2020-09-07
The sliding spectrum: from eye to ear
"I guess we are just going to have to play it by ear!"
How often have you heard this common expression? Have you realized it is essentially a musical expression? It perfectly embodies the two critical senses for music making - sight and sound.
I didn't think much about the relationship between sight and sound when I was a young pianist. Everything I did followed the same regimen: Read a piano score, translate its symbols into an acceptable interpretation, execute that translation to the best of my ability at the keyboard. I usually already knew what the "sound" was, because I usually pestered my teachers to study scores that I had heard and loved on the radio or the stereo... Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.
It was not until I was a sophomore in high school and I was enrolled in the Preparatory Division of New England Conservatory that something changed. Actually, life changed in a few ways... my schedule included theory classes which were taught by one of the greatest Third Stream musicians, Ran Blake. Ran was constantly stretching our ears, demanding that we listen to Billy Holiday and Coltrane and Theodorakis and that we "learn" these works from the recordings. What? No printed notes? Wolfgang, I don't think we are in Salzburg any more... after theory, I would head down to the Youth Singers and Doris Solomon in the Keller Room. One Saturday, I was sitting with my friend Brendan McHugh from Dorchester, and he handed me a record. (Remember vinyl records?) "Listen to this." Brendan said. I did, and my ear journey went off on another tangent... Chieftains 5, The world of Irish traditional music.
My training as a concert pianist taught me to cultivate sight-reading to a high degree. To this day, I can play most scores for you if you plop them down on the music rack. But these other ear musics, something I was not forced to encounter until I was a teenager, compelled me to internalize musics that exist in sound and only in sound. Yes, one can go notate them if you really have to, but why? Their entire perfomance practice consisted of hearing the music either recorded or live, memorizing it as rapidly as possible, and then playing it back, often with your personal amendments... i.e. improvisation.
I envy colleagues and friends who have a higher degree of ear skill than I do; they, in turn often will lament the fact that they are unable to write and read music to a high enough level. Now, after living for years between these two "poles", the eye and the ear, I appreciate that all musicians come down somewhere in the territory between the two extremes. Yes, there are those musics and musicians in which >nothing< is notated, and vast amounts of wonderful music are created and transmitted this way. There are those classical musicians who freeze solid if you ask them to improvise even the briefest of passages... they cannot function without a code to decipher. We all, however, can move our marker back and forth between the two poles. Eye musicians do well to tackle music that they can only internalize through their ears; they will find that their knowledge of theory will skyrocket if they do. Ear musicians should always strive to become readers and writers of notation... it is a powerful tool for "fixing" musical experiences in place, just like a photograph captures a moment in time.
Several years ago, a good friend asked me to make a recording of a work that had been forgotten by Western musicians for probably 150 years. She found what might have been the last remaining copy of its score in a second hand book store in Ireland. It was not a particularly good score; I could see why it was rapidly forgotten after its premiere. But as I worked through this musty old book from 1850-something, I realized that this item was really a message in a bottle. The message of this work of art and its whole moment in history was contained in this printed score. Without the score, this music, and what it represented to the composer, the performers and its audiences, would be completely lost to history. The printed note guaranteed its future survival, even if it had a miniscule claim to quality.
So, put away that Prelude and Fugue and play a recording of Billy Holiday's "Don't Explain". Can you figure it out and make your own version? Jazzers, can you take this Bach Minuet and play it accurately in the correct performance style? If one can do both things, one is truly living somewhere on the spectrum. Slide back and forth!
If you have more questions about this topic, don't hesitate to contact me and we can chat.
K
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