The first movement of Beethoven’s Opus 101 is an extended, wordless run-on sentence. Theoretically, we may understand that no satisfying cadence in A major occurs until the very end of the movement. But what player has the gumption, the courage, to play this music like your friend’s long, winding story, a tale that really won’t end, won’t resolve, won’t let in enough air — so you’re in suspense, so you can hardly form other thoughts, so you can’t get a word in edgewise?

In a masterclass, Alfred Brendel observed that too much dynamic tapering of lines (played on the piano) runs the risk of separating the softest notes into what seem like new phrase units. (Under consideration was the beginning of Schubert’s B-flat Sonata, D. 960.) Less shape may better preserve linear continuity, and voice-part integrity.

As I understand it, this relates to what Mr. Brendel so highly values in Alfred Cortot’s 1933 recording of Chopin’s E-Minor Prelude. In this recording, according to Brendel, Cortot manages to sustain independent continuous strands of texture.

With each piano there is the question of how much timbral change the instrument manifests between a loud note and a soft note, and how much the left pedal colors the sound, if the left pedal is to be used extensively. In piano playing, very soft notes at the end of a tapered phrase can too easily seem to belong to another “voice.”

I believe the new low “E” on Beethoven’s new clavier motivated him to cast the Opus 101 Sonata in the key of A — where E would be the dominant harmony. The incredible harmonic withholding and stretching of gesture through time in the sonata’s first movement fits well in the big picture of the piece, but especially so if we can render it without real pause, without conventional breath organization, running it on and on and on, hovering, until the oddity of this discourse becomes palpable.

Beethoven: Opus 101, last movement

In B.o.B.’s “So Good,” the word groups “how you feel [fe-el],” “fantasy oh,” “put your feet up,” and “Señorita” are made almost to rhyme, and conform to the same four-syllable emphasis-pattern. The sound is the word is the music is the sound. It’s joy-inducing virtuoso display.

Wordless music also offers possibilities for sonic enharmony.

I first encountered Brahms’s A-Minor Intermezzo, Opus 116, no. 2 through Arthur Schnabel‘s recording. One detail in the playing so captivated me — it might be what made me want to learn the entire Opus 116 set.

In Schnabel’s recording, the notes including the Scotch snaps in measures 51 and 52, are ellided in such a way that the sonority, the syncopated rhythm, the emphasis pattern, the voice-leading, dissonance and resolution are so much of one piece, the elements resist being teased apart. (The half-notes in the alto voice begin the second syllable of four-syllable groupings…)

Brahms: Intermezzo in A Minor, opus 116, no. 2, mm. 51-52

I can’t say that the notation, the text, leads clearly to Schnabel’s performance. But I coveted the synergy of that performance in my own recording, twenty years later.

And this four-syllable pattern of emphasis, this lexia, is with us still (“how you fe-el”).

As I was rehearsing with Ursula Oppens for our recent performance and recording of Meredith Monk’s piano music, a few passages were particular puzzles. Some apparently simple rhythms — when played “idiomatically” — fit together only with considerable attention.

One such passage is near the beginning of my 2-piano transcription of “totentanz” from Meredith’s large work impermanence:

The top staff is played by one player, the bottom two staves by the other player. We found that the rhythm pattern of the upper part is not satisfying if the eighth-notes are played very evenly, as subdivisions of the quarter-note pulse. An aesthetically better (?) rendering quickens the eighth-note pairs and may begin them very slightly late, or end them slightly early — in the first measure, the eighth-notes begin slightly late, for example.

I invite you to try playing the upper line in a way that satisfies you.

None of that matters too much to staying together, until measure 3. In the first two bars, the lower part has long notes, and they can be coordinated with the upper part, even if compressed eighth-notes are played. In measure 3 though, the lower part has eighth-notes (a kind of demented waltz-upbeat figure) that need to arrive on a precisely-together downbeat at the beginning of bar 4.

What I believe I learned is that if the lower-part player mimics the duration of eighth-note that’s played in the upper part in bar 3, it will not quite work. The lower-part player is likely to come in with eighth-notes that are too fast to fit with what’s going on above. In practice, the eighth-notes played in the lower part are probably going to be longer in duration than the eighth-note that’s heard in the upper part…

Listening for a compound rhythm made of the moving notes in both parts (in measure 3) can help, if you recognize that the durations of the various eighth-notes are not going to be equal:

 
This isn’t exactly a matter of performance practice. It is a matter of interface between music, and performance in time. Perhaps that’s what “performance practice” is? But we might add something: in time, and “of a time.” Come back in twenty years, the passage may need to sound different.

This is an important practice in a world where intellectual property is functionally and conceptually challenged, a world in which much interesting “new” art is a making of pathways through the accumulated culture of the past – “postproduction art,” as Nicolas Borriaud terms it.

It’s difficult to preserve, in theory or practice, a clear distinction between appropriating pre-made material coming from inside and outside a project. And long standing questions about the granularity of ideas are everyday challenges. Can an intertext of one note be a “theft”? One chord? Which four notes are a lexia?

Clover-v!

I’ve read of Busoni returning to the hall to play through an entire concert after the audience departed. For me, it seems a bad idea, a misunderstanding. What has “gone wrong” in a performance, what doesn’t satisfy the player, frequently doesn’t result from lack of practicing or lack of physical skill. Problems arrise from a lack of readiness for the encounter with the heightened awareness, the fluttering stomach, the frisson of the concert.

I can get ready more reliably by drawing a frame around my playing, previewing the once-and-only-once mindset of the concert. And as I don’t play after run-throughs, I also do not play for 30 minutes before run-throughs.

I take the sometimes bitter pill and do not touch the piano.

Let’s not deny teachers provide models. Following from my own teacher Jacob Lateiner, I sit apart from my students, at some distance. I read from a separate copy of the printed music. I aim not to demonstrate on the piano. I do sing notes, intervals, or phrases. When I arrived at New England Conservatory I had the second piano removed from my teaching room.

It may seem that a piano lesson is a passing-on of specifics, techniques of playing, and details regarding particular pieces of music. “Today, we will learn Chopin’s First Ballade.” I was somewhat perplexed though, at a well-known summer master class series, when I was asked, “Do you teach the piece, or do you teach the student?” Following came something like: “Mr. Fleisher teaches the piece.” (And a few celebrated teachers do offer a student only a single lesson per piece. All there is to say?)

I prefer to believe that what’s happening in a “lesson” is the scrutiny and exploration of process. That’s why very satisfying work can occur with music not known in advance by the “teacher.” All those details of enunciation, metric grouping, fingering, the pedal — are not the point. From lessons the student comes to know, as Schoenberg puts it, “… that one must come to grips with all the problems — not how to.”

When explanation and singing won’t do it and I succumb to playing during a student’s lesson — it feels like a little failure. Better for the synthesis of ideas and the grappling with issues to lead to sounds arising from within the student, the analysand.

I am the pianist’s wife, Hurrah
Hurrah for the pianist’s wife!
Ah yes, it is a gruesome [glorious] life
To be the pianist’s wife.

Wanda, Nela, Naomi — that’s a lineage. Helpmates, sounding boards, ghost writers, taskmasters, goads. Paula had lessons from Tracy Taub…

Maxims and Citations:

“Always take home as many programs as you can carry.”

“After the concert, in the green room, if the playing was bad, be a spin doctor. Tell ‘em it was great!”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Pressler/Lowenthal/Frager can’t speak with you now.”

“The audience seemed to love it, but I had a heartattack in that place in the first movement.”

For a long time, this work was accomplished with photocopying, scissors, or paper cutter, and adhesive tape. The pianist Judith Gordon called it “arts and crafts.”

Some outsized pasteups were made to occupy the entire width of a piano’s music rack. Ten letter-sized sheets of the first movement of my copy of Edward Steuermann’s Sonata were mounted five-over-five on a single large cardboard. (No page turns, and no page turner!)

Orchestra musicians may make a physical cut between lines, horizontally slicing through a page in a bound part. That can allow the top part of the page to be turned at a convenient moment, revealing what’s next — a workaround for an awkward page break.

Robert Mann‘s string-quartet parts were notably hand-crafted, often considerably reduced in size and taped together, minimizing the number of page turns.

Calling this “arts and crafts” might seem just a clever turn of phrase, but the interconnection of hand, mind, heart, and spirit is great. After preparing an improved layout for a piece, I sometimes find I can play the music better right away.

Laptops, new monitors and technology are changing all this. In much earlier times, composers or copyists prepared most parts. (Separate wind parts were needed for Bach’s two Leipzig churches because the two organs were quite differently pitched…)

Hand copying music was a means of musical learning — like the copying of paintings by art students. Musicians such as Brahms spent hundreds of hours copying out rare music for use and education.

When Gustav Mahler or George Szell reorchestrated classical symphonies it necessitated that an orchestra librarian or a copyist handwrite inserts for the musicians’ parts. (Recent research is identifying Mahler’s copyists…)

After a recording session, I spend hours listening to the material I record. Eventually I make an editing-plan. After all that listening, and contemplating what goes with what, my playing of the pieces improves — without further practice or performing. The hands-on (hands-off?) work with the musical material affects me.

Right now, I’m preparing two-piano arrangements of several pieces by Meredith Monk. I figure out which material goes to each player and notate my version.

I think my playing of the music is improving — even though I haven’t started practicing it.

It’s a spare video. (There’s a single image of a lake.) This music is featured in the cult-fav TV show Battlestar Galactica. And a lot of BSG fans find the video. The music’s also used in NPR’s This American Life and that yields “hits” for the vid.

Last year, “Very-Famous-Celebrity” comedian Michael Ian Black made the album that has this recording of Metamorphosis One on it, his album of the year — though this “album-of-the-year” was released a decade earlier.

All this intertextuality brings waves of views to the YouTube clip.

Last week, the video was referenced in and linked to a fanfic called “Little Numbers.” LN is about the characters Kurt and Blaine on the cult-hit TV show Glee. A hypertext, this fanfic is in the form of a series of text messages:

(2:13)
And you could listen to the music I’m listening to.

(2:14)
Mhhh. And what would that be?

(2:15)
Since I’m on my phone, I only have a youtube link for you, sorry.

(2:15)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL8lQU_1a-w

(2:16)
You can also pretend that I’m playing it.

Fans of Kurt and Blaine refer to them as Klaine. And all kinds of words can be derived therefrom: klainer, klaining…

It’s clear from new comments, this video’s been Klaimed. So many fandoms, so many cults — now 300,000 views.