What Blind Virtuosos can Teach Us

 I strongly recommend the documentary available on Youtube, a two-part interview with the English jazz pianist, George Shearing. He comes across as both a musical genius and a kind, essentially modest person. An equally fascinating documentary was made about Art Tatum, a phenomenal blind pianist of even greater importance. Another great blind jazz musician was Roland Kirk - I haven't seen this documentary yet. There have also been blind classical composers and performers. I looked it up on the Web. However, I don't think any of them was as influential in their field as Shearing, Tatum, and Kirk.

 A number of great jazz musicians purportedly didn't know how to read music like the monster guitarist Wes Montgomery and the pianist and composer Erroll Garner. In Western classical music, I doubt if there were any sighted composers or performers who couldn't read music, whereas in Indian classical music, no one plays from written notes, as far as I know.

The development of musical notation was of huge importance in the history of Western classical music. It's hard to imagine how any of the composers from the sixteenth or seventeenth century on could have composed their works without setting pen to paper. Notation can be a trap, but not for great musicians. Some composers like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, were also famous as improvisers. Bartok apparently worked on his piano pieces by ear until he was ready to write them down.

The musicality of a musician who plays without written notes is different from that of musicians who mainly play from written notes. I wonder whether musicians like myself, who are enslaved to written scores, could have been trained to be the first kind of musicians, who learn music by ear and play it by ear, if our teachers were interested in teaching us that skill (and possessed it). I suspect that it's not a matter of training but one of personality and talent. If I, for one, had been more independently musical as a child, I would have developed in the way I now wish I had developed. I can't blame it on my teachers.

Authentic Instruments?

I just heard a splendid live performance of Mozart's Serenade for Winds. All the musicians, including the two who were playing the basset horn parts, were playing modern symphonic instruments, not the instruments Mozart wrote for in the late eighteenth century. 

I'm not complaining. It sounded wonderful. However, if the argument for playing baroque music on baroque instruments is strong, why isn't a similar argument, equally strong, made for playing Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, among others, on the instruments of their times (which were not essentially different from the instruments of the mid-eighteenth century)?

A few years ago at a music festival in Warsaw I heard a symphony orchestra that used old-style instruments and arranged the musicians the way they used to be arranged in the nineteenth century, and I was impressed. Obviously if a symphony orchestra today is playing a program with music from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, it has to use modern instruments (most of which haven't changed all that much since the Industrial Revolution), and, within limits, it can't keep rearranging the players. So we hear what the conductor has in mind and places on the stage.

Incidentally, the Mozart Serenade calls for two basset horns, which are similar in range to modern alto clarinets. Authentic basset horns aren't exactly common, so I assume the two musicians who were playing in the Serenade last night were playing alto clarinets. If a clarinettist wants to own a range of professional level instruments - a B flat and A clarinet, an alto clarinet, and a bass clarinet - he or she has to invest a considerable amount of money, which, in general, professional musicians don't have.