Waiting into the Night

This album of spontaneously composed piano music follows the unfortunate trail of worry through several different situations. It is usually the worry and not the situations that make things uncomfortable. Whether obsession, jealousy, phobia, or guilt, the formula never seems to end well. Often tinged with love, wrought with fear, and infused with a distinct lack of self confidence, the reaction usually causes more pain than the original action.

The music is somber and often sad but not melodramatic. It also has a number of moments of elegance and beauty, as much of the subject matter it touches is meaningful. Personally, worry has not played an important role in my own life, but I have seen enough of it in my friends and loved ones to know its pain and consequences. I tend to worry more about my own abilities than the actions of others.

1. Obsession. The first track explores the poison of obsession. Though I tend to think most good musicians tend to be rather OCD anyway, a real obsession is cancerous. The track starts with some passionate sweeps of inquiry, but quickly becomes infatuated with a descending fourth and will not let it go.
2. Waiting Into the Night. The title track takes us through the daydreaming, insecurities, fears and anticipations of waiting alone. The longer you wait, the worse the result, which is often much worse than the reason you’re waiting.
3. All is Forgiven, Don’t Do It Again. This is probably the most volatile track of the set, but also has some of the most touching sequences. Love, when accompanied by fear, makes for some difficult moments.
4. Woulda Coulda Shoulda. Worry can also extend into the past. If only . . . It tends to make you feel that you have already doomed yourself to disaster. A healthy dose of the present is the only cure. “A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.”
5. The Monster Under the Bed. In a book of vignettes about music practicing, I remember a short image by Itzhak Perlman. He said those passages that you have not fully mastered are like monsters under the bed. They come out to get you at the worst possible time. The same could be said about any ignored problem.
6. Romance and Regret. Nothing is sadder than worrying when things go right! Falling in love is one of those moments.

This album was recorded at my home in Phoenix, Arizona in the autumn of 2010.

A Change of Heart

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video on Facebook about education. It was about how recent education had stopped stimulating imaginative thought through content testing, etc. The point was that imaginative thinking was more common, more interesting, and more useful than just facts. It rekindled an idea I had pondered many times, about how modern culture and technology has fostered a “cult of the literal.” How access to, even bombardment by audio, video, and constant information has suppressed abstract and imaginative thought and somehow made it seem less important.

Our culture used to be brimming with stories, oral or written, with which you became involved. The stories taught as much as they entertained. They would exist in your mind as abstract images. They meant more as ideas than they would as literal people and places. I took my first trip to Europe this summer, and I saw places that I had heard about my entire life. But by themselves, these places were unremarkable. It’s the stories and my imaginative extrapolations that made them come alive.

I first noticed this trend several decades ago when digital watches were introduced. You would ask someone for the time and they would answer, “3:43,” where before they might have said, “It’s almost a quarter to four.” Digital watches had suddenly made precision important.

The society now has instant access to a thousand times the information that it did when I was growing up. But so much of it is a passive access. It is either video, or a search engine, or stuff roboted to your email. We don’t have to work for it or even think about it. It’s here; it’s gone. It used to take patience and skill to find things out; now if you can’t Google it, it’s not worth searching for.

The culture has changed enormously in the past couple of decades, and I suppose we really have no choice but to roll with it. But I have lived long enough to experience this immense change in my lifetime, and if I step back, I can look at how it has changed me. Because of all the tools I have at my fingertips, the role imagination plays in my work has become limited and temporary. Composers used to carry an abstract aural concept of a piece in their head for months or even years with larger works. Now our computer plays whatever we write as soon as we write it. On one hand, we don’t make big mistakes anymore; on the other hand, we don’t take any chances.

The innovation of the Suzuki method was that it taught Classical music by ear . . . Most Classical musicians at the time thought this was “cheating!”

When I was just learning music, the teaching method of Sinichi Suzuki was just becoming known in America. I can remember that my teachers were horrified. The innovation of the Suzuki method was that it taught Classical music by ear, which is the way most music is learned throughout the world. Most Classical musicians at the time thought this was “cheating!” My piano teacher advised me to not listen to any recordings of the pieces I was playing. He thought it polluted the process of creating my own concept of the piece. Today, listening to a recording is the first thing that a musician does. The Suzuki method has become standard practice. When I started my orchestral career, conductors were expected to have different interpretations of even standard repertoire. Alternate interpretations now often strike my orchestra colleagues as “wrong.”

Classical music has always lived through the imagination of its performers. Classical notation is just an approximation, and was not intended to be very precise. I didn’t think this was the case until I started using computers. Nothing alerts you to that fact more than having a computer play music from your own notation. A computer just plays what it sees – no imagination, no extrapolation. It’s dreadful. When I started recording using MIDI, I found that the computer would record the touch of my keyboard with 128 different volume gradations. It makes the seven or eight different dynamics of written music seem pretty meager. I looked at a graph of my volume values and realized I had used every one of the 128!

A screen shot of a (condensed) keyboard MIDI file showing pitches and note lengths above and volume (key pressure) in the pinkish area.  The pink areas are places where the sustain pedal is depressed.

But it is exactly that generalization of music notation that has continued to regenerate Classical music throughout the centuries. A musician can always imagine a better performance, and can always imagine improving his or her own performance. The imagined music is what makes the real music come alive; it is just like all those famous places I saw this summer.

Several weeks ago, I wrote on this blog about transcribing from my piano recordings. I had decided that the music was better represented if I transcribed it against a steady pulse, allowing the music to ebb and flow around what amounted to a stationary grid. Though I have been able to do this, and the music on the recording matches well with the music played by the computer from my notation, it does not embody the imaginative spirit that entices a pianist to sit down and play it. It creates the music with smoke and mirrors. If you play what I wrote, the music appears out of nowhere; not because you imagined it and brought it to life.

So I have gone back to notating the music rationally, by showing the rhythms and tempos in a clear fashion that gives a pianist something to re-imagine. Though I must show changes in tempo, I am not showing every rubato. I use the notation to show the structure, and let the pianist show the music. This is what musicians have always done, and what they do best.

Music and Emotion

I was helping a friend of my son’s with her music theory. She was a first year theory student and her assignment was in figured bass. She was a sharp girl and seemed to have no problem with the material, but was obviously distracted. Finally, she shut the book and sighed. “I don’t care a thing about figured bass,” she said, “what I want to know is why, when I play Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, it gets me EVERY SINGLE TIME?”

Sometime in the late 1970’s, I was in my doctor’s waiting room looking for something to read. I thumbed through a copy of Psychology Today (slim pickings) and discovered an article by Manfred Clynes. He had been doing research on emotion by asking subjects to think of situations that would cause them to feel love, joy, anger, etc., while recording their reactions as pressure on a finger sensor. I was struck by his intuitive knowledge that emotion was a timed phenomenon of tension and release. I later discovered that besides being a psychologist, neurologist, inventor, and computer whiz, he was also a concert pianist!

Subjects were able to generate emotions at first by visioning and later on their own, and Clynes was able to identify specific waveforms for a number of different emotions. These waveforms were the same among all of the subjects. Clynes then was able to secure a grant to test subjects of completely different cultures (Central Mexico, Japan, and Bali). His results were still the same. His research led him to presume that these waveforms, or sentic forms as he called them, were innately human and a part of the central nervous system. (Here is an article he wrote on sentic forms, with some illustrations.)

Being also a musician, he decided to play recorded music for his subjects. He found that the listeners responded emotionally to the music all in basically the same way, at the same points in the music, across different cultures. OK, now he had my attention.

As musicians, we know that we respond to music emotionally. It is part of the natural camaraderie between musicians. But it was news to find out that everybody responds to music in the same way, with the same emotions!

When Clynes first started experimenting with his finger-pressure device (sentograph), he had musicians “conduct” (on his device) while imagining different pieces of music silently. His first subjects were Pablo Casals and Rudolph Serkin, so he was not fooling around!  He soon found that a specific composer’s music generated a unique waveform that permeated all of his works.  A different composer, however, would elicit a different waveform. It was almost like a fingerprint. For a composer, this is very interesting!  For a performer, this helps explain why musicians can identify most composers after only a second of two of listening to their music.  Later, while doing his emotional research Clynes noted the interplay of the emotional waveforms with the previously noted composer waveforms and noticed some interesting results. In Middle-period Beethoven, for instance, which is often angry, the emotional waveforms usually ran counter to the composer waveforms; while in Beethoven’s later works, which can be nothing short of transcendent, the waveforms tended to run concurrently.

Clynes found these sentic forms, being biological, to be exceptionally specific. An expression of an emotion in music that wasn’t quite precise, would be perceived as less strong. If it is off a little more, the expression would be perceived as false or fake. Off even more and the emotion isn’t perceived at all. This speaks to the difference in “musicality” between performances. Musical expression turns out to be a very specific skill. Predictability also seemed to diminish the strength of the emotion. This speaks to the difference in skill among composers. Even emotional expression can become tedious! Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, after probably 200 career performances, doesn’t get me “every single time” anymore, but it is still surprisingly affective even though I know exactly what is coming!

While working at the University of California at San Diego, Clynes developed a therapeutic discipline for emotionally disturbed patients that involved expressing a whole cycle of emotions with the assistance of his sentograph over a period of about thirty minutes. These sentic cycles are essentially both biofeedback and therapy. Learning to recognize, control, express, and develop intimate knowledge of these emotions, as well as allow patients to express and release these emotions in a safe environment, had a significant effect on patients. (These therapies are now readily available on the Internet.) Though the patients seemed to be getting better, however, the research ran counter to other research at the institution funded by drug companies and his funding was not renewed. After which, he was offered a position and lab in Sydney, Australia, where he concentrated more on music, emotion, and electronics.

At any rate, I was lucky that day in the doctor’s office that the doctor was quite a bit behind schedule and I was able to finish quite a bit of the article. I was so excited that I stole the magazine! A few years later, Clynes’ book Sentics – The Touch of Emotion was published and I ordered it. But I kept the magazine for many years, through a number of moves, and I may still have it somewhere.

No John, it’s not the sounds that are making love! Words and pictures don’t make love either, but they can break your heart!

As a professional performer, I have always known that it is emotion that makes music tick. Without emotion, there is no reason to listen to music at all. John Cage scoffed at the idea of emotion in music. He joked that some people thought the sounds were making love. No John, it’s not the sounds that are making love! Words and pictures don’t make love either, but they can break your heart! Music is sound, but it is sound in motion, and it’s the motion that is important. It is the ways that those sounds change which trigger our biologically wired emotional impulses. It is the verb, not the noun, where the action is.

Clynes has done some composing, but his musical interests are primarily interpretive. His later work involves programs that analyze music for its emotional content and shape the intonation, vibrato, and metrics to conform to that content. He wrote a program called “Superconductor” that allows someone to conduct a piece and alter it according to not only the tempo, but the emotional content contained in the conductor’s motions.

Though I can understand his excitement about how his work relates to musical interpretation, I am more interested in his theories from a creative standpoint. For me, he confirmed that emotion was the language of music. Emotional forms are very specific and unforgiving, but they are hard-wired into all of us so we already know what they are! How to create those forms in music takes a little skill, but whether or not the music is expressive takes more intuition than knowledge. Considering his research showed that composers are leaving an emotional record and a personal inner pulse within their music, it seemed to me that the most important characteristic for a composer to maintain should be honesty. At a time when music was being flooded with the importance of Ideas and Processes, it became clear to me that to keep an intimate knowledge and identification with the music I was creating was the only way to insure its emotional integrity.

I don’t think that the sound of the music is the only way music can have an emotional impact. Juxtaposition of style, texture, placement, social concerns, stark contrasts, and innumerable other techniques can all cause emotional involvement of a different sort by suggesting situations which trigger emotional memories, fears, or responses. But even by just manipulating the sound, I think there are still vast untapped resources for emotional expression.

As for that first year theory student, I was able to give her some hints about what was going on in the music, but mostly I just reassured her that she was on the right track. She had discovered the magic of music herself. Dr. Clynes has shown us the mechanism with which it gets us. It is up to the creative ingenuity of performers and composers to devise methods with which to deliver that magic to us all.