Wednesday, February 26, 2014

The Enormous Joy of Going Back To Student Pieces

Twice before, circumstances have forced me to go back close to the beginning of music and both times have revealed richness that I'd never suspected on my first pass through.  The first time was when I went back to Bach's Two-Part Inventions and other pieces on that grade level.  Of course none of the others measured up to the Inventions, though the relevant volumes of Bartok's Mikrokosmos came closest.

Having played through the entire set of the Mikrokosmos by the time I was a Sophomore in college, I knew and loved many of the pieces, especially the fifth and sixth volumes*.   After I started teaching I kept pushing forward the point at which I noticed fascinating musical substance - the pedagogical significance begins with the first piece.  After having taught them for years, it's my turn to learn from them again.  I'm currently playing through the third volume to get some of the rust out of my hands and arms and am finding it is pretty effective on rust in my ears and head too.

If there is a multiverse it is in Bartok's ability to create worlds in the pieces of that collection, each having its own particular world of sensation and implication. The colors and light are so brilliant and the shadows and dark so dark they don't seem to come from the same world.  Even what seemed like the more banal pieces in the volume all those years ago have so much substance.   Bartok was renowned for the nobility of his character, his scrupulous sense of responsibility to students and his public and to music and he obviously lavished the utmost care on these student pieces.  That's clearly something he had in common with Bach and with few other composers for keyboard.  I think a lot of what he put into those pieces you have to be several decades older than the students he wrote them for would understand at first.


*  And not just the well-played over Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm.  I especially love these pieces from the other end of Volume Six.



3 comments:

  1. I'd been meaning to tell you, and this is as good an excuse as any, how much your posts on music have meant to me.

    As I get older, I realize more and more how little depth there is to popular music. I don't despise it, but my appreciation of it is limited to the music of my childhood, and that appreciation is largely nostalgia and little else. When I hear current popular music I realize how really thin the genre is, how little it has to work with, how much it is music as industrial/consumer product (the difference between real food and processed food).

    Your reference to these Bartok pieces is a case in point. I'd never heard of them, and now I have something to look forward to. Your jazz postings give me the same pleasure and hope for music that will engage me. So, thanks. It's meant a lot to me.

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  2. It's a great pleasure to share it. When something makes you so happy you want other people to share it, the difference between being one of the kewl ones, the in-crowd and being a liberal, of the traditional American sort.

    So much of music is what Nicholas Nabokov (Vladimir's composer brother) called "tissue paper music" you listen once and it's used up. Then there is real music that is endlessly revealing of new things, that's the difference between a merely talented composer and a great one, a great one can put that kind of potential into a fixed composition. A jazz musician can compose new variations over even a banal song every time they play , sometimes it can surpass the banal original, some of them can do that in amazing ways, like those pieces Gary Burton and Chick Corea played or that amazing Habana Sol from McCoy Tyner. Or what Sheila Jordan did so subtly with Willow Weep for Me. I love it when other people get to hear that. You can listen to a great jazz musician play the same piece over the course of forty or more years and hear they're always finding new things in it, always making new things from it. Then you hear some pop musician who has been singing the same thing for four decades and they don't do anything with it but what they recorded on the hit record, they know their "audience" isn't really listening and they want to be lulled instead of shocked. They must be so bored, I couldn't stand that.

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  3. Some of it is real musicianship: I can listen to the Chieftans endlessly, even though I couldn't tell you the difference between a jig or a reel. I have an album by a violinist, playing traditional Scottish music, and I could wear it out, it's so good.

    But some of it is just the music. I love "traditional" music of some variety, but, as you say, so much music is "tissue paper." That and I've come to realize the "music critics" on radio or in print, haven't the first idea what they are talking about. I heard Stephen Sondheim school Terry Gross on the difference between dissonance and assonance, and since then I wonder how many "music critics" could explain it; or even understand it.

    Anyway, I was giving up on music except as a diversion, and now I'm back to listening again. It's good to listen.

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