PianoMorphosis

To have lived in grander rooms,
I sometimes think,
would have been --
well, grander.

Until I walk into my other room,
quickly come to the piano
and see
the window I looked out of,
as I learned Brahms's Concertos.

By some, it's considered a mark of distinction to play J. S. Bach's music on the modern piano using no pedal. Glenn Gould often did. Several of my students have aspired to. It seems like it must be harder to play that way, more pure, more noble. And the harpsichord has no such device for extending sound -- so perhaps it's more "authentic" to eschew the pedal in old music?

I always use the pedal. Perhaps judiciously or even undetectably -- to the non-pianist. But always. It's a bit of an obsession. I believe the piano's right pedal (that raises the dampers and allows sounds to be held or overlapped) is integral to the operation of the instrument. Really good pedaling is rare. The "close-up" of the modern recording is revealing. Tiny intersections between notes in a musical line, or transition from one harmony to the next, are more audible than in a concert hall. Especially in quiet music, subtle pedaling really matters in recordings.

I played a concert in Luxembourg that was linked to performances by one of my students -- who likes to play old music on the modern piano using no pedal. I thought as a sort of homage I would play the tricky last movement of a piano sonata by Haydn without any pedal. I have to admit it felt a bit risky, until I actually started to work on the piece that way. Then I learned something: it's easier to play complicated fast piano music without the pedal!

The necessarily rapid changes of pedal in fast music introduce an added layer of syncopated physical activity that greatly increases the difficulty of the overall task. It's patting your head and rubbing your tummy on a grand scale. It's "syncopated" in that the changes of pedal accomplished with the foot do not quite line up in time with the gestures being made by fingers and hand. The motor coordination required is much more complex than playing with the fingers alone.

The syncopated, overlapping binding of sound with the right pedal (that pianists now take for granted) may not have developed until the 1830s. Imagine slow movements of piano pieces by Mozart or Beethoven without the smooth connection of the foot... Typical pedaling in the middle 18th Century featured long sustained stretches of unchanging pedal -- we see the evidence in Beethoven's and Haydn's markings.

As I practiced my unpedaled Haydn rendition, a difficult spot in the music that always challenged me was now easy. Aha, Gould was on to something!

In recent reviews, I've read about the structural shortcomings of Robert Schumann's Humoreske and the emotional emptiness of Pierre Boulez's piano sonatas. When I proposed a complete performance of Messiaen's Catalog of the Birds in Boston some colleagues told me it wasn't good music. Let's be cautious about reaching such judgments.

Just because we have not yet heard (or given) a performance that makes sense of a scripted piece -- I don't believe we can know that the composition is flawed. And just because I may never "get" Schumann's Faschingsschwank doesn't mean future performers or listeners will not, or that past performers and listeners did not.

Some music comes to us more easily, or comes more easily at certain times, in particular places, or in particular environments. Some art seems more rooted in time and place. And art's significations continue changing, as its context and the larger culture change.

Some music is more easily represented in writing or lends itself to the notational practices used -- as read by me now. Some fantastic music is only uneasily conveyed through script.

There are magnificent compositions -- even old pieces, even often-played pieces (!) -- still awaiting performances that might reveal their wonder.

What leads to professional success as a musician?

Talent matters. The ability to hear and feel and think. Digital dexterity. Work. Perhaps luck, or chance, or random events play their parts in many careers. And there are other elements of "talent." Some artists interest us. The sounds they make compel. We want them around, we want them to be part of our life.

There are so many young musicians of real ability and achievement who do not make commercially successful musical careers. What happens? Are there just too many of them? Do they lack perseverance? Do they lack what Marian Seldes described as the performer's necessary capacity to absorb disappointment?

Certainly I recollect many pianists who impressed me tremendously in their teens and twenties who have now disappeared from view. I'm thinking of musicians of very high order. It can seem sad, arbitrary, or wrong.

A manager or teacher may have prescience about who can make it. Often, I believe we are too careful. We may just be encouraging those who are most like us. Can it be we are trying to perpetuate our musical world, with all its limitations?

A real success would be the youngster who can blow the lid right off.

You might drink some exceptional wine from a highly-prized and highly-priced vineyard in Burgundy. But if you're in the know or lucky, this vin might come labeled simply as "Bourgogne" and cost 10 euros instead of hundreds. The wine has been "declassified." Sold as something more generic and less valuable that what it really is. Government regulations in France and elsewhere stipulate how much can be produced and labeled from the most venerable appellations. With modern agriculture, there's often a lot of great wine made at these properties, and then sold off or blended. I drank some of Anne Gros' plain "Bourgogne Rouge." Wow!

Perhaps the quality of musical performance used to follow expectable patterns. Big city orchestra. Small university faculty quartet. A pianist playing at Carnegie Hall. A pianist with a degree from a western state university.

Now, there are so many exceptional musicians coming from everywhere -- classical music performance has been declassified. Sometimes the really good stuff comes in a plain bottle. Sometimes the amazing musical communication is taking place in Northampton, or Ames.

Old assumptions don't serve very well. It doesn't mean the "grands crus" are not good anymore. It does mean that sometimes the same experience may be much more accessible to many more imbibers. We just need to get our senses, our receptors, our taste buds working and ready.

Walking down the sidewalk, I sometimes fasten on a phrase from a classical piece in my mind's ear. I make it into a loop. Over and over I hear it, hum it, sing it, effectively turning the bit of music by Beethoven, or Mozart, Gershwin, Schoenberg, or Radiohead into minimalism. I go through the phrase dozens of times. I'm stuck on it and in it -- an obsessive, vastly-extendable run-on sentence, an earworm.

Did people used to do this? Strolling in Paris in the 1840s? Or sauntering through Vienna in 1784? I doubt it.

Before mass production pervaded life, before repeatable sound recordings, I imagine that the impulse, the motivation to make musical loops was much weaker.

Of course, there have been wheels for a long time. Turning around and around. And horses. The rhythmic patterns of a lot of classical music show the instincts of the rider, and the sensations of the passenger in a coach.

The horse's galloping or the turning of the coach wheel was repetitive, but it was repetition in the service of moving from one place to another. Travelling.

Even though my musical loops often occur when I'm walking, I have the impression that their repetitiousness is not about moving forward linearly. On the contrary, it's about not being able to.

There I was in the green room, about to play at the Gilmore Festival.

Included on the program was Chopin's Polonaise-fantaisie -- music I've performed, coveted, engaged with, grappled with for 30 years. Over time, I've exorcised, from my playing of the piece, the details and atmosphere of Vladimir Horowitz' 1966 recording. (The sounds that were my first contact with this music.) Lately, I've been trying to construe the Polonaise-fantaisie's admittedly detailed script as the traces of a fantasized, or fictionalized, extemporaneous musical action! Instead of the practiced brilliance of certainty, I'd welcome the wonder of not knowing so exactly what's coming next.

Do modern classical performers spend too much effort trying to play with surface perfection? I'm not sure what playing "perfectly" would be exactly. It's true that a lot of work can go into getting all the notes in the "right" places. How important this is and how obsessive we become about it varies. Certainly there is perfect playing that seems far from ideal music-making. And there are vivid, lively performances in which missed notes don't seem to matter.

It crossed my mind in the green room that if I delivered a "note-perfect" performance of the Polonaise-fantaisie, I would die! And soon.

Would it be daring the gods? (Surely accidents are so frequent in playing scripted music that we don't have to fear not-making mistakes?) Would it be that in the exact realization of the script (whatever "exact" really is, and to what level of scrutiny?) the "life" would be drained away, leaving the music and me -- in my moment of mystical thinking -- dead?

Although perhaps not directly related to his playing, the pianist Simon Barere did collapse and die at Carnegie Hall, in the midst of a performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto. (Isn't there a Neil Simon character who prays not to die -- on Third Avenue?) Perhaps expiration while playing Brahms at the Musikverein would be preferred?

During my actual performing in Michigan, I forgot about my dare to the devil. A couple of days later, I recalled an audible wrong note in the performance. In a place where a quiet low bass E appears in the notation, I also depressed the adjacent E sharp. That little mistake may keep me humble. Anyway it's keeping me alive.

"You can't play the next note until you finish this one." Obvious, yet how often classical performers truncate or even skip something. Particularly in anxious moments, or when difficulties, or the unexpected occur, the musical equivalent of a syllable or even a whole "word" is dropped or omitted.

A musical score is an order of events. Rhythm and speed may be indicated, but most significantly we read that the soprano voice resolves from C to B, and then, and only then, after that resolution, the bass voice will sound a G.

In a chamber music performance, if the violinist lingers over a cadence, I will also. And, if my right hand needs or takes extra time to play a note, the other parts of the texture will have to accommodate. Some asynchrony can be lovely, but if my sonata partner waits a very long time, too long, then so must I--making sense of the odd nuance if I can, but not letting "N" come before "M," putting the "cart before the horse," or "jumping the gun."

To achieve a performance, in chamber playing (or with orchestra!), where every event, every gesture occurs in order, audibly, with supple, somewhat free rhythmic delivery--that's the definition of an eloquent performance. It requires a virtuosity of listening, and even predicting the immediate future.

For the pianist, it's true also in solo playing. To hear how the particular piano action under my hand renders a rhythm and how the notes speak in the acoustics of the room, this determines what comes next, and how it comes next, and even, exactly--NOW--when the next note will be played.

Not an habitué of nightclubs, boîtes, or other dens of musical iniquity -- I have played 4 times at New York's Le Poisson Rouge since it opened. In case you didn't know, this is the "it" place of the new millenium. A club (in the expensively refurbished premises of the former Village Gate) where music, high-toned classical, alt classical, and bands comingle, and drinks are served. It's caught the attention of the Establishment. Countless mentions and reviews in the New York Times (almost to a point of parody -- LPR performances are more often covered than concerts at Carnegie). I first played as an opening act for Max Richter. The place was full of fans -- his. And that's been a strategy for Ronen Givony, one of the LPR masterminds -- start an evening with some relatively friendly new classical and follow with music of greater commercial appeal.

LPR is not without parallel elsewhere. The Yellow Lounge in Berlin -- although held in changing venues and supported by Deutsche Grammophon. And, in London, Limelight and some events at the much larger Roundhouse.

In New York, I've played at John Zorn's converted Chinese restaurant The Stone. It's hip (?) but not as swanky as LPR, and no refreshments to wash down the art. Sonic conditions in these "alternative" venues may not be as fine as uptown concert halls. I've usually amplified subtly to give a bit of added ressonance. The impact of the performances is something else. After I played Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time at the Poisson Rouge, after nearly an unbroken hour of music, the listeners -- many of whom had never heard of Messiaen before and never heard anything like this music before -- stood and cheered.

notes on my program at the Gilmore Festival last week

The piano has always been a virtual instrument. "Virtual" in the sense that for a phrase the keyboardist could sing, or dance, or speak -- by turns, taking on the musical or expressive persona of an Italian coloratura soprano, a violin virtuoso, a country dancer, a marching soldier, or then a whole orchestra, or a madrigal group reading from part books. Robert Schumann commented that Beethoven's piano music always imitates something else -- the piano never sounds like a piano.

Postmodern music is full of allusions, borrowings, or theft! There are measures of music in some of Philip Glass's genial, middle-of-the-keyboard piano pieces that could be mistaken for brief excerpts from piano pieces by Robert Schumann or Brahms. According to musicologist Susan McClary, these pieces by Glass take on, or mimic, the "subjective interiority" of nineteenth-century, Middle-European living-room music. I started playing Glass's etudes in 1996, after he gave me a copy of the first six. On the surface of this music, there are continuous patterns of repetition.

The notion of "fantasy" is crucial to piano music. The instrument is a quick sketch pad, a place to explore, or dream. Yes, ways of music-making are drawn from other instruments and voices, from singing and speaking. But keyboard music can conjure, associating and recombining thoughts and behaviors from the external non-keyboard world. Schumann's Opus 111 is filled with transubstantiation: a sinuous accompaniment turns into melody, ambiguous meters reflect chordal structure. The first piece in Opus 111, with its unbreakable thread of quick notes, is rather like Elliott Carter's Caténaires or Richard Beaudoin's Black Wires, twenty-first-century piano pieces in which bending, unending lines span or connect larger events.

While he was still a student at Juilliard, I commissioned Nico Muhly to write a piece that would serve as "mortar" for a concert I played at Alice Tully Hall. Nico's Music in Transition connected together the performance of a string quartet (by Glass) and a classical piano sonata. A few years later, he provided electronic commentaries and "graffiti" that were overlaid on my live performances of two piano sonatas by Haydn.

Backstage, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, after we gave a Haydn performance, I asked Nico about writing some new piano music, possibly with electronic sounds. Somehow, in Drones & Piano, fragments of Haydn, as well as lexia from lots of other music I play -- John Adams' Phrygian Gates, a phrase of Janáček via Alvin Curran, the drones in Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes -- all appear.

The making of scripts, of writing down music, leads to questions. In scripted plays or movies, we often want and expect the impression of spontaneity. We want our actors to live and breathe -- to appear to have free will. And in music! How can we arrive at this result?

Just getting all the details right in a complicated written-down musical piece can take so much work and attention that it may seem to complete the task of the pianist. It's just a beginning. Chopin's Polonaise-fantaisie seems to me to hover at an intersection of artful design and ecstatic improvisation. Chopin grappled with this music. The unexpected but seemingly inevitable way that the second theme arises from whispered arpeggios and then turns into a grand tonic-key peroration could have strongly influenced Richard Wagner -- if Liszt played the piece to him. In a single phrase, the proud, taut polonaise-rhythm can somehow morph into florid and emotionally extroverted bel canto singing. As detailed as this musical text is, it's only a trace of the music, it only offers hints and clues.

Music is useful. How each generation and group of listeners and players hear it, how we touch our instruments to make sounds always shows more about us and our time than anything about history. The surroundings, the context for hearing a new piece affects the way we take it in. But, with each new artwork, with each new performance and every concert we hear, we are subtly changed. We are re-centered. And we bring all the music of the past along for the ride, shifting and resettling. The continuing importance of the legacy of classical music is newly experienced and felt, each time our hands coax sounds from a piano, or bows draw sound from strings. Each time we listen or hear anything, we move forward, changing willfully, or inadvertently -- one step, one sound at a time.

program:

Philip Glass: Etude No. 5 (1994 version)
Robert Schumann: Fantasy Piece, Opus 111, No. 1
Glass: Etude No. 4 (1994 version)
Schumann: Fantasy Piece, Opus 111, No. 2
Nico Muhly: Drones & Piano
Frédéric Chopin: Polonaise-fantaisie, Opus 61
Glass: Etude No. 3 (1994 version)
Muhly: Drones & Piano (reprise)