A couple of fragments of television drama have stuck with me, each between an aspiring young musician and a teacher of theory or composition who is pointing out an error in the student's work. The student rejects the correction as an unwarranted incursion on his artistic voice; the teacher defends the correction; and a clash ensues between the stuffy old defender of rules for their own sake and the ardent young spokesman for originality and artistic integrity (with whom American audiences can be counted on to identify). I wasn't interested enough in either of these shows to stick around and find out how it all turned out. I suppose the student sticks to his guns and ultimately triumphs in the teeth of The Rules.
It doesn't work that way. Within the context of any art or genre there are things that work and things that don't, and rules and techniques that you ignore at your peril. While there probably are teachers who can't see beyond the letter of the rules and would allow themselves to be sucked into the kind of altercation depicted in these TV shows, any teacher with his wits about him would point out that the young musician can do anything with his own music that he can get his band, friends, and relations to go along with; but a passing grade in the class or a degree from the institution presumes mastery of certain material. A student who has learned those techniques can go beyond them, but breaking a bunch of rules because one doesn't know any better usually doesn't work well. An artist who is honest and genuinely talented will recognize that it doesn't, and either give up or re-invent a lot of wheels trying to fix the problem.
Thirty years or so ago some tune from The Godfather was being played a lot. I always knew that it annoyed me, but I didn't care enough to figure out why until, after hearing it one time too many, I found myself humming it, to my dismay (Laurie and I had some satisfying Ain't It Awful moments on getting music you don't like stuck in your head). Unable to rid myself of the Godfather tune, I turned around and looked it in the eye and noticed that it violated at least one rule of melodic writing that has been in force in Western music since the days of Gregory the Great in the seventh century: a wide upward leap in a melody is usually followed by a more or less corresponding descent; if such an interval is part of a continuing rising line, the effect is awkward; and the longer the upward motion continues, the more of a bad debt, so to speak, is created. The Godfather tune exactly, unrepentently and repeatedly took some big upward leap and kept on going.
Another time, annoyed by the background music in a restaurant, I asked Laurie, "What's the matter with this thing, anyway?" "Oh, it's all parallel," he said in disgust. Centuries ago, when Europe was figuring out how to manage music that consisted of more than one pitch at a time, we discovered that in most contexts we prefer the sound of contrary motion -- melodic lines sounding simultaneously and moving in opposite directions -- to parallelism, where lines move together the same distance apart. Obviously, if there are more than two parts they can't all move in different directions. We settled on keeping the bass line as independent as can be managed, and eschewing parallel octaves and fifths. Laurie was a sophisticated enough listener to recognize the problem with the restaurant music as parallel fifths. I just knew that I didn't like it.
When you invoke rules in the arts, people roll their eyes and accuse you of pedantry; but it tends to work the other way around. You don't think, Oh, god, parallel fifths, horrors, this
song must be terrible; you think, What is wrong with this thing?? and then notice the parallelism, if you can hear it. If you can't, you may just go on liking that piece of music less and less without knowing or much caring why.
Monday, May 25, 2015
Thursday, April 2, 2015
A VOICE FROM THE PAST
Looking through my late husband's effects for something to read, I came upon The Glenn Gould Reader, a 1984 collection of record jacket notes, articles for music and audio magazines, and other writings from the 1960s and 1970s by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Goul
Gould's many eccentricities are the stuff of legend, to the point where they could obscure his merits as a musician. He loathed performing. He stopped giving concerts early in his career, predicting "that the public concert as we know it today [will] no longer exist a century hence, that its functions [will] have been entirely taken over by electronic media." He gives an intriguing account of the extent to which recordings of concert music are doctored and patched, cobbled together out of many takes, to produce the kind of musical experience that performers and listeners have come to expect.
In The Prospects of Recording (1966) he explains how, as recording and editing skill and equipment become more widespread and sophisticated, listeners will be able to produce their own definitive recordings: "Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer's handling of the development section. . . . You could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance."
Prophecy is a risky business. Presumably, music-loving audiophiles now have the equipment and the know-how to make the kind of edited recordings that Gould describes; but I have trouble picturing who would bother. I would think that hobbyists with that level of editing savvy would be more interested in generating projects of their own -- like Eduardo Antonello, who posts videos on YouTube of himself in quadruplicate playing sixteenth century dances on krummhorns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The evolution of harmony has been central to Western music since we began to invent polyphony around the turn of the tenth century. Gould describes how harmonic development culminated in the work of such turn-of-the-century post-romantics as Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): chromaticism and dissonance, he says, have expanded to the point where key orientation is no longer workable. While Strauss stuck to tonality, Schoenberg and the other atonalists, as Gould sees it, pointed the way to further development of music by avoiding tonality and "liberating" dissonance.
This development has been greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm in musical circles. In a mid-1970s conversation with a recorder player who worked in a music store, I mentioned a question from a musically naive individual who asked if "classical" music -- symphonies, string quartets, and the like -- was still being composed. "Oh, yeah," the recorder player said, "but hardly anybody likes it."
Gould acknowledges with some reluctance that the "fundamental effect [of Schoenberg's works and ideas] has been to separate audience and composer. . . , shattering irreparably the compact between audience and composer, . . . separating their common bond of reference and creating between them a profound antagonism." In other words, hardly anybody likes atonalism.
At one time I tried to figure out what all the post-tonality shouting was about and could find nothing attractive or interesting about that music. I would love to have an atonality aficionado explain to me, YouTube link in hand, just what one is supposed to hear in that mass of dissonance and strained, screaming sound. In the meantime, I stick to my suspicion that that particular emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.
It is often assumed that innovators are ahead of their time and the public will eventually catch up; but the professor with whom I studied theory at DeAnza college in the mid-1970s - like Gould, a great admirer of Schoenberg -- pointed out that it had been nearly seventy years since Schoenberg's 1908 venture into atonality, and that if something is going to catch on it happens faster than that. I also heard in music school that radio stations know to a nicety for how many minutes their audience will sit still for an atonal piece (the number was in the single digits, as I remember) before changing the station. From 1908 through the 1960s and 1970s to the present time, the music-listening public hasn't taken to atonality.
Gould, in a 1967 essay, was still waiting, expecting atonal music, you might say, to sneak in the back door: "If you really stop to listen to the music accompanying most of the grade-B horror movies that are coming out of Hollywood these days, or perhaps a TV show on space travel for children, you will be absolutely amazed at the amount of integration which the various idioms of atonality have undergone in these media." I've noticed that, actually. Gould goes on to express an expectation that scary movie music will accustom the public to the sound of atonality. Maybe -- but in the decades since Gould wrote, I haven't noticed any such effect.
These two preoccupations -- the inevitability and rightness of atonality and the imminent replacement of concert performance with recordings -- intersect in ways that Gould seems not to have considered. He takes for granted the continued forward march of Western concert music; it seems not to have occurred to him that the listening public might respond to all that discordant shrieking by walking away altogether from the kind of music often called (erroneously) "classical."
Neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) claims that concert or "classical" music hasn't been written since about 1950. His book emphasizes the psychology of rhythm and tone color (or timbre) and barely mentions harmony at all. I have known other rockers -- often with a defensive edge -- to refer to "classical" music as passe. The decline in concert attendance that Gould takes as evidence of the obsolescence of public performance applies to electronic music reproduction as well: the "classical" section of CD stores has shrunk steadily since Gould's time, and radio stations playing that kind of music are now few and far between. Meanwhile, rock concerts continue unabated. Something other than preference for recordings over live performance must be going on.
Photography hasn't replaced painting but has become an art form in its own right. Film hasn't replaced stage drama. Similarly, electronic sound reproduction hasn't replaced acoustic public performance so much as spun off another kind of music altogether. I have been saying since the late 1960s (when anyone would listen, which has been seldom) that the possibilities of harmonic development seem to be played out; that the experimenters who have been trying to create electronic music for as long as electronics have been around have developed sounds and techniques that are interesting but not clearly music; and that the first efforts to come to my attention that are electronic and also undeniably music, would be the Beatles and others like them. (Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an electronic music pioneer.) The Beatles weren't the first or the only ones to combine conventional sounds and techniques with electronic ones, but they must be the mostly widely-heard.
My favorite Beatles song is Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966), with its steady, insistent percussion (not produced electronically, as it probably would be now, but left to Ringo Starr's impeccable rhythmic sense) supporting what might be described as a collage of electronically generated sounds. Tomorrow Never Knows is studio music that in the 1960s couldn't be performed live, although Paul McCartney has said in an interview that it could be now.
None of the above is at all what Gould had in mind. In a piece on Petula Clark (whom he detested), he takes a sideswipe at the Beatles, calling them "amateurish" and faulting their voice leading. I'm sure he would have been horrified at the suggestion that their productions were comparable to what he was doing with his own recordings. And the Beatles' studio pieces were far more innovative than Gould's endless picking over of historical works that were never meant to be handled that way. As little enthusiasm as I have for the decline of Western concert music, it rather amuses me to reflect while reading Gould's sarcastic putdown that the Beatles won: they beat Gould at his own game, and arguably the future of music rests more with them than with him.
Gould's many eccentricities are the stuff of legend, to the point where they could obscure his merits as a musician. He loathed performing. He stopped giving concerts early in his career, predicting "that the public concert as we know it today [will] no longer exist a century hence, that its functions [will] have been entirely taken over by electronic media." He gives an intriguing account of the extent to which recordings of concert music are doctored and patched, cobbled together out of many takes, to produce the kind of musical experience that performers and listeners have come to expect.
In The Prospects of Recording (1966) he explains how, as recording and editing skill and equipment become more widespread and sophisticated, listeners will be able to produce their own definitive recordings: "Let us say, for example, that you enjoy Bruno Walter's performance of the exposition and recapitulation from the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony but incline toward Klemperer's handling of the development section. . . . You could snip out these measures from the Klemperer edition and splice them into the Walter performance."
Prophecy is a risky business. Presumably, music-loving audiophiles now have the equipment and the know-how to make the kind of edited recordings that Gould describes; but I have trouble picturing who would bother. I would think that hobbyists with that level of editing savvy would be more interested in generating projects of their own -- like Eduardo Antonello, who posts videos on YouTube of himself in quadruplicate playing sixteenth century dances on krummhorns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
The evolution of harmony has been central to Western music since we began to invent polyphony around the turn of the tenth century. Gould describes how harmonic development culminated in the work of such turn-of-the-century post-romantics as Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): chromaticism and dissonance, he says, have expanded to the point where key orientation is no longer workable. While Strauss stuck to tonality, Schoenberg and the other atonalists, as Gould sees it, pointed the way to further development of music by avoiding tonality and "liberating" dissonance.
This development has been greeted with a certain lack of enthusiasm in musical circles. In a mid-1970s conversation with a recorder player who worked in a music store, I mentioned a question from a musically naive individual who asked if "classical" music -- symphonies, string quartets, and the like -- was still being composed. "Oh, yeah," the recorder player said, "but hardly anybody likes it."
Gould acknowledges with some reluctance that the "fundamental effect [of Schoenberg's works and ideas] has been to separate audience and composer. . . , shattering irreparably the compact between audience and composer, . . . separating their common bond of reference and creating between them a profound antagonism." In other words, hardly anybody likes atonalism.
At one time I tried to figure out what all the post-tonality shouting was about and could find nothing attractive or interesting about that music. I would love to have an atonality aficionado explain to me, YouTube link in hand, just what one is supposed to hear in that mass of dissonance and strained, screaming sound. In the meantime, I stick to my suspicion that that particular emperor really isn't wearing any clothes.
It is often assumed that innovators are ahead of their time and the public will eventually catch up; but the professor with whom I studied theory at DeAnza college in the mid-1970s - like Gould, a great admirer of Schoenberg -- pointed out that it had been nearly seventy years since Schoenberg's 1908 venture into atonality, and that if something is going to catch on it happens faster than that. I also heard in music school that radio stations know to a nicety for how many minutes their audience will sit still for an atonal piece (the number was in the single digits, as I remember) before changing the station. From 1908 through the 1960s and 1970s to the present time, the music-listening public hasn't taken to atonality.
Gould, in a 1967 essay, was still waiting, expecting atonal music, you might say, to sneak in the back door: "If you really stop to listen to the music accompanying most of the grade-B horror movies that are coming out of Hollywood these days, or perhaps a TV show on space travel for children, you will be absolutely amazed at the amount of integration which the various idioms of atonality have undergone in these media." I've noticed that, actually. Gould goes on to express an expectation that scary movie music will accustom the public to the sound of atonality. Maybe -- but in the decades since Gould wrote, I haven't noticed any such effect.
These two preoccupations -- the inevitability and rightness of atonality and the imminent replacement of concert performance with recordings -- intersect in ways that Gould seems not to have considered. He takes for granted the continued forward march of Western concert music; it seems not to have occurred to him that the listening public might respond to all that discordant shrieking by walking away altogether from the kind of music often called (erroneously) "classical."
Neuroscience researcher Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) claims that concert or "classical" music hasn't been written since about 1950. His book emphasizes the psychology of rhythm and tone color (or timbre) and barely mentions harmony at all. I have known other rockers -- often with a defensive edge -- to refer to "classical" music as passe. The decline in concert attendance that Gould takes as evidence of the obsolescence of public performance applies to electronic music reproduction as well: the "classical" section of CD stores has shrunk steadily since Gould's time, and radio stations playing that kind of music are now few and far between. Meanwhile, rock concerts continue unabated. Something other than preference for recordings over live performance must be going on.
Photography hasn't replaced painting but has become an art form in its own right. Film hasn't replaced stage drama. Similarly, electronic sound reproduction hasn't replaced acoustic public performance so much as spun off another kind of music altogether. I have been saying since the late 1960s (when anyone would listen, which has been seldom) that the possibilities of harmonic development seem to be played out; that the experimenters who have been trying to create electronic music for as long as electronics have been around have developed sounds and techniques that are interesting but not clearly music; and that the first efforts to come to my attention that are electronic and also undeniably music, would be the Beatles and others like them. (Paul McCartney was a fan of Karlheinz Stockhausen, an electronic music pioneer.) The Beatles weren't the first or the only ones to combine conventional sounds and techniques with electronic ones, but they must be the mostly widely-heard.
My favorite Beatles song is Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966), with its steady, insistent percussion (not produced electronically, as it probably would be now, but left to Ringo Starr's impeccable rhythmic sense) supporting what might be described as a collage of electronically generated sounds. Tomorrow Never Knows is studio music that in the 1960s couldn't be performed live, although Paul McCartney has said in an interview that it could be now.
None of the above is at all what Gould had in mind. In a piece on Petula Clark (whom he detested), he takes a sideswipe at the Beatles, calling them "amateurish" and faulting their voice leading. I'm sure he would have been horrified at the suggestion that their productions were comparable to what he was doing with his own recordings. And the Beatles' studio pieces were far more innovative than Gould's endless picking over of historical works that were never meant to be handled that way. As little enthusiasm as I have for the decline of Western concert music, it rather amuses me to reflect while reading Gould's sarcastic putdown that the Beatles won: they beat Gould at his own game, and arguably the future of music rests more with them than with him.
Friday, September 12, 2014
ZAXEROPLASTEION
When Justin was in school he and I often found ourselves on Lake Street between Route 2 and Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington. There, just as you turn left onto Mass Ave, is the Arlington Bakery, advertising Italian and Greek pastries.
Above the name on the sign is an intriguing Greek word: ZAXEROPLASTEION. Justin and I wondered idly on many occasions how to pronounce it, and what it meant. In the absence of any information on the subject, he blithely pronounced it phonetically: ZAX-ER-O-PLAS-TI-ON, the A’s as in “cat.”
Then a day came when for once we weren’t in a huge rush to get home. The other issue had always been that having turned onto Mass Ave we were a bit too far up to stop at the bakery. This time, surrendering to curiosity, I turned up a side street and doubled back.
We bought some things that looked good, and weren’t disappointed. I would have looked for an exotic concoction that I hadn’t seen before; Justin probably opted for the kind of regrettable pastry that kids favor. I’ve patronized that bakery from time to time since, usually when driving west on Mass Ave and thus on its side of the street.
The proprietor explained that the word on the sign means “sugar store” and is pronounced ZA-CHER-O-PLAS-TI-O(N), A as in “father,” CH as in “Bach,” E as in “feta.” O(N) is the final nasal vowel that also occurs in Portuguese, as in “Sao Paulo.” I can’t reliably produce that sound in Portuguese or in Greek.
I have since tried to do justice to the Greek word and pronounce it as nearly correctly as I can. Justin has no patience with that and shamelessly sticks with ZAX-ER-O-PLAS-TI-ON.
Above the name on the sign is an intriguing Greek word: ZAXEROPLASTEION. Justin and I wondered idly on many occasions how to pronounce it, and what it meant. In the absence of any information on the subject, he blithely pronounced it phonetically: ZAX-ER-O-PLAS-TI-ON, the A’s as in “cat.”
Then a day came when for once we weren’t in a huge rush to get home. The other issue had always been that having turned onto Mass Ave we were a bit too far up to stop at the bakery. This time, surrendering to curiosity, I turned up a side street and doubled back.
We bought some things that looked good, and weren’t disappointed. I would have looked for an exotic concoction that I hadn’t seen before; Justin probably opted for the kind of regrettable pastry that kids favor. I’ve patronized that bakery from time to time since, usually when driving west on Mass Ave and thus on its side of the street.
The proprietor explained that the word on the sign means “sugar store” and is pronounced ZA-CHER-O-PLAS-TI-O(N), A as in “father,” CH as in “Bach,” E as in “feta.” O(N) is the final nasal vowel that also occurs in Portuguese, as in “Sao Paulo.” I can’t reliably produce that sound in Portuguese or in Greek.
I have since tried to do justice to the Greek word and pronounce it as nearly correctly as I can. Justin has no patience with that and shamelessly sticks with ZAX-ER-O-PLAS-TI-ON.
Thursday, August 21, 2014
HIPPOPOTAMUS (with apologies to Eugene Ionesco)
The Christmas when Justin was nine, Paula pulled in with a large wrapped package under her arm, intimating that I might not be pleased with what she was about to bestow on my son. I'm not sure why she thought so, except that our condominium wasn't large and the object in question clearly was.
It proved to be a gray plush hippopotamus, four and a half feet long, a couple of feet high, and correspondingly bulky. She made it, of course. Paula makes many clever and intricate things.
Justin loved it. He established it in his room and lived with it day and night, using it as a pillow in childhood and beyond. He also vented his frustrations on it, wrestling with it and punching it. He had a lot of frustrations. A strong, energetic, active kid, he was in some sense, as he put it, under house arrest because his interactions with the neighborhood kids often brought grief on all of us. His father had stopped seeing him on weekends when I remarried. His stepfather yelled at him a lot; Justin was a kid who could get yelled at, but Laurie overdid it. My health wasn't reliable, which was hard on everybody. That's a lot for a nine-year-old to deal with.
Paula's sturdy and meticulous stitching held up remarkably well; but the hippopotamus could hardly have taken that kind of punishment indefinitely. Seams leaked, and then burst. Bits of hippopotamus stuffing appeared, and more bits, and bigger pieces, and once a small sofa pillow that Paula had shoved in when the batting was running low. By Justin's early twenties, the hippopotamus was tattered and its stuffing scanty.
Justin brought this pathetic rag to Paula's attention and begged her to save it. Undaunted -- Paula raised three boys of her own -- she took it in hand. The head was held together with a lot of seams but had lost at least one eye and a bunch of stuffing and clung to the body by a few threads (I think it still had both projecting fangs). The body was no better. The only thing for it was to construct a second hippopotamus out of a sheet and line the original hide with it. In two or three places where the damage to the fabric was beyond help or hope, she stitched brightly-colored cotton patches over the holes.
It proved to be a gray plush hippopotamus, four and a half feet long, a couple of feet high, and correspondingly bulky. She made it, of course. Paula makes many clever and intricate things.
Justin loved it. He established it in his room and lived with it day and night, using it as a pillow in childhood and beyond. He also vented his frustrations on it, wrestling with it and punching it. He had a lot of frustrations. A strong, energetic, active kid, he was in some sense, as he put it, under house arrest because his interactions with the neighborhood kids often brought grief on all of us. His father had stopped seeing him on weekends when I remarried. His stepfather yelled at him a lot; Justin was a kid who could get yelled at, but Laurie overdid it. My health wasn't reliable, which was hard on everybody. That's a lot for a nine-year-old to deal with.
Paula's sturdy and meticulous stitching held up remarkably well; but the hippopotamus could hardly have taken that kind of punishment indefinitely. Seams leaked, and then burst. Bits of hippopotamus stuffing appeared, and more bits, and bigger pieces, and once a small sofa pillow that Paula had shoved in when the batting was running low. By Justin's early twenties, the hippopotamus was tattered and its stuffing scanty.
Justin brought this pathetic rag to Paula's attention and begged her to save it. Undaunted -- Paula raised three boys of her own -- she took it in hand. The head was held together with a lot of seams but had lost at least one eye and a bunch of stuffing and clung to the body by a few threads (I think it still had both projecting fangs). The body was no better. The only thing for it was to construct a second hippopotamus out of a sheet and line the original hide with it. In two or three places where the damage to the fabric was beyond help or hope, she stitched brightly-colored cotton patches over the holes.
The resurrection of the hippopotamus was complete by Christmas. Again, Justin was delighted with it; it was, he said, the best present he had ever received. He carried it home proudly on Christmas night, by way of a date with a young woman he had long been interested in. The young woman didn't work out, but it was reported that she thought the hippopotamus rather cool.
Paula doesn't remember what prompted her to select the hippopotamus pattern out of the offerings at the fabric store. Once in possession, she made half a dozen hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) for her grandchildren and two for her husband's nieces. At the baby shower anticipating Aurora's appearance, Paula arrived carrying a round-ish package a couple of feet long. Somebody said, "It's a little hippopotamus" -- Justin's having become modestly famous. Paula smiled enigmatically: "Open it and see." Sure enough, it was a purple plush hippopotamus about half the size of Justin's.
For Xavier's second birthday Paula produced a similar object, in bright red. Amanda commented, "I feel like I should have a hippopotamus, too." I had thought of that and suggested yellow; Amanda put in for orange. Paula mentioned having orange fabric that would just do among her bales of fabric, boxes of sewing notions, big cutting table, and, at one point, seven sewing machines. Amanda may get her orange hippopotamus yet.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
THOSE EXCELLENT PONIES
Justin was five when we read The Hobbit. During most of one rainy weekend, I sat in my chair in the corner and read while he tore around the living room jumping off the furniture, working off the energy that he couldn't release outside.
I kept saying, "Look, Justin, we don't have to read this." I would fold up the book with the idea of letting him play freely -- but the next thing I knew he was back with this big, heavy book in his five-year-old hands: "Wread it, Mummy." So I read, until the jumping around reached a level that couldn't be compatible with listening -- could it?
Finally I said, "Justin, what did I just read?" He responded with a capable precis of the last paragraph, concluding on a rising inflection with the phrase -- an important one in context -- "those excellent PONIES!"
All right. He really can run around like a Tasmanian devil and listen at the same time. I kept reading, ignoring the wild rumpus at my feet, until we finished the book.
I kept saying, "Look, Justin, we don't have to read this." I would fold up the book with the idea of letting him play freely -- but the next thing I knew he was back with this big, heavy book in his five-year-old hands: "Wread it, Mummy." So I read, until the jumping around reached a level that couldn't be compatible with listening -- could it?
Finally I said, "Justin, what did I just read?" He responded with a capable precis of the last paragraph, concluding on a rising inflection with the phrase -- an important one in context -- "those excellent PONIES!"
All right. He really can run around like a Tasmanian devil and listen at the same time. I kept reading, ignoring the wild rumpus at my feet, until we finished the book.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
TOCCATA
I turned twenty-two that summer; Laurie was twenty-six. Our lives were in chaos. A bright spot for both of us was making our way to a back room up many stairs at M.Steinert's on Tremont Street -- Laurie worked there and had access at all hours -- where he would take his place at the piano that Sviatoslav Richter and John Browning asked for when they came to town, and play for me whatever he was working on at the time. One of these pieces was Prokofiev's Toccata, Opus 11, one of Vladimir Horowitz's encores and a barn burner by any standard. When Laurie was first looking at the music and thinking about learning it, someone he worked with said with a smirk, "You can't play that." Having, as he gleefully put it in later life, "no brains," he ground his teeth and settled down to learning the Toccata, just to prove that he could.
It begins with repeated sixteenth-notes on D, establishing a driving rhythm that, except for one short lyrical section, continues throughout the piece. It's percussive, chromatic, dissonant, exciting, and great fun to watch. Laurie said the Toccata is in sonata allegro form, like the first movement of a symphony. I'll take his word for it. Laurie was big on structure; I've never been able to hear these things, or figure them out. What I'm aware of structurally in the Toccata is the ingenious way the themes develop and fit together.
Toward the end of the development section, it must be, starting from the top and bottom of the keyboard respectively, the performer's hands work their way towards each other in contrary motion. The pattern in the left hand looks to me like thinly disguised parallel fifths; the right hand plays chromatic chords bristling with accidentals. At that point -- measure 77, in the middle of page 27 -- to be sure of positioning his hands correctly, Laurie would hesitate ever so slightly. Any interruption in the relentless sixteenth-note pulse is conspicuous; but I always liked the effect of that slight hesitation, which gives the listener a split-nanosecond to wonder what on earth is coming next.
Before the coda, the momentum relaxes -- think of the train slowing down at the beginning of The Music Man -- into repeated D's that echo the introduction. Then, at the original tempo, chromatic chords begin climbing the keyboard, louder and faster as they go, until the main theme explodes in frantic octaves at the top, twice as fast as anything that's happened yet. With a dive into one of Prokofiev's signature glissandos, the piece finishes fortissimo on a double open octave on D.
Laurie and I stayed in touch for the twenty-odd years between the spring and summer of the back room at Steinert's and our marriage in 1986 but weren't always aware of each other's day-to-day issues. I didn't know that the Toccata had become part of his repertoire. I was delighted when he announced his intention of dusting it off and playing it at a concert at our church. Hearing it in slow motion over many weeks, I came to appreciate the interplay of the different themes, even though I still didn't grasp the overall structure.
Discussing the concert with the choir director, Laurie told her what he was going to play and asked if she knew the piece. "Oh, yes," she said. Either she was thinking of a different work, or that was one of these absent-minded remarks people make. When she heard the Toccata at the concert, she was grafityingly surprised and impressed. At her request he repeated it a few years later. I think that was the concert that he left saying,
"Well, that's about as well as I can play."
As Laurie got older and less sure of himself, his playing took on a heavy-handed do-or-die quality. Usually this is a mistake -- sometimes a fatal one. With the Toccata, it works. Laurie once played me a recording by a young pianist who rippled through the piece, making it sound almost easy. That struck me as wrong. I missed the fire and drama of Laurie's rather desperate rendition. He began his relationship with the Toccata trying to prove something, and struggled for four decades with this powerful and rather angry piece that one biographer has characterized as "nasty."
I have kept three or four pieces of Laurie's piano music, including his 11 x 17 enlargement of the Toccata. For most people who knew Laurie, his signature piece would be the Gershwin Songbook (which I have also kept), the second Prelude, or Rhapsody in Blue. When I remember Laurie at the keyboard, I think of the Toccata.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGlXRW7GLsY
It begins with repeated sixteenth-notes on D, establishing a driving rhythm that, except for one short lyrical section, continues throughout the piece. It's percussive, chromatic, dissonant, exciting, and great fun to watch. Laurie said the Toccata is in sonata allegro form, like the first movement of a symphony. I'll take his word for it. Laurie was big on structure; I've never been able to hear these things, or figure them out. What I'm aware of structurally in the Toccata is the ingenious way the themes develop and fit together.
Toward the end of the development section, it must be, starting from the top and bottom of the keyboard respectively, the performer's hands work their way towards each other in contrary motion. The pattern in the left hand looks to me like thinly disguised parallel fifths; the right hand plays chromatic chords bristling with accidentals. At that point -- measure 77, in the middle of page 27 -- to be sure of positioning his hands correctly, Laurie would hesitate ever so slightly. Any interruption in the relentless sixteenth-note pulse is conspicuous; but I always liked the effect of that slight hesitation, which gives the listener a split-nanosecond to wonder what on earth is coming next.
Before the coda, the momentum relaxes -- think of the train slowing down at the beginning of The Music Man -- into repeated D's that echo the introduction. Then, at the original tempo, chromatic chords begin climbing the keyboard, louder and faster as they go, until the main theme explodes in frantic octaves at the top, twice as fast as anything that's happened yet. With a dive into one of Prokofiev's signature glissandos, the piece finishes fortissimo on a double open octave on D.
Laurie and I stayed in touch for the twenty-odd years between the spring and summer of the back room at Steinert's and our marriage in 1986 but weren't always aware of each other's day-to-day issues. I didn't know that the Toccata had become part of his repertoire. I was delighted when he announced his intention of dusting it off and playing it at a concert at our church. Hearing it in slow motion over many weeks, I came to appreciate the interplay of the different themes, even though I still didn't grasp the overall structure.
Discussing the concert with the choir director, Laurie told her what he was going to play and asked if she knew the piece. "Oh, yes," she said. Either she was thinking of a different work, or that was one of these absent-minded remarks people make. When she heard the Toccata at the concert, she was grafityingly surprised and impressed. At her request he repeated it a few years later. I think that was the concert that he left saying,
"Well, that's about as well as I can play."
As Laurie got older and less sure of himself, his playing took on a heavy-handed do-or-die quality. Usually this is a mistake -- sometimes a fatal one. With the Toccata, it works. Laurie once played me a recording by a young pianist who rippled through the piece, making it sound almost easy. That struck me as wrong. I missed the fire and drama of Laurie's rather desperate rendition. He began his relationship with the Toccata trying to prove something, and struggled for four decades with this powerful and rather angry piece that one biographer has characterized as "nasty."
I have kept three or four pieces of Laurie's piano music, including his 11 x 17 enlargement of the Toccata. For most people who knew Laurie, his signature piece would be the Gershwin Songbook (which I have also kept), the second Prelude, or Rhapsody in Blue. When I remember Laurie at the keyboard, I think of the Toccata.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGlXRW7GLsY
Thursday, April 3, 2014
THE YEAR OF THE CHICKEN
The pig was before my time, but I remember the chickens. My sister and I sometimes helped my feed them grain and collect eggs. As far as I know, no one in the family developed any emotional connection to them, as owners of such things sometimes do. We watched with interest as Dad beheaded one or more of them, holding the body at arms length until it stopped flapping and spraying blood around. (I once asked a doctor what method of execution would be fastest and least painful, and he said probably the guillotine would have been as humane as anything. On the basis of watching the chickens meet their end I have wondered idly if guillotined French aristocrats flailed around comparably; but there are things one doesn't have to know. I'm glad, anyway, that the chickens and the aristocrats didn't suffer, except in anticipation -- the aristocrats, of course; Barbara Kingsolver says poultry on the threshold of eternity have no idea what's coming.)
On one of these occasions I picked up a chicken head from beside the chopping block and examined it closely: reddish feathers, yellow beak, wide-open beady little yellow-ringed black eyes. I thought it was neat. I asked my mother if I could keep it. She said I could not. She maintained that it would become ugly and stinky very soon. I didn't believe her. I often disbelieved things I hadn't experienced personally. At least, I had to be able to visualize it as a direct result of what I had witnessed. I had seen Mother's dire prognostications fail to materialize. When no one was looking, I carried off the chicken head and put it in the mailbox for safekeeping. I knew, of course, that it couldn't stay there. I intended to retrieve it at my leisure and hide it in my room.
As children will, I got sidetracked and forgot about the chicken head in the mailbox. Mother found it when she went to mail a letter. She was not pleased. Of course, there was no possible question as to who was responsible. Even aside from my earlier expression of interest in the object, bizarre occurrences were routinely, and usually correctly, ascribed to me.
Mother read me the riot act. The mailman, she declared, would be within his rights in declining to deliver mail to people who kept chicken heads in their mailbox. I don't remember particularly regretting the chicken head, beyond feeling rather foolish for forgetting about it and incurring a scolding.
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