Summer 2014

It has been three months since I've blogged. I'm happy to be getting back to it.

During those three months, my time has been filled with learning the ropes of coordinating aspects of our department from adjuncts to budgets to concerts to dates to educational materials to . . . okay, I'll stop there. Teaching and performing have continued, but time to reflect and express what has been coming out of those activities has been non-existent. I hope to catch up on those things during the summer months.

Summer has begun with several fun Florida wildlife encounters -
crossing paths with a rat snake while hiking with Brian Blume,
passing rather closely to a roadside alligator while driving with Wesly Hulin,
and noticing my first young little blue heron while walking with Kathy Hulin at Lake Hollingsworth.
(The photo above is an egret we saw in the same location back in January.)

Summer has also begun with some diverse music making this very morning at All Saints' Episcopal here in Lakeland -
improvising some pre-service meditative music following the ringing of the great bell,
a hymn arrangement with one of our young saxophonists,
a gospel anthem with our youth choir,
and some lovely music by Stefan Waligur sung by the children during communion.

Each of these works I was privileged to play functioned differently and drew me into a different mode of musicality and experience. The gospel piece, for example, took me to a place of joy with the rhythms and waves of its structure and its spiritually encouraging text.

The varied workings of pieces of music often get lost in the shuffle as we seek to instill a musicality that almost seems to have an existence independent of the details of specific works. (An interesting question to ask one's self, musicians, would be: What works have shaped my musicality?)

Phrase endings taper. Melodies are clearly projected. The flow goes over the bar-line. These are all good habits, but they are mere shadings, as I believe Stravinsky stated. To be experienced as significant human moments, works of music require engagement and expression at the level of their essence. Their specific structure and feeling need to prevail.

I find myself thinking of the first movement of Schubert's Sonata No. 16 in A Minor, Op. 42, D. 850 which I am currently exploring with a very good student of mine. This work by one of the very greatest writers of tunes is far from a simple expression of tunefulness. That generalized musicality I described a bit of above might be adequate for a series of well-behaved charming phrases. But this is not that. This is a churning, heaving structure. It is a drama unfolding through tones and silences. To play it well, to play it truly, I think one must sense something of the strangeness of Schubert's material, his obsessiveness with it, and the process he creates out of it.

We piano teachers sometimes wax poetic with images of the woods and bears and references to "The Telltale Heart," etc. This isn't because the music is particularly about these things but because that way of talking tunes us into the tone and process of works like these that require us to recognize and be in the drama as we share them.