…pour pénètrer les âmes.

The second piece from Charmes, by Federico Mompou, is an incantation for penetrating the soul (…pour pénètrer les âmes.) As I mentioned in my first post about Charmes, each of the six pieces that form it is a little magical spell which should bring about the desired effect on the listener. The first piece’s intention is to alleviate suffering (…pour endormir la souffrance), in the case of the second piece, the intent is to penetrate the soul.

While this specific piece may not have the desired effect on all listeners, especially on those that dismiss Mompou’s music as lacking substance, I think every one of us, in particular those of us that are musicians, has had music touch their soul at some point. That is the attraction that Charmes has for me, each of the six pieces embodies a magical effect that music in general can have on a person; this approach towards composition gets to the heart of why we make and listen to music. The second piece in particular also affects me as a performer; to penetrate the soul is what we all should try to do each time we play for an audience.

Every musician I know has a story of one of those moments in which music penetrates the soul. Most of the time, that moment is one of the turning points which convinced them to devote their lives to music, or playing a particular instrument. It’s not just a piece of music that does it, I believe that this magical moment is deeply connected with a particular performance and that it cannot happen without the relationship between interpreter, composer and listener. When this connection between all three happens, it’s an amazing feeling, like butterflies in your stomach, like a tingling feeling all over, a moment of intense emotion that leaves a glow which is slow to fade away and that can be felt again by recalling the music that caused it. I can’t do justice to what it is, but everyone should have felt it at one time or another; it’s as is the sound of the performance stops being something external to which we listen and becomes a part of you, it takes over you for the time the music lasts.

This kind of connection is much more intense, and happens more often, in live performance. I was lucky enough to have an amazing piano teacher, Galina Eguiazarova. She had stopped performing by the time I studied with her but, in the middle of one lesson, she played the entirety of the second movement from the third piano sonata by Brahms for another student and me. If I had to choose one particular moment that exemplifies how music can touch the soul, that would definitely be it. It’s tougher to find those experiences on recording, but when it happens it is that much better because you can hit the rewind button and listen to it one more time. There are five recordings that are very close to my heart because at some moment of my life they had that effect on me; an emotion of great intensity, beyond merely enjoying a piece of music:

Krystian Zimmerman playing Chopin’s second piano concerto:

Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s first symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic:

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (which is one of the first things I wrote about on this blog):

The first Brahms piano trio, with Julius Katchen, Joseph Suk and Janos Starker (another of the first entries on this blog):

Bach’s fourth English Suite by Murray Perahia. I couldn’t find a video of this on YouTube, but you can listen to a sample on Amazon, and definitely buy the album if you don’t have it.

Play like a man!

“Play like a man!” is an expression that was used very often by my teachers, usually in a very loud voice with a few expletives thrown in for good measure. My students hear it very often from me as well, usually before a concert. So, what does “playing like a man” mean? That depends on how you define manliness.

There are two ways to look at it. Some think of manhood as the opposite of womanhood. This kind of thinking is more concerned about external characteristics, like being rugged, physically strong and keeping your emotions to yourself –pretty useless for a musician. To say the truth, I used to think that was what my teacher meant with “play like a man!” which resulted in some very loud and tasteless performances of Debussy, Chopin and Dvorak on my part.

I think that the best way to understand the concept of manhood is as the opposite of childhood. This means that manhood, and womanhood as well, is really about internal characteristics which are there regardless of how subtle, delicate or emotional you are. So, what are those characteristics?

Well, what is a child like?

Children are dependent on others, they need you to hold their hand and show them what to do. They need approval from adults and can’t make their own decisions, they need others to do things for them. So, “playing like a man” means being independent. It means working by yourself, making your own decisions and then acting on them without needing someone to hold your hand all the time. “Playing like a man” means that you don’t wait for your teacher, your conductor or your colleagues to do things for you.

Children have irrational fears, they are helpless and fragile. That means that to “play like a man” you need to be bold. It means having initiative, taking risks and jumping fearlessly into new situations. “Playing like a man” means that every time you make music you cast all doubt aside and jump straight into what you are doing. To “play like a man” you must face challenges instead of avoiding them, you conquer irrationality and fear with strength of character and the courage to look at things as they really are, without self-delusion.

Children are self-centered, a man is at the service of others. To “play like a man” means doing justice to the music you play, being at the service of the composer and his intentions. “Playing like a man” means getting rid of unnecessary showing-off, performances full of affectations and attitudes that are more about trying to look a certain way than about expressing a musical idea.

In conclusion, let’s not confuse “being a man” with having lots of facial hair and grunting. “Manhood” and “womanhood” are much more than a collection of superficial characteristics, they are a set of virtues (like courage, resiliency, independence, honesty and discipline.) I believe that “playing like a man” is  what we should always be trying to teach our students and not just something we yell at them when we want them to play louder.

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In their site, “The Art of Manliness”, Brett and Kate McKay do a great job of explaining what manliness is about and much of this entry is inspired by their latest post. I highly recommend you follow that link and look around.

Charmes.

Charmes, by Federico Mompou is a work comprised of six short pieces that, as the title implies, are short little spells intended to conjure different effects: …to alleviate suffering …to inspire love … to penetrate the soul …to effect a cure …to evoke an image of the past …to inspire joy. This approach towards composition is a great example of what Mompou’s music is about. Traditional analysis brings nothing to the table, most of his works from after the 20′s are wisps of fog; scraps of melody, ostinato figures and refined harmonies which, while owing a lot to the music of Satie and his contemporaries, have an entirely different approach towards musical discourse.

Development and rigid construction are the furthest thing from Mompou’s mind –in fact, in an interview he admitted to adoring all music except for Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, precisely because of those qualities. What Mompou fully appreciated, decades before John Cage talked about everything around us being music, is that every chord, every motif, every note has an intrinsic beauty and meaning that is completely independent of what a composer does with it. What results of this aesthetic is music with long ostinati, frequent repetition and in which harmony has no functional meaning, but is profoundly connected with timbre. Much like bells –which play a very important role in Mompou’s music and life– the notes in each chord and the harmonics they produce result in different qualities of tone, ranging from the tinny, metallic sound typical of minor seconds and tritones, to the full, resonant, harmonic-rich superimposed fifths and fourths.

Magic is the word that best describes Mompou’s music, a meaning to be taken literally in his 1920-21 work Charmes. But perhaps this concept isn’t so unique to Mompou. After all, the use of music for its magical properties is something that has been a part of every culture since we started walking upright. The first spell in this cycle, …pour endormir la souffrance (…to alleviate suffering) conjures up an effect that everyone has felt at some time. Music as a refuge, as a way of dulling our pain.

Contrary to what happens with the majority of serialist music, which is more interesting to analyze than it is to play or listen to, Mompou suffers from analysis. The first piece in Charmes is  just a short Debussyian fragment of a melody repeated exactly the same four times over an ostinato pattern in the left hand, with very slight coloring shifts in the harmony. While not to everyone’s liking, I find that repetition to be an essential part of Mompou’s language; here it softly nudges you over and over, subtly shifting from darkness to light. It’s like taking a beautiful gemstone in your hands and turning it, watching the light play on its surface.

Does this music do what Mompou intends it to do, that is, “alleviate suffering”? I think it does. But that’s entirely up to the listener. While one may just hear the same thing over and over, someone else will allow himself to be swept away.

Play!

We pianists do our job: we play. We learn the repertoire for the competitions, the recitals, the chamber music ensembles; we spend hours accompanying singers, amazing, good and bad… and sometimes horrible beyond words; teaching students, enthusiastic and unmotivated; we sit hours in the orchestra rehearsals waiting to play the twenty measures where the symphony has a piano part; we dutifully clean up our Chopin etudes –just not Op. 10, n. 7!– our Prelude and Fugue from the Well Tempered Clavier, our classical sonata; we show up at the violin auditions and accompany the same violin concerto ten times, go to the dance studio and play the same passage in 3/4 time for thirty minutes so the dancers can warm up; we practice our concertos and prepare an encore; we sit down with kids and teach them that our thumb is number one, and our pinky is number five, and to sit up straight and sing out loud; we show up for the singers’ auditions and sight-read Italian arias for hours, sometimes transposing, until our head hurts…

Why?

We often lose sight of why we want to play. Are we even making music, or just going through the motions? We constantly have to work on maintaining our ability, the craft of playing an instrument. We are also stuck in the drudgery of having to think of the business side of things, looking for work and vehicles with which we can use our craft to create a living (that is, if we like things like having food in the fridge, and a roof above our heads.) We get bogged up thinking of perfection, and style, and whether a piece of music is suited to our particular capabilities, and how it will go over with an audience, and if it will sell.

But playing just because we want to? Whatever we want to play? That’s a different story and, for some reason, we stop doing that. We need to find those moments, and embrace them. More importantly, we need to create those moments. Once in a while, we need to put down the sheet music we are required to learn, find something we like and play it. Just for the joy of doing it. Because we can. It sounds so simple and yet, we forget how fulfilling it is to simply make music for no other reason than to make music.

The physical, emotional and artistic satisfaction that we get from making music is something that we should never forget to nurture. It’s so easy to lose our way and forget this part of our artistic soul. Just play something you love. Doesn’t it feel amazing? The way our bodies interact with our instrument and the noise it makes. For a brief moment, losing ourselves in that sweet nonsense that is musical discourse, wrapping ourselves in the vibrations we make. Connecting with other people without saying a thing, just sharing a moment of music with an audience, or with other musicians.

Once in a while, find your voice and make some music because you need it, because you want it. Get together with other people and make chamber music together, find a piece of music you really like and play the hell out of it in your living room, or just sit with your instrument and make some noise. Organize a concert, just for yourself and play music you really love. Write about music and don’t be afraid to share your passion with other musicians, even if it means sounding a bit ridiculous during rehearsals. Then, when you walk back into the business side of things, you know what it feels like to do what you do. To make music just because.

The Satie problem.

The music of Erik Satie presents some very difficult problems of interpretation, especially when you consider that it wasn’t long ago that he was considered a minor composer, an eccentric that really didn’t know what he was doing. There are two reasons why Satie is so difficult to play right: the very disparate extremes of character in his compositions and the amount of trust that Satie places in the hands of his interpreters. In other words, he does all kinds of crazy things, constantly changes everything around and doesn’t give you a single clue to what’s going on.

His music can evoke both classical antiquity and a smoke-filled dingy café. It can seduce the listener at one moment and thumb its nose at him in the next. He writes delicate, refined, Schubert-like melodies that were intended for the cabaret, to be belted out by a booze-soaked, raspy-voiced singer while, for a solemn, grand-scale work like Les fils des étoiles, he fills the dissonant score with eccentric comments and a huge dedication, poking fun at the seriousness of the event.

The tempi and articulation are up in the air most of the time and the music is completely devoid of expression marks, time signatures, bar lines or tempo markings. In place of standardized musical terminology you are faced with wacky comments, such as like a nightingale with a toothache or it’s finally going to end! (that in a piece which is barely two minutes long.)

I find that the biggest problem with Satie, much like eighteenth-century French harpsichord music, is in the characterization. The pieces are increasingly fragmentary, and one has to learn to give each passage its proper character (even if it means pondering long and hard on what a “nightingale with a toothache” sounds like) without falling into the trap of bringing it all together by playing everything in the same tempo. Another problem here is that most pianists approach Satie’s music with preconceived notions about his music, failing to take into account the wildly differing changes of style from one piece to the next. The two most common approaches are “this music is too boring for an audience, let’s speed it up!” –Aldo Ciccolini is a good example of this done well– and “this music is so pretty, let’s make it minimalist” –Reinbert DeLeeuw does this in a good way, with his six-minute Gymnopedies.

The fact is that a good Satie interpretation is a very delicate thing, there’s much more to it than just picking a tempo and trying to make pretty noise. It’s all about the little nuances in the phrasing, timing and timbre. Things you pick up by knowing the composer’s life and work in-depth and, most of all, by really loving the music and being truly convinced that what you are playing is a great work of art. But be careful, there is still a trap there. By giving the music the importance it deserves, that very seriousness undermines the spirit of Satie’s music, be it in his funny moods or in his “furniture music” period. See the problem? That’s why to play Satie, what you really need is a sense of humor.

Bullfighting and La Virgen de la Macarena.

My house is right beside the city’s bullfighting ring. Today was the first corrida of the year, which meant an extremely noisy day at my home, there was a huge crowd cheering and Olé!-ing and a band playing La Virgen de la Macarena every few minutes for six straight hours.

La Virgen de la Macarena is a very traditional pasodoble (a march-like dance in 2/4, usually in Phrygian mode –think of the theme from the second movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez if you’re having trouble picturing it.) La Virgen de la Macarena is the most popular pasodoble in Mexican bullfights, in many cases it’s the only one the band can play –which I think is the case with my local bullfighting ring because it’s all they played over and over. There are popular versions of this piece that heavily feature the trumpet, usually in some sort of virtuoso setting.

I grew up in this same house, and the bullfighting arena has been there since before the house was built. When I was a kid, I played trumpet; La Virgen de la Macarena holds a special spot in the repertoire for me because, along with an LP of Alicia de Larrocha playing Mozart’s 21st piano concerto and a few Scarlatti sonatas my dad used to play, it is one of my earliest musical memories. When I started playing the trumpet (I was about seven years old) instead of practicing what I was supposed to practice, much to the irritation of my teachers I’d spend hours learning by ear all the solos from the bullfighting band, and I’d go out into our backyard and play La Virgen de la Macarena along with them. When I was growing up I heard this recording of Rafael Mendez playing La Virgen de la Macarena:

Along with his famous double-tonguing and the circular breathing extravaganza in his version of Paganini’s Perpetuo Mobile, that recording, and the fact that he was Mexican, turned him into my favorite trumpeter –a funny thing about Mendez, he had the worst luck with his embouchure; his mouth was struck with a rifle butt when he was kidnapped by Pancho Villa, crushed when someone slammed a door into his trumpet and smashed with a baseball bat when he was in the stands watching a game! He was my idol throughout my childhood (until I turned teenager and discovered Maynard Ferguson’s ridiculously high notes and, later on, Wynton Marsalis.)

I’ve only been to a couple of bullfights in my life and I’m pretty ambiguous about the whole thing. I expected something barbarous and cruel but instead I was fascinated with the complexity of the bullfighting ritual. There is art and passion in the dance of bullfighting, there is much of flamenco dancing in the elegance of the poses of the torero (the correct term is torero, the word toreador has no place anywhere except in Bizet’s opera.) The observer’s point of view is what defines a bullfight. While one person sees a metaphor for the triumph of life over death, another sees a mob cheering while an animal is tortured and then slaughtered. Personally, the cruelty with which the bull was taunted and killed was pretty sickening. Even so, I can understand why people are passionate about bullfighting and, being an enthusiastic carnivore, I have no illusions about my place in the food chain. I don’t mind them killing bulls all day long, but I’d rather not watch. I’ll just listen.