Speed Reading, Chess, and Playing by Ear

Recently I've taken to starting recitals by playing popular jingles from TV or radio shows. It's fun to see who else in the audience listens to Serial or NPR, or is familiar with the Champion's League theme (come on people, it may be the most widely-recognized music on the planet). Admittedly, it's also to win over the audience and impress them right off the bat, because rattling off something by ear is unusual and seldom taught in the world of (so-called) classical music and traditional music education (a topic for another time).

At the intermission of one show, someone asked me: can you play anything by ear, instantly? The answer is a definite and emphatic no, but the question reveals a lot about people's misunderstanding not just of music, but of human cognition and the limitations of memory.

People assume that playing music by ear is difficult because amateur listeners (and even amateur musicians, see: educational issues above) are not used to identifying pitches or the distances between them. Sadly for us musicians, identifying notes is only the first and easiest hurdle to clear when trying to learn music by ear. Remembering and rattling off a piece, armed only with the ability to identify pitches, would be like memorizing a poem by remembering the sequence of letters. The real problem is not identification but information reduction, taking a whole slew of sound and unconsciously reducing it to larger abstract musical components.

Think about the process you would go through in memorizing some lines of text to write out later. First, let's keep it simple, and imagine you just had to learn a single sentence, like, "What is your favorite piece of music and why do you like it?" Piece of cake, right?

But what if the line were in a foreign language that you didn't know ("Cila është pjesa juaj e muzikës dhe pse nuk ju pëlqen?" **from google translate, possibly not accurate)? In that case, your best bet would be remembering the sequence of letters that make up the spelling of the phrase. Think how difficult that might be for even a few words, how much more work, and how prone you would be to mistakes. Even worse, if you misremembered even just a couple of letters, it might distort the meaning or render the phrase completely meaningless. You couldn't remember it accurately with a single glance, even though remembering any of the individual component letters or words on their own might not be difficult at all. (In a language with different symbols, things would be an order of magnitude more difficult, though in principle the same: remembering any single letter in Arabic might not be too difficult, but good luck with a string of them).

The difference is, in your native language you don't have to remember the individual letters—or even words—that make up the phrase, but only a single concept (or two) of favorite-music-ness. If you mis-remembered the exact wording, you would still easily reproduce something that preserved the meaning ("What's your favorite piece of music and why do you love it so much?").

I was reading this morning (pretty quickly, but not that quickly) about speed-reading in the New York Times, and the problem is the same (though one level of abstraction higher). I used to think if my eyes could just move faster through text, I could read faster. But the limiting factor in reading isn't the speed of cramming letters and words into your brain through your eyes, it's remembering, keeping track of, and making sense of what your eyes are sending to your brain. Turns out, most people can only keep track of 5-9 "concepts" at a time, and so reading is really an exercise in grouping words into concepts, absorbing them, and then moving on. People who can "chunk" the most words into a single abstract idea or concept, then, will tend to be faster readers.

The go-to example in psychology textbooks is memory for chess positions. People used to think master chess players had great memories because they could remember an entire chessboard much more accurately than amateur players, but it turns out expert players are no better (or only slightly better) at remembering a randomly arranged board than amateurs. They're better with boards from real games because rather than store the pieces and their positions one by one, they store the board in relation to other "types" of positions they've seen before, and so only have to remember a few ideas, rather than all 32 pieces' positions.

I know very little about chess, so I can't really explain what those "types" are, but what I do know a lot about is music! And the process for learning something by ear is very similar, only the "types" of things you have to remember are music-specific instead of chess-specific. Identifying this pitch or that pitch from something you hear is essential, but it's only as helpful as remembering that the word "what's" starts with a w, or that white bishop is in position a6. In other words, it's a total red herring and completely misses the point. What's helpful in reproducing a musical phrase is reducing it to something close to something you've heard before and stored in memory already from hearing and categorizing thousands of times already, to a series of harmonies and rhythms and patterns that you already know.

One final story to clear up a musical misconception about absolute, or perfect, pitch. Absolute pitch is the ability to identify the pitch class of a sounded note (a, b, c, etc., basically, where it is on the piano). People sometimes think of absolute pitch as a great musical gift, and it doesn't hinder anything, but it's also, again, a red herring in terms of musical cognition. Example: a classmate who had absolute pitch in one of my music classes in high school. We were learning to identify different chord types (major, minor, etc.) by sound and by sight (hearing them or seeing them written down on the staff). Just as a point of reference, most of my beginner piano students can learn to do the sound identification task without too much difficulty. But rather than listen to the quality of the chord overall in the sound training, my fellow student would try to hear all the pitches individually, write them down, and then determine what type of chord was played by sight. In other words, instead of reducing the information, she was multiplying it! Like a great speller declaring, "I'll remember the phrase 'what's your favorite piece of music and why' by spelling it out each time, rather than storing its meaning." Moral: absolute pitch plays little to no role in musical memory since it generally doesn't help reduce information at all.

And even relative pitch (the ability to identify relationships between two pitches), while important and more valuable than perfect pitch, is only the first small step in learning to play by ear, since it, too, only aids the identification of pitches, but not necessarily the ability to store and remember those relationships.

Podcast! The Music Post is here

The Music Post is here! It's a podcast dedicated to discovering what makes great music great.



Listen to the first episode above, or right click here and select "save link as" to download directly.

You can also find episode two and all future episodes here, and subscribe on iTunes here.

Should be available for subscription on iTunes within a few days!

Okay, now why would I do such a thing?

In the past five years, I've played a lot of performances, and received a lot of feedback from audiences. A fair amount of this feedback comes in the form of praise for the feat of performing, things like "That looked so difficult" or "I can't believe you memorized that whole piece." Of course, I appreciate this type of praise, but as a musician, it's definitely not what I'm going for, because music, after all, isn't a sport. It's art. 

What I'm really shooting for in a performance is to have the audience fall in love with whatever I'm playing, to seek it out. I know I've really, truly connected with an audience when people say something more like "That piece was so great! Where can I listen to it again?" 

Even more effective than simply playing, I've found that walking people through a piece, pointing out features and motives, beautiful moments, is the surest way to get them to connect with it and seek it out later. Even more so than my playing, people appreciate these mini-explanations of the music I'm playing (or at least, that's what they claim!), telling me they've never been able to listen more closely or more attentively. 

So I figure why restrict that to the recital hall? It scales perfectly well to a podcast, where you can listen while you drive, cook, or get ready for bed. 

Hope you enjoy!

Art of Fugue, cont'd: which instruments?

Of the many mysteries surrounding the Art of Fugue, perhaps the most practical regards the instrumentation: Bach leaves no indication of what instrument(s) he had in mind in composing the piece. Perhaps it was just an oversight, or perhaps he thought it was so obvious, he didn't need to even write down the instruments. More likely, though, Bach was purposefully evasive and ambiguous, leaving the door open for numerous readings.

There's evidence to support multiple sides of the debate. The piece is written entirely in "open score," instead of on a grand staff as was most typical for keyboard music. On the other hand, various details suggest that Bach heard it on a keyboard (the fact that it's possible to play). For many people, Bach’s failure to explicitly commit to an instrumentation—along with his failure/reluctance to indicate tempos/dynamics/phrasings in the vast majority of his compositions—is a weakness or an unfortunate omission, opening this work, and all the works of Bach, to “wrong” interpretations and gross manipulations.

But for me, it’s a strength, and maybe even a sign of Bach’s foresight and growing wisdom in his old age. Why commit his final masterpiece to any single instrument or ensemble when the world of music is always changing, adapting to new trends? If a piece is to be timeless, it should adapt too, and this is exactly what the Art of Fugue, and all of Bach’s music, has aged so magnificently well. It’s the difference between “No state shall discriminate on the basis of race” and “No state shall deny its citizens equal protection of the laws.” The former may have been essentially what the drafters of the 14^th Amendment had in mind, but it would have been overly rigid, with no room for an evolving standard of equality.

Questions of history and constitutional law aside, though, the practical question remains: what instrumentation best suits this piece? Few works have been the subject of more variety of interpretation. You can hear the Art of Fugue played on piano, harpsichord, organ, harmonium, string quartet, brass quartet, and recorder quartet, guitar and trombone duo (seriously), among others. 

The advantage of the quartet versions is obvious: each player can give his full attention to a single voice, giving them each an independence that should—in theory at least—be impossible for a single keyboard player to execute.

On top of that, compare moments like 0:38 in the video below to 0:34 in the video above. On the piano (though not the organ, to be discussed next time), you can't sustain notes. Once you play a note, it immediately starts to disappear. This is a huge disadvantage, in general, but even more so in the Art of Fugue, in places like this one. This moment brings back the main theme for the entire piece in a soaring soprano line, but on piano, it can be a little, well, disappointing.

Then again, what we gain from hearing from four instruments' individuality and attention, we can easily lose in unity of vision and overall coherence. It's mighty difficult for one person to keep track of four voices, but at least that person is in full control and able to present one single vision of the music in question.

And then there’s the inescapable fact (for me, at least) that this music just doesn’t quite sound right played on strings or brass instruments. The main difference is in the quality of articulation on these instruments vs the piano, harpsichord, or organ. On the latter instruments, it’s impossible to play with a true legato, or smoothness between the notes. Every note is marked by a clear and definite beginning, unlike in string instruments (where the bow can continue moving between notes), or winds and brass (air keeps flowing). This fact is something we pianists work incredibly hard to overcome or compensate for, but it’s this place in between, the illusion of legato that’s not quite there, that makes our instrument perfect for contrapuntal writing. The quick-moving notes in the string parts have to be separated to be heard at all, but as such, they're too articulated, where on piano they can be with a more singing quality.


There are lots of other considerations, of course, and it depends on a lot on which number of the Art of Fugue we're talking about, as well as who exactly is playing. But perhaps not surprisingly, as a pianist, I think this music sounds best on a keyboard (and apologies to all brass player friends, but the brass quintet just doesn't work, at least not the one I linked above). But where I’m firmly convinced that much of Bach’s keyboard music sounds best on piano, specifically, I can’t say I’ve come to the same conclusion for the Art of Fugue. More on that next time.

For the record, this is my favorite non-keyboard version yet:

The Hypnosis of Bach's Art of Fugue

A little over a year ago, I was driving along unsuspectingly when I switched on the car radio. Immediately I was taken, entranced by the incessant, interwoven lines of a four-part fugue played on the organ. I knew it could only be Bach, and moments later, when the original theme emerged in sustained and soaring whole notes in the soprano line, I knew it was from the Art of Fugue. Somehow, I had never heard any except the first, second, and fourth movements, or "Contrapunctuses," from one of Bach's last, culminating masterpieces. Sitting in city traffic is not usually the time or place we associate with profound experiences, but such was the power of Contrapunctus 9—and of Glenn Gould's playing—that I'll never forget those few minutes.

I went home and listened to more of the same recording, and was shocked at what I'd been missing. I know a lot of Bach's music, and have been lucky enough to perform a good chunk of it as well: the Well-Tempered Clavier, many of the dance suites, the Italian Concerto. When I played the Goldberg Variations, I kind of thought I had conquered the most difficult, the most complex, the pinnacle of them all. Little did I know the Art of Fugue is like the Goldberg Variations on steroids. In the words of Angela Hewitt, "it makes the Goldberg Variations sound like child's play."

So when a fellow pianist proposed last spring that, together, we learn the whole thing, I enthusiastically-and-somewhat-naively accepted the challenge. Over the next month, I'll attempt to describe the piece and my experience grappling with, learning, and playing it.

These pieces are different from anything Bach wrote. They are beautiful, yes, and they can entertain, certainly. But at their best, they overwhelm, they awe, and they mesmerize. 

Of course, if you don't know this music, what are you waiting for?  Go listen! 

The whole project consists of eleven fugues, plus four canons, plus six more "mirror" fugues, plus the final, colossal-yet-tragically-unfinished quadruple fugue, all labeled with the somewhat more generic Latin "Contrapunctus," for "counterpoint."

Why the obsession with fugues? Bach was the unquestionable master of counterpoint. No one has been (or will for all eternity be) able to combine music of multiple independent parts to better entice and challenge the human brain. That's why listening to Bach's music can sometimes be "difficult": there's usually no one thing going on (no "melody") that draws your ear to the exclusion of other parts of the music; there is, rather, a bunch of melodies all at once, constantly vying for your (and the poor keyboard player's) attention.

But the payoff is enormous. To the extent that our enjoyment of art comes from subtly recognizing patterns, contrapuntal music provides a whole layer or dimension on which to built those patterns. And fugues—pieces defined by one (usually) to a few recurring musical ideas, twisted and transformed to varying degrees of recognizability—provide the perfect medium for a true craftsman to demonstrate his mastery of counterpoint. And Bach was the greatest craftsman of all.

The first fugue is smooth, filled with a feeling of emptiness and desolation. It never departs from the key of d minor yet never stands still, continuously in flux, with no clear structural boundaries or moments of repose. It is in one sense the simplest piece of the whole set, yet it is mysteriously elusive. Whereas the other fugues will draw heavily on increasingly elaborate technical feats of fugal style—stretto, inversion, augmentation and diminution—as well as an elaborate chromaticism that was a hundred years ahead of its time, this fugue is propelled by nothing more than its simple subject, which serves as the inspiration for all that follows.

After that, the the music grows in technical and harmonic complexity, as well as sheer density, culminating—at least temporarily—in the obsessive, relentless and truly manic Contrapunctus 11.

The four canons and six mirror fugues are even more esoteric in style, but underscore Bach's incredible ability to mold his music to his thematic ideas. (The mirror fugues, by the way, are kind of exactly what they sound like: each has a right-side-up version, and an upside-down version, to be presented separately in their completion...pretty incredible!).

But none of them matches the dignity, solemnity and profundity of the final fugue (Glenn Gould's all-time favorite, by the way)....

Perhaps it is not the easiest piece to become acquainted with, and doesn't exactly make for easy listening. But be careful: the Art of Fugue is apt to consume you as it has done for me over these past couple of months. And the best is yet to come!

Alex Ross Missed the Point

Having just read Alex Ross's typically eloquent essay from last week's New Yorker (hoping my opinion is still relevant a week later), I can't help but wonder whether he's missed the point.

Ross talks about the joys of scanning his collection of CDs, of reading the old liner notes, of the personal connection he feels to each recording by virtue of its real, physical existence. He laments the economics of online streaming, where royalty payments are so pathetic, only the artists who have no need for them can hope to earn anything from them. (Aside: I was legitimately excited last month when my Spotify income surged to $1.95.) Certainly, he realizes that not everyone agrees: "If I were a music-obsessed teen-ager today, I would probably be revelling in this endless feast, and dismissing the complaints of curmudgeons."

But the problem of the cloud reaches deeper than Mr. Ross realizes. All nostalgia and ethics aside, listening to music from the cloud changes the perceptual experience of listening. Technology has shortened and divided our attention in many ways, and listening to music is no exception. And that's bad news for classical music in particular.

CDs, LPs, and cassette tapes: music in these forms is (or was) a commitment. You made a decision to buy a recording and spent your hard-earned money on it. Any time you wanted to listen, you had to decide that you would listen, what you would listen to, and physically go through the motions of starting some sort of listening device, while remaining in the same place for the duration of the recording. Listening was expensive, not just because it cost money, but in the cost of setting it up and parking yourself somewhere to hear it (or carrying around a massive portable player).

One of my very first recordings was a cassette of the Bach inventions. Cassettes were terrible, of course, but they were great because I couldn't skip ahead in the tracks: they forced me to listen all the way through.

At that point I probably only had three of four classical recordings to choose from (along with a handful of Madonna and Alanis Morisette tapes).  Every time I bought or received a new CD, it was an event! I always listened religiously until I knew the new recording inside out.

Sometime in middle school, I jumped on board the technological bandwagon (at the time, this consisted of acquiring something called a "MiniDisc") that allowed me to splice different parts of different CD tracks together. I thought this was great! I could finally take my favorite moments of every piece of music and listen to them next to each other, basking in the continuous ecstasy of musical climax after climax. But of course, things didn't work out that way, because a musical moment's power comes with context. Much of the power of the end of Beethoven's 7th Symphony, or Mahler's 2nd, or any piece, comes from all the buildup before it, and trying to cheat my way to that kind of musical epiphany was shortsighted and naive. 

In college, I swung back in the other direction. Having bought a record player and inheriting a bunch of my parents' old records, it was like elementary school all over again, and I could listen for long stretches of time. Maybe listening to LPs was a waste of time at a university (sorry parents!), but once I went through the tiresome routine of removing a record, cleaning it, and putting it on, I was certainly going to try my best to enjoy it and absorb everything it had to teach.

Listening today takes neither time nor money. MiniDiscs never rose to popularity, but what replaced them is more efficient and much easier to use (and much, much cheaper). On its face, this seems great! I doubt I ever would have bought six different recordings of the Marriage of Figaro, but I do have them all in my Spotify. But every time I want to listen to something new, the number of choices is mind-boggling. And humans don't always deal with choices intelligently. If I don't like something new right away, I don't usually follow through and listen to it again, the way I always would with a new CD, until I was absolutely sure I didn't like it.

Streaming makes it easy, too easy, to listen to music. We can listen any time, anywhere, for whatever tiny duration we choose, without taking our attention from whatever other task we might be engaged in.  If you're listening to Ke$ha and Taylor Swift, that's probably okay. Pop music can survive a five minute attention span. But "classical" or "art" music requires sustained engagement and attention in order to be fully appreciated and understood.

Cloud listening has the potential for good, but it doesn't lend itself to true listening. Unfortunately, that's what classical music depends on. The only solution: fight back against our habits!

life and tragic death of recorded music, part 2

Recently I read this lovely article (subscription required, unfortunately) by pianist Jeremy Denk in (but what else?) the New Yorker, and it reminded me to follow up on this post about recordings and music. In the article, Denk describes how the process of recording is inherently stressful and tortured, more so than performance, because of the finality of the product, as well as the expectation and possibility of perfection (in some sense, at least!).

A while after writing that last post I realized a somewhat surprising fact about the recorded music that I love and cherish: it is, almost without exception, all recorded before 1985.

authenticity and performance practice, part 1?

To follow up on the earlier post about my recital.....Here are some thoughts expanded from this short introduction I gave before playing Mozart, which you can see here.

Authenticity is a problematic concept when it comes to all art. In the world of classical music, the problem is especially important to address because most of what we do as musicians is reproduce the music of others. We don't typically own, at least in a strictly philosophical sense, intellectual property over our performances, since they're written by someone else. Unfortunately, as the classical music scene struggles with evolving standards of intellectual property involving the internet and duplication, it simultaneously struggles to evolve out of an antiquated and damaging mindset involving all that music in the public domain!

It's one of those things that, if you operate outside the world of classical musical performance, you'll probably say either "huh?" or "who cares?!", and maybe you're not totally wrong. But maybe you would care more if the world of classical music performance weren't so bogged down in its silly performance practices!

Before writing anything more witty about it, I feel I have to lay down the groundwork for what I want to say.

new pieces

I recently played a recital at the Levine School of Music in Washington, DC. On the program were many of my own pieces. I had to learn them a bit too quickly for my liking, so the performances aren't exactly polished, but representative enough of the compositions that I hope you'll give them a listen if you weren't there! Here they are, with the notes I wrote for them.

Notes on the original works performed tonight:

I've been trying to compose music, on and off, since I was very young. I wrote quite a few “model” compositions—works modeled specifically after the styles of past composers—in college, but I was only ever satisfied with one of them. It wasn't until just over a year ago that I managed to compose with any consistency—or any general success (though I suppose the jury is still out in that regard). The Silent Night fantasy, which you will hear tonight, was cobbled together in two days, one year ago, in the run-up to my recital in this same hall last December, and revised this fall. The Fugue from the Prelude and Fugue in D major, after Bach was written in 2007, when I was a junior in college. The Star-Spangled Banner Fantasy was written in the last week of June, just before this year's 4th of July, while the rest of the pieces were written from September onward.

These pieces were written obsessively and unpredictably, in fits and starts. At times, I would sit down, intent on working on them, and nothing would happen at all. At other times, needing sleep, I would stay awake as long as the ideas kept flowing. All in all, (too) many of them came together in their final form about two weeks ago. You may believe that since I wrote these pieces, they should be easier for me to play, when in fact, the very opposite is true. Because these pieces have in many cases been through multiple revisions, it has taken extra time and care to delete the past versions from my memory and muscle memory, and replace them with the new ones. Accordingly, I put aside my originally ambitious plan to complement my own pieces on this program with other pieces that were new to me, in favor of some music that I'm more comfortable playing.

When you hear my music, you might miss the influence and inspiration of one “composer” if I didn't give her due diligence. Gabriela Montero is not only my favorite living pianist, but a truly brilliant composer, though her “pieces” are all improvised. Since I discovered her improvisations two years ago, they've been a revelation for me. She improvises with the skill of a jazz player, but in a huge range of styles. She can take any tune, from any time, and turn it into something completely different, all seemingly instinctively and almost without conscious thought or foresight. Her playing was critical to making me realize how rhythmic and textural variety can add so much, can indeed completely change the character, of a simple melodic or harmonic idea. She made me realize also that composing is just as much a physical act as a cerebral one. So much of the music I've written came about not from thinking, but just from putting my hands on the keys, seeing what came out, and then refining it.

The “style” of these compositions, if I may claim have the authority or perspective to comment

on them, is eclectic, but they share a conservative outlook, a debt to past styles that is extremely uncommon in modern “classical” music. A good friend of mine heard another one of my pieces (not being performed today), which I wrote and performed in June, and criticized it on the grounds that it “sounded like a hybrid of Mozart and Schubert.” My immediate thought was, that's a criticism?! But at the same time, I feel such a need to justify the existence of this music, that I suspect deep down, at least a part of me shares his criticism.

The question he raises is a serious one, and gets at the heart of what we consider the value of art. Is it, at its core, an aesthetic experience, or do we care about authenticity, about the meaning behind the experience? On the one hand, I believe that music is just music, and all that matters is how it sounds. If it sounds good, it is good, and if it sounds vaguely like Mozart or Schubert, then it's probably really good. People like to say there's no point in writing music in Classical style (capital c-Classical denoting a system of form and harmony in common practice in Europe from roughly 1750-1830) because we already have the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. But if, tomorrow, we discovered a trove of previously unknown, mature works by any of the above, is there any doubt that they would

dominate concert programs all over the world? That if Mozart had lived another 30 years, he wouldn't have written hundreds more works that we would still be playing today? Perhaps this is an irrelevant thought experiment, mostly because I don't claim to be capable of writing music that could be mistaken for that of any of these composers. But that doesn't mean that music that sticks to old styles has to be strictly imitative. Each of the above found a way to express himself within a set of rules that gave his music structure and definition, and I think that's what all composers, indeed all artists, strive for.

That being said, only one of the pieces you'll hear tonight was conceived specifically to sound

like music from a by-gone era (the prelude and fugue that opens the second half). I haven't set out, generally, to write music in any specific style, but rather to play only that which I find good enough to be worthy of repetition. Still, the things I write have a habit of sounding as if they were written for another century, , which, at least superficially, defies the idea that music is a reflection of the culture and the times in which it was conceived. I think people who would make this claim confuse the normative with the positive, the idea that music is inevitably looking back, a reflection of its time, vs. the idea that it must be, in a predictable way, reflective of its time. Nobody in 18th century Europe knew how Classical style was especially suited to its time and place. All I can reflect on in my own music is my own philosophy regarding music; if I am so lucky, perhaps one day people will see some connection to the world in which I lived. But to me, it doesn't much matter.

Sam Post

December 20th, 2011

The Life and Tragic Death of Recorded music

I've already decided on an early New Year's resolution: listen to music. Seems so simple, right? In truth, it is deceivingly difficult, maybe impossible.

I mean, does anyone listen to music, for long stretches at a time, without undertaking any other distracting task, except in a concert setting? Put on a CD or turn on your ipod or other cloud-playing device, sit down and just listen with no other short-term goals in mind?

I suppose maybe most people never did this; certainly very few people, if any, do it today. But I used to do it all the time.

Gouldberg Variations

I wrote this for a magazine a while back, but as of right now, it still hasn't been published. I was reminded of it again by a recent conversation I had about recordings: are they gateways to musical enlightenment, joy and ecstasy, or destructive pieces of garbage that ruin music for everyone? These are, of course, the only two choices. The essay is about Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations, and me, but gets at the question of recordings too....naturally, my answer is: it depends! Recordings can be great, but their influence, proliferation, and the way we listen to them, makes them terrible too...

The lights dim, the audience grows quiet, and the film begins. It starts so simply, so innocently: two tones, two octaves apart, ringing purely, seemingly alone in a dark room. The camera turns and the scene reveals their source, as the music unfolds slowly, methodically. At first from a distance, we see a man, aged beyond his years, crouched behind a piano, head scarcely visible rising above it. As we approach, we see him seated about a foot above the floor, arms bent unnaturally, his gargantuan glasses nearly touching the keys as he sways back and forth, appearing to speak each note as he articulates it with his long, spindly fingers. The scene is somewhat unsettling; the music, divine.

Thus began my visual introduction to Glenn Gould, at a “concert” screening of his 1981 Goldberg Variations film at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, in honor of the twentieth anniversary of his death.

coaching!

Nothing brings out the inner blogger in me like Atul Gawande. I just finished his latest New Yorker piece on expertise and coaching, and as usual, it was illuminating and extremely relevant! Its lesson is one that is all-too-easily ignored: even true experts in a field are easily blinded to their own shortcomings. Even after eight years as a surgeon, Gawande needed a "coach" to point out his weaknesses and help him improve, even if he could spot the very same weaknesses in other people. People are so invested and so involved that when it comes to our own weaknesses, we lose perspective, and the ability of unbiased judgment along with it.

The article talked a lot about schoolteachers and musicians, of which I am now both. Both examples are interesting for me in very different ways. No one will admit more quickly than I will to the value of having a coach for schoolteaching, and yet, teacher coaches are relatively rare.

My feeling about musical coaching is more nuanced.

emily howell, cont'd: essentialism

Okay then! Before I start rambling on about essentialism, let me just say that I've now listened to a bunch of music composed by David Cope's programs. Most of it is terrible (the older stuff, where EMI is trying to imitate composers of the past). But the newer CD is intriguing to say the least, and certainly worth listening to if you have any interest in the future of music. To argue that the Emily Howell project and artificially composed music isn't at least a worthwhile venture, or that it doesn't have the potential for making beautiful and powerful music, is absurd.

Anyhoo, I've recently made the claim that humans' natural inclination toward essentialism distorts our perception of art, and indeed, lots of stuff.

Essentialism, roughly defined, is the idea that things have intrinsic properties that go beyond their more obvious external, analyzable properties, and that these intrinsic properties are in some sense or another irreducible and essential to the things themselves. The classic example is a species like a tiger: there is some essential "tiger-ness" to every tiger that has nothing to do with the way any individual tiger looks or behaves. Rather, "tiger-ness" is an invisible but necessary property that all tigers share, and that all non-tigers lack.

Psychologists have shown how people--cross-culturally, and from very early in life--believe this idea of species essentialism despite the fact that it is, strictly speaking, false.

what is music? a debate sparked by emily howell

Over the past year or so a performer-turned-scholar musician friend and I have debated on and off about our various philosophies regarding what we call "art music" or "classical music." I think I've written a little bit about the matter at hand a few times before, but given his conversion to scholar, I can no longer shrug off his ideas. Here is my initial attempt to organize my own thoughts thoughts, with the ultimate goal of perhaps putting them in some more tangible form, as a rebuttal to my friend's crackpot theories (don't worry, the mutual respect runs deep).

Emily Howell, for those who don't know, is a computer program created by computer scientist and composer David Cope. David Cope's previous program, Emi, analyzed music in a given style and was then able to compose music in the same style. Emily, however, purports to write music in her own style.

The reason Emily Howell is such a controversial figure--well, at least in the world of art music--is that she (it?) makes us question what music is, why it's important, and ultimately, why we value it.

Meter, ct'd

A friend of mine wrote me this long email discussing the philosophy of music. I wrote back, telling him the discussion was arcane, and sent him the link to my meter post, below. He accused me of irrelevance.

I remembered this piece I heard last year. My friend plays in a wind quintet. They played this piece, "Aires Tropicales." I heard it twice, once in a masterclass scenario, and then in their concert. Now listen to the beginning of the second movement. Where's the downbeat? Now when I first heard this movement, in the class, I heard it, as I'm sure you did, as the first image shown above. It's the only way anyone would ever hear it! After the bassoon goes on for a while, the other instruments join, but if you'll listen through to the youtube video, the rhythm just doesn't sound right for the entire movement. Then, in the masterclass, they projected the score on screen, and it all made sense. The bassoon ostinato is actually written as the second image above. But once you get it in your head the first way, it's impossible to get rid of it. Every time I heard it, for the rest of the class and then again in the concert, I tried really hard to hear it the right way, in this case not just because it was right, but because the whole piece sounds so much better the right way. But I couldn't do it.

(Apparently, neither can the clarinetist in that youtube video, who keeps tapping his foot on the faux-beats.)

Anyway, the point is, the metrical tension should be one of the most important aspects of this music, but it's completely lost when it's impossible to hear it the right way.

My suggestion: the basoonist should stomp at the start of the second movement to signal the downbeat, or at least breathe to the downbeat. I don't know if that would solve the problem, but it couldn't hurt. I mean, he's got to do something, right??

Point is: this happens all over the place. It's far from irrelevant!

Meter

Something's been bothering me for a while, and that something is meter. Meter is a fundamental attribute of most music, something so basic we're usually completely unaware of our effortless perception of it. But I get it wrong all the time. Is it just me, or are you all in the same boat? Quick survey: How do you hear the following excerpts? At 0:29 here, is the strong beat on a) the triplet, or b) after? What about 7:20 here (strong beat with a) the winds or b) before) or 2:13 here [beats on a) the first of the three note motif or b) the second]? (This kinda thing happens all over the place in Brahms...please also note the ridiculous-looking, yet absurdly effective conducting in the first link). But it also happens in Bach (are the 8th notes here grouped in a) 3's or b) 2's?) What about this one? Go to the end of Variation 25 (maybe 5:10 on)....where are the downbeats? Or where's the beat in this one [with a) the bass notes or b) just after? Don't peek at the score, not that it will really matter!]. Just a few examples of the thousands available!

So did you botch the listening quiz like I did? (answer b is correct for all the questions). How much did it matter if you've played/seen the scores to the pieces in question? For me, the Brahms excerpts go in and out, often depending on how actively and engagedly I'm listening (see below). But I can't hear Hilary Hahn's Bach "correctly" no matter how hard I try (though I can play the correct auditory image afterward in my head). Ditto with the Schumann.

So maybe the composer's really botched it? Or the performers? Or is it us listeners?

Or is it just me.

goldberg variations, ct'd: cheating

So aside from the fact that I'm obviously really gung-ho about cheating in general at the piano, what does it have to do, specifically, with Goldberg Variations? As I talked about here and here, Goldberg Variations is unusual in that it was written specifically for a two-manual harpsichord. Indeed the piece is unusual, almost anomalous, for Bach's writing, in other respects: the multiple-of-three-minus-one numbered variations are virtuosic show-pieces with lots of hand-crossings. These hand-crossings often take the form of voice-crossings of the second type described here, and they present a unique challenge to the pianist playing on a single keyboard: when to respect Bach's part-writing, keeping a continuity of voicing with each voice in the "correct" hand, and when to "cheat" and switch voices to make the execution simpler? What makes GBV unusual is the added "visual element" of the performance. I am not referring to the mere spectacle of seeing someone play it, which is pretty awesome, but rather how the brain integrates visual information along with aural input in separating counterpoint into its different parts.

And just like that....

A new blog is born with a little help from friend, colleague, and competent writer Alissa. Motto: "because there's more to life than soccer, science, politics, and the arts...ie, New Yorker cartoon captioning."

goldberg variation rankings, ct'd

When I decided to take my sister's advice and rank each of the Goldberg variations 1-30, I didn't really stop to think how difficult it would be after 29 and 30. They're all brilliant to start with, but from here on out they're, like, really brilliant. So we'll see how long I can keep up this farce.

28: Variation 19

27: Variation 8

Variation 19 (8:40) is a nostalgic break in the action from the charming, echoic canon on the sixth and the bustling, energetic variation 20. Two distinct motives are shared between the three voices throughout: a six-note sixteenths figure, and a syncopated eighth-note/quarter note figure. The genius here is in the tied notes that are suspended over the bar lines; these held notes give the variation its unique rhythmic and harmonic character. Beautiful indeed!

Variation 8, like variation 19, has two main ideas which are repeated measure by measure and passed between two voices. In the first four measures, the top voice plays rising arpeggiated sixteenths (with one sixteenth note "missing" at the end of each bar), while the bass plays four falling eighth notes, followed by three falling sixteenths. In the second phraselet (bars 5-8), both parts are inverted, or turned upside down. This is a common technique Bach uses, especially in GBV, to change things up within a variation while maintaining its rhythmic character and give the listener something to latch onto (it happens to a greater or lesser extent in variations 1, 5, 11-17, 20-21, 23, and 26-28 aka all over the place). Variation 8 is a doozy for pianists; look what GG has to do in the last measure (0:50)! Gah!

goldberg variations, ct'd

Okay, enough "Handel-lambasting" (as Brett accused me of in his last comment). Let's do some Bach-lambasting instead.

Wha??? But I thought GBV was, like, the greatest? Well, it is....but Bach does some nasty things in there that just make it really hard to pull off, on harpsichord or piano. Especially on piano....but especially on harpsichord. One of the difficulties in performing, listening to, or understanding GBV is voice-crossing.

When two separates lines of music "cross" pitch paths, we call it a voice-crossing; one starts out above the other in pitch, but ends up below. If one person started singing a scale up from below, and another person down from above, there would be a voice-crossing somewhere in the middle.

goldberg variations, part 2

While I'm still on the theme of proof by contrast, those who know ol' Golby should listen to this Handel chaconne. Despite obvious differences from the Goldberg Variations, most notably length and, well, quality, comparison is just too easy given the superficial similarities. A chaconne is like a continuous theme and variations light, and Handel treats theme and variation as most composers do: the harmonic progression stays the same more or less throughout, but the melodic rhythm increases steadily, with more and more "flourish" as the piece unfolds. There's also, as is customary, a couple of variations in minor. It's just unfortunate for Handel that he had to write the piece in G (the same key as Goldbergs) and make the opening progression identical to the opening progression in the Goldbergs. Because although the piece is lovely and all, it's a perfect illustration, by contrast, of Bach's genius. This piece, by another giant of the Baroque era, is so vastly inferior to the Goldberg variations in every possible respect, it's astounding. No one could listen to it without feeling the repetition; the variations are different, but only incidentally and ornamentally; there's little fundamental difference of melody, counterpoint, and overall character. In contrast, each variation in the Goldbergs has its own identity, and could stand on its own if it had to (even variations 11 and 18).