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.