This is a partial response to Bob Specter’s response to my response… well… anyway. It’s been a mildly busy week (that’s my story) and this is the first chance I’ve had to sit and think about something that stuck in my brain about Bob’s last posting. Don’t go looking for it–I’ll just quote it:
“2) Having grown up playing an instrument in an orchestra and brass ensembles, I feel that by immersing my entire focus into my past [sic; “part” (?)] and how it facilitates the “piece”, that takes all the energy I have. It is interesting to talk to people about the Canadian Brass performance of the Barber Adagio, and not have them have a clue how hard breath control can be. Now I see that as technique, not as the musical plumbing (open sevenths, etc.), and I wonder if someone who focuses on the musical plumbing loses the ability to appreciate the variances in the performance (and performers).”
Over the last year, my opportunities to perform have dwindled significantly, while the amount of time I spend thinking about the theory of music has grown to encompass most of my working time. On top of that, the playing I’ve done has largely been in popular styles where the “text” of the music (i.e., the written score) isn’t taken as seriously as in, say, a Mahler symphony.
The results have been interesting. I am “hearing” like never before, either from lack of preparation time (come in on Sunday morning, read the charts in rehearsal, go to Sunday school, go back and play the service, hoping I remember the key change after the third verse) or from being immersed in styles where “note” is less important than “feeling.” I am literally living and breathing music theory most of the time, and it is showing in my performance–what is improvisation other than simply living and breathing music theory?
So the “plumbing” isn’t a way to deal with music that circumvents or minimizes some aspect of the musical experience. On the contrary–once one “groks” the plumbing, it ceases to be something that one thinks about and the effect is the same, except that it now becomes possible to label and explain the plumbing to others in a more efficient way. We could do without it–simply talk about “that moment that happens at 2:43 on track 17 in the recording by George Solti,” and this works for people who are very involved with a few pieces or for a group of people who are discussing a single, communally-understood work. But for full-time musicians, who must often absorb a great deal of music in ridiculously short periods of time, there must be some way to generalize, to categorize, to compare and contrast the great moments in Mahler with the great moments in Messiaen, and compare them both to the somewhat cruddy moments in certain Broadway-style musicals. The difference is similar to the way a person like myself deals with a computer and the way a professional computer person deals with it–I can’t talk to an IT professional about computers for very long because I don’t even know the jargon; the IT guy, on the other hand, lives and breathes the stuff.
In my freshman theory classes, someone always brings up the complaint that analyzing a piece of music takes all of the “magic” (by which I think they mean “emotional impact”) out of the piece. It is true, that I now find that I must on occasion force myself to step back and notice the beauty as well as the plumbing (of course, sometimes the beauty is in the plumbing, as with Webern or Babbitt). For this reason, after we finish an analysis in theory class, I try to take another minute and have the class listen again to what we’ve been studying. I imagine that visual artists and natural historians must do the same thing from time to time–after studying the way Seurat uses points of color to make other colors in Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte, it is imperative that we step back and let the beauty of the scene again wash over us.
On Sunday, we have a fantastic group of musicians coming to OPSU: the Harrington String Quartet. Since I organized the concert, I know the program in advance, and I have already been listening to the music they will be playing. I’ve thought about the music, and I’ve written the program note. I’ve been looking forward to this concert all summer, and it’s going to be fantastic. I’ve been pushing it on the students, of course, but it won’t matter if I’m the only one there on Sunday–I will enjoy it. And I think, based on what Bob has written, that I am going to make this one of those “step back” moments and just soak up the music.