able to do. The issues I had were no different than when the lesson occurs in the more usual venue. Some things you expect to go well go well. Some things you expect to go well don't go well. And some things you don't expect to go well at all surprise you. Thus in this case and in order: arpeggios, Bach (3 Part Invention No. 1), Chopin 25.12. On those last two, not a bad tradeoff. While JSB is the composer in these parts, to have a ferocious Chopin etude go much better than expected at the price of JSB is quite acceptable. To say the least.

On the upside. I got to hear a real virtuosa play my piano. Wow! And hearing me on my own piano gave her, I think, more information about me and my playing, which is all to the future good. And now she sees why I'm such a fanatic about my AF.

It's a rare treat. A once-in-a-lifetime exerience. If this opportunity ever knocks, say "yes"!

Need Reader Input: Difficulty Levels

2006-06-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've been pondering this topic for some time. And done quite a bit of research (naturally). It's a mess out there. Some conservatory syllabi give numbered levels. Some books do too, but some just go by easy/intermediate/difficult/very difficult. Sometimes a teacher will say "this is much too advanced for you"; this is not a reference to my own teacher (my wants are extravagant, but not out of this galaxy). I recently read someone who's not been studying very long wanting to take on...Liszt's La Campanella. You get the picture.

So as I ponder and start getting an entry together, I ask my Loyal Readers about any experiences or thoughts they have. I promise to consider what I receive, but I also promise that I will do this entry irregardless of the amount (if any) of input I get. Thanks!

Mozart Is His Own Worst Enemy

2006-06-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

This all began when my Inspirational Teacher asked "Tell me about your conversion to Mozart. Does that mean you didn't care for him at some point? If so, how were you converted? I'm currently obsessing over Mozart only to find out that several of my students and colleagues dislike much of his music." I replied at some length (as always). But as I think about it, some of my ideas might be useful to my readers here. So I've tweaked and rewritten and blogged.

First, some brief background. I'd heard Mozart, either live or records, for as long as I can remember. While I liked the symphonies 30something onwards, it was only 41 that I couldn’t live without. Same for the piano concerti: D Minor (K.466), C Minor (K.491), G major (K. 453). Sonatas: the F major (the K. 332 one). But all the rest was...very nice but so what? Likewise when I started learning the piano. All those little pieces, all very nice but.... so what?

My last inspirational teacher, Dimitri Toufexis (1980s) changed that. He gave me the first movement of the Bb major sonata (K. 570). It was the first extended Mozart I’d played. I was enchanted. As I recall, it was feeling Mozart under my fingers and those modulations got to me in a way that the baby pieces, or all the listening I’d done just never did. Besides, playing that passagework made me feel...very professional. I took an intellectual approach at the same time. Devoured Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style and did some modest analysis of the movement I was playing. It turned out to be very similar to an ancient author I've had much do do with: Homer. Both H. and M. using a highly stylized, formulaic language, but each does very remarkable things with it. Here was the intellectual complemented what I’d been feeling. But the real clincher was...the A major concerto (K.414). Much as I liked the K. 570, this was revelatory. I felt, and still do to some extent, that the concerti represent Mozart's best piano writing. By this stage, and ever since, I couldn’t and can't get enough of Mozart. Except the operas. Sorry, everyone. For opera I'm Wagner and Strauss and that's it.

Some takeaway points that may help you:

1. Beginners inevitably get baby Mozart. Nothing you do about that if it's happened to you, but without careful handling, it just confirms some other issues (below). By the time you can technically handle a substantial sonata, or concerto, the damage is done. But I suspect my readers here are a bit beyond that and...the damage is done.

2. A concerto. Even if my point about it being his best writing is arguable, there are other reasons. First, many think playing a C-word is big-time. That's inspirational all by itself. Second, any concerto movement, obviously, isn’t as continuous as a sonata movement; you get time off for the orchestra. That is, someone who thinks he/she hates all that Mozart passagework may respond better to a concerto, where it’s...over sooner .

3. Technical. This applies to those beyond beginner. You can’t run and you can't hide. If you’ve not been practicing your scales and arpeggios the right way, if you haven't been practicing Mozart the right way, you have a problem. The pedal can’t save you. The True Solution here is...obvious.

4. Intellectual. If you're of that persuasion, try what I did (above).

5. Aural. Listen to the concerti I listed above. G major has the most sublime slow movement anyone ever wrote. For starters. Please, please hear them with a modern piano; listening to a fortepiano can kill your interest fast. And I say this with absolutely no apologies to...Malcolm Bilson. In a later posting on JSB I'll be talking about the whole authenticity issuel. If none of those concerti move you, perhaps you should consider becoming ...a pastry chef.

Some larger considerations to ponder:

1. You’re up against a cultural thing. The formulaic is hard for modern ears and minds to grasp; I find it very hard to show my students that Homer isn’t just formulae strung together. Just consider, for example, the popularity of nineteenth-century French novels over those of the previous century, even among academics! Hence the value of some intellectualizing. And there just isn’t formulaic music coming over boom-boxes.

2. The most obvious Mozart musical motion is horizontal (diachronic), whereas most later music is vertical (synchronic). Obviously, diachronic has a synchronic component, and vice versa. But modern ears are attuned to the vertical. Such ears find Mozart a bit thin...until they understand the use of formulae and the modulations.

3. The chromatic is omnipresent today (I even heard an ad jingle the other day in...D-flat!). It explains why many will play Bach, very form-oriented, but dodge Mozart. The obvious chromaticism of the former as opposed to the less obvious chromaticism of the latter. Analysis again can help!

Ya see? If the Opinionated One can have a conversion experience on Mozart, anyone can.

Magic Martha

2006-06-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

I've added a link to an excellent fan site on Martha Argerich. The others are certainly good, but this one is my personal favorite. Warning! There is some kinda sad recent news about her.

That said, I've been following her since she started. And she's only gotten better and better. Every so often I read reviews of her in chamber music saying that the other players "tame" her. Phooey. Since when does she need taming? Not to these ears! No one ever said Lazar Berman or Pollini needed taming. I think there are still some gender issues involved. I've been a big supporter of the egalitarian position...forever. Insofar as a male can be a feminist, is me. But it's kinda of sad...all the advances in the last several decades are just a little bit illusory. It's no longer socially acceptable to say overtly sexist things. But that doesn't stop people from thinking them. And every so often those unsavory thoughts bubble up. But I digress....

Actually, it all puts me in mind of when my mother was piano student. She did the Tchaikovsky concerto, and very well. She really wanted to do the Emperor concerto. Her teacher wouldn't let her and insisted she do #4 instead. His reason? Women didn't have the strength for the Emperor; # 4 was "The Girls' Concerto" (exact quote). I'm not sure anyone would say that today, but when I read about "taming" Magic Martha, I wonder just how far the male mind has evolved recently. No, I don't wonder. It hasn't evolved much at all. It's true that there are differences between the genders. That's what makes having two genders just great. Little girls are not just soft little boys. But I remember when women weren't allowed to run marathons. Now they are. But "experts" are proclaiming, allegedly on physiological bases, that a woman can never hold the world record. I don't believe a word of it. Because the one physical gender difference I really believe in, and physiology backs me up, is that women are the stronger sex. So let's hear it for Martha Argerich!

Real arpeggios, real fast

2006-06-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

I'd planned on blogging some other matters today. But Waterfall made such good comments on yesterday's arpeggio entry that I didn't want her comments, or my reply, to be buried in the comments forever. Also comments so generous that I didn't want to leave the impression that I'm better than I am. This isn't false modesty. Sensible people know what they can do, and what they can't do; sensible people are equally honest about both, to themselves and to the world. Waterfall iss behind the practice blog link I've got listed in the links area; if you haven't visited, you really should..

A general point. Arpeggios are a means to an end. Not an end in themselves. No matter how good someone's may be, the real test comes with...how does LH of Liszt's Un Sospiro sound? I personally find them great confidence builders, and good for hand flexibility issues, issues I definitely have. But you wouldn't want me to go Woody Allen on you now (psychological interior decorating, "like dat" as Kojak used to say). So no one should feel bad about their tempo; everyone who's making progress should feel good. Period. There's much too much a macho element in piano playing, sorta like the kids with their jacked up rear ends (cars', not persons') revving at a stoplight.

More specifically. By no means all of my arpeggios are in groups of eight at 80. Some are, some are getting there. My point about progress. I should add that I'm also studying Chopin 25.12, which is a serious arpeggio workout, so there's definite, er, synergy involved. I'm doing just parallel motion, this on my teacher's advice. Her view was that CM is too much trouble, too little gain. Incidentally, she has the same view about doing dominant seventh arpeggios, that if your regular arpeggios are good, dominant seventh (diminished too) just fall into place. At the time I thought, but did not say, "heresy". But the other week I took a couple dominant sevenths for a spin. She was, as usual, right.

There's a final point I hesitate to mention even though it deserves it. One of the barriers to speed is fingers too high. Too high fingers slow you down, and increase wrong notes. So when I'm working on an arpeggio for speed, I as it gets faster I start playing more from the wrist, with the fingers as the final delivery mechanism. Here's why I hesitate. I'm working on about 1.5 measures of Chopin 10.4., the very beginning right after the RH octaves. My teacher pointed out that if you play from the fingers, you never get it even close to tempo. Hence the playing from the wrist. She showed me how, and I'm working on it very carefully. But if anyone wants to try this, if you're not absolutely sure of what you're doing, get your teacher to show you. Don't try this at home.

And a side point on Martha Argerich. I've been following her since she first came on the scene. One of my top three living pianists. If you don't know her Bach recording for DGG, run and get it. It's the real thing. I listen to it in preference to anyone's rendition of JSB.

Last, but certainly not least. This blog is now certified as clean. No suspicion of spam. I found a way to connect with live (anonymous) people among The Powers That Be. So being plaintive worked. In fairness to Blogger. I've read up on spam blogs. They're a real menace, and make the world lousy for everyone. Given the proliferation of legit blogs, I suppose it's inevitable that spam blogs follow suit. So while I found being flagged as a possible spam blog annoying, I can understand what's behind it. At any event, this site is now certified as clean. I wouldn't want my loyal readers to think that...they associated with gaol-birds.

Arpeggios at last!

2006-06-19T08:27:00.000-07:00

Trumpets blare. Drums roll. In the last year my arpeggios have taken a definite turn for the better, especially since early 2006. By that I mean they're more accurate, faster, and more musical. Why should you care? Because it came from a significant change in how I practiced them. But first things first.

I've heard more than once that Martha Argerich has arpeggios as fast as scales. That is, Warp 5, maybe even...Trans-Warp. But down here at the base of Mt. Parnassus, things are different. For most students, regardless of level, arpeggios always play catchup. And I don't think it's their (or our) fault. Take a look, for example, at Cooke. He's got a lot to say about speeding up scales, but nothing similar for arpeggios. Look at any of a number of books, and you see advice like "practice arpeggios the same way you practice scales". That means with various touches, rhythms and dynamics. Sorry, been there, done that, no good. Look at various conservatories which publish tempi for scales and arpeggios at various levels of attainment. Scale requirements are always faster than arpeggio requirements. It's easy to think that this is the nature of things. Groupthink. But think about Magic Martha. In theory it can be done...but do we have to have her formidable talent? As a result of what I'm going to discuss, my arpeggios have gotten much closer to my scales than I would have thought possible. I'm quite satisfied...and I'm sure Martha Argerich will sleep better too.

By way of preface. This assumes that you have them in fairly good shape HS. That getting them beyond a certain point HT seems not in the cards. Uncertainties, dropped notes, yuk. This despite using all the traditional practice methods. That's where I was in January 2006. And my Inspirational Teacher quite unwittingly inspired me. I played scales for her. She: "Good" or "Very good" vel sim. I played arpeggios for her. She: "Not bad". Something went off in my head along the lines of "I'm going to get these to a level where she has to say 'good' ". Also unwittingly, she provided the method. If you visit her www.pianomedia.com and look at the section "Rhythmic Scales" you'll be ready to go.

Here's how I implemented it. I started with the metronome at 60. And took my groupings up to groups of eight. Then I started with groups of three (aka triplets) and did with accents, on each of the notes in turn. Similarly all the way up to groups of eight. I tried with groups of more than eight, but things got messy in my head, so when an arpeggio got reliable with groups of eight, I took the metronome up (in may case to 80, where it is right now; this means the usual 160 for sixteenth notes). Incidentally, I use the metronome to fix the beat; it's counterproductive to play the groups all the time with the metronome. Setting the beat, checking on tempo occasionally is its best use.

Here's the second stage. I still do stage one, but focus on groups which seem most useful. For an arpeggio that needs real work I spend time with it at 60 and groups of three, four, and five. For one that's in good shape which I want to get really moving, I focus on groups of five and seven. At the same time, I practice in groups of 5 and 7 without reference to a metronome speed. Play a group of five as fast as can be while remaining accurate. Then the next one, and so on up and down. Then start on the second note of the arpeggio and do the same thing. Then the third note. Then do the whole thing over with group of seven.

It takes less long than it sounds, but it will take time. I saw substantial progress in a week. And what came of my imaginary grudge match with my teacher? I played one, quite well I think, and here's the dialogue:
She: "Very good."
He: "Aha. Gotcha. No more 'not bad' ."
(Aside to those who wonder if I'm going off on a non-professional's tangent. I explained my method to my teacher, and it has her full approval and support)

I'm back...links and memorizing

2006-06-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

You've surely noticed a time gap in my postings. The last six weeks have been frantic. Exams to compose and grade and all the usual end-of-term madness at the University. A pile of proof to correct for my latest article. Piano practicing and lessons have continued, but I got way behind here. And The Powers That Be have noticed too. This has been flagged, as I write this, as a spam blog! I ask you, are there any of the forbidden spam words here? I didn't think so. My guess is that the automated system bot simply decides if you're not here pouring your heart out on a very regular basis you can't be a real blogger. Ahem. I've sent TPTB a rather sardonic note asking them to complete their review and take me off the s-word list. And to fire their current bot. But moving along to happier matters.

Two new links. Musical Fossils is aimed at the particular issues that older students have, those of us who weren't playing the Emperor Concerto while in Junior High School. Very sympathetic, very helpful when you're feeling funky. The practice blog turned up from a link in another group I frequent. It's simply wonderful, whether or not you're at the author's level. Full, detailed, both on the physical and the emotional; she writes incredibly well, and as an academic I don't say that casually.

Coming soon. My arpeggio post. Some very peculiar Mendelssohn experiences I'm having. But on to memorization!

Clara Schumann began it all in her recitals. Note that even she was human...there's an anecdote about how she got trapped inside Mendelssohn's Spinning Song. But the reasons to, and not to memorize are a whole different matter. What follows are some methods I use; this is an expansion and reworking of a recent post of mine on Pianostreet. There's a zillion, at least, possible tips on this. A very personal thing; what works for one person may not work for another, or if it doesn't work it may point the way to a method which does work. You can spend so much time trying to collect tips...that you don't get anything memorized! Here's one I recently got from my Inspirational Teacher, which I've not yet tried. Xerox the music. Mark through the passages you've memorized as you memorize them.

Here are some methods which work for me -- your experience may be totally different. In no particular order:

1. Move the hand positions. I start by moving RH up and octave, LH stays put. Then RH stays put and LH down and octave. Then both moved. Rationale: gets you away from using solely hand memory. I've found it very useful for counterpoint, JSB in particular.

2. Reverse the hands. RH plays LH where LH is supposed to be, LH similarly for RH. Very humbling; you find out fast how good your non-physical memory is. Rationale: as for #1.

3. Don't just start memorizing with m.1 and go straight through. Take a chunk from the very end, the middle, and close to the start. Helps you to be able to play from any point in the piece.

4. I sometimes find that memorizing a section HS first helps a great deal -- but be warned that once you start putting them together you'll think you've been wasting your time. Don't think that. Persevere!

5. As you're memorizing, every so often put some stress on it. Play on a different piano. Play at odd times: when you start your practice, pre-warmup. First thing in the morning. I tried it once right after a long run and it was...humbling. First thing when you walk into your teacher's studio (I have to travel two hours plus to my lessons, so the F-train to Brooklyn puts on all sorts of extra stress).

6. Different techniques for different kinds of pieces. I find I can memorize pieces with lots of chords very easily, almost like "when I can play it I've memorized it." So I might spend more time working on starting at odd places in a measure. With counterpoint, I do this too, but probably more time on # 1 & 2 (above).

7. Many recommend doing in-depth analysis of a piece before memorizing. I've never found it helps me memorize, but many swear by it. I do work out various non-technical hooks, i.e. at one spot, LH descends a third, RH ascends a second. That is, hooks, whether formal or home-brewed, work for me on places I find hard.

8. Bernhard's dropped-notes technique (find it via the Pianostreet link). Like everything he's posted, tremendously useful. I use it for difficult passages, and for memorizing passages that I just can't "get".

9. Double-notes (I got this from a published interview with Mark Westcott, who uses it for scales.) Play the first two notes together, then hold the second note and play the third, and so forth. Good both for hard passages and memorizing.

10. Triple notes. Play the first note with a strong accent, then the next two w/o. Then the next note with its two following notes. If the passage is triplets, do as if it were sixteenth notes.

11. Away from the piano. Many swear by this, some swear at it. I've not used it often, but the couple of times I have the results have been good. Why don't I use it more? Simple. In my professional life I spend so much time solely bent over a book...that's it's psychologically hard for me to do the same for music.

I don't use all of these all the time with the exceptions of #3 & 5. Some may work for you, some may never work, some may guide you to something which does work.

Printed Matters (more links)

2006-04-15T07:19:00.000-07:00

Books first, then sheet music. Why books? Who wants to bother with words about music? Don't get me started since I'm already started. Yes, I'm an academic, so words about music are predictable. Yes, I've got some bias since my first EX is a first-rate musicologist. But it's not just that. Music didn't get composed in a vacuum. Without words about music you might play Bach from the Czerny editions, or slavishly follow Beethoven's metronome marks. Without words about music you'll follow Received Piano Tradition and learn each voice of a Bach fugue before doing it HT (there will be a later entry on this with excruciating detail). Without words about music you'll never grasp how Brahms combined Bach and Beethoven...and your playing will sound like it. And this just for the Three Bs. True, it's time away from the keyboard, but there's one whole side of playing which doesn't come from your physique, but from your grey matter. So if you think of the piano as a very expensive cross-training machine, you're not going to be very happy with this entry.

Actually, I'm not trying to lay advanced theory on you, or excruciating musicological details either. Rather, I'm giving a brief annotated list of some books I constantly use. In no particular order.

Maurice Hinson, Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire covers an amazing amount of territory. It's a great way to find out about other works of composers you like, or learn about still more composers. Suggestions on editions, useful short summaries of the works, and bibliographies make it even more useful. Many of the pieces are graded, but you have to be careful with that. While there's no doubt that getting the notes right in the Hammerklavier requires, er, a bit more training than Chopin's Prelude in A, that's not quite the point. He's also done a volume on transcriptions which is somewhat less useful, simply because there are so many, often obscure, that complete coverage would require more than any one mortal possesses.

William Westney, The Perfect Wrong Note. Learning to Trust Your Musical Self. An amazing book. Changes how you think about practicing. Instead of taking a wrong note as something to be ashamed of and to fix asap, take it as valuable data. Your body is telling you something. Learn to hear what it's saying and what to do about it. This totally changed my attitudes on practicing, and my attitudes were fairly good already.

Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments. A collection of some of his essays. For those who don't know, he studied with Rosenthal and is one fiendishly talented major pianist. I recall a lecture on Schumann, where every so often he'd walk from the lectern to the piano and dash off a couple of bars (perfectly) from the Symphonic Etudes. He's not just a performer, but a scholar with a doctorate in French Lit from Princeton. The ultimate embodiment of why words about music matter. It's hard to go wrong with any of his books. The Classical Style is probably his most famous, but these essays make him easy of approach. He writes regularly in many places; a recent article of his on Mendelssohn totally changed my thinking...for the better. His Piano Notes. The World of the Pianist deals with performance matters, and if you still think that people write about music because they can't perform it well, think again (and listen to some of his recordings too).

Dean Elder, Pianists at Play. A collection of some of the interviews he conducted for Clavier. Here they are edited and in some cases updated. It's always stimulating to read what the biggies think about their career, how they practice, what it all means. Not to be missed is the lengthy interview with the legendary Inspirational Teacher, Adele Marcus. Aside from an enormous amount of information that anyone of even moderate advancement can use, you can read her famous account of when she sent a pupil, the then-young Byron Janis, to play for Horowitz. Horowitz phoned her the next day "You know his octaves is faster than mine. But don't you think I sound better?"

Walter Piston, Harmony. A book you can use to learn, but which you won't outgrow. The best non-technical discussion of secondary dominants I've ever read. A composer ought to know.

As for sheet music. I've added a link to my favorite dealer. Hutchins and Rea are simply wonderful. There has never been a glitch with an order, and I order from them often. A big advantage is they list how many copies, if any, they have of a given item. They know what they're selling; I'd been wondering why Wiener Urtext editions were so often on back order, and a chat with Bill Rea cleared that up nicely. The ultimate example: I ordered a transcription of the Bach D Minor "Dorian" Toccata and Fugue. They called an hour later and asked if I knew that I wanted that one rather than the more famous D Minor T&F. There are two other stores which I mention here, but don't have in my links list because of infrequency. Burt & Company has a very easy to use search engine and make it very easy to track your order. Unfortunately, you don't know what's in stock until they have tried to fill your order (but you can check this online), which for me is a drawback. You can find them at www.burtnco.com. Patti Music Company has a nice printed catalogue, but I've not been totally happy with them. The order takers are just that; if you don't have the catalogue number of the item, they're lost. Put differently, don't try ordering like "send me the Laredo edition of Rachmaninoff Op. 23 and Arrau's Beethoven Sonatas." You don't know what's in stock until they've tried to fill it, and to do that...you have to deal with the ordering minions, and I have serious doubt those minions know what Middle C is. Still: www.pattimusic.com.

Finally the sheet music download link. It's run by a pianist, a very fine pianist. It's a pay site, but with very moderate prices. You can view, and print, the first page of any of their offerings, and they encourage you to do this. Downside: editions are public domain, so if you think you're going to get Arrau's Beethoven Sonatas on the cheap (they're not that expensive, anyhow), think again. Upside: they have most of the standards, and an amazingly wide selection of the less well-known.

Of course, there are sites where all manner of in-copyright works are available. Fie, fie! I've never understood why people will pay big $$$ for a piano, fork over regular $$$ for lessons...and think sheet music should be free. Same thing in the computer world. Sheet music isn't so terribly expensive, and your purchases keep the publishers publishing. It's not that I'm a copyright troll. Since I'm an academic I know all about fair use and do fair use all the time in my professional life. And in my music life. But asking someone to scan and post Arrau's Beethoven Sonatas is definitely not fair use. Sorry people, but that's how it is; if you think you shouldn't have to pay for sheet music, any sheet music, you're not my kind of people.

First things (some links)

2006-04-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

As the title suggests. I've started to populate this place with links.They need some elaboration, and that will raise any number of other considerations.

First, about the two forums. I've chosen the two which I frequent, and that's not a negative on the other ones out there. Each is different, so here's an opinionated (you might have guessed) guide. Pianoworld has an especially active area on the purchase of pianos. People ask about just every make and model, and the denizens are never without an opinion. Many dealers frequent the area too. The discussions can get a little robust at times, and at least one member left out of revulsion at same. Overall, very valuable if you're in the market for a piano. By the way, I play an August Förster 170. Pianoworld also has an Adult Beginner section, for adults just starting or starting over again. The denizens are very supportive of anxieties, and for those inevitable times when you feel you're never going to get anywhere. Pianostreet is the one I go to for repertoire and performance matters; incidentally, it's how I found my current Inspirational Teacher (more on her in a minute). There can be a bit of a macho element at times: someone asks for a not-too-hard Liszt piece, and a joker suggests Mephisto. But the jokers are easy to tune out. One of the real regulars is Bernhard, whose posts on a wide variety of learning and repertoire issues are an education in themselves. Not to be missed!

As for my Inspirational Teacher. No matter what your level, you need to keep learning from other people. In my academic career, although I'm a fully qualified and experienced professional I'm constantly seeking advice and comments from others. Same point about the piano, especially at the learning stages. A really good teacher can make all the difference but, at the same time, no teacher is better than a bad teacher. Luckily, I've had two of the "really good" variety; for that read Inspirational. A really good teacher will be student-specific rather than "this is what everyone must play at this stage." A really good teacher will never make you feel like a pastry chef, but will seek to build on what you do well, and help you make your weak areas into your strong ones. A really good teacher will be open to new ideas, even if some of yours may be a bit strange. A really good teacher will be brimming with musicality and will share that with you to develop your musicality. I consider myself blessed to have such a teacher, and I vote with my feet; it's about 2.5 hours' travel each way to get to her studio. And, last but not least, she plays a truly wicked Chopin 10.4. Trust me. I've heard many of the biggies play it live, and many more recordings, and her rendition is the one I'd want to live with.

I'd thought about including some comments on books and music editions, but that's a whole entry in itself. Soon.

In the beginning....

2006-04-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

My title and description say it all, at least to me. Perhaps I'd better share with my readers. Although I am a pianist, that's not my career (university-level academic in a not-so-musical discipline). So if you're planning to enter the next Cliburn, or are looking for thoughts from someone who's placed at Warsaw...you may want to surf on. On the performance side for the moment, let's just say that the Anna Magdalena pieces ceased to be difficult a very long time ago (on the one hand), and (on the other hand) that I have no desire to play Prokofiev's "Black Mass" sonata but, then, I don't much care to listen to it either. On the listening side, I've been even longer; the first recording I remember hearing was of the Bach Brandenburgs when I was five.

So why am I here? There are some very fine piano discussion places where I'm a regular (links to be posted). But learning and listening and playing is an ongoing process. To try to use one of those already-existing places to write about personal musical journeys would definitely not be manners. Blogs are, er, a different story. So I want to use this to put up random thoughts I have while practicing -- a new way to practice counterpoint, my experiences with modal scales, research on Bach performance practices...you get the picture. Frustrations and triumphs. The technical side of it all matters greatly to me -- hence the A-word in my title. And I have strong opinions about what to play and how to play it, opinions which are constantly changing (there was a time when I refused to play Mozart). And random thoughts while listening. Which will, dis volentibus, generate some random thoughts from readers. And we'll all get something out of it.

Finally, a "not" reason. I am not here out of desire to see my name and writings on the screen and, presumably, whirling around to other screens in cyberspace. Trust me on this! My academic career, the research and publication side of it, means I've seen my name and writings in print...a lot. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with enjoying your name in print or on the screen, but it doesn't motivate me. And I think it does motivate a considerable amount of self-published, excruciatingly boring twaddle. This I can promise -- whatever else you think about this blog, boring it will not be.