Music as Language (2)

Clearly music is only a language by analogy, because it doesn't mean anything the way words in a language mean things. There is no way music could convey the meaning of the following sentence: When I was a child I took piano lessons from my aunt Ethel.
Whereas people do convey specific messages by beating drums and whistling, those drumbeats and whistles are no longer music, just as spoken sentences have pitch, tempo, and rhythm - but they are not music either.
In any event, "music" is a huge category, like "language," and within the field of music there are innumerable musical idioms, some related to each other and others extremely distant.
Recently I began to work on Bach's E Minor sonata for flute and continuo, as I would rather improve my playing by struggling with Bach's sixteenth note runs than work on exercises.The phrases that Bach wrote are more interesting than the patterns written by the authors of flute methods. They are also challenging, because the sequences of notes were composed by a musical genius. As I slowly played the first movement, I encountered sequences of notes that did not fall into place naturally as phrases - at least for me. Figuring out how to phrase a piece while you play it, which notes should be emphasized, when the piece should get louder or softer, and so on, are aspects of understanding music. Sometimes this understanding is intuitive, but often it is conscious and planned. The musician studies the score and marks it so she will remember how to play it with understanding.
To understand Bach in that way requires familiarity with many works of his, with the music of his age, with the rules of harmony and counterpoint that he obeyed, and so on. The same applies to playing any kind of music. That's what I mean by a using musical language.
Not everyone uses a musical language in the same way: composers, conductors, performers, and listeners all respond to different demands and have different abilities within the use of musical languages. In my estimation, composers, arrangers, conductors, and performers who memorize long and complex pieces are masters of musical language, as are jazz improvisers. By those high standards, I merely stammer in music, though I'm a decent amateur musician.
I play baritone saxophone in a community orchestra, whose repertoire ranges from arrangements of classical music through jazz and Latin pieces. This requires us, without thinking about it very much, to shift abruptly from one musical idiom to another, and it also requires the audience to listen to, say, the soundtrack of Star Wars, followed by an arrangement of the 1812 Overture.
Years ago I took musicology courses at the Hebrew University. The third year of the cycle of courses in harmony was a form of analysis developed by the nineteenth century musicologist, Heinrich Schenker, which I found stiff, reductive, and uncongenial - though it also provides deep insights into the classical pieces are constructed. As presented in that class, the laws that Schenker discovered are meant to be universally applicable, based on the acoustic properties of notes. But I kept thinking that those laws were only a kind of grammar of classical music, not universal at all.
Is there a Chomsky in musicology who has worked out a universal generative grammar of music?

Music as a Language (1)

Years ago I attended a concert in a small auditorium at which the works of ten contemporary composers were performed. I must have enjoyed it and found it interesting, because I stayed to the end, though the music made no concessions either to the listeners or to the performers. I came away with the feeling that each composer was writing in a musical language of his or her own, a language that the composer invented along with the piece that was played. I didn't feel that the works were in conversation with one another, which is not the case when a program contains works from the standard Western classical repertoire.
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart built on and rebelled against the baroque composers who preceded them. Beethoven and Schubert looked back at their classical predecessors and opened new possibilities for the romantic composers who followed them - and so on. These composers didn't try to invent a new musical language. They were writing in idioms shared by their contemporaries. True, their compositions stretched the conventions of the norms they inherited, but by and large they remained within them.
I'm tempted to say that using an existing musical language made it easier for them to compose, but obviously it isn't easy to compose like any of these great composers. We all speak a language, but not everything we write in it is immortal poetry.
On my only trip to Japan  (so far, one can always hope) my wife and I went to one act of a kabuki performance. The music and chanting sounded entirely random to me, interesting, not exactly pleasant, but full of energy and surprises. I couldn't understand it any more than I can understand the Japanese language when I hear it spoken. Other non-Western music, such as classical Indian music, is far less off-putting, and I can listen to it with enjoyment, if not real understanding.
So what do I mean by understanding music?
To be continued.

Flute Chronology - Past and Future

I just returned home from a two week trip to Bulgaria. We flew by a low-cost airline, and our baggage allowance was tiny, so, instead of bringing my copper traveling flute, which was cheap enough so that, if it were lost or stolen, I wouldn't suffer a huge loss, I brought my plastic copy of a baroque flute, an excellent instrument that costs as much as a good recorder, since I don't like being separated from a musical instrument for a long time. I bought the baroque flute a few years ago, because I love the sound of the instrument, and I (stupidly) thought it would be easy to play. It isn't. It's harder to produce a full, rich sound on my baroque flute than on a modern metal flute, and the chromatic fingerings are cumbersome, at best.
While we were in Bulgaria I managed to play for twenty minutes or so for two out of every three days, so I didn't lose my embouchure entirely. The instrument is naturally in the key of D major, so you have to learn at least the fingerings for C natural, F natural, and B flat to play almost anything at all. I worked on that a little and thought of a strategy for actually learning to play it freely, but I doubt that I'll get around to it.
When we got back home, and I took out my silver flute, I found that the effort I had put into getting a good sound out of the baroque flute carried over onto the modern flute -- a pleasant surprise. In fact, I am close than ever to producing a sound that pleases me. It has taken time and patience.
I never even tried to play flute until 2012, when I was in my late sixties, against the actuarial odds, because I didn't think I could do it. But when we took a trip to Vietnam, I bought a Chinese style flute there as a souvenir, and, after a while, I managed to play it a little bit. That encouraged me, so I bought the first of my five metal flutes (trading up to my silver Sankyo, which is a better flute than I am a flutist).
At first I tried to learn to play on my own. After a few months, looking for free lessons on the Internet, I realized I needed a teacher, and that's when my true flute odyssey began. At this stage I still consider myself a saxophone player who also plays flute, but I've been working so obsessively on flute, that before I reach the age of eighty, I might think of myself as a flutist who doubles on sax.

You Know What It Sounds Like, Play Great!

When I brought my clarinet to  one of Arnie Lawrence's sessions, he said, "Play like Barney Bigard," the clarinet player in Duke Ellington's band. Obviously, and Arnie knew it, there was no way I could play remotely like Barney Bigard. If I could, I would be giving Arnie's music workshops. So what did he mean?
This morning, after practicing flute for nearly an hour, I noodled around on the instrument, following the advice of a wise and inspiring musician, Raul Juarena, under whose direction I got to play a few years ago. Suddenly, I found myself blowing freely into the flute the way I ordinarily don't do, and the sound was thrilling. I couldn't believe I was producing that sound. I was, in Arnie's words, for a minute or two, playing great.
So why don't I play that way all the time?
Partly it's because I'm trying to learn difficult music, and I have to concentrate on getting everything right, the notes, the dynamics, the phrasing, the articulation....
But mostly, it's because I inhibit myself. I know I can't play great, so I don't try, because, if I try, I'll fail and be disappointed. Better to play cautiously.
Playing great means playing riskily. It means accepting the risk of reaching the end of your abilities and smashing up against that brick wall.

Diminishing Returns: Practice Doesn't Have to Make Perfect

Last night the saxophone quartet I play in managed to rehearse again. We've been playing together for two years or so, but in the past six months, for one reason or another, we haven't been able to meet regularly. Now, for example, it will be more than a month before we can get together again.
Last night we played a couple of pieces we hadn't been working on regularly and were surprised at how well they went. Sometimes it's a good idea to put things aside for a while.
You can only work on something for so long, before you get bored with it and start making new mistakes. When you get to that point, you have to stop and let the work you've invested gradually sink in. The more you go over something, the less spontaneous your playing becomes. You don't sound fresh. You stop discovering new things in the music.
There's always a fine line between mastering a piece of music, so you're confident you can play it in public, and playing with too much control.
The other group I play with is a wind orchestra. Our conductor chooses difficult, challenging music for us and makes us responsible for learning how to play it. We're going to play two concerts in a couple of weeks, and the performance will be far from polished. Does it matter? We're amateurs, and everyone knows it, so no one expects the Israel Philharmonic. We'll have fun playing, and, most probably, the excitement of performing in public will raise the level of our playing.
I like the conductor's attitude. You don't improve unless you play challenging pieces that are a bit beyond your ability - but not so hard as to be frustrating.

Brilliant Young Musical Talents

On Saturday night we went to the concluding concert of the masterclass under the guidance of maestro Murray Perahia at a the Jerusalem Music Center. Eight pianists between the ages of fourteen and eighteen played extremely demanding works with a wonderful mixture of youthful enthusiasm and maturity. Each one was better than the last, and I'm sure that most of them could become successful performers if they continue in that path and are fortunate.
They all played with great skill, and clearly they have invested hours and hours of practice to attain the high level of musicianship they displayed that evening. Obviously they haven't had the time to develop the repertoire expected of a top concert pianist, and their performances might have been lacking the depth of mature musicians, but they have acquired the foundations they can build on.
I found myself thinking that if you aren't great when you're a teenager, you probably will never be great.
And also that the potential of gifted young people, if they are motivated, guided, given the opportunity, and placed in a supportive environment, is almost magical, and not only in music.
I'm not in favor of musical education aimed solely at picking out the most gifted kids and training them to be professionals, and I'm not in favor of pushing kids, but of giving students a chance to blossom, to explore and develop their abilities, to find their own field of excellence. Obviously I don't know the young people who played at the concert, and I couldn't have been more impressed by their performances, but, on the other hand, it might not be terribly disastrous for them if they didn't perform till they were in their twenties, for example, unless they are totally drawn to performance. Not every gifted fifteen-year-old is capable of performing before a demanding audience - or interested in doing that. Also, not every fine musician is built for the rigors of an international career, with constant travel and enormous pressure, the sense that you're only as good as your last performance. If that's the only kind of career they're being trained for, and if they think that any other outcome would be tantamount to failure, that would be sad.
I hope that these young pianists are receiving wise and empathetic guidance along with their fine and rigorous musical training.

Musics

In the past few days, I've run through a varied range of musical experiences, and I'm wondering what they tell me.
On Tuesday afternoon my wife and I attended the last in a series of lecture/concerts on Chopin and Liszt, given by the brilliant pianist-composer-conductor-lecturer Gil Shohat. This session was devoted to the "demonic" Liszt, and the major guest performer was the brilliant Israeli pianist Dorel Golan, who, as usual, played magnificently. In the end, however, I decided that I'm not a big fan of Liszt. His pieces seem to me to wander all over and to depend too much on fantastic piano technique. See if you can play this! At a recital, I'd be happy to hear one piece by Liszt, but not a whole program.
Later that evening I has a flute lesson. I played 2 duets with my teacher. One is by Kaspar Kummer hardly a household name among music lovers. The duet is kind of vapid when you only play one of the parts. Together it sounds fine. But there's a lot of pointless running around in it. I worked on it for a month or more, and I learned a lot by doing that, but I was glad to get it behind me. Then we played the first part of a sonata by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, which is a much more interesting piece of music (too interesting, my teacher said). He was surprised that we managed to stay together from beginning to end, because the rhythms are complicated, and the parts seldom come together. But I played it too slowly. So that's a summer project.
Since I'm a grownup, my teacher more or less lets me call the shots, and I've been playing duets with him, because I love it. Also, he's so good, that he pushes me upward. His tone is enviable, and hearing him while I play helps me improve my own sound.
Then, on Wednesday night, I went to the Yellow Submarine, a venue known to Jerusalem pop and jazz fans, to hear my friend and teacher, Stephen Horenstein lead a group of musicians he calls the Lab Orchestra in an intense new piece called Tabular Rasa. The piece ranges from slow, melodic, tonal passages to cacophonous noise, from tranquility to intense anxiety, from clean solo passsages through discordant ensemble passages. I don't know whether the performance was recorded, but I can't imagine enjoying a CD of it as much as I enjoyed seeing it develop with a mixture of spontaneity and planning.
Finally, last night, we went to a screening at the Cinematheque of two short films about Oriental Jewish musicians, from Egypt and Iraq, who, against all odds, maintained their traditions here in Israel, during the 1950s, when it was almost suppressed by lack of government support and indifference and hostility on the part of the Ashkenazi public. One of the featured musicians was the Egyptian-born Felix Mizrahi, and among the most moving scenes was his visit to an oud-maker in Cairo, where he plays on a lousy Chinese violin with a wonderful young oud player. The communication and mutual appreciation of the two musicians was inspiring.
How fortunate one is to be able to hear and play so many different kinds of music.