I sent my friend Roy a recording I made ages ago with the Polish violinist Hanna Lachert.   Among other things it contained the three “Myths” Karol Szymanowski*.  Part of his response was:  “What’s the structure of these pieces?  They seemed episodic, and I did not recognize the music as being in any traditional form.”

I responded:

#1 Why do ear training?

Ask a student or performer if they listen as they play, and the answer which they give, without much pause to think, is generally “yes”.  Yet the ability to hear clearly while playing, and to understand what one is hearing, is the principal things that sets a good player apart from others.  The good player does not only have a good technique, but they have as strong an ability to listen completely and objectively to the sounds they are making.  In the hands of a master, technical matters are brought under the control of the ear.

In learning a new piece, the rate of progress is a function of a combination of variables.  Two of these, which are closely integrated, are level of ability to read the note symbols in the score, and the level of ability to translate what’s read in the score to the fingers in the hands.  If these two are not on par with each other, then the entire process of learning a new piece is thrown out balance.   Both  the student and the teacher may not be conscious of the exact source of the difficulties observed in the student’s progress on the piece.   Incidentally, it is probably doubtful if there are man pianists are equally adept at the visual comprehension of the score and the tactile realization of what they are comprehending.   I’d like to talk a bit about the latter part: translating the score into physical actions.

Here is an exercise that evaluates, as well as isolates, the student’s tactile responses to the keyboard versus visual placement of the hands.  It is based on how strongly developed a topological sense of the keyboard resides in the student’s imagination.  We want the hands to find the notes on the keyboard as quickly as the eye recognizes them in the score.

E. and I were working on Variation 9 in the Brahms variations on a theme by Schumann (in F# Minor).  In this variation, at the beginning of each measure, the right hand has two sets of triplet sixteenths in the form of an ascending arpeggio.

We discussed two opposite ways of dealing with the evenness required of the arpeggio.

I had one lesson today in the early morning.  The ubiquitous “Irving” was over and played the Scriabin Etude in C-sharp minor (Op. 2, No. 1).

My mind was running at a very fast pace dreaming of turkeys with enormous thighs and having visions Japanese sweet potatoes drowning in Vermont maple syrup.  The result was that I gave, let us say, a ‘rambling’ lesson, one in which I let my imagination loose, which caused me to use a lot of mental imagery, flights of fancy and outre analogies.  It definitely wasn’t a very ‘literal’ or scientific lesson.  But it worked.