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In this essay, I was somewhat inspired by the narrative prose style of Abi Andrews, whose novel, The Word for Woman is Wilderness, I would encourage everyone to read. I This weekend I put my phone aside, as I often do, less as a kind of digital detox than as a way of quieting my mind and leaving myself open to the kind of thinking and hearing necessary for writing about or engaging deeply with music. It often strikes me that the music I play was intended to be heard in a world much quieter than our own -- both literally and figuratively -- and so this exercise of quieting the mind is crucial to getting at the actual "sense" of classical music. II All my greatest chamber music teachers bring up the idea of "listening to the room," which is, I suppose, a way of trying to hear something in silence. Ideally this is something that leads you to feel more comfortable playing in different spaces. A seemingly similar idea among musicians is that of "projecting for a hall." Fundamentally, however, these two activities are opposites, because listening is inherently reactive in nature, as opposed to "projection," which can be done obliviously. Listening is also essential to how chamber music can come to life. One teacher's definition of room listening is, "hearing the silence of the room and playing into that." Another teacher always says, "your trio has four players, the three of you and the space you're in." III Some other people who like room listening are audio engineers. I always smile at that first track whenever engineers send along a batch of takes: the one that's simply called "room noise." It sounds like a piece of contemporary art music with a possibly downtown vibe. Of course the irony of room noise is that it is recorded to be eliminated. Even so, recordings define rooms; they recreate the impression of a room in that they depend on real relationships in space. Microphones are placed relationally to instruments, and those distances suggest different kinds of listening. A distant microphone often gives the best sense of including a space in one's listening. Close microphones might suggest intimacy or even listening too closely. There is also a subtle sense at any distance of whether playing is intended for the microphone or ignorant of it -- whether the microphone participates or simply overhears. IV I love this sense of overhearing in the early piano trio recordings of Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, and Gregor Piatigorsky. This sense is created partly through the position of the microphone, which all three instruments share. The microphone is placed at a medium to close range, which means that the microphone is much closer proportionately to the strings than to the piano, more so than if it were placed further back, and there is a sense of distorted balance that comes from the strings being right up close. At the same time, there is a sense of all three players filling the room with their sound, of playing "past" the microphone. This creates an impression of overhearing enhanced in this short video segment from a "documentary" made of the Trio: https://youtu.be/nxpKz4CoLPc?t=950 When Heifetz introduces the Mendelssohn slow movement that they perform, he speaks -- as he plays -- past the microphone, to the interviewer at the back of the room, which we realize when we see the microphone itself set very close at 0:05. Later we also see a man listening outside at 1:40. This moment feels delightfully unscripted and reminds us of a point earlier in the documentary (before the attached segment), when our interviewer's -- and our -- first "hearing" of the Trio is from outside the garden window. There, the microphone, placed outside with our listener, is very literally overhearing, with the sound almost completely muffled by the class. V Today, the recordings that most imitate this impression of overhearing are those made in concert halls using only hall microphones. Here, though, the kind of overhearing is decidedly more objective than in the Heifetz trio recordings, and the purpose of such recordings is often archival. One such recording that comes to mind for me personally is of my trio performing "Schubert B-flat" from a recital last year at Jordan Hall: https://youtu.be/4UDmBMxFV7w Here, the further microphone placement conveys both a strong sense of the space as well as relatively accurate balance between the three instruments. The less positive side of this recording is that all three instruments sound a bit dampened. The dynamic nature of the performance has been lost. Often, however, it strikes me that we experience these archival recordings more similarly to how we would experience memories, where the act of memory itself recreates and alters the remembered fact. Thus, these recordings are most effective and valuable to listeners who either were there or are familiar with the space. The strength of these recordings is not in their fidelity but in their associative meaning; nostalgia, or at the very least imagination, is essential on the part of the listener in rendering the performance vibrant once again. The qualities of balance, space, and proportion, created by the microphone placement, are paramount because they allow the listener to imagine, or to recreate, the effect of the room, not dissimilarly to how an artist might produce a painting from a sketch. VI Today's recordings are mostly done in studio, using close micing of instruments, followed by mixing that is used to recreate something of the original balance. These techniques amount to a kind of transcription that makes us aware of the fundamental differences between the medium of recording and the medium of performance. Ironically, close micing creates a much more accurate picture of the sound produced by instruments up close, but has very little to do with what a listener hears in a hall even twenty feet away. Yet, because of the dampening effect of recordings on the overall impression of performance, somehow, close micing in a recorded medium often has a more similar impression on the listener to sitting further away in a live medium. VII Of course, the one way in which modern studio recordings do more closely resemble live performance is the way in which they are closer to what the musician hears. Certain classical musicians (and many more non-classical musicians) do employ close micing to create a very specific, but different effect of overhearing. This special type of overhearing has very little to do with whether or not the player is playing for the microphone or for the room, but simply with the voyeuristic sense (or its auditory equivalent) of hearing what the performer hears coming back from the instrument. I think of this as the great attraction of Igor Levit's recordings in particular. I find his recordings in some ways even more compelling than his live performances, in part because he plays so softly and with such specificity, but also for microphones that are uncomfortably close. There is a real sense of hearing something in his recordings that would be impossible to hear or even perceive in live performance, yet in his recordings this quiet speaking quality of the more intimate dynamic range is etched almost painfully into your mind. In his recording of the slow movement of Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Sonata, I was amazed that in the muted chords of the first theme I heard not only every voice of these sometimes seven-note chords, but the sounds of the dampers lifting and re-touching the strings with each pedaling, which began to take on a primary quality in my listening focus: https://open.spotify.com/track/3KYn62SLmHoh42RtUQf8Ld?si=PRyYHfAqTM6jsQMsJUmc1Q VIII I have a feeling that this almost painful intimacy -- listening so close it is painful -- takes on a special quality in Beethoven's work, Beethoven who was known for his "difficult" but heroic characters and his extreme dynamic contrasts that "exploded" the range of what composers dared to do. Yet there is an intensely introspective quality to his late works such as the 'Hammerklavier' that were written in his period of total deafness. With these works, then, it would seem to make sense that the most quiet utterances would also be the most compelling, the closest, perhaps, to the inner hearing that emerges from deafening silence.
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In her essay, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde makes a case for the erotic as a "source of… information" that is fundamentally nonrational in nature, reclaiming it from the domain of shallow sensation to which it is often relegated.[1] In opposition to rational systems of thought (exemplified in Descartes' cogito ergo sum), the erotic provides an opportunity for a foundation of self cast in the often uncomprehended depth of our innermost feeling. Lorde writes: ... the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge… and understanding is a hand-maiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born." [2] With erotic knowledge, feeling precedes understanding. Piano playing, too, offers knowledge sought in the darkness of unrecognition. Touching a key is always as much sensing as sensual. With other instruments, the physical sensation of plucking a string; the felt vibrations of a mallet; the way that breath transforms the human body into a powerful resonator: all of these interactions suggest a definition of music-making as a deeply embodied act. Even when touch is mediated by reed, bow, or mallet, this mediator becomes a sort of talisman that connects the instrument back to the body. One vibrates through a reed. One feels the flexion of the mallet or bow returning feedback to the hand. With piano, the touch is always more ambiguous, and it is this combination of sensation with imagination that renders piano playing ultimately more erotic than athletic. Each manipulation of a key is a question that echoes Lorde, asking, "does that feel right to me?" What creates this space for ambiguity is the piano's mechanism, which is neither fully tangible nor fully abstract. On the harpsichord or clavichord, tangible instruments, one can literally feel the "pluck" of quill or the strike of metal against string. On the organ, more abstract, each key is simply a switch that allows the already present, mechanized breath of the bellows to pass freely through a pipe. The piano lies somewhere in between, while possessing qualities of its own. Crucial to the sensation of piano playing is its lack of weight transference. Pianists use their weight to balance the hand, control articulation, and achieve finer control of keyspeed, yet the key itself transfers no weight to the hammer. The hammer, for its part, starts out resting against the key, but at a certain point is released, flying freely toward the string. Its acceleration, and by extension its force, is determined only by the key's acceleration at the point of release. Mass is fixed. It would seem, then, that piano sound would be a single variable calculus. Yet there are other variables. Key depression influences damper height, and damper height (how high the muting dampers are held above the string) influences the rate of decay or blossoming of a note's sound. The pedal adds a third dimension, multiplying the blossoming or decay effect of a single damper by allowing other strings to sympathetically resonate. By varying the relative activation of key and pedal (how deeply each is depressed), pianists can influence not only the shape of a note, but also its overtonal composition. When a high school teacher of mine first directed my ear to these subtleties of piano sound, he confessed that he had always imagined such factors to act primarily as a musical guide for the pianist. Effects such as "blooming" a note's resonance with the pedal to achieve a kind of crescendo are more helpful to the pianist in feeling exactly what the dynamic of that next note should be than they are to an audience listening for the expressive shape of a line. The audience, for its part, will intuit the expressive shape of a line in retrospect -- they will sense that there has been a crescendo -- if the pianist is able to manipulate the dynamic of connected notes well. But, by this logic, if listeners are able to pick up on such subtleties as an implied crescendo, shouldn't we be encouraged to put every effort into rendering audible those gradations of sound and pedaling (yes, even pedal crescendi) that can actually be heard? For, surely if listeners are already filling in gaps with their imagination, then, assuming that they can hear even a fraction of what the pianist hears up close, surely their imaginations will also amplify these barely perceived subtleties? For these reasons, we can see that two fundamental aspects of piano playing are already imaginative at their core: (1) basic instrumental mechanics (being able to imagine the specific weight and interaction of hammer against string, amplified by pedal, always on a unique instrument in a unique hall) and (2) expressive playing (manipulating sound to communicate expressively to an audience through illusion or, better yet, suggestion). Yet we can go one step further: into the very philosophy of playing. Glenn Gould used to say that it only took an hour to learn everything one needed to know in order to teach oneself the piano, but that teaching oneself the instrument could take a lifetime. The duality of this lifelong struggle is perhaps no better expressed than through the musicianship and temperament of Glenn Gould himself, whose creativity was only matched by his meticulousness. Gould's urge to mastery stemmed from this deceptive fact that the piano is a machine with finite noise-making parts that should theoretically be comprehensible and controllable, given enough time. I used to interpret this formulation of piano playing as a challenge — the idea that one could somehow adjust and compensate for the deficiencies of any given instrument, let alone one’s own physical limitations from day to day, assuming the right preparation and through sheer force of will. Each performance becomes a kind of heroic struggle. These days, I prefer to think of each performance as an act of searching imagination, depending less on our ability to navigate this piece of clunky machinery than our ability to utterly transcend the circumstances, given the right frame of mind. In doing so, we arrive at a performance that we had perhaps not originally expected to deliver, but that is paradoxically more representative of “us” than if we had attempted to contort ourselves to produce an exact, desired effect. In other words, we can do our best to understand the array of variables that go into performing a given piece on a given piano, assuming some blank canvas idea of what a piano should be, but pianos are such wildly temperamental creatures that we would do well to cultivate, equally, a sense of the sheer scope of how such variables might fluctuate on a given day. Such an understanding, in a rational sense, is aspirational at best. Theoretically, Glenn Gould is right. We can comprehend each of the variables with full lucidity if we isolate each and practice creatively. But in the moment of performance at an unfamiliar instrument, as we begin to take in each of those variables fluctuating in different ways all at once, the attempt to control our playing becomes a futile, self-defeating effort. We must fall back on a trust in ourselves, on a trust in the unique, embodied knowledge of being a pianist that, paradoxically, does allow for the creation of a physical connection to the instrument, even as the physicality continues to be largely imagined. Just as Audre Lorde's definition of erotic knowledge depends on the construction, "it feels right to me," so must piano playing become a searching within oneself, of attuning one's body to a both a purposeful flow and a spontaneous, inspired choreography. By this definition, piano playing at its very best is an act of becoming, an act of imagination that rises to the circumstances and transforms not only the audience, but also the performer in its navigation of these myriad interactions (pianist to audience, instrument to audience, pianist to instrument). [1]: Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" Sister: Outsider, Random House, 1984, p. 43.
[2]: Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power" Sister: Outsider, Random House, 1984, p. 46. |
Lee DionnePianist, writer, educator ArchivesCategories |
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