Playing Between the Opposites

Stylistic Balance.

A pendulum swings back and forth.  The period of the swing sometimes takes years, sometimes months, sometimes days, sometimes just seconds.

For instance: sometimes the pianist is more aware of the harmonies than the melodies, and on another occasion the other way around.  The teacher’s job is to keep the two in equilibrium.  It is an example of the “Goldilocks” principle: not too hot, not to cold, but just right.

We want to try to maintain, over a prolonged period of time, a balanced position in the middle between two extremes, just as a pendulum set into motion eventually comes to rest in a middle position.*

In talking about this, I like the use of the word “spectrum” because, in addition to the end points, which are the most easily identifiable points, it embraces every possible proportion of blending of the two.   While it is easiest to think in terms of the ends, in this melody and harmony, it is actually the middle positions that are most relevant for the pianist.

Here are some other examples of the idea of spectrum applied to piano playing:

playing too softly                 . . . .              playing too loudly

playing too slowly                . . . .             playing too fast

playing too legato                . . . .             playing too staccato

playing too mechanically    . . . .          playing too dramatically/emotionally

having too much variety     . . . .          playing with too little variety

having too many contrasts     . . . .    playing monolithically

If we wanted, we could add to this list.

It is the nature of thought and language that whenever we come up with one term to describe a person’s playing that there is usually also a term that would be its opposite.

First example:

I told my student Rachael that she was laying too much attention on melody at the expense of harmony.  She took the comment to heart and gradually changed her way of playing in this regard.   Two years later I told her: Rachael you are laying too much attention to the harmony at the expense of the melody.  She responded: “But! two years ago, in fact on October 1st (she has an eidetic memory) you told me I wasn’t laying enough stress on the harmonies.  Which is it?  Logically, they can’t be both true.  Aren’t you contradicting yourself?”

I said: “Is it possible that both statements are true if we take into account an additional reference point: time.  Time passes and things change.  Two years ago I had to exert a lot of force to pull you away from a sole preoccupation with melody, and in the direction of harmony.   Once enough energy is exerted by the teacher to dislodge the student from a frozen position on one end of a spectrum, movement can continue away from that end, pass the midpoint where harmony and melody are balanced, and continue until she finds herself stuck a second time, this time on the other end of the spectrum.

Switching to the analogy to a pendulum, the hope is that once the student “dislodged” from extreme position pendulum, the pendulum will swing back and forth until eventually settling down in a position of relative rest near the midway point between the pendulum’s two extreme positions: so that harmony and melody are in balance.

Staying in the middle is a difficult state to maintain when it comes to human behavior.  Time is the bringer of change.  You’ve continued to change until you find yourself in an extreme position again, only on the other end of the spectrum.   This is but one half of a cycle that repeats and repeats, over days, months or years, until finally settling down at a point of balance, which combines the virtues of both ends of the spectrum, of harmony and melody.*

Second example:

Here is another case for what, in this blog, I am alternately calling an example of a “spectrum” and an example of a “pendulum”.

The spectrum would represent all the positions between bringing out the likenesses between two similar passages, on the one hand, and the bringing out all differences between the two similar passages.  In terms of the pendulum analogy it is the swing between the maximum sameness and maximum difference between two passages that relative to each other have both similarities and differences.**

We can overemphasize the similarities in sound, we can overemphasize the differences in sound, or trying to find that golden mean where the listener is made aware by our playing of both the similarities and differences.   This golden mean between is most manifest in the works of the great composers, and it is incumbent on the pianist to make this apparent.

I asked Irving today at his lesson: “where would you locate yourself right now on this spectrum.  Are you more captivated by the subtle differences between things that are otherwise alike***, or are you more captivated by overlooking such differences and seeing the underlying similarities between things.  Each is equally important, so doing one does not automatically mean that you are attending to the other.”  “In my opinion, right now, at this time, this day and date, I feel that you are extremely focused on minute differences, more so than the qualities which act to unite all the passages and in the general the many different parts of the movement that are woven together into one cohesive whole.”

I wanted the left hand to always exhibit the same ineluctable motion in half steps despite the various melodies in parallel thirds that those eighth notes outlined one and another measure.  My solution was to play along with him in the bass on the same piano.  I played an unending series of eighth notes, like an ostinato****. all on the same pitch, starting with the tonic note in a low octave*****.   The overtones of this bass tone created the necessary “glue” to hold the voices together in the soloist’s two hands.  Another way of saying this is that the main strata of the piece were now enveloped in a larger, common sonic aura.  The voices in these strata could now move around more meaningfully in relation to each other in the shared sound-space.

A last comment on this second example.  Sometimes, only sometimes, and then only with the music of a great composer, you can strike up a “deal” with the composer and share responsibilities: “I will take care of all the samenesses if you can take care of the differences…after all I trust you completely to have chosen  the best pitches and rhythms.

* The pianist is a dynamic entity, rarely the same twice.  We are always traveling back and forth between one pole and the other.  We do not remain in a “golden mean” too long, but that we drift to one side or the other. Some students are very good at tracking their location from day to day, or month to month. Others need the application of an outside force in the form of the teacher.   The golden mean was Aristotle’s definition of morality.   For instance: not cowardice, and not rashness, but courage.

** This situation arises frequently when there is something in the recapitulation of a sonata-form movement that is like, yet not like something in the exposition.   Even in the extreme case where the notes are exactly the same in both places, there is still a subtle difference between something we heard once, and then being reminded of it, or calling something we have experienced in the past.  It is as if we have “grown” or “matured” through time, not through the years of our life, but in the extremely condensed maturation process of a single movement of a piece.  The result is that we can “look back” with at something that occurred “many, may minutes ago”, and see it (hear it) with a greater understanding and familiarity.

*** The piece was Bach’s Italian Concerto, second movement.

**** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostinato

“In music, an ostinato [ostiˈnaːto] (derived from Italian: stubborn, compare English, from Latin: ‘obstinate’) is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, frequently in the same pitch.”

***** I changed the pitch of my ostinato sometimes to one that was more in concord with the passage he was playing, when it modulated, when it a spent a brief time a new harmonic region.  I could of also done this interaction at the second piano.   In that case I might have exaggerated the effect of what I was doing by playing not single notes appropriate chords in root position containing four notes Root-Fifth-Third-Root.  It would be a D-minor chord at the start of the piece, then later varying it with the piece’s modulatory ambitions.  At times I allow the upper two notes of the chord to articulate in a different rhythm than the ostinato rhythm, just enough to give a suggestion of the rhythm of the soloist’s right hand melody.