A Successful House Concert

Last night an unusual trio played in our house for an audience of about thirty-five of our friends: Yinon Muallem, an Israeli who now lives in Sweden and plays oud and percussion, and sings; Saman Alias, a clarinetist from Iraqi Kurdistan, who also lives in Sweden now; and Dina Kitrossky, a versatile Israeli pianist. They played original compositions based on Middle Eastern music.

The audience's response was heartwarming. We are privileged to be able to host concerts in our home and enable the musicians to create an atmosphere of warmth and joy. We began hosting concerts in the 1990s when accomplished Russian musicians arrived in Israel and couldn't make a living, and we continued because it is so rewarding for us to provide a venue for fine musicians who appreciate the chance of playing for a small, intimate audience, even though they don't make as much money from such performances.

Recently we spent five days in Paris on our way home from California to Israel. One evening, in a restaurant we happened to go to, a jazz duo played: a guitarist and a bass. They were excellent musicians and played fairly traditional tunes. Both the fine food and the fine live music made me happier than I have been in a long time. A day or two later we went to a recital of cello sonatas in a huge theater near the Champs Elysées. Although both the cellist and the pianist were on the highest level, and the sonatas they played were fabulous, they were separated from the large and enthusiastic audience by being up on a stage, with the house lights off. 

Hearing live music is always a special experience, and hearing it in someone's living room, when you're not  separated from the musicians at all, is even more special.

More on Memorizing Music

 The course I signed up for is useful for a number of reasons.

Yesterday I wrote that the issues in memorizing is cognitive, but the course pointed out that there are two elements along with the cognitive: auditory and motor - remembering what you hear (or are supposed to hear) and remembering what it feels like to play what you're memorizing.

The main key to memorizing is playing with full awareness, or as close to full awareness as possible. Music offers so many features to notice, that perhaps only a musical genius can notice them all, and that might be the key to musical genius. Who knows? I find it uncanny that a mere child (prodigy) can play better than someone who has been studying for more years than the child has lived.

Practicing with an ear to memorizing what I'm playing has helped me, so far, after only two days, to practice better. Like most people, I imagine, I tend to gloss over difficulties and moving on to easy stuff instead of focusing on problems and solving them. If you intend to memorize what you're playing, you have to notice what's challenging and master the challenges.

Addressing my Weaknesses as a Musician

It's more enjoyable to keep doing the things you do well than to work on things you don't do so well. Recently I fell for an online course that promises to teach you how to memorize music easily and keep them stored in memory "forever" (when one is eighty years old, as I am, "forever" is not all that long). Not to worry, the cost of the course is less than a good dinner for two in a restaurant. Difficulties with memory are common as one ages, so maybe working on memorizing music will stave off general memory loss. Recently I read an interview with the brilliant Canadian pianist, Angela Hewitt, who, without false modesty, described her own memory as prodigious, about finding her memory a bit less prodigious than it once was, and dealing with that development.

I'm not good at memorizing. For several months, on and off, I've been playing the bossa nova song, "Chega de Saudade," and trying unsuccessfully to memorize it. There are other songs that I once had by memory but have forgotten. For example, I often get stuck on the bridges of jazz standards, and I have found it impossible to memorize any of Bach's unaccompanied suite for flute. This is frustrating, and I'm hoping that the online course will help me overcome this weakness. I also hope that I'll be able to memorize the chords that accompany the melodies - the changes. That will help me improvise, another musical skill that I should improve.

This evening, for the first time, I started using the course, and I found the insights it offers into the process of memorization both intelligent and useful. Meanwhile, addressing the memorization weakness has led me to notice another big weakness in my musicianship, which is identifying intervals. I devised a little exercise to help me with that. Starting on any note, I played each interval going up: minor second, second, minor third, third, perfect fourth, augmented fourth, perfect fifth, etc. As I played I tried to anticipate the intervals in my mind's ear. When I got to the octave, I started doing the same thing, but going down. I found that a lot harder.

It's been easy for me to avoid dealing with these two weaknesses in my playing by being a fairly proficient reader, and I often spend practice sessions reading music. That helps me play the music with other people, but it doesn't help me overcome the two weaknesses I've mentioned. It does, of course, help with other weaknesses, such as intonation, rhythm, tone quality, and general mastery of one's instrument.

Importantly, musical weaknesses are not technical. They are cognitive. The lessons one learns in addressing weaknesses in one area of one's life ought to carry over into the rest of one's life. Let's hope.