Emotional Expression; Changing from Flats to Sharps

CP’s lesson 8/29/19 “Claire de Lune”

C: Everything I do, both in general, and specifically at the piano I when practice, is rational, organized and methodological. This includes the fact that once I start something I must complete it regardless of the months it takes me.   Moreover, I’ve never noticed any emotional expression in my playing, and I feel it is a lack on my part.

J: Your contention about emotional expression is belied by the natural beauty of your sound quality, and how unerringly you hit just the right feeling-tone of the piece you are playing.

(C seemed pleased that I thought so)

J: So if you believe that the last mentioned traits exist in your playing,  where  do think they come from; how do you get them?*

C: I don’t know. Partially because I don’t know when I’m getting them.

J: Exactly! You are not supposed to know, because they do not come from a part of you that is identifiable with words.  If so, would you be OK if we use words like irrational or non-conscious, to signify why you cannot tell  precisely where they come from within yourself. A bigger question: is it OK with you to have these two contrasting natures in yourself: one organized, under your control, and available to consciousness, the other, just as potent, but uncontrollable because inaccessible to your conscious or rational mind?

(She always knew about the organized one but had been very concerned that might not have the other. She was pleased to know she did have it, as well)

J: These two do not necessarily have to contradict each other or conflict with each other. Any conflict we sense comes from the rational side of our selves, when we try to define one in the terms of the other. In truth, each can amplify and encourage the other.

(She described an analogous situation in her life)

C: In my business life I frequently have to get to understand the
inner workings and organization of a large, international company.
The task seems daunting. There are too many interconnecting parts,
each pair seeming to interrelate in its own way and according to its
own customs. However, given enough time, I find that I begin to
grasp the whole and the parts.

J: My guess is that the foundational work you did was largely rational, but the insight that eventually came about how the company, despite its many parts, worked as an organic unity, came unexpectedly and was not directly
caused by its conscious antecedents in time. Again, we do not know from where this insight comes from, but it represents a direct intuition of the companies inner, organic unity.

–

In Claire de Lune there is a moment when the key signature changes
abruptly from five flats to four sharps. C. says this change causes
her great difficulty.

Here began a diagnosis.

1) I picked a passage in the flats section: in your imagination, rather than thinking about the key signature, just put, in your imagination, a flat sign in front of each and every note in the score. Note that this produces a somewhat different sequence of notes than what Debussy wrote.  C had little trouble doing this.

2A) Then we picked a passage in the sharps section. Now do the same thing again, only with sharps.  Put an imaginary sharp sign in front of every note you see in the passage and don’t think any longer about key signatures.  This too, though producing a passage that sounded different than the piece she was used to, offered her no difficulty.

2B) Play the same passage again as in #2A, but this time, in your imagination, put a flat sign rather than a sharp sign in front of every note. She had little little difficulty doing this.

Just so you know, all of these three things are much harder to do than play the score as written. So you have all the mental equipment necessary to  make a successful shift from flats to sharps.  Yet it is still giving you trouble.  We must explore further.

She said: the confusion occurs at the moment it changes key. It’s barely marked in the score. I’ve gotten so used to being in the flats for the last few pages,  I need just as long a period to get used to the sharps.

I said: this is very useful.  It’s time for me to ask a stupid question.  Do you start practicing the piece starting from the change of key, or do you usually start at the beginning of the piece?

She: the latter.  Remember, once I start something I have to see it through the end.

I think you have just diagnosed your problem as well as solved having found the solution to the problem.  Simply get in the habit of sometimes starting your practicing from the beginning of the sharp section until you are used to that part as you are to the opening section.

An aside.

She asked me how I handle this sort of situation. I said: it’s probably different for a professional musician, and different from one professional to the next.  Here is a part of my process  in handling keys and changes of key  that had remained unconscious to me for many years, but which after starting teaching others, became more accessible to my consciousness.

Here is a simple example.  I encounter a piece in G Major.  One sharp.  F  sharp.  I am sight reading the piece.  I come, in the score to an “F”.  It  genuinely does not look like an F.   It looks like something else: it looks like  an F-sharp.  There is nothing in the vicinity of the note on the page to cause   it to look any different.   But nothing you can say to me, will change the  impression that it looks different than an F natural.  There is little my mind can do to make it look again like an F and not an F#.  It is as if its printed in a  different color.   It produces a different emotional state in my mind.  It is  as if the # sign was printed just left of the note.

That indicates how a strongly I am affected from the start by hearing the  piece sound in the key of G major.  It is the obvious presence to my ear that we are in a tonal world known as “G Major”, and how that affects every note  in the piece, not just F#.

* With certain students I do teach things like being musical, understanding that inner thing-in-itself of the music.  I am surprisingly successful in doing this.  But when I have a student in front of me who does these  naturally, the worst thing I can do is make them aware of it in a way that includes how I think they are achieving it.

Tidbits From Recent Lessons: Shostakovich, Chopin, Mozart, Bach

R.M: Shostakovich: Prelude # 10

Its syntax is filled with sonic miscues, altered expectations.  Like a peptide chains that have been snipped apart into separate amino acids in order to form unexpectedly new peptide chains.

Each time something unexpected happens can you find your new harmonic footing before the minimum possible number of notes has passed.

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A.J. Chopin Waltz in C# Minor

Joe: Sometimes you are not sounding all the written notes.  How do you  know if every note sounds, for instance, in an interval or chord?

Ideally your ear knows or can quickly take stock of every note.  Otherwise you can try this: Play the chord and release all but one note.  Is that note sounding?  Is it sounding in a way that you think will balance well with the rest of the sounds in the chord.

Repeat process for each other note in the same chord.

More mechanical based approaches:

-tap each note separately once or twice before sounding the chord.

-have the illusion that you are not playing the chord notes simultaneously but that you are articulating them one at a time.

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J.M. Mozart: C Minor Fantasie

#1

No matter what you do in the opening two measures, when you get to the B-flats at the beginning of measure 3, forget any connection with the immediate past, the only note that it should connect from is the C-naturals at the beginning of measure 1.  Similarly with the next forthcoming groups of measures until you reach A-flat.

#2

When the right hand settles down into repeating ds4-fs4 as sixteenths, don’t let any of those thirds escape your attention regardless of what the left hand is doing or is in the midst of doing.

#3

The ending of one phrase and beginning the next.  How you start the  next phrase, musically and physically, can be strongly  influenced and controlled by the way you release the last note in the first phrase.  How you end something is a big detriment of how you begin what’s next.

#4

The B-flat major section.

How to create a coherent and flowing melodic line in spite of the variations in the rhythm.

Before playing the melody as a dotted eighth followed by two sixteenths and a quarter note, play those four notes as a triplet followed by a quarter note.  In that form, the descending steps of the B-flat major scale (d5 c5 bf4 a4), assert their simple melodic flow and harmonic coherence.  Then, right away, “capture” what you just heard – but add in the extra parameter of the rhythm.  If done with a calm mind, the melodic flow of the triplets will not be lost in the written rhythm.  It happens ‘automagically’.

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A.B. First prelude from book One of the Well Tempered.

Liberating the expressivity in the bundled chords.

#1

Choose one note from the measure you are about to play.  Sing and hold that note from the beginning of the measure to the end of the measure while playing at the keyboard the measure as written.  In the next, and next…, measures do the same, either 1) choosing as the note to hold the note that is in a similar place in the measure as the one you held in the previous  measure, or 2) purposefully switching at random to some other note in the next measure (singing and holding that note from the beginning to the end of the measure).

#2

For evenness.

My best advice is, given your propensity for on the spot evaluation and analysis of what you just heard yourself play a moment ago, don’t react to anything;  don’t think, don’t be upset, with anything that has happened, just notice it in passing.  When you do analyze it provokes an attempt on your part to physically alter what you will try to do to sound the next note.  You quickly trap yourself into an endless series of corrections, in anticipation of what may go wrong with each next note, because it went wrong with the current note.  The result is that no note is played in a fresh and unencumbered way.

Stay in the present.  If you don’t, one of the things that will worry you is how you will be able to sustain any evenness you have already achieved for so many more measures to come.

The piece plays itself – without much help from you.

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A.B. First fugue from book one of the Well Tempered

#1

There are some crazy sections in this fugue, harmonically.  Let things wax expressive when Bach has demanded this by the way out notes and modulations he has written.  If it helps, think that Bach and not you is demanding this heightened expressivity.  It’s his fault (sic).

#2

You say that when you listen to a recording of the fugue things often go by too fast for your ear to pick out each and every theme entrance regardless of in what voice or voices it occurs.  Especially in the stretto sections.

I suggested this procedure:

Listen to your favorite recording.  Mark in the score the first four notes (only)* of each and every theme entrance.  Play along with the recording but only at the moments in the score that you marked; just four notes.  For the rest of time just listen to the sound of the music flow by.

 

* Playing more than four notes can lead to technical difficulties if the tempo of the recording is faster than you are playing the work.  It will also confuse things in the strettos.

 

How to Tackle Difficult Pieces, Practiced Simply

A.B.’s lesson on 4/3/19 on the first prelude from Book One of the Well Tempered Klavier

Balancing memory with freshness:

Be surprised and delighted with each new chord (which is to say each new measure).  This is to balance out the impregnation of the piece by memory, from having heard and/or played the piece many times.   Instead create a “beginner’s mind” for whom the new chord is fresh, unexpected, and bathed in morning light.  You just don’t know what’s coming.  Memory doesn’t go away but a proportional balance is attained between memory and the unforeseeableness of the future.

The persistence of a single chord through an entire measure:

In this piece it helps that you were formerly an organist, for as long as you hold the keys down on the organ manual the sounds continue unabated, persistently, and without the piano’s ‘decay’.  Hear in your “inner” ear of imagination the five different notes of each measure as a simultaneous ensemble, which continues unbated as a totality from the beginning of the measure to the end of the measure.

A.B. is not satisfied with his control over the evenness of the sounds in a measure:

Take a single measure out of the flow of the piece.  Reiterate the first note of the measure over and over until it “sounds like you want”.  Do this without thinking of the other notes and whether they will match the first note in sonically – in other words this is not yet about evenness between notes).  Then switch to the second note.  Play it ever and over, until, as before, it sounds how you want.  Repeat this procedure for each further note in the measure.  When you play the measure as written you will notice in retrospect that all the notes were even, although you were in no way trying to match them, but instead having each note have its ‘ideal’ sound.  A musician with a  good ear will always be able to tell when a sound has reached a certain ideal perfection, but not through analysis, through an intuitive sense of the sound.

For evenness when one note, occurring between two other notes, is not balanced sound-wise with the others:

In the measure that begins : f2 f3 a3 c4 e4, the c4 was not balanced with the a3 and e4.  I suggested that he hold down the a3 and e4, and while they are being held, repeat c4 over and over.

Another path to evenness: the written notes are part of a larger whole:

In measure one, for example, turn the measure’s notes into a rapid arpeggio that starts, with the highest pitch, e5, descends through the notes of the chord until reaching the bottom note (c4) and without pause re-ascends to the top note.  This creates a more cohesive and integrated motion in your hand.  Once you have this gestalt, you can remain silent during the first part of this arpeggio and start playing in the middle of it, at the note that is supposed sound first in the measure.  Eventually there is no need to pause or mark time for the first half of the arpeggio, it can occur in the inner feelings of the body in just a split second.

Yet another path to evenness:

When a baton twirler causes the baton to make a circle, it is the result of a sequence of different motions all blended together in a one overall fluid motion.  I’m ignorant of the breakdown of those motions, but you can still imagine, yourself as twirling a baton, one cycle every half measure (as the note pattern repeats).

I would sing a sustained line for A.B.:

Sometimes I would sing a sustained melody, one note per measure, starting at the beginning of each measure, made up of the top note of each measure.  Maybe I thought of doing this because I Gounod’s Ave Maria flitted through my mind.  That Gounod may have felt that the Bach begged for a continuous line (adumbrated by Bach made tangible  by Gounod).  The effect that my singing had unconsciously on A.B. was each note of the measure was instinctively made to balance, or fuse sonically, with the sustained note I was singing.

How to bring out the dramatological curve of a piece, even though it was originally played on an instrument of a constant degree of loudness: 

There are not many overtly dramatic moments in the piece that stand out from the monotonous (sic) patterns that repeat every half measure.

And even if we become aware at a certain time of these moments, they will afterwards fade into the background due to the abrasion or erosion of constant playing of the piece.  So  make the most of these moments.

Here is one example.  Chords outlining diminished chords, for instance, happen only a few times in the piece, but each time it does, try to react to the sound of the chord as being jarring, intense, dissonant.  This effect can be gained even without making any change in the loudness of those measures versus the surrounding measures. One can intimate a dramatic curve merely with intent and adumbration in the flow of the notes.

One of my other students, while playing through the Adagio from  Beethoven’s Op 13, came across of a few measures of diminished chords in the passage leading back to the second A section of its ABA form.  She said “diminished chords are ugly”. I said: that’s great, can you make them sound as ugly as possible!

Another example. When an interval of a minor second in the left hand, treat it as an astonishing, unexpected dissonance.

One more example, this time a longer passage:

In the second half of the page there is a long dominant pedal point in the left hand playing g2 (lowest line of bass clef).  As he went from one measure to the next I repeated: “long … long endeavor … never stops … we’re not ‘there’ yet”.

Matching two sounds that are separated in time:

When you play the first half of a measure and get to the highest note, consciously hold its sound in your ear’s memory, so that when you play the same note in the second half of the measure you can match it with the first.

Sometimes a “group” of notes is just one note:

In the last few measures of the prelude, I find that it is not useful to think of groups of four notes, or even two notes, the measures are too ambiguous compared to what has preceded it throughout the piece. My way around this is to play these last measures in “groups of ONE” note.  To promote this I say out loud as i am playing: “One”, “one”, “one” …. “.  Every note bears little allegiance to every other note except when though of in retrospect.

Remember that your pinkie is part of your hand, not a separate appendage:

Often your pinkie seems to be out in right field, detached from the rest of your hand as if it were a separate appendage.  Hold the pinkie in the unity of your whole hand.

Isolating Variables: the sequence of fingers as against the sequence of pitches:

This is in line with what we just said about the pinkie being “held” in the hand.  In measure three A.B. is using fingers 1, 3 then 5 to play g4 d5 and f5.

I asked him to cover the notes g4-a4-b4-c5-d5 with the five fingers of his right hand.  Play it as a cluster and hold it.  And while holding all five notes try to lift the thumb and replay the G, then again while still holding all the notes, raise the third finger and replay the d5, and similarly with the pinkie for f5.  Just focus on an awareness of the identity of which finger you are playing, as if to say “these are the fingers I’m going to use: 1 3 and 5”.  Then use the same fingers but for the written notes (g4 d5 f5).  You hopefully will feel an interesting transference of the awareness of which fingers to use, now mapped onto a different set of fingers.

Isolating Variables: The sensation of evenness as against any physical actions taken to instill evenness, especially when there is a new set of notes:

There is an ’emotional’, a generalized physical sense in the body as a whole, of ‘balance’ among the notes of the keyboard that are played together and in close succession.  As with any feeling, this emotional state can be reproduced at will under different circumstances.  Rather than the details of how to play the next measure evenly, try to reproduce the experience of having this feeling.

This distinction applies to many situations in playing.

For instance: there is the sensation we get of playing an ascending set of pitches.  This feeling can be conjured up even if we are playing a descending set of pitches.  Sometimes doing this is very useful in a Bach fugue to help homogenize two different voices, so that what a second voice is doing does not sound too dissimilar from what a first voice is doing.

Or, a sense of enlarging and getting louder can overlay a series of notes that are getting softer.

Or, a sense of wide space between the fingers in the hand can overlay a passage that involves a series of notes only one half step apart from each other.

Or, the sense of energy that we get from one very dynamic piece or passage from such a piece, and overlaying that feeling of energy onto all passages, slow or fast, loud or soft.

Making a clear connection between two non-adjacent fingers:

There is a measure in the first part where the pianist plays this sequence of notes: b3 c4 e4 g4 c5 … .

Notice that I tapped your fourth finger when you went from your third finger on g4 to the fifth finger on c5, It was meant to show the hand the focus of the ‘connection’ between the fingers playing g4 and c5, more at being located at the connection between the 3rd and 5th fingers.

At another point in the lesson I slid a pencil between his second and fifth finger.  The pencil passed over those two fingers but passed underneath the fingers in between them.  This helped him sense that those two fingers don’t act separately, but more at being the two ends of the plank of a see-saw, and thus the result of one single action.

More about see-saws:

Regardless of what two fingers play one after the other, and regardless of the distance between the notes they play, always an imaginary see-saw plank between the current note’s finger and the next note’s finger.  Add to this image an almost felt, pivot point, midway between the two fingers.  Now pretend you are a very strong person who  can make the two ends of the plank move reciprocally move up and down just by leaning first on one side and then the other side of where the pivot.

Once you are on the second note resulting from the first see-saw, move the see-saw’s location so that it connects this second note with the note that follows it.

To develop the sense of this see-saw, and the ability to relocate it quickly, it may help (using measure one as an example) to do this exercise:

Go back and forth between c4 and e4 (something which I notate as |: c4 e4 :|.  Once that see saw is functioning organically do the same for |: e4 g4 :|, and so on.

Addendum to the previous section:

It is your tendency, when you encounter a problem in a measure, to  just play ahead for quite a long time, and then tend to the problem later.  It is good to balance that tendency out with the ability to not move ahead, maybe only as far as the end of the current measure, and then focus in on tiny details.  Focusing entails a greater degree of  awareness of what is  happening physical and sound-wise, plus  reiterating that tiny detail until it sounds how you want it to sound.

Don’t rob the last note of each measure of its full duration:

A.B. usually tries to rush into the new hand position at the beginning of the next measure.  He feels that he may not have enough time to do it in, and compensates by holding the last note of the current measure a little shorter than the other notes of the measure.  I said “it is always good to try to hold longer whatever note sounds just before a leap, a skip, or a change of hand position.  One can deal with this near the end of the note by continuing to hold it when your hand tells you it is time to let go of it.  There is another way that is just as effective, that is more at being located time-wise at the beginning of the note rather than near the end.  Start the note with the “intention” of holding it longer.

We reached the goal of evenness:

Joe: in general today we have accomplished one of your goals: the sound is now even throughout.  During the attempt to make each note sound clear and close to its ideal sound, you were finding it easier to do this when playing all the notes a little louder than usual.  Often two variables get tied together, “entangled” as it were.  On the hand playing more evenly, on the other playing more loudly.  The latter helps achieve the former, only at some point, you want to separate the  former from depending on the latter.  Once you have effected this separation, the evenness and clear-speaking-ness of each sound, no longer depends on loudness and can occur at any dynamic you choose.

General comment #1:

 Notice that while you tend to try to solve things with specific actions of specific fingers, I almost never suggest a solution that involves the fingers, but relies instead on a more integrated motion of all the parts of the arm from shoulders to hands.

General comment #2:

I think you are evolving from one species of musician into another species: from an organist to a pianist.

Leverage and Sound

Chopin, Etude in C# Minor from Opus 25:

Irving’s brother came today.  We wanted to get a rich cello-like / vocal-like tone out of the piano for the notes of the opening “baritone” melody for the left hand.  It is in single notes without accompaniment, so it is very exposed.  We need our entire sound/mechanical tool-kit to keep it resonant and sustained so there isn’t a moment’s break in the flow of the line.   Their softness shouldn’t belie their resonance.

Our first exploration was with leverage, the principle being that the greater the leverage you have over the production of each sound, the more that sound approaches the ideal piano-resonance.

The effectiveness of a lever is a function of how long the lever is and where you place the fulcrum on which to rest it*.  Leverage increases with the length of the lever and how remote the fulcrum is from the end of the lever that, from which in this case, the pianist initiates the motion of the lever.  If, for example, the lever is solely the length of a finger, and the third knuckle is where the fulcrum is, there is little mechanical advantage to depressing the key through the motion of that lever.  If the lever extends back into the wrist, and includes the finger, there is greater leverage on behalf of the movement of finger tip.  So the question is, how we can create the greatest leverage with the human body.

We ended up using a curious combination of several different levers, that ended up being connected one to the other.

The length of the arm, from shoulder to finger tips, while perhaps not the longest lever we can make of the body, is a conveniently long one that is still easily manipulated.

We started by his holding out both his forearms; straight out in front of him so that they parallel with each other and were horizontal to the ground.  We Left a comfortable distance between the two hands, about the same as the distance between the two shoulders.

We then had him move his arms up and down using just the shoulders as pivots.  At their highest points the arms were aiming well above the horizontal, at an angle of about forty five degrees.  At their lowest points the arms were just slightly below the horizontal.

Very soon, we changed it to an oscillating motion between the arms. One arm was at its lowest when the other was at its highest.  And they exchanged these positions.  We did this until he felt a sort of physical exhilaration from all that motion.

The next thing we did was to create a second, more imaginary, lever.  At the same time the arms were moving, we pretended there was the plank of a see-saw that connects the two hands (traversing the empty space between the hands), which, as a result of the arm motions, was itself going up and down as if two people were seated at each end of the see-saw.  The pivot of this imaginary see-saw was exactly half way between the hands, so that neither hand or arm had a mechanical advantage over the other – the advantages were equal.

I also had him imagine a secondary but similar see-saw between his two shoulders, as if an, albeit, small person was seated on each shoulder.  We continued exercising the combination of these levers until he felt a definite exhilaration from making these motions.

We then ‘elected’ his two index fingers as the sole ‘beneficiaries’ of all the motions he was making, so that the each index finger was backed up by the entire arm and contributing see-saws.

While continuing the oscillation of the arms he used alternating index fingers to play first the opening note of the second note.  The solo was no longer distributed solely to the left hand but alternately, from note to note, between one arm lever and the other.  If he played the first note with his left index finger, then he played second note with his right index finger.  Then back to the left index finger to sound the third note, the right again for the fourth note, and so on through the line.

During this procedure the fingers were to never loose their connection to the hand, and on to the wrist, the forearms, the elbows, all the way to the shoulders.

Sometimes the arms had to cross one another, but the more important thing was the swinging motion from one arm to the other regardless of which one was to the right or left of the other.

When he did this with physical abandon fervor, without thinking so much of the ‘proper’ or ‘usual’ way of pushing the notes down, the result, to our joint delight,  was an unusually rich sound, one that he was unaccustomed to getting on single notes.

Even when consecutive notes were ‘next door’ to each, only a half step or whole step away, we did not diminish the feeling of the widest possible see-saw between the arms.  In other words, while the objective distance between the consecutive notes might lessen, the subjective sense of how long that distance was always remained large.

The last step was to preserve the widest and most dynamic sense of an oscillating motion when going not just from one hand to the other, but from one finger of one hand to another finger of the same hand.

* The saying, concerning how levers work, as attributed to Archimedes, is: Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.

Playing With Authority, Intervals, and the Inner Heart of Music

Playing with Authority:

C.P told me at our last lesson: I am very soft spoken in my private life, and in my business life.  I am habitually quiet, but you have given me permission to speak out more, even though it is at the piano.  I can make more sound and command more attention.   Maybe it’s safer to do it on the piano first,  but nonetheless it an exciting change.

What I had been doing for the last few months with C.P. was to ask her to speak out her notes with more pride and more certainty.  She shouldn’t play it safe, be unassuming and be on guard for mistakes.  This was in her Bach prelude.  On the other hand, in her “Claire de Lune”, I said: here it less a matter of loudness or authority, and more about richness of tone, finding a deep and sensuous source for all your sounds; but that at heart it is the same thing as expressing yourself more fully.

Intervals:

Later in the lesson we were working on a new Bach Prelude (WTC I c minor). I pointed out to her the intervals that were formed between the two voices, particularly after the first sixteenth note of the measure and the first sixteenth note of beat three of the measure.  At first she asked a type a question that I had come to expect from her inquiring mind.  “What is the use of knowing intervals”?

First she gained facility in naming the intervals.  This led to her noticing how the sixth and the third (sometimes as tenths) were the most frequently used intervals between the hands.  I asked her if those two intervals had anything in common.  This led to the idea of inverting an interval and that thirds and sixths invert to each other.  This led to ask about seconds and sevenths, which meant we could discuss the role consonance and  dissonance in a tonal piece of music.

Perspectives leading to the inner heart of the music:

Then I put things in a broader perspective.  There are two ways of knowing something: from outside and from the inside.  From the inside is the goal. Often we cannot go directly into the inside of something unless we first take a series of perspectives on from the outside.  Intervals is one such perspective on the inner heart of music.  So are chords, rhythms, structural features, thematic development, listening awareness, and the list  proliferates.

I had a friend in High School, Stephen*, who sometimes took walks with me in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Once we were discussing the first of Emerson’s two essays on “Nature”, and how it is divided into sections, each on viewing nature from a series a different perspective.  He said this was like the bible story of Joshua.  Joshua’s goal was to get to the inside of Jericho.  So for seven days they walked around it getting, as it were, every possible perspective on it.  And on the last day the “walls came tumbling down”, or in other words, they now stood on on the inside of the city, just as the musician’s goal is to live in the inner heart of the music.

*An interesting thing about Stephen.  He was born with only short stubs in the places where the fingers emerge from the hand.  When you are a teenager everything seems possible.  So one day Steven asked if I could teach him to play piano.  Without hesitation I said yes.  We chose the first prelude from the first book of the WTC.  By the rotation of his forearm, and thinking of his hand as a wheel, and thinking of the stubs of the fingers as teeth of a gear wheel, we found a way not only to make sounds on the pianos with the his virtual fingers, but gradually gained a sophistication in the control of the rotation, together with the possibility that at any moment the arm could lift the wheel of the hand off the piano so that when the wheel came back down on the piano the virtual finger ajacent to the one that just sounded a note, could land on any key regardless of its distance on the keyboard from the previous note.  Steve went on to Cornell, and I wish somehow I could be in contact with him again.