Playing as Well as You Can - Far from Perfectly

 A while ago the New York Times ran a story about a woman who plays the euphonium, not an instrument that it's easy to make a career with. She decided to try out for the US Army Band, a good home for a professional musician, and she went through a demanding series of auditions before she was accepted. The story was actually about the way the army made her go through basic training, during which she didn't have a moment to touch her instrument, before she could actually join the band. I was less interested in that aspect of the story than in hearing about the intense scrutiny that her playing received during her auditions.

I've been playing recently in a band that aspires to be a big band, but falls far short, and, frankly, we're not very good. But we have fun. We almost never play for an audience, but, when we do, the pleasure we take in playing comes through. That's important. In fact, I joined the band because I went to one of their performances, and it was clear they were having a good time. It was also clear that the musicians were all giving it their best effort.

I've also been playing in a sax quartet for quite a few years. We play pretty decently, but we're not professionals. We only rehearse once a week, and we often have to cancel rehearsals because one of us can't make it. We don't play demanding music, but our repertoire is pretty varied. We have performed in schools, old-age homes, and even inmates in a mental hospital. It's rewarding for us to bring music to those audiences. We know that our audiences aren't the most discerning music lovers in the world, and they probably don't notice it when we make mistakes. But we try to play accurately and musically, to the best of our abilities, and the challenge of putting together an interesting program and performing it makes us better musicians.

With a friend of mine who is a very musical person and once played flute on a professional level, I have been playing duets for her mother, who is nearly 100 years old, physically weak but mentally on top of things. We read through duets, stopping when we get off, going back, working on them, not with the idea that we're performing, but that we're keeping the old lady company. We all enjoy it.

That's what music is for.

Does Harmony Really Exist?

 It's a truism, which also happens to be true, that Western music is characterized by polyphony, unlike classical Arabic music, for example. In Western music, since the Middle Ages, when people started singing in counterpoint in church services, melodies have been accompanied by other melodies, sung and played at the same time. Recently, with a friend of mine, another flautist, I have been reading through duets by Stamitz, a German baroque composer, a case in point. All there is to this music are the two melodic voices, which both answer to each other and blend together. Occasionally one or the other voices arpeggiates chords under the melody played by the other voice. But are they chords?

The question in my mind is: When did Western musical theorists and practicing musicians invent the concept of chords? When one studies Western music and classical harmony, chords are axiomatic. We learn chord progressions: one chord leads to another, from an initial statement of the key in which they piece is written, on and on, until the progression resolves by returning to the original key. When you know something about harmony, as you play the melodies in pieces like the Stamitz duets, you notice when he moves you from one key to another, and from one place to another in the chord progression underlying the piece. But medieval musicians didn't think in terms of chords. They thought in terms of modes, in which complex, interlocking melodies were performed. Later on baroque and classical composers added the idea of chords and chord progressions to their works: functional harmony.

Since we Westerners are accustomed to hearing to music based on functional harmony, we listen for it, even when it's not there. In the second half of the nineteenth century, composers like Wagner (about whom I don't know that much) and Debussy (about whom I know more) broke free of the functional harmony that underlay classical music, but their music still has a texture that the listener can relate to. However, theorists like Schoenberg sought to free music of the idea of the tonic, the idea that a certain note was the most important one, the center from which one departs and to which one returns. His music still makes us feel uncomfortable.

Jazz was originally a harmonic genre of music, not surprisingly, because a lot of it was played by ear, and our ears are accustomed to harmony. But increasingly jazz musicians have been straining against the restrictions of traditional harmony. Recently I've watched some videos that explain new conceptions of jazz harmony, the use of non-traditional scales and strange stacks of notes that they insist on giving names to, as if they were chords in the old-fashioned sense.

The basis of functional harmony is voice-leading. To put it very simply, a G7 chord, GBDF, resolves to a C major chord because the G stays the same, the B moves up to a C, and the D moves up to an E. Jazz musicians discovered that the two important notes in the G7 chord are the B and the F, known as a tritone, with a very unstable sound. They also noticed that the Db7 chord, Db-F-Ab, and Cb, contains the same tritone: F and Cb (=B). So you can substitute a Db7 for a G7, which is odd, because the Gb scale, to which the Db7 belongs, is quite distant from the key of C major. By using a Db7 instead of a G7, you make it possible to play notes that don't belong to the key of C major. This is just one of many innovative aspects of jazz harmony, and may also explain why many conservative listeners are not fond of modern jazz.

My takeaway is different. I find myself wondering why we insist on labeling groups of notes as chords (i.e., G major 7 sharp nine, sharp eleven), unless it's for the convenience of not spelling them out (G-B-D-F#-A#-C#) which is not to be sneezed at.

. 

Monteverdi and Shostakovich

Last night we saw the production of Monteverdi's pioneering opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea, performed by Students at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. The singing was, at least to my ear, on a professional operatic level, and it was accompanied by an excellent baroque orchestra. Forget about singing the demanding music. Just learning the text in Italian was a formidable task,

It's a puzzling opera, because almost all the characters are despicable. The final duet, a sublime piece of music, is sung by Nero, the cruel tyrant, and Poppea, who is little more than a sexy slut (to use politically incorrect language). I would like to know why this unsavory story of murder, betrayal, and lust was chosen for the opera - a subject for inquiry.

I was impressed by how well the students sang, with strong operatic voices, and acted their parts. A fantastic amount of hard work had to be invested in this demanding production. It could well be that some of the performers will never have the chance to sing in an opera again. The memory of this performance will be a high point in their lives. That's okay, better than okay. I found myself envying the young people who took part in the opera, wondering whether I could have attended a music conservatory, with my limited reserves of talent and motivation.

A few weeks ago we heard a string quartet composed of high school students perform a movement of a Shostakovich quartet. They played with depth that it's hard, perhaps unfair to demand of musicians that age. They're part of a program for talented high school students, designed to produce a generation of professionals, an aim I'm somewhat suspicious of. It seems to me that it will only create a tiny cohort of the very best and a large number of frustrated people, who might be unable to enjoy playing the way competitive swimmers get sick of doing laps. Though the ambition built into the program gives the students a strong incentive to excel.

The other night we heard another Shostakovich quartet performed by the Jerusalem String Quartet, one of the finest in the world. The performance was almost too intense to bear. Those four brilliant musicians were once just high school students. In their case the program worked.

After a double dose of Shostakovich, I decided to hear (I can't claim that I'm listening properly) all fifteen of his quartets on YouTube, played by the Borodin Quartet. As the music flows by, I'm astonished by its variety. Shostakovich wrote entirely sweet music interspersed with challenging, dissonant passages, seven and a half hours of sublime and fascinating music.

Standards - Freedom of Interpretation

Recently I admitted to myself that I enjoy playing old standards most of all, though I enjoy listening to classical music just as much. I might as well enjoy myself when I'm practicing. 

Just now I was thinking about the catchy song of the late 1930s, "Comes Love," composed by Sam H. Stept (whom I've never heard of), with witty lyrics by Lew Brown and Charles Tobias (also unknown to me), featured in a long-forgotten Broadway musical called "Yokel Boy." I decided to share it with some friends and looked it up on Youtube. There I found a cover by Joni Mitchel. She sings it in the saddest way, as if love were a disaster. The great Artie Shaw recorded it, sung by Helen Forrest, in a serious but not tragic vein. But long ago I had heard it in a much cheerier mood sung by Ella Fitzgerald with Louis Armstrong, welcoming love. 

So what's the right way to play it? I'm aware that Glenn Gould made some controversial performances of well-known classical pieces, claiming the freedom of interpretation automatically awarded to popular songs like "Comes Love." But he was Glenn Gould. Not too many classical musicians would dare to alter canonical works with the freedom he arrogated to himself, but in the performance of standards, jazz musicians are expected to do whatever they want. They can change the tempo, reharmonize a tune, and take it so far away in their improvisation that listeners would be hard put to recognize it if they didn't hear it at the outset.

Some of the standards I've been playing are challenging, like the Jobim song, "Chega de Saudad."  If you didn't grow up on them it's hard to play bossa rhythms the way Brazilians sing them. If you listen to different recordings of that song, in Portuguese and in English, by various performers, you hear the freedom of interpretation I love so much and find so hard to emulate. 

If I play Bach or Telemann on the flute, I feel obliged to play as accurately as I can, and I carry that over, inappropriately, to the playing of standards. In fact, I doubt that musicians of the eighteenth century would have felt the need to be 100% accurate. The notation of the rhythms of bossa songs and jazz standards is merely a suggestion, because standard notation isn't designed to convey the subtleties of those rhythms. I imagine that it was equally inadequate to convey baroque rhythms. Certainly composers didn't bother to notate dynamics, articulation, and ornamentation.

Maybe I'll play baroque music better if I keep playing jazz standards.

Our Love is Here to Stay

             I’m not a natural musician, but I managed to learn how to play pretty well. Popular singers, folk and jazz musicians, people who hear songs, remember them, and play them by ear – they’re what I’d call natural musicians. The best classical musicians, although they play the notes written by composers, also have to be natural musicians to play expressively, an adverb that stands for a whole range of intangible qualities.

           Arnie Lawrence, my musical guru, used to say that you shouldn’t play a musical instrument. You should be a musical instrument, the way a singer is a musical instrument. I think of it as unification of ear, mind, and the physical instrument you’re playing. As you play, you should sing what you play in your mind.

            I don’t do that enough. To learn a song, you’re supposed to listen to it, sing along with it, and then play it by ear. I don’t even try to do that. When I’m learning to play a standard like “Our Love is Here to Stay,” one of my favorite Gershwin tunes, I don’t pick a version of it, say the one by Tony Bennett that I’m listening to now, and sing with it. Rather, I look at the notes, play them, and memorize them, which I have found hard, because it’s kind of a tricky song.

            I’m trying to figure out just why I have had trouble memorizing this song. It should be easy. After all, it follows the standard thirty-two measure structure of hundreds of standards. It’s made up of two sixteen bar sections. The first eight bars, the A part, are pretty straightforward, but they’re clever. Without getting too technical, Gershwin leads us to the key of F major in the third bar, but then he wanders off, so that by the end of the A part, the melody is pointing to the key of G. The next eight bars, the B part, hover around between G major and G minor, ending in a tag that leads back to the beginning of the song, the A part, which is repeated note for note. The first three measures of the final eight bars, the second B part, pretty much echo the first three measures of the first iteration of the B part, but they veer off in a new direction the fourth bar, with a melody the leads to a resolution of the song in its native key of F major.

            The chords that Gershwin put in the last two measures are the standard II-V-I progression that are the backbone of jazz harmony: G minor 7, C 7, to F major. However, the melody note that’s harmonized with the C7 chord is a fairly dissonant D (the ninth of the C7 chord), not exactly what one would expect to lead back to the home key of the piece.

            Not only that, the song’s structure is slightly unbalanced in an interesting way. It begins with three notes under the words “It’s very” the first time around and “But oh my” when the melody repeats. These notes are a pickup to the A part, whose melody is seven rather than the expected eight bars long. When you look at it closely, you see that the simple sounding, catchy melody of this well-known song is actually clever, as one expects of Gershwin, a natural musician if there ever was one. As a result, if you try to memorize it my way, by reading the notes and analyzing them, it’s easy to get confused. Only after I’ve played the song again and again can I begin to play it like a natural musician, without having to think about what comes next.

Two Movies About Musical Geniuses

 Recently I saw the documentary about Jon Batiste, American Symphony, an astonishingly talented and intelligent young musician, as well as the biographical drama film about Leonard Bernstein, Maestro. Both of the movies are focused on the protagonists' dramatic and sometimes conflicted personal lives. In the case of Jon Batiste, while he is skyrocketing to success as a musician, his wife, Suleika Jaouad, is struggling with leukemia, and, as the movie progresses, we don't know any more than he did while the film was being made whether she would live or die. Leonard Bernstein is shown as a bisexual man whose extramarital homosexual affairs come close to destroying the happy married life he simultaneously strove to maintain.

Both artists are incredibly versatile and energetic, extremely gifted and hard working. Bernstein's legacy is monumental. Batiste is likely to garner similar achievements. Their musical talent is backed up by extensive study. Batiste has an advanced degree from Juilliard. Bernstein studied conducting and piano at the Curtis Institute after his BA in music at Harvard. Neither man sprang full form from the forehead of Zeus. However, the films hardly touched on their education at all.

What does emerge from the films is the factor of ego, personality, drive, and showmanship. Not every super talented musician has the flamboyant ambition of Bernstein and Batiste. Very few people can withstand the pressures of careers like theirs. Without the more modest talents and ambitions of the musicians who play with them and others in their retinues, they would be unable to achieve what they do. Partly they are egomaniacs who thrive on adulation. But they are also infinitely generous of their gifts.

Music and the War Effort

 

Photograph by David Young

For quite a few years I've been playing baritone saxophone in a quartet. Just playing together every week is satisfying and enjoyable, and it gives me a reason to keep practicing. At this time, during the war between Hamas and Israel, when many thousands of Israelis who live close to our borders have been evacuated and housed in hotels, we have performed twice to demonstrate our solidary with the evacuees and to raise their morale.

We're decent amateur musicians, and, if we weren't busy doing a million other things in our lives, and we managed to rehearse more than once a week, and sometimes not even that, we could get to a respectable level. As it is, our repertoire doesn't include challenging pieces that we might be capable of playing if we could rehearse more often and find time to master our parts on our own.

I often listen with admiration to performances of chamber music on my computer and in concert. It's magical to hear an ensemble playing together, in agreement about all the elements of the performance: pitch, tempo, dynamics, and articulation. Some string quartets, especially modern ones, are so demanding that it barely seems possible to play them. My own modest experience of playing in ensembles makes me appreciative.

I also listen to quite a bit of jazz, and when I hear performances of big bands like those of Duke Ellington and Count Basie I'm equally in awe of their tightness, which can only come from countless hours of playing together.