I know that I will never have an actual piano technique, and I know that I will never have the confidence on the instrument to ever play it in public. In my house with the door closed and/or nobody listening is my happy piano place.
I do play with my students, and it puts them at ease because they know I am not a pianist, and that chances are I will make more mistakes they they will.
[And, by the way, I need to drop this little aside in about "composer speed." Composers always hear music in their heads at a faster tempo than it should (or even could) be played. That's why composer-generated metronome markings are always too fast.]
Yesterday I made it through the C major miracle known as the "Waldstein." A normal competent performance by a real pianist lasts a little under thirty minutes. My read took three days (maybe forty-five minutes each day). At composer speed the harmonic movement is slow, but at composer speed the music is just as exciting as hearing it played at pianist speed. And after making my way up the mountain of the piece, I have a newfound respect for pianists that have made Beethoven's expressions their own.
Most of the piece fits comfortably in the hands and arms, but how anyone can actually play the right-hand trill at the end eludes me, even considering Beethoven's instructions on how to present the illusion of playing a trill. It is like the tricks that Ricky Jay does with playing cards.
Part of my personal "Project 2025" is to read through all of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas at "composer speed." I have six to go, but those six take up 209 pages. After I make my way reading through the final six (which might take me until March or April), I plan to start the cycle from the beginning again. I do pepper my piano experience with Bach and other diversions, including my old friends Haydn and Mozart, but there is something about the defiant resilience of Beethoven that I imagine (or hope) will continue to give me courage as we navigate our way as musicians through the next couple of years.
Schubert is too hard right now, and I'm still too young for Brahms. Maybe by the time I'm old enough to play Brahms (maybe when I am close to 70, in four years) the figurative sun will rise up to illuminate our world, and I will be able to play some Schubert to greet it.
3 comments:
" Composers always hear music in their heads at a faster tempo than it should (or even could) be played." I would love to hear your thoughts on why this is, to see if there's any overlap with my long held belief that high level musicians - who play hours a day every day for years - process music more fluently, meaning that a tempo I think is a perfectly fine allegro feels sluggish to them.
I think that composers hear music faster in their heads than it should be played because there is no actual physicality, aside from tapping while singing, maybe, to inform the decision of how quickly something should go. A song, perhaps, would be an exception, because the saying or singing of words gives a good idea of how a singer would use their singing voice to make them sound. But singing is different from speaking . . .
There is a great deal involved in determining tempo, particularly with orchestral music, because the distance, both physically and in terms of extremities of range, between musicians. Large low instruments speak differently from smaller and higher ones.
I think that sluggishness has more to do with the trajectory of a phrase than the tempo. A more accomplished musician (strings, keyboard, or percussion) would be able to shape a phrase at a slower tempo than a less accomplished musician who is trying, mid phrase, to figure out where the next note is. Maybe there's an analogy to ballet, where fast movements involve momentum, and slow movements (like an adagio) involved strength and balance. The faster movements are easier than the slower ones.
Playing too fast can be a problem for people who can. Playing a phrase too quickly can cause a perfectly lovely harmonic progression to get glossed over. Speed has its place in music that is designed for it, but it is my feeling that most music that you would want to play at a faster tempo is designed for forward-moving expression and not for speed.
Bearing this in mind, there is usually a "right" tempo for a piece that has a lot of moving notes, and it is the tempo at which the structure of a melodic phrase (if that's the kind of music it is) feels comfortable and expressive.
Thanks!!!
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