What I love most about Beethoven.

Almost all of the great composers had to pay the bills; in many of their works we can find concessions to the guy who was actually paying their salary. We find compositions that are in reality thinly veiled first drafts of things to come, or quick reworkings of a previous work. Whatever the cause, great composers –such as Beethoven, Tchaikovsky or Chopin– wrote works that are, frankly, pretty bad. Not every single one of the more than 800 works in the Beethoven catalog is the Ninth Symphony, not every one of the 1300 works by Franz Liszt is the B minor Sonata. How could it be? Regardless of this, so many musicians go out of their way to seek out these unheard works, to play them and record them; they want to share with the world music that is flawed in so many different ways. And by extension, some people dedicate their lives to research and bring to life the works of all the other musicians that shared their period in time with the great composers, all those unremembered saps who at some point were probably as well-known (and in most cases much better liked.)

Imperfect art, then. So why the interest, specially with so many sublime works in the repertoire? Because it’s still Beethoven, and Liszt, and Bach, and Mozart. These were complex people, who lived complex lives. So much of their genius stems from the depth and richness of their perception of the world.  And so there was much of life in their lives, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and unhappy. Bringing their music to life is as much about finding something out about the world and ourselves as it is about sitting down and enjoying the pretty sounds. This search that we undertake into all the unpopular, unheard and unappreciated repertoire is worth it to find those little moments where the genius shines through, where a common piece of pretty tinkling –indistinguishable from a myriad of similar mediocre compositions of its time– suddenly becomes Bach, or Schubert, or Prokofiev.

That is what I love most about Beethoven, his imperfect life, his character. The way his work, no matter so insignificant, always carries the most amazing individuality that, at the same time, speaks to us all on some level. The fact that his compositions reflect the many facets of his personality while at the same time attempting to transcend his many flaws. How, his personal relationships were complicated to the extreme by his horrible temper and ego –particularly his relationship with his nephew– tear a kid from his mother after his father dies, call her a whore in public, force the kid into music even though he has neither the desire or the talent for it and then write letter after letter where you wonder why he doesn’t like you? Really, Beethoven?

His music has moments of such sweetness and ecstasy and –sometimes in the same work– of banality or violence. That is what makes Beethoven so prone to becoming myth, every generation sees something in Beethoven with which they identify and imprints into his image their ideals and flaws. The life of the man permeates every note he created, no matter how insignificant; and by extension, the humanity of every one of us is in his music. Thus the interest of his music, because of its extraordinary existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and sing, it would sound like Beethoven. Beethoven, like Shakespeare, like Michelangelo, like Bach, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.

Sandunga.

Sandunga is the fifth piece in Carteles, by Miguel Bernal Jimenez.

A sandunga is a musical form native to the isthmus of Tehuantepec region. This part of Mexico represents the shortest distance between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and is formed by the states of Oaxaca, Tabasco and Chiapas. The word sandunga is thought to be a nahuatl (the language spoken by most indigenous cultures in central Mexico) derivation  of the Spanish word fandango. “Saa” means music and “ndu” means deep; sandungas usually have a nostalgic or sad mood. The two most famous sandungas are “La Sandunga” and “La Llorona”.

A typical sandunga is a somewhat slow dance in a minor mode, usually in the key of A minor. The beginning is a common 32 bar melody, usually repeated several times with heavy ornamentation and variation. In a traditional sandunga it is followed by a 62 bar section in a major key, usually in 3/4 time, which is known as the paseo. If the sandunga is being played as part of a dance, what would usually follow is a return to the main theme, but in a much more rhythmical character called the zapateado (which is very characteristic of this dance’s precursor, the Spanish fandango.) The instrumentation of a sandunga depends on the location; in Oaxaca it would probably be played by a typical town band like the ones I described in this post and would sound something like this:

In Tabasco, a sandunga would probably be played with harps and guitars and in Chiapas it would probably be played with marimbas and would sound something like this:

In Sandunga by Miguel Bernal Jiménez, the melody receives a treatment with some virtuosistic elements of the romantic period; a left hand that constantly plays chromatic scales coupled with tremolo passages, an A minor scale in ascending octaves and some hand crossing– although it is by no means a technically difficult piece. The main melody is mainly in A minor, although it has some chromatic inflections that are quite a bit more modern, as well as sections based on the whole tone scale. The central section in A major starts very traditionally, but it quickly changes keys into F major with a chromatic accompaniment, giving it a bitonal color very characteristic of Miguel Bernal Jiménez. This central section also contains a few playful minor seconds, like the ones seen in the first piece of Carteles, Volantín. After going back to the first theme, there is a short coda which clearly ends in A minor, with a few more of those minor seconds right before the long ascending scale in octaves.

In this work, there are several elements that are very idiomatic of Mexican music. One of the most important is in the rhythm. The whole piece is written in 6/8, but the melody is full of little syncopations on the third eight note. These shouldn’t feel as upbeats or misplaced accents, but are sections where the actual meter changes to 3/4. In a sandunga, the accompaniment usually follows a waltz like pattern, dividing the 6/8  into two 3/8 groups (the original Spanish fandango is usually written in 3/8 time), the Mexican element that marks the difference is the way the melody sometimes follows the 6/8 accentuation and other times it changes to 3/4, forming a hemiola with the two pseudo 3/8 measures. This is more noticeable in the central part of the work, where it changes into major (which is related to the paseo from the original sandunga form.)

Another element in the music that is very Mexican is the way many of the phrases end in a descending second or third on a strong beat. This downward inflection is very characteristic of the way people in southern and central Mexico speak and is very present in many melodies of the region. The third very Mexican element in Sandunga are the parallel sixths in the central section, which reflect the way that melody would be harmonized if played on marimbas in Chiapas, for example.

Activity vs. Energy.

To my last post (on the need to come to terms with the reality of the work required for any worthwhile cause), I’d like to add one more thing: Being busy all the time is useless without focus. It is easy to mistake mere activity for energy, supposing that by always being busy one is certain to advance towards a goal. You can’t forget that misdirected labor is just a waste of activity. It can happen in all sorts of ways, but it usually boils down to a lack of organization, discipline and most of all: focus.

Uninspired practice will always lead to uninspired playing, touting around a magic number of hours practiced per day is no guarantee of actually getting any work done. It took me a long time to learn this; there was a period in my life where I would spend up to twelve hours per day locked up in a practice room– not out of necessity, but out of a strange compulsion to always push myself to work harder than the rest. I would take pride in the number of hours I practiced instead of in the quality of my playing.

Eventually I grew out of it; now I find that the best kind of practice comes out of a need to play in a certain way, from a need to reach an ideal in our minds of the way a work must be. The truth is that it is much easier to “practice” aimlessly because mere routine requires less involvement and “feeling busy” gives us a certain reassurance. Energy is focused and goes straight for the result, mere activity is just running around in circles to make ourselves feel better. In the end, when you’re up on the stage, nobody cares if you practiced five hours, or five hundred.

Sticker Shock.

There’s a term that is widely used in the United States: “sticker shock”. It describes that feeling that you get when you go into the store for the first time set on buying something only to find the price is much more expensive than you expected. This feeling is so familiar to us piano teachers that I’m surprised it doesn’t have its own name yet– I’m not talking about money, although there is no lack of underpayed musicians out there; I’m talking about the actual work required to learn a musical instrument.

Students have a vague idea of the effort that it should take to play the piano in a certain way but it’s comical how far off the mark this idea is. So they give up. And it feels so unfair, so unjust, that it leads to bitterness. “This amount of effort should result in me playing the piano like Vladimir Horowitz. I can’t do it so it must be someone’s fault (my teacher, the other students, those awful judges at that competition, the uneducated audience, the government, the Asians, the Russians…)”

It applies to so many things in life; for some reason, people in the western world have massively skewed expectations. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. I don’t think kids born in 1200 had this fantasy idea of what it would take to become a successful peasant.

It’s the Karate Kid’s fault, or any movie with a training montage for that matter. A character is awful at anything (karate, boxing, schoolwork, playing the guitar, football, being attractive), cue a five-minute clip of him practicing (set to 80′s power rock) in the middle of the film. When it’s done, he’s an expert. It’s not hard to think that our pop culture, full of stories of success due to a sudden burst of practice (like every single underdog sports movie out there) has given everyone the idea that accomplishing great things is hard, but it’s the kind of hard that you can do in a single weekend. Meanwhile, research has shown that to become an expert at any given field, one has to study for at least 10,000 hours. That’s four hours a day for more than seven years! (which should sound familiar to professional musicians out there.)

In real life, the winner of the All-Valley Karate Championship would have been one of those guys that had been practicing karate since elementary school, spending hours training every evening while Daniel-san was goofing off. Wax on, wax off a couple of hours and suddenly you’ve mastered the art of defending yourself from a flying punch to the face?

It’s a recent trend that music educators have had to deal with, the American Idol effect. Kids that believe that becoming a star means putting in a bit of work and all of a sudden having everyone at their feet. The thing about American Idol and all the other “everyday people come on and try to get a free trip to stardom” reality show is that they heavily neglect to show the amount of practice the “everyday people” who make it through the selection round have done in their life.

They are never people who walked in off the street, decided they can sing/dance/cook/design and surprised both themselves and the judges by showing what a natural talent they are. Those people who are singing classical opera, or juggling flaming bowling pins, or doing complex and dangerous dance routines didn’t get that ability through some sort of magical aura that being on TV gives you, they got it through hours and hours of excruciating practice, without any sort of promise they’d get somewhere.

But they never show this on TV. They make it look like these people were just people who woke up one day, turned on the TV and saw a rerun of American Idol and thought “wow, I bet anyone can do that!”, auditioned and all of a sudden became superstars.

So, when these kids start taking music lessons and realize that after months of daily practice they are nowhere near what they are seeing people do on TV, they get discouraged and quit. It’s easy to become a pessimist when you see that every one of your expectations gets shattered over and over again. The reason it happens is not because the world is against you, but because those expectations were so inaccurate in the first place. Relationships, managing your debt, building a successful career in any field, learning a skill or a craft– it all takes work. A lot of it.

The point isn’t that you should give up because the world is one impenetrable brick wall. There are successful pianists everywhere. It’s just that at some point you have to come to terms with the amount of work it involves. It’s a necessary step towards maturity, being honest with yourself; part of growing up. What amazes me is the number of people out there that never take that step. Back to the analogy with “sticker shock”: instead of saying “I should buy something a bit cheaper or save up some more”, they’ll just stand there saying “This can’t be right!” over and over, forever thinking that the world screwed them over. “Why can’t I have it easy, you know, like other people do?” Of course, those “other people” exist only in their imagination.

Huarache.

A huarache is a kind of sandal typically worn in Mexico. It’s usually just a flat piece of wood or leather tied to the feet. Mover el huarache (literally: to move the huarache) means to go out and dance something lively. Many of the folk dances of southern Mexico involve stamping the feet on the ground and making a slapping noise with the huarache.

Huarache is the name of the fourth piece in Carteles, by Miguel Bernal Jiménez, which I introduced in this post. I’ve been recording the pieces on my laptop’s horrible integrated web-cam as a bit of preparation for a couple of recital programs I’ve been practicing, since this year marks 100 years of his birth (and since it is also the 200th anniversary of our independence from Spain, many musical programs will feature Mexican music.) I’ve been uploading those here.

The piece has a pretty simple form. There’s a short introduction in G major and then the dance starts. It consists of two simple phrases which repeat several times, which most Mexicans would recognize as the last part of a playground song: La Vibora de la Mar– integrating Mexican popular music into his compositions is typical of the music from Miguel Bernal Jiménez’ nationalist period (all over the world at around this same time period many composers, notably Bartok and Kodaly, went out to record real folk music from their respective countries as a source of inspiration for their compositions.) After repeating a few times, we end the piece with a return to the introduction. The whole time the right hand is in G major, the left hand is in F sharp major, which makes the work sound out of tune.

Miguel Bernal Jiménez was from Michoacán, in southwest Mexico. This part of Mexico has a very strong band tradition. Most small towns in Michoacán tend to have a band for parties, parades and religious processions. These bands are mostly made up of whatever wind instruments people have lying around, violins, a bass drum, cymbals and a tuba or a tololoche (a Mexican kind of string bass). The bass consists mostly of descending fourths non-stop, like a Sousa march. The trombones and clarinets play repeated notes with the harmony that give the music it’s unique forward momentum. The melody is made of up of trumpets and violins blaring away as loud as possible. Most folk dances from Michoacán involve the men stamping their feet in rhythm, making a big racket with their huaraches, while the girls sway to the music and wave their big skirts. The rhythm of this music is very catchy, usually it is constantly changing from 6/8 to 3/4; this hemiola is a fundamental metric in most music from Mexico, it’s easy to follow if you pay attention to the bass line. Here is what a traditional dance and band from Michoacán looks like: (it starts around 0:40)

Most of the time, these bands were extremely out of tune and rhythm. In Huarache, the composer uses a lot of minor seconds to replicate the out of tune trombones and clarinets, and the melody in G major tends to clash with the occasional F sharp major accompaniment so as to sound really out of tune. He also doesn’t use the normal 6/8-3/4 rhythm found in this music. Instead, he writes it in 2/4, but the right hand tends to play in syncopation which kind of replicates the effect of the whole band getting out of sync all the time. In some parts I like to play some of these upbeats a bit later than what is written to get the effect of the original 3/4 time and I also like to give the bass line a bit of a swing, because these dances have to jump around a bit; I specially mark the lower notes of each figure in the bass, as a separate voice, since it’s the characteristic tuba line found in this music. Everything is written and should be played in fortissimo, which is also pretty normal for a Michoacán town band and a lot of fun.

Bach’s expressive technique.

That’s Glenn Gould playing the C minor prelude from the first volume of the Well Tempered Clavier. Most of this prelude is in sixteenth notes, playing the same eight note pattern, but it is definitely not Czerny; they are expressing a musical idea. In this case, I would describe it as dramatic, in a theatrical kind of way. The first half of the prelude is a chorale that gradually builds up dramatic tension until it reaches the more improvisatory passages of the presto. The musical line ebbs and flows, with several returns to a more placid character (in a short modulation to E flat major), but when the dissonances start to accumulate over the long pedal note, the suspense builds until it finally explodes into a series of cadenzas which gradually fade away into C major.

That’s Sviatoslav Richter playing the prelude in C sharp major. While almost everything is also in sixteenth notes, the character of both works cannot be more different. In this case, the sixteenths should be airy, flighty. The music itself expresses joy and happiness; it demands a light touch and a special balancing of all voices in the chorale that underlies all the little notes.

That is Angela Hewitt playing the G sharp minor prelude from the second book. This work is very monophonic, for Bach; the parts constantly shift from an accompaniment figure to a more melodic character. Despite its minor tonality, it isn’t particularly sad or melodramatic — only a few bars into the piece we see a descending sequence that gives the piece a brief major color. It is a bit melancholy but rhythmic and somewhat dance-like always traveling (in that sense very much like a sonata movement, in that it embodies a musical journey or drama.)

That’s Andras Schiff playing the E major prelude from the second book of the Well Tempered Clavier. The best adjective that I can think of for this piece of music is “serene”. It is peaceful and in a way pastoral (although I hesitate to describe music as pastoral because many people tend to understand it as farmers dancing in big clunky boots, which is quite the opposite of what I mean by it.)

Rosalyn Tureck playing the B flat prelude from book two. The music here is light and definitely dancing, very polyphonic but never heavy. The main motive is a simple scale, which tells us of a lively tempo, and coupled with the ternary figures, it is reminiscent of a gigue. The writing is mostly in three parts, although in some sections one of the voices has extended periods of silence. The nature of the main subject gives this piece a natural swing in which one voice always leads into the next. It is easy to get lost in all the possible imitations and contrapunctal devices within a very transparent and apparently simple framework.

All five of the above musicians have very different ways of playing Bach in many aspects (pedaling, dynamics, tempi, rubato, balance) but they all share a quality that makes their interpretation masterful: what they do is all in the service of a musical idea, of the character that underlies each particular piece. In my last post, about Bach’s flute sonata in E flat major, I described a short little canon that pops up in the third movement. Bach is quite clever, and these kinds of passages are everywhere in his music (this site , which I highly recommend, gives a very complete description and analysis of every prelude and fugue in the Well Tempered Clavier) and his music is extremely interesting to analyze, but the main concern of any interpretation should be to reach and express the essence of what each work is about.

Bach initially wrote many of the preludes in the Well Tempered Clavier as exercises to help develop his pupils’ technique, some are built on a repetitive pattern or musical idea that includes a technical difficulty. The genius of Bach lies in the fact that the technique is decided by the musicianship. Contrary to something like Czerny, in which you can have five volumes of piano etudes all expressing the same primitive musical idea: I-ii6-V7-I, the mood of the piece  determines the way the performer’s technique has to work (not to bash too much on Czerny, many of his works are quite beautiful and a huge departure from his “School of Velocity” that has tormented piano students for 200 years — not being as good as Bach is not an insult, it is a fact of life that applies to almost every single musician born since his death.)

Bach decided to use the technique to express musical ideas: joy, sadness, peace, pathos, violence — every technical difficulty has a different sound, a particular mood that it communicates and how do you get that mood except by musically having that inspiration? That is why the Czerny approach doesn’t work very well with Bach, the first step is trying to reach the mood of each particular piece. One of the most crucial aspects of interpretation in the Well Tempered Clavier is choosing the tempi and articulation, and it all stems from understanding the mood of each prelude.

Bach had the right idea, technique must be used to express musical ideas. A Bach interpretation cannot be reduced to making the piano sound as closely to a clavichord as possible (or the dry lifeless version of the clavichord that seems to exist in so many pianists’ imagination) while maintaining a metronomic tempo, a non-existent pedal and playing thematic material forte and everything else piano. That’s not the Well Tempered Clavier, that’s an exercise.

Bach BWV 1031

One of the aspects that I love about playing Bach’s music is the way it expands your mind and the way you listen to musical structures. How the music sounds has an immediate emotional impact, and in most cases the  melodies are very catchy tunes — which is  more impressive if we consider that most of his music was not monophonic. One interesting aspect of his music is that after analyzing and practicing it, your ears open and you start to listening to things in the musical structure that most people could not consciously perceive listening to it for the first time. It’s amazing how his music can speak  in such a meaningful way on so many levels.

Examples are everywhere, but this one came up in the middle of a chamber music lesson a few days ago. Here is the third movement of the Bach sonata for flute and harpsichord, in E flat major:

Now go back and listen to the little episode right after the main theme, around ten seconds into the video. There’s a little eight measure bridge that starts to lead us away from E flat major. The harmonic writing and the texture are quite different, which is pretty usual in this kind of form. The passage repeats with both instruments switching places.

Here are the two melodic lines.

One of the melodic lines is in sixteenth notes, while the other one is in eights. The way it sounds is as if one is the main melody while the other is the accompaniment. This kind of passage presents a basic problem of interpretation: what is the correct phrasing? How should both voices be balanced? That is where musical analysis comes in; by observing the music and trying to understand it, we can come to meaningful conclusions about the way it is played (however different those conclusions are from one musician to the next.)

If we isolate the “real” notes from the passage in sixteenths, we realize that those sixteenths are actually ornamenting the same melody that is present in the passage in eights.

Here is the same passage without the scales and arpeggios connecting the melodic notes.

And if we substitute the sixteenth notes for longer values, we get this:

A unison canon, offset by an eighth.

Now, after listening to the examples, go back and listen to the original recording again, and pay attention to those same passages. Notice how your ear is now drawn to the way those two lines interact? It can’t be unheard once it’s been noticed because your knowledge of the piece just got a bit deeper.

You can choose to not bring it out in any way, or decide that it’s really something that isn’t important to show. You can go the opposite route and adjust your phrasing and balance in a way that will make both lines leap out a bit more at the listener. Regardless of the choices we make, by knowing that it’s there we are hearing the piece in a different way. That is a quality that is noticeable in a performance, and it is very good; it is an element that gives depth to a person’s playing.

Killing the tiger.

In Mexico we call it a hueso (bone, as in throw me a bone) in Spain it’s a bolo and in Venezuela it’s called “Killing the Tiger” (apparently, the Tiger Rag was so popular at one time that any musician on a gig was practically guaranteed to have to play it at least once.) Anywhere in the world, musicians can get short informal jobs that are usually not related directly with what they really want to do, but they do them anyways because the bills don’t pay themselves.

These kinds of gigs are a huge part of being a student. In many cases, they do more harm than good, which is why most teachers frown on them. Taken in moderation, though, they are part of a complete musical formation. The key to not suffering the negative effects of bolos is to manage your time so that you don’t neglect practicing your instrument, regardless of all the extra time you have to invest in them. It is also important to always be self-conscious about potential bad habits that you may pick up and to adjust your practice accordingly.

Some teachers believe that in an ideal world, a student should spend every minute of his time locked in a practice room, learning repertoire and working on his technique; nothing should take the student’s focus from practicing. Thanks to an amazing scholarship, I lived like this for a couple of years, during my graduate years. Now, a few years later, I realize that many of the skills I use every day were learned as a student struggling to pay the bills, when, out of necessity, I had to play every gig I could get. A well-rounded musical education not only takes place in the classroom and in the concert hall, one of the most important elements comes from life and how each student applies his musical knowledge to real situations.

When we were starting out at the conservatory, my wife and I were paying our way without any help from our families. That meant that apart from the normal routine each student has to have, we had a lot of extra work, most of which had little to do with our training as classical musicians. She would play pop and ambient music with a small trio at a café three times a week. Most weekends, she’d play at a wedding, graduation or party with a small combo. She had a few children and adults who would take private lessons from her and we would both play in church on Sundays. Apart from the piano I also played the trumpet. Sometimes I’d be called as an extra by one of the local symphony orchestras or bands. I would play the piano at a dance academy three times a week, where I had to accompany ballet and Spanish dance. I would play in a salsa band three nights a week and also had private students. I played with anyone who needed it, from singers to percussionists, mostly free of charge in exchange for one favor or another (considering that most other people who needed accompanying were also students in the same situation as we were.) At some point I played regularly at restaurants and bars and was also a member of a mariachi band.

Our formal education consisted of Chopin and Beethoven, but almost every night we were out playing arrangements of whatever pop song was popular at the time, wedding music, salsa music and just improvising when we needed to make a set last more or learn something at the very last moment. Many musicians thrive on this kind of work, but it’s not really what you learn to do at school. We thought what we were doing was wrong, and it was incredibly embarrassing to mention to our extremely serious and foreign teachers that the reason we didn’t practice was because we were out until three am playing salsa at a club or when they’d look at our sheet music and out of our book of Chopin etudes, the sheet music for Dust in the Wind or Besame Mucho would slip out. Everyone does it, and that includes whatever big-name musician you can imagine; it is not a bad thing at all, when done correctly.

In the same way that you can have students whose technique deteriorates because of lack of practice and careless playing, it is equally common to have students that cannot play anything beyond the score (and only after studying it extensively and getting every single measure explained to them by their teachers.) I’ve known piano students that can play a Rachmaninoff etude, or a four-part fugue but cannot sight-read, do basic improvisation or even play Happy Birthday with both hands when put on the spot. Playing these kinds of gigs gets us out of our comfort zone, builds a relationship with the public, helps you learn things faster and more intuitively and helps develop that important relationship between technique, practice and ultimately going out and actually playing for an audience.

Here are some things that you must remember so that going out to “kill the tiger” helps you and doesn’t become harmful to your development as a musician:

- Be professional. That means be on time and properly prepared. Study your material as best as you can and, regardless of the gig, give your playing the respect it deserves.

- There is no excuse for sloppy playing. Warm up and prepare in the same way as for any other concert, regardless of the music you are playing, your performance is completely under your control; take it seriously. If I show up to a hotel and find one of my students playing in the lobby, it’s not a big deal; there would be no reason to be upset. What would make me angry, would be to find one of my students at a hotel playing badly, not taking it seriously. When my wife showed up at a hueso, everyone would give her weird looks because she would warm up carefully with thirds and scales and would always sit with proper posture when she played. Any playing is good practice if it is done with the right attitude. It’s pretty common to see violinists on these kinds of presentations not taking their job seriously, with their instruments lying practically on their bellies, barely bothering to play in tune or with a proper sound. Playing extra gigs doesn’t deteriorate your playing, doing it badly does.

- Don’t lose your perspective. It’s easy to get depressed playing Pachelbel’s canon and the Wedding March if what you ultimately want is to play another kind of repertoire. It is also easy to lose track of your goals by the lure of quick money from playing the same ten pieces over and over. Whatever you do, try to focus on the long-term and don’t stop working to get there.

- All this extra playing is “in addition to” not “instead of”. Playing a lot of huesos is bound to make you tired and drain your energy from your actual schoolwork. Don’t take the easy route of replacing your academic progress with the extras. You have to make sure that you have enough time to continue advancing in your lessons with your teacher, and that is not easy. Going out and playing a couple of hours at a café is not a proper replacement for sitting down and practicing your scales and repertoire. There is a limited number of hours one has each day, and you have to remember that the time you invest moonlighting in a salsa band is time that you are taking away from your studies. In a strange way, that is a good thing because, by limiting the time you can practice each day, you force yourself to become more efficient. That is one of the most important things I learned in that period of my life, making sure that every second in the practice room counted. Even so, if you are not willing to sacrifice one or the other, be prepared to lose some sleep. I listed all the extra work my wife and I had to take in addition to our regular load of work from the conservatory. How did we manage? She would get up at six to do her theory work and complementary piano, I would practice daily until very late at night and we would pretty much work non-stop every single day.

I assure you that it does get better later but, if you want to be any good, being a music student is supposed to be difficult.

Carteles

One of my favorite Mexican composers is Miguel Bernal Jimenez. He is mainly known for his sacred music, but I think that his best writing is in his secular works. Of his keyboard compositions, the one that stands out for me is Carteles (Pastels or posters, not a criminal organization.)

Carteles is a group of eight very short pieces for the piano. Each one of these pieces evokes a picture of Mexican life, heavily influenced by Mexican folklore and music. The first three pieces are Volantin (Merry-go-round), Danza Maya (Mayan dance) and Noche (Night).  I haven’t found a recording of them on the internet, so I’ll be recording them here, although on an out of tune piano with my horrible webcam.

Volantin is a short piece in a basic A-B-A form. It evokes a volantin, a tipical Mexican toy found on any playground, which consists of a free-spinning pole with chains or chairs attached to it which one can use to whirl around it non-stop. The middle part of this piece has an interesting effect in which the phrasing of the right hand is offset by an eighth note, making it float over the accompaniment.

The second piece is based on a famous Mayan theme called conex-conex-palexen. In the early 20th century, the consensus among musicologists was that Mexican indigenous music was mostly based on the pentatonic scale, which is the basis for the accompaniment at the beginning of the piece. Danza Maya is a small set of variations on the Mayan theme. In the third variation, he plays the theme in parallel fourths (which is very typical of native American music in general), and then in parallel major chords, before ending in fortissimo.

The third piece, Noche, evokes a night landscape just before dawn. It has an ostinato E chord, colored in different ways; first with a minor 9th, then by adding fifths on it until forming an E11 major chord and finally by superimposing an F# major chord at the end (F# acting as a kind of representation of the break of dawn.)

Carteles are short and not technically difficult, and since they evoke concrete images, they are also easy to relate to for a beginner. They also offer enough variety and originality that they are a lot of fun to play for a professional and are, in my opinion, some of the best works by Miguel Bernal Jimenez and of Mexican music for the piano in general.

Earl Wild

Earl Wild passed away on January 24. He was 94 years old and just the week before he died, he was still teaching. Past 90 years old he was still giving recitals, always with the highest level of playing. He had that quality that the great pianists of his generation had, which so many lack today, where the music seems to flow from them like a fountain; effortlessly and in the most natural of ways. The technique was always dazzling, but always a means to an end: to communicate a musical interpretation of unparalleled depth, never stuffy or showy in the wrong way, and always with a lush rich beautiful tone. He was a complete musician, he wrote, he arranged, he taught, he composed, and most importantly, he never stopped trying to better himself. He had a wonderful career and he always did right by the music he played.

Such a great personality was ideally suited for Liszt, and he championed the music of that composer in a time where pianists considered his music unfashionable. He truly did Liszt’s music justice. Here he is playing “Le Jeux d’Eau a la Villa d’Este”:

Slowly coming out of hibernation.

As the few of you who follow this blog may have noticed, I stopped posting for a while. I was quite busy with work, but most importantly, I just found out that I am going to be father! We are very excited about it, but it has also resulted in a hectic couple of months.

I’ve started forcing myself to record a short piece a couple of times a week, just to force myself to keep learning new music, instead of limiting myself to playing only music for which I am payed to play or learning a hundred fragments of pieces without actually taking the time to try to polish them until they are relatively presentable. I’ve posted those videos on this site.

Apart from being an anniversary year for Schumann and Chopin, 2010 is also the 100th anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolutionary war, and the bicentennial of the independence from Spain for many countries in Latin America (including my own.) That means that I have been working on Schumann, Chopin and specially Mexican music for this year. So I hope to write a bit on that in the following months.