I think I have pretty well established here that I am not
shy about my genuine accomplishments, so I hope I can trust you all to take
what I say in this post at my word. This
observation is prompted by Chris Mulvaney’s suggestion that Susie videotape my
Christmas carol playing tomorrow, assuming I go through with it, and my
horrified response to the suggestion.
Now there was a time, twelve years ago, when I was a pretty
fair amateur violist, regularly playing Haydn and Mozart quartets and early and
middle Beethoven quartets, and I think I have even told here the story of my
triumphant playing of the last movement of Beethoven’s Op. 59 Number 3. But
even then, at the height of my powers, I was nowhere near as good as someone
consigned to the last stand of the viola section of a local professional
orchestra in a small Midwestern city.
Think about that for a moment, and you will get some idea
just how impressive is the skill of even a minor professional
instrumentalist. In this age of instant
stardom, we lose sight of the years of hard, slogging work that it takes to
master the violin, viola, oboe, flute, cello, or piano well enough to give real
musical pleasure to even a minimally discerning audience. I am not talking here about flights of
inspired interpretation, just playing all the notes in tune with a smooth,
graceful tone and some sense of rhythm and dynamics.
Even with my facial twitches, which I have all my life
considered disfiguring, I have no hesitation posting videos of my lectures for
posterity, because I genuinely believe I have something unusual and valuable to
say. But record myself playing the
viola? Not for all the money in the
world!
I'm currently studying for a piano diploma, and the amount of work involved in even the most elementary things is astonishing to me. I could play simple music when I was a child. But to play, say, Scarlatti's K208 *with poetry* feels as impossibly far away as ever it did.
ReplyDeleteJust to add to this - I remember you saying some years ago that the work involved in becoming a good musician dwarfs that of becoming a good philosopher. Well I have a PhD in philosophy, so I feel I to some extent have access to both sides here. I'm tempted to agree with you; but then I remember how long it was before I felt confident in my philosophical abilities; and I remember that when I did philosophy, although I only spent four hours or less in a day at the desk, I *embodied* philosophy in the deepest, vocational sense, and so asking 'how many hours a day' I 'worked' at philosophy seems ridiculous. There's a substantial sense in which I worked fourteen hours a day, without even noticing it, and without it being any more fatiguing than it is to be awake for fourteen hours a day, because this was just the mode of my being awake.
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your honesty. It is one of your endearing qualities.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy your story telling.
I enjoy your perceptive running commentary.
And I love you expertise in those areas in which you have lectured and made them available through your writings and your video postings.
As you have said, it gives you reach (an an immortality) that previous professors could never have dreamed of achieving.
But your basic honesty and sensible understanding of your limitations is the bedrock on which all else of your accomplishments are built.
Well done!
Thank you, James, for the Scarlatti reference. After reading it, I promptly turned to YouTube, where I played Scott Ross's performance, on harpsichord, of course. From there, I had to break down and acquire, finally, after many years desiring it, the set of Ross's complete traversal of the sonatas. I recall hearing many of them on KPFK in Los Angeles when the set was first released. The station played the entire recording over the course of more than a day. The experience was ear-opening.
ReplyDeleteGreat performance, Dean - but did you know! Scarlatti had access to early pianos, and the 'cantabile' indication in his scores - as here - arguably indicates that he envisioned the work on piano. There's not much info on what exactly he thought of as a 'piano', but it would in any case have been an instrument with dynamic variability! This isn't to say that it can't be played on harpsichord - there's no shortage of proof of that! - but a piano performance is hardly anachronistic. Indeed, in general, we have such little idea what the performance practice for Scarlatti would have been that we have an unusual amount of freedom in interpreting him. Check out Yevegny Subdin's CD of Scarlatti for a wild interpretation (he actually calls them *arrangements*) that I think works really well.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't for even a split second questioning the validity of Scarlatti (or Bach or, heck, Buxtehude or Byrd) on piano. Among my favorite recitals of Scarlatti is a live recording by Yuri Egorov, and then there's Alexandre Tharaud, and that guy...what's his name?...oh, yeah, Horowitz! I haven't listened to it in ages, but I have a jazzed up version of Scarlatti by Italian pianist Enrico Pieranunzi, too. I'm a huge fan of so-called authentic, HIP performances, but then just this morning I played the Bach Christmas Oratorio conducted by Eugen Jochum!
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, the "of course" was an acknowledgement that Ross of course performed it on harpsichord, not that of course it must be performed on harpsichord.
ReplyDeleteHi Dean, yes I misinterpreted your 'of course.' I'm like yourself in that much as I love a really uncompromising authentic performance (which, if done right, can have a lot more folky driving energy to them than a modern performance), but the freshness of a great modern take could never be sacrificed for it. I don't know Pieranunzi at all so I'm going to give him a go right now!
ReplyDeleteYou hit the nail on the head with "with poetry," another way of saying, "avec je ne sais quoi."
ReplyDeletePieranunzi's discography is huge. The more familiar jazz stuff is worth your time, too, if that's your thing.
I second the observations of Anonymous; "well done" indeed.
ReplyDeleteNow, about Nancy Pelosi....
Speaking of harpsichordists...I recall a moment from, say, 1989, at The University of Central Florida, where the great Rosalyn Tureck was to deliver a "Master's Class" on Bach. I had a terrible hang-over that morning. Lurching toward the rest-room in the lobby---whether to take a leak or to throw-up I don't recall---lo, there darted before me a five-foot one wisp of magnificent red hair. It was Tureck herself. I nearly knocked her over. "Idiot" she called me disdainfully, fire in her eye. I booed her rendition of, "Jingle Bells".
ReplyDelete@jgkess, I confess that's the first "I almost knocked over Rosalyn Tureck when I was hung-over" story I've ever heard. And I've been around the block a few times.
ReplyDeleteStill, wow, how cool to have heard her play live! But how did she try to pass off "JB" as a work of JSB?
David Egan has a recent piece at Aeon where he offers a critique of the “hard” vs “soft” sciences on the basis of an analogy involving the kind of skill necessary to playing the violin well.
ReplyDeletehttps://aeon.co/ideas/is-there-anything-especially-expert-about-being-a-philosopher
Dean: I suspect she was hung-over as well. Talk about ill-tempered.
ReplyDeletefgs, I read the piece and I think it is all wrong. I know what it is like to be a philosopher and I know what it is like to learn to play the violin, and the viola, and they are nothing like. A comparison with learning to be a singer would be closer.
ReplyDeleteBy my reading, learning to play the violin well stands in for expertise in the sciences in this analogy. I believe acting stands in for the humanistic pursuits, such as philosophy. The idea being that there is more continuity with our usual human experience in acting than there is in something like playing the violin well. I could imagine singing working just as well.
Delete"A comparison with learning to be a singer would be closer." This is really fascinating. Is it because the singer embodies his/her instrument as a philosopher embodies his/her mind?
ReplyDeleteI found the article unsatisfying, but because the headline asks a question about expertise that isn't really addressed in the piece (likely because the author had nothing to do with providing the title), but also because the analogies aren't effective (e.g., acting involves "capacities that we all have to some degree," but so does engineering, medicine, etc.), and because it merely assumes or accepts that usefulness ought to be the final measure of value.
I took the article to be rather silly. My sense is the author doesn't know much about music. Music is sui generis. It is its own language, or better, code, and it likely began prior to language. I can't back this assertion up, but you can learn music as a kid, but not philosophy, history, creative writing, or whatever. I learned piano starting at age six, studied a couple other instruments, and have played semi-professionally.
ReplyDeleteAs a rule, learning to pay an instrument competently takes many more years than a typical post grad experience. It requires one to learn a new "language", an abstract code that tell you what note to play, when, how loud, for how long, and what notes go with it, when to be silent, hhow to coordinate with other players, etc. Learning to read music ultimately enables one to see at a glance not just what your instrument plays, but what everybody in the group plays, from the double bass, to the piccolo, and every part (1st violin, 2nd violin, etc.) I guess it takes a good 8 years of practice to to learn the fine motor control and the technique to become a good pianist. To be great requires much more.
To compare that to philosophy, or history, is, in itself, kind of silly. There is no code in which every philosopher's work can be rendered and as a result reproduced and understood by every philosopher. In music, that is the case. Years ago, I was looking at a 10th century manuscript my brother was working on and it contained a 5 part Gregorian chant. I could have reproduced every line of it - the 1,000 year old manuscript could be deciphered by anyone who can read music.
There are lots of good things learning music teaches one, and yes, practice makes perfect is one of them. Music students acquire a huge capacity for memorization, for categorizing material, for understanding the relation of the part to the whole. These are skills, habits of mind, and behaviors, that are typically learned by kids. They can be put to work as adults in grad school and in careers. Frankly, I have little doubt that music structured my brain in ways that were extremely useful in grad school (having a weekly gig in a local bar certainly helped, too) and in the various careers I have had.
I'm not sure what I learned from the article.
We can and will compare any X with any Y on any day you choose. I'm interested in the professor's distinction between learning an instrument like viola and learning to sing. Both entail learning an approach to music making, yet for him voice is like philosophy where viola is not.
ReplyDeleteIs it so that the neumes in use during the tenth century are legible to anybody who can fluently read a modern staff of Western musical notation? And isn't it the case that some respected musicians do not read music? Who trained only in Western musical notation can read without further instruction the scores of Cage, Xenakis, or Braxton?
I feel I need to reread Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art...
ReplyDeleteBach to the Future. I am currently at a Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, in Vancouver. One of the Sony presentations here is on “A.I.-assisted music generation.” And one part of this is about Sony’s “DeepBach—a model able to learn and generate music in the style of J.S. Bach.” –Fritz Poebel
David Cope, Bach by Design, 1994: https://www.discogs.com/David-Cope-Bach-By-Design-Computer-Composed-Music-Experiments-In-Musical-Intelligence/release/7531356
ReplyDeleteDean,
ReplyDeleteBy the early 10th century the staff notation system had been established. Neumes, I think, refer to the prior system/s lines and squiggles. What I was looking at must have been a hundred years later than I remembered. That manuscript didn't have a time signature, nor a key. I think sacred music was always in a minor mode (at least everything I used to play at Sunday Catholic mass was in Em or Am). But the pitch and duration were clear. There have certainly been lots of extremely talented musicians who didn't read music. The limitation is they would have to have heard a piece before they could play it. Then again, if someone says let's do a 12 bar blues shuffle in E you don't need any music.
I confess to have never seen a score for a Cage piece. It seems notation will have to change to accommodate composers who want to specify where the sound originates.
Just a weird personal anecdote about my musical experience. I remember flunking a basic music course in eighth-grade Catholic school. The notation completely baffled me. I felt utterly lost. Hell, I couldn't even read a clock till I was twelve years old. But I was determined to learn the guitar (if not the clock). Years and years passed. I knew all the chords, but I could never learn to translate what I heard others play. Some thirty years on, now, I've not learned one complete song. But I've always managed to make up my own stuff---to my satisfaction if not other's.
ReplyDelete