Such a musician does not shun acquiring technique – heaven forbid! – but realizes that the music is the food, and the technique is the plate you serve it on. After all, if one is able to play a difficult piece flawlessly, doesn’t that automatically make one indisputably good? Not only that, but even an idiot can hear you and tell you’ve got chops.Ĭontrast this scenario with the alternative path, that of the musical seeker. Perhaps the focus on perfecting technique is considered the easier path, and a foolproof one at that. That said, musicians must always ask themselves: am I leaving something out? Am I serving the music? The devil will never get a hold of those un-idle hands. It keeps one off the street and out of the bars. No longer is musical expressiveness, emotion and understanding (no matter how strong the connection with the Muses) valued above technical display – mainly because most listeners don’t listen that deeply.Ĭertainly there are a lot worse ways to spend one’s time than in perfecting one’s piano technique. Today, a classical pianist is not respected unless every note is just as the composer wrote it. He even dared to re-write sections of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Mussorgsky and Chopin to “improve” them. Tommasini is correct, and musical virtuosos really are becoming a dime a dozen, what does that say about the state of music today? What does it say about the future of music? And what does it bode for the music business?īack in the day, Vladimir Horowitz thrilled audiences with his innovative interpretations of the piano repertoire. So high has the bar been raised that the legendary Alfred Denis Cortot, remarks Tommasini, “would probably not be admitted to Juilliard now.” Apparently, the pianistic equivalent of breaking the four-minute mile now happens with such regularity that even teenaged piano students are comfortable with such repertoire. “That a young pianist has come along who can seemingly play anything, and easily,” he notes, “is not the big deal it would have been a short time ago.” Tommasini goes on to list several of the current superpianists who are able to leap over tall pieces like Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and the Ligeti Etudes with a single bound. “Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen” was his recent declaration on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section. In the world of classical piano, the geese are cackling up a storm, according to New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini. When every goose is cackling, would be thought The nightingale, if she should sing by day, The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark, As the Bard expressed in “The Merchant of Venice,” But as we shore up the chinks in our aural armor, we also sew shut the portals of mind that are empowered, indeed transformed, by access to the deepest levels of musical expression.Įven in Shakespeare’s time, people weren’t listening. Moreover, in our era, the population’s musical insensitivity has been cultivated gradually by several factors: less substance in pop music, the ever-upwardly-creeping volume level, the proliferation of recordings and internet music, and the competition among every type of media for the attention of the consumer.Ī person has to block out most of the Universal Soundtrack in order to function. Sound is with us even in a completely soundproof chamber, where John Cage reported two pitches that could not be eliminated: the whine of the nervous system and the drone of the blood in circulation. Our refrigerator, dehumidifier, lamps – all of them run at 60 cycles per second, which is about a Bb. In our homes, our bodies hum along to our electrical appliances. It’s hard to do when one is immersed in the Universal Soundtrack: that collective din of talking, laughing, crying, traffic, machinery, Muzak, nature sounds and broadcast media that surrounds many of us, especially in the city. A place and time where it’s easier to perceive and appreciate the more subtle layers of music. Sometimes I wonder why I wasn’t born in a place and time like that: a place and time in which the true nature of music is understood, respected and valued. Rather, the prize will go to the musician who can make the mountains tremble by the purity, depth, emotion and intention present in the music. The winner will not be the one who can play the fastest, or the most notes, or the hardest piece. In the opening scene of Peter Brook’s film “Meetings With Remarkable Men,” tribespeople from miles around gather at the base of a mountain range to witness a contest of musicians.
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