Writing

My two-year-old son once informed me happily, “I want to listen to music with my ear, and with my other ear.” I laughed, “Me too!” I’ve been looking for new ways to hear music all my life, and I encourage my students to do the same. All my music teachers helped me do this to one degree or another, but three special people—an art teacher, a tennis pro, and a yoga/piano teacher—gave me such valuable insights into the process of unclogging stopped-up creative listening and observing, that before I continue this article, I’d like to introduce them to you. The…

DEFINITIONS: Music exists in two forms. In little black and white lollypops on a fence, and in glorious sound. It takes musical performance by musical interpreters to change it from leaden ink blots to artistic gold. Beethoven’s famous Fifth Symphony sits in IMSLP, but it can only raise the hair on our heads when we perform it, or hear it performed. What can an audience of non-musicians really hear in a musical performance? They can tell if the musicians are beginning notes together, ending notes together, making crescendos and rallentandos together. They might also notice if the music sounds ringingly…

I’ll never forget my first quartet concert. We were all 14 years old playing Beethoven’s Opus 18, No. 4, and I thought I had chamber music all figured out. “First you start together, play all the notes on the page, and end together.” I was a lot wiser at the closing chord. Great chamber music isn’t as easy as it looks. We couldn’t even start together. In my college and high school teaching, I’m seeing other 19, 16, 14 year olds making the same unsettling discovery. Once, I asked a high school group what they did during rehearsals when I…

When I was working with Alexander Schneider as a member of the New World String Quartet, he offered us two important suggestions for keeping the peace in a chamber ensemble. Tip #1: Be on Time. Tip #2: Don’t play bridge together. We laughed, but he had gained this wisdom at a high cost—many arguments, hard feelings, and ensemble break-ups—and he wanted to pass it on to us to possibly save us grief in the future. I started thinking about other hard-won bits of advice that I could offer to my students, and came up with a total of 28 ensemble…

One of the great joys of working in a small ensemble is simply: THERE IS NO CONDUCTOR. What a concept! Having no conductor can mean living in the best of all possible worlds—an on-going, spirited dialogue between intellectual equals, each owning the interpretation and feeling empowered. Joyful! The challenge, of course, is that THERE IS NO CONDUCTOR, and the ensemble members need to reach musical decisions by consensus. This means knowing how to talk to each other, make suggestions, criticize, and disagree, all without upsetting the balance of personalities that every ensemble must have in order to perform. So, the…