How to Play Chopin, also, maybe, How to Listen to Chopin

Here's everything you need to know about how to play Chopin. Not really, but it's a pretty good start.

1. Chopin loved opera, particularly opera of the bel canto variety. Listen to Joan Sutherland. Notice how each note sounds like a unique, beautifully-colored gem in a bejeweled tiara. Also, realize some notes are melodic and others are ornamental. Play that way.

2. Chopin was a master melodist and a master harmonist. Often, the masterful melodies depend on the masterful harmonies. But be sure to notice when the mastery is more melodic or more harmonic and respond accordingly.

3. Those masterful harmonic moments often amount to the effect of a lighting change on-stage. Learn about chiaroscuro in Rembrandt and notice how Chopin does this, too. Suddenly, the sun comes out, or a single intense ray brings hope to a dungeon. Just really register these things as you play, and they will be very effective. Mozart and Debussy do this, too.

4. Clouds have a silver lining and vice versa. The sad music is rarely wholly sad, and the happy music is never fully happy. Joy and sorrow, life and death, are constant companions in Chopin. It's a lot like Mahler. Read about Mahler 3 (or anything else by Mahler) to get the idea.

5. The handling of transitions creates charisma. In those tentative moments, the momentum of meter is not in the driver's seat. Your personal sensitivity is.

6. Look for rhetorical connections between the sections. For example, usually the sections of a Chopin Nocturne don't sound much alike, but they might make sense together because of some structure they both feature such as a parenthetical phrase at the end of a series of phrases.

7. At times, the music is more contrapuntal than you might expect. Don't forget that the left-hand part can be just as musical as the right. Sort of like playing Bach, you can almost take those left hands and perform them as their own free-standing pieces of music. Almost. With Bach, of course, you can actually do that with all the individual lines. 

There's more, but that will be another post - something about "Ode to the Western Wind."

Thank you to Veda Kaplinsky, Michael White, Ellen Mack, Wayne Connor, Joseph Machlis, and Richard Becker for teaching me these things, and also to my students for studying Bach, Chopin, and Debussy with me.

Dwelling in the House of the Lord

After last night's concert, I was feeling a little depressed about my playing. Many factors contribute to that feeling:

My hands are forty years old and don't always feel quite like they are twenty. (I've finally given up on 17.)

I've been busy professoring for years which means I haven't been practicing so much.

My relationship with the instrument and my ability to control it seem to have eroded a bit as the collateral of increasingly distant years of somewhat consistent practice has worn down.

I did lots of different things on a single concert which is often a way to feel bad about something.

Also, there were flashes of what I imagine I would be like if I had consistently practiced for years and had truly set performing as my primary goal. There were moments when the memory and technique and musical impulse were so clear that I could play with abandon and start to discover the pianist that's deep down inside of me. I really like it when that guy appears, but then I'm sad since I'm not sure how to keep him around

etc.

But after sorting through all those things and recognizing that the performance was pretty good considering the big picture, there's still a little voice, an insinuating whisper, that suggests that my efforts are not good enough, that I'm an outsider, a fraud.

I just happen to know that I'm not an outsider or a fraud in this particular world of music. And my efforts usually seem to have been pretty good.

I don't know where that whisper  came from. I don't think my parents put it there. Maybe folks who did bad stuff to our family contributed. Ultimately, it doesn't matter how it came to me. I have a whisper and so do a lot of other folks.

Come to think of it, that whisper is so insidious, so undermining, so joy-robbing, that its source must be the Deceiver, even if it did make its way to me through human channels.

I spoke of these experiences with one of my classes today and we talked about what maybe ought to be as opposed to what often is.

As people and musicians, we're on a pilgrimage which means we left somewhere to start with. But we always carry some of home with is on our journey, as well.

So what exactly am I and where did I leave? I don't think I'm just this body, or just a concept of this physical brain of mine. No, I think I am somebody, an identity, a person, a being with a design, a soul, a spirit.

And what is my home? Who has extended hospitality so I'll have a place to be and needs met? I think God is that host. I dwell in a body God has provided, and it's furnished with some talents. Plus, I've been provided time and education for developing them. Really, I've already been blessed through these basic/extraodinary provisions of human existence. Living out this design with intentionality and awareness, I think I can be at home anywhere in this world.

This means, among other things, that my musical impulses are a good gift. The way my hands find to deal with the instrument is okay. I don't need do a dozen different things to be like someone else to not be a fraud. (It sounds stunningly obvious when I put it that way.) Being me is good. In fact, it's really the thing I should be doing. Only being  me will be good enough.

So when I go before an audience,  the fact is that I am extending and expanding the blessing that comes to me daily through God's hospitality. I bet it's the case that the more me I am, the more blessing is expanded.

Indeed, last night I was touched by sweet students who care about what I do; and by friends, church members, and in-laws who have hearts to show up and then appreciate piano-playing; and a lovely wife who tells me I am a good pianist. These things meant something to me because the musical experience had meant something to each of these people. That's the expansion of the blessing, the meaning of the offering, the reason we call talent a "gift."

So I think the starting point for being human and for being musicians ought to be that as we are made in God's image, we are good. We've been blessed with that image and with all the mysteries that bearing it entails.

And to bless our students with an accurate view of their specialness, we must begin with recognizing and celebrating the good that God has placed in this house for them.





 

Test Pilot

In memory of Neil Armstrong

Today, I presented a little lecture recital on Gottschalk for our departmental recital. As part of this I shared the idea that playing in departmental recital is like being a test pilot.

A little helpful background for those who haven't been music majors before: the process of preparing to perform music, at least the process followed in an academic setting, involves these three stages.

1. Work one-on-one with your primary applied teacher to learn the music, to get some idea of how to interpret it, and to develop disciplines to support your performance.

2. Practice performing for peers (peers who study with the same teacher) in studio class.

3. Performance for a larger group of peers in departmental recital.

As you can see, these steps become progressively more public. The result of this is that students often feel a lot of pressure to play or sing well on the departmental recital.

Pressure or not, the fact is that some event has to be the first time you go public with your performance of each work in your repertoire. A test flight must happen sometime and somewhere. That's what departmental recital is for. You take your performance up and it might work great, or your psyche might pull apart up in the air. But at the very least, the instrument isn't actually going to blow up and your life is not really in danger, although you might go into fight, flight, or freeze-mode just for the heck of it!

Another comforting thing about this test flight (That last paragraph was comforting. Music students, you'll want to re-read it if you didn't catch the comforting part.) is that that this test flight takes place in the company of many other test pilots. Everyone present has the same fear of blacking out and making crash landings. It can be the most empathetic of audiences.

While navigating the performance experience, I am often reminded that the business of musical performance seems to demand a presentation that appears whole and a presenter who comes across as self-assured and as one who has arrived. But the art of performing music requires that we be on a quest involving growth and vulnerability. On this quest, we learn the same things over and over again. We become exhaustingly familiar with our specific issues. And I think it is best to think of these as issues and not problems. They are the things that make us who we are. And we must be ourselves so that others can be themselves. I think of my mentors who were clearly being their own unique selves. Without them being exactly who they were, I could not have found the way to be who I am, which is someone quite different from who they are.

Some of my issues I was reminded of in my recent departmental recital performance:
too much movement, physical tension, and general lack of focus on fundamentals of musicianship in performance. I'm trusting that somehow, in the big scheme of things, in some significantly human way, in the divine design, that it is important and worthwhile for me to have and deal with these issues.

A pianist is always somewhere in the process of learning music and bringing it to the public. Each performance is a step in a life-long journey that keeps you alive and moving artistically. Knowing these steps, making the journey- these are the core, motivation, and discipline of our musical lives.