{"id":322,"date":"2009-04-06T07:08:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-06T07:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp\/2009\/04\/tail_wind\/"},"modified":"2020-07-19T17:34:20","modified_gmt":"2020-07-19T21:34:20","slug":"tail_wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/2009\/04\/tail_wind.html","title":{"rendered":"Tail wind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My flight to Los Angeles took over six hours. Coming back to the east coast with a strong tail wind making the flight easier and faster, the flight lasted only four hours and twelve minutes.<\/p>\n<p>Rudolf Serkin is sometimes credited with having said: &#8220;Playing the piano is easy, if everything goes well.&#8221; Raising the question, &#8220;What about when it doesn&#8217;t go well?&#8221; Then it&#8217;s harder, then it takes more fuel. Then, you need to be an &#8220;expert,&#8221; a <span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"mt-image-right\" style=\"float: right;margin: 25px 3px 8px 38px\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/PlaneAJ2.jpg\" alt=\"PlaneAJ2.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"160\"><\/span>&#8220;master,&#8221; a &#8220;virtuoso.&#8221; It&#8217;s true of being a surgeon, or a president, or a pilot &#8212; you need to be at your best, most insightful, most steady, most adroit, when things are worst, when things are not going well. (That&#8217;s why in practicing music we might not stop when &#8220;mistakes&#8221; occur, but actually use &#8220;misfortune&#8221; as an opportunity to continue from a mistake, without stopping.)<\/p>\n<p>And momentary adversity can lead to expression or beauty in art.<\/p>\n<p>In a pre-concert recital at Mostly Mozart at Lincoln Center, I was playing a piece I know well, Scarlatti&#8217;s Sonata in C Major, K. 513. (This was at a time when I didn&#8217;t embellish or elaborate much on the script). In the opening pastorale, I played a strongly dissonant melody note &#8212; a mistake. I was shocked, and angry, and instantly hot with fear. Without knowing consciously what I was doing, I then made up a little ornament and continued on with Scarlatti&#8217;s text. I didn&#8217;t like what I had done. But, listening to a recording of the performance much later, it seemed this moment was not only musically plausible, but one of the most vibrant and interesting parts of the playing.<\/p>\n<p>As Edward Said has written, performance is an &#8220;extreme&#8221; occasion.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-image\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"mt-image-none\" src=\"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/ChopinE1AJ3.jpg\" alt=\"ChopinE1AJ3.jpg\" width=\"360\" height=\"131\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Elsewhere, Mr. Said has written about hearing Maurizio Pollini play Chopin&#8217;s First Etude, opus 10, number 1. Having entirely mastered or even nullified the technical challenges of the piece &#8212; there&#8217;s no more &#8220;resistance.&#8221; And perhaps Pollini renders the music as something other than itself&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My flight to Los Angeles took over six hours. Coming back to the east coast with a strong tail wind making the flight easier and faster, the flight lasted only four hours and twelve minutes. Rudolf Serkin is sometimes credited with having said: &#8220;Playing the piano is easy, if everything goes well.&#8221; Raising the question, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1566,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[100,547,552,392,257,91,551,555,554,553,282,550,549,548,111],"class_list":{"0":"post-322","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-chopin","9":"tag-crisis","10":"tag-edward-said","11":"tag-etude","12":"tag-expert","13":"tag-expertise","14":"tag-maurizio-pollini","15":"tag-mostly-mozart","16":"tag-no-1","17":"tag-opus-10","18":"tag-piano-playing","19":"tag-pollini","20":"tag-professional","21":"tag-professionalism","22":"tag-rudolf-serkin","23":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5353,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/5353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/pianomorphosis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}