L’initiation.

One of my favorite twentieth century pieces is Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet. Playing it is grueling, mainly because it lasts almost two hours and requires a constant attention to the duration of the rests and the number of repetitions for each measure (all the durations are written out.) One little lapse of concentration in those two hours and it’s very easy to get lost and never catch the rest of the ensemble again, since it all sounds so similar –it’s also exhausting for the page turners, my wife turned the pages for me during a performance a few years ago and her back ached for a week! Feldman’s music tends to have rhythms that seem free and floating, with slow evolution and asymmetric patterns, his later music also tends to be very long.

I find that the Prelude to the second act of Le fils des étoiles, by Erik Satie has some elements that are very Feldmanesque, not a small feat considering that it was composed 100 years before Piano and String Quartet, while the rest of Europe was still playing to Wagner’s beat. The first similarity is in the character of the music; when I play the music of both composers, I feel it has a very slow, quiet evolution, as some sort of solemn ritual (which is very much in the context of Satie’s prelude.) All kinds of interesting things are happening in the music and we have time to enjoy and assimilate each and every one. The other element in common, which is much more technical, is the way they both use repeating asymmetric patterns in their music.

There is a special expression in the way asymmetric patterns and structures that are not quite perfect work. The imbalance in the music immediately calls attention from the listener and, in the hands of the right composer, it becomes fascinating.

Just as the first prelude, L’initiation is written without bar-lines or time signature and has all sorts of quirky, baffling performance indications. The first few notes of this short piece are groundbreaking:

A lot is happening here, all of it for the first time in musical history. We have a small unit which is formed by two minor chords, superimposed. The top voice then jumps up in a tritone –since the middle ages, the tritone has had strong satanic and mystical symbolism and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some sort of extra-musical significance to its use here by Satie (he did hang out with a Satanist sect for a while, after all.)  The remarkable thing about this tritone is that it does not resolve in any way, he just repeats the whole thing a minor third below and then he continues downward with the sequence at a major second. Then comes a beautiful, metallic chord moving in parallel harmony. Note his use of asymmetry, he could have built the chord using only perfect fourths but he adds an augmented fourth right in the middle of the chord. This gives the chord a kind of metallic quality, a distinctive dissonance that alters the way it rings.

Then comes the whole thing again, only transposed up by a major second. Here is another use of asymmetry; the beginning gives the impression that he will repeat the same sequence, but he departs from it in the third repetition, going down a fourth instead of a second and replacing the octave with a minor ninth. We end this section with another one of those planed quartal chords.

Satie was always credited by Ravel as being the mind behind the french impressionist movement. The role he played in the history of music was that of a great experimenter, every few works moving into new ground. Much of the best music by Ravel and Debussy –and most french composers that immediately followed– was directly inspired by Satie’s experiments. I believe that, besides the experimental nature of his music, there is great substance in what he wrote. The aesthetic of his writing is so far beyond romanticism or impressionism that it is no surprise that his music wasn’t fully appreciated until the second half of the twentieth century.

What a musician should be.

A college athlete that exclusively aims to play in the NFL or the NBA is probably setting himself up for failure. However, athletes that gear themselves up to be able to play several sports, teach, train teams and run sports-related businesses are equipped to succeed in their careers. Thousands of music students every year enter the best universities and conservatories with a similarly improbable goal in mind, to join one of the top orchestras or to be a famous soloist. Yet, the odds of attaining a full-time position in a good orchestra or being able to make a career of touring and playing concerts exclusively are astronomical.

A huge demand for music and music educators exists in today’s economy and musicians can make a decent living. Indeed, the myth of the starving musician applies only to those that fail to maintain a suitable level of skill with their performance or teaching abilities and those that fail to engage in multiple aspects of musical life. As with any other career, an adequate preparation is essential. I feel that, in most institutions, the skills most critical to a successful musical career are grossly neglected, if not outright ignored.

Many teachers’ approach can be reduced to “learn this piece and eventually play it really well, then learn a harder piece and eventually play it really well…” repeated from the moment a student enters school until they graduate. They’ll sometimes even actively discourage students from getting too involved in other courses lest it take away valuable practice time –this is very common with pianists, since most don’t have the orchestral experience to balance out the many hours spent as a shut-in practicing. The result of this teaching approach is a student that can play a handful of works with no guarantee that the pianist understands the process involved or can communicate it to others, or ultimately find someone who will want to hear him play his handful of works. In the real world, this is close to useless.

When I work with students that I know are going to pursue careers in music, I take a very specific approach. In a way, I feel responsible for them; if a student is practicing and actively involved in what we do, it becomes my responsibility not only to help him learn a handful of pieces, but to give them the tools to prevent them from becoming “starving musicians”. Most of the time, this results in a greater emphasis on often neglected aspects of a pianist’s education (such as sight-reading and singing, harmonic analysis, improvisation and accompaniment) which sometimes takes away time from them being able to “learn a handful of pieces really well” by drilling them repeatedly.

I propose that, to build a career in music, musicians should strive to be as diverse in their knowledge as possible. They should be able to read music fluently, improvise, arrange and have at least a functional knowledge of conducting, composition and performance in more than one style; every musician should have at least elementary keyboard abilities and every pianist knowledge of singing as well. More important than “playing a handful of pieces very well”, should be the ability to learn any piece of music quickly and to perform it comfortably onstage. Every musician should be a competent teacher and be familiar with diverse pedagogical methods and the appropriate material for different age groups and types of students. They should be able to work with other people, as part of a team in smaller ensembles or under a director with bigger groups. A musician should be able to express himself in writing, speak to a group of people and be confident with the use of technology (at least with the internet, notation software and basic recording and sound reinforcement techniques.)

The musical education I received was always very traditional. I was lucky to have very good teachers but my instruction was always limited to playing the works I was assigned precisely and expressively. I was lucky in one sense, I had to support myself through school. That meant playing trumpet in several orchestras, salsa bands, mariachi ensembles and on the street; playing the piano in a dance studio, piano jazz in restaurants and religious music in church; directing various ensembles and teaching students of all ages; and taking every job I could get, regardless of the time I had to learn the music or the particular situation of each audience. When I look back, my teachers gave me the means to communicate through music and to overcome the mechanical difficulties of playing. However, the life as a musician that I have now, that comes as a result of every single one of those experiences.

Child of the stars.

Erik Satie wrote the music for a pretentious play called Le fils des étoiles (The child of the stars) by self-entitled “super magician imperator” Sar Peladan, leader of an order of Rusicrucians and obsessed with mysticism (particularly that of Wagner). This composition by Satie included incidental music for the whole play, probably scored for flutes and harps (and recently re-orchestrated for that instrumentation by Toru Takemitsu), but Satie only published the preludes to each act for piano. The prelude to act one, La Vocation, is a surprisingly advanced piece of music. 

The music is very immobile and detached, a complete departure from the prevailing aesthetic of Wagnerian romanticism –the irony of this work being used for a play for a sect that included Wagner in their daily prayers was certainly not lost on Satie. More than an homage, this piece is a rebuttal to Wagner’s musical aesthetic.

The score has no bar-lines or time signature, something that hadn’t been done since the renaissance. In this piece, for the first time in history, there is a systematic use of chords –in fourths, no less– moving in parallel motion, three years before Debussy’s famous use of parallel harmony (also known as planing) in his Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Unlike Debussy which, in this period, was still using traditional harmonic functions and writing tonal music, the preludes to Le fils des étoiles are atonal and the parallel-moving tritone on top of the fourths already makes possible a proto-polytonality, due to the voices moving in completely different tonal planes. In only a few minutes of music, Satie uses harmonic techniques that were unheard of in the music of his time and predates an aesthetic that has much more in common with the music of Morton Feldman or Toru Takemitsu than with any of his contemporaries.

There are many problems with the interpretation of Satie. Many pianists fail by trying to make the music “exciting”, worried about boring their audience. Although it is also easy to lose oneself in a work that is so open to interpretation, often without time marks of any kind and with cryptic, sometimes humorous music directives such as “on the tip of the tongue.” Players often get distracted by the eccentricity of Satie’s personality and the often bizarre indications on his scores but, beyond the surface, there is amazing, revolutionary music in these still, immobile compositions.

Le fils des étoiles

Prickles & Goo.

In the history of literature, philosophy and art, we always find the interchange of two personality types. Alan Watts, in one of his audio recordings, describes them as prickles and goo. The prickly people are advocates of intellectual rigor,  precise statistics and clear logic; they dismiss gooey people as hopelessly vague and mystical. On the other hand, the vague and mystical sorts consider the prickly types as sterile and inhuman; as Alan Watts puts it, they say to the prickly people:  “you know the words, but you don’t know the music.”

In the world of music you encounter both all the time, in the people you meet and in the works you play. There’s the intellectual musician, always perfectly correct in his speech and manners, impeccably groomed; always looking for a note-perfect performance, the most correct edition of a work, the kind that exactly plans out his rubato and tries to execute it in exactly the same way every time. On the other hand you’ve got the dirty hippie sort, laid back, calls everyone “dude” and probably has not had a thorough shower in a while; this type of person is much more interested in how the music makes him feel regardless of what notes are played. There are prickly types of compositions and composers, in which it is all about structure and analysis, and there  are gooey works, which are a lot more free-form.

In the end, it’s almost impossible to find an absolute example of one or the other; at the extremes they become cartoons, parodies of reality. In real life most music and musicians aren’t prickles or goo but rather, gooey prickles and prickly goo. Most of our life’s work is a constant effort at balancing the two, order and chaos (or, as Alan Watts was famous for introducing eastern concepts to western audiences, yin and yang.)

When interpreting a musical work, that magic point at which it works best is near the middle. Go to the extreme of the prickly side and it’s impossible to listen to; it’s boring because it’s lifeless. This sort of interpretation can be achieved by plugging in a computer to a Yamaha Disklavier. Go to the gooey extreme and your playing becomes boring because there is nothing to stimulate the mind. Without structure, style and clarity you could get the same effect by sitting there and just playing random noise and making faces.

The problem with going to the middle is that you can end up in a sort of gray area with none of the qualities of either the prickles or the goo. Many musicians and composers end up there because of insecurity and fear of making decisions. The trick is not to be neither, but to strive to be both in everything we do.

Unstern! Sinistre, disastro.

Unstern! Sinistre, disastro is one of the last pieces by Franz Liszt. As most of his other work from this period, it is stark and bleak with dissonant harmonies and an exploration of the whole-tone scale and augmented chord. The title has words from three different languages and could be translated as “Dark Star! Sinister, disastrous.”

Unstern! is divided into three distinct sections. We begin with an introduction in bare octaves with special emphasis on a descending tritone (an interval that for centuries was highly symbolic and even forbidden as it was considered demonic and extremely dissonant), reminiscent of a recitativo or some sort of chant. We then start a loud passage in octaves that sounds almost like a trumpet section in the right hand with the left hand playing motives built on the whole-tone scale. These passages gradually rise in a chromatic sequence and lead into a whole tone scale in the bass which ends in a tremolo. On top of this tremolo, Liszt builds a rising phrase in accelerando with an augmented chord moving in chromatic steps until it resolves into an extremely dissonant chord in fff that ends this section. The last part of this piece is written as a chorale which never resolves but instead constantly leads into chromatic scales. In the end, it all fades out, unresolved, into a whole-tone scale in the lowest register of the piano.

There is a marked similarity between this piece and others of Liszt’s final period, such as Nuages Gris and La Lugubre Gondola. They could be considered (along with many others of this period) as small parts of a bigger work, all dealing with the same subject matter (death and despair) and using many of the same compositional techniques, almost as a sort of extremely dark last book of Années de pèlerinage –in this case the travels being into Liszt’s own tortured mind.

I find Unstern! darkly programmatic; when I play this piece I imagine it as a meditation on the end of the world. The first part is the apocalypse, trumpets and all; the second represents the prayers of a terrified humanity. The unrelenting dissonance in the harmony and the failure to ever resolve makes this piece very difficult to listen to, which is the composer’s intent. Most of Liszt’s late works are uncomfortable for everyone: the listener, the interpreter and, probably, Liszt himself.

Do I like kids?

It’s very difficult to find a good musician that likes to teach kids. Many only do it because they don’t have the technical skill, repertoire, and knowledge of musical theory required to teach more advanced students. With children, you can rarely blame problems on previous teachers, the responsibility is all on you. They are built to be like sponges, absorbing any information you tell them, good or bad –whether they put into practice what you teach them ultimately depends on your teaching skill. With kids, teachers are not only expected to know exactly how things are, they’re required to make them appealing and easy to understand.

One piece of advice you always receive about teaching children is “treat them like equals.” It’s true, if you avoid being patronizing and talking down to them, they’ll love you for it. The problem here is that it’s very easy to lose control of a class by going too far; children are always testing their limits. It is important to remember that because you treat a kid as an equal, that kid now has a responsibility to act as one (up to a point, of course; after all, they’re still the kids and you’re still the adult.) Any child disrupting a class  or a performance should be specifically called on it and dealt with quickly and not ignored. After all, you wouldn’t let an adult ruin a class or a concert for everyone else.

The biggest problem I have when teaching kids is finding the right balance between authority figure and entertainer. Go too far in one direction and most kids will just shut down and refuse to even show up for lessons, too far in the other and it’s impossible to keep them focused enough to learn anything at all. It’s up to each teacher to find the methods that suit them best and adapt them to each particular situation.

In my case, I tend to be quite strict with kids. Instead of patronizing them, I think it’s important to push them to give you their best effort. I try to have a clear set of rules or guidelines for classwork and to make sure that there is some sort of consequence for not following them.

My classes with children are quite short and very focused (I prefer having frequent very short lessons with children instead of once-a-week snooze-fests.) My aim is to avoid distraction from what we are doing and to keep them playing, singing, thinking, counting, clapping or doing something the whole time. As I pointed out in a previous post, the best way to build understanding is with variety in our learning activities. A twenty minute lesson in which there is non-stop musical activity and in which the student’s mind is focused on the task at hand is always better than a one hour lesson in which we are constantly stopping for any number of reasons, in which half the lesson is spent scolding the kid, on some needless tangent, or just sitting there looking at each other. Just as with practice, if you’re not mentally exhausted when you’re done teaching, you aren’t doing it right.

It’s important to learn to read the mood in the classroom and the reactions of your students, you don’t want them to get frustrated with a single activity or overwhelmed by too much material at once. An often overlooked skill that is very useful for any teacher is knowing how to lighten the mood, especially after a particularly difficult lesson. You don’t want unhappy kids leaving your classroom –if you’re so heartless that you don’t care, at least consider it because you want to keep parents happy and paying for your lessons! Thankfully, lightening the mood with kids is very easy because all children laugh at the same things.

With adults, humor varies wildly according to a myriad of factors, drunken college students will laugh at different things than senior citizens. What one group finds funny will offend the other one or leave them cold. Sometimes they’ll laugh just to be polite, other times they’ll refuse to laugh because they’re afraid to stand out. There are too many potential differences between adults: religious, social, sexual, political, etc.

Kids are a whole different story. Every child has the same sense of humor, every group of children will react in mostly the same way. They love anything that is silly or exaggerated; armpits, belly buttons, farts, banana peels, silly voices, bald heads… those are all things children will find funny. Find any kid in the world, look him right in the eye for a couple of seconds and say “Poop!”. He’ll laugh; even if he doesn’t understand what it means.

Do I like kids? I’ve always thought that is a strange question. You might as well ask if I like adults. Some kids I like, some I don’t. In other words, it depends on the kid. Children are never offended or patronizing; they’re innocent, naïve and can be wonderful to work with. On the other hand, they can also be abusive, out of control and bratty –these kinds of problems can always be traced back to something either you or the parents are doing wrong.  Kids are impatient and wont suffer a fool gladly and, if only for that, I love teaching them.

La Lugubre Gondola.

In December 1882, Liszt was staying in Venice with his daughter Cosima and his son-in-law, Richard Wagner. The funeral processions of the gondolas fascinated Liszt. He began to have premonitions of Wagner’s death and had visions that soon his son-in-law and dearest friend would be one of the corpses floating down the canals. Two months later, Wagner died in Venice.

This episode of Liszt’s life inspired a piece called La Lugubre Gondola (the lugubrious [funeral] gondola) which went through various iterations. The version most popular today is called La Lugubre Gondola II, and was rewritten and published in 1885, and later arranged for strings. This version is written in a more tonal, accessible language than other music in Liszt’s late period; probably influenced by its publication (as I mentioned in my post about Nuages Gris, Liszt was not interested in publishing the bulk of what is now considered his most interesting output from this period.) After Liszt’s death, an earlier,  much darker and  starker version of La Lugubre Gondola was discovered and published in 1927. This is now referred to as La Lugubre Gondola I.

As in Nuages Gris, the augmented triad has a very important role in the harmony of the piece. Liszt’s love affair with the augmented triad is a crucial aspect of his compositional techniques and is central in his evolution towards a quasi-atonal harmony. Even though the piece is written in the key signature of F minor, there is no sense of traditional tonality; the whole funereal barcarolle unfolds as a series of augmented triads descending in a whole tone scale:

In the very last chord, Liszt omits the C in the augmented chord, leaving just a ghostly E-Ab interval. Alone, it’s enharmonically a minor sixth, but in this context it sounds completely disturbing. This kind of harmonic treatment is more typical of french impressionism and wholly alien to mainstream nineteenth century romanticism.

Left hand tremolos and open arpeggios as a way of representing water are a recurring element in the music of Franz Liszt. By mixing this kind of writing with the otherworldly harmonies in his late works, he evokes a ghastly image of a funeral procession on the water, all dark colors and despair at the decease of his lifelong friend and son-in-law and his own approaching death. This is an honest, unromanticized representation of death and sadness, which makes this music all the more compelling.

The need for music on the border.

In the last few years, any talk about Mexico in the media necessarily has to include the issue of drug trafficking and organized crime. I personally live near the border in what is now regarded as the most violent non-war  zone on the planet. We had a brief respite from that last summer, when Mexico was equated with swine flu in the eyes of the world –which at least allowed my wife and I to get dirt-cheap tickets for an amazing week in Cancun.

Between the H1N1 virus, the drug-related violence on the border and the numerous diplomatic gaffes our former president made on the world stage, Mexico has had an increasingly terrible  image in the last decade. The numerous countries that have issued warnings to their citizens about traveling to Mexico corroborate this. Our country is seen as unsafe, practically unlivable. We are so frequently compared to Colombia or to Iraq (the first due to the power held by the drug cartels, the second because of the drug-related executions which, after 2008, surpassed those in the conflict in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities) that, according to the media, Mexico is quickly becoming a failed state. To a country that depends economically so much on tourism and foreign investment in the industry centers on the US border, this negative image is catastrophic.

While I find insulting to our situation many of president Calderon’s remarks regarding the violence on the border, downplaying it almost to the point of pretending that it is not happening, I agree with his instructions to the various Mexican embassies and consulates to promote a positive image of our country. The situation has reached a point where it is important to our economic growth to take steps to try to balance out Mexico’s negative image with positive cultural, artistic, scientific and athletic achievements. It is in our best interest to make sure that other countries see that, despite the problems we are currently facing, there are Mexican people working every day for a better future for our families and that everyday life goes on as normal.

As a Mexican musician living near the border, that gives a new dimension to my work. Each concert we play helps, in a tiny way, offset the negativity associated with our culture; by playing concerts we are, in a way, doing public relations work. For those of us immersed in the environment of fear and negativity that is being lived on the border, each concert we give is a much-needed rest from our daily lives, as much for our audience as for ourselves. Almost every musician in our community has seen the extent to which this fear has permeated our daily life, especially those of us that work with kids.

I’m usually the first to admit that pianists have one of the most useless professions in the world; if I were stranded on a desert island, I’d much rather have pretty much any other profession. Even so, in this particular part of the world and in this moment of time, we have the ability to do good with our craft. As demonstrated by Rostropovich playing on the Berlin wall and Smajlović among the bombs in Sarajevo, music is a powerful force for hope.