Mozak
The other evening R said something in passing about my tolerance of her piano-playing. OK, of course you have to make handsome allowances for her customary self-denigration+ but yes, I daresay it might irritate someone more musically sensitive than me, but it’s a good piano and she doesn’t thump it.* * As far as I’m concerned she’s producing a series of pleasant enough sounds. Musical wallpaper. Mozak. Mozart himself does the same thing on a rather grander scale. I don’t notice.
Some things do intrude: wretched squeaky violins (and OK, maybe it is a Strad, but it should stick to the low notes;) modern jazz; that raucous brand of folk that shoves itself in your face with a kind of gritty howl: “Who the hell cares I’m ugly – I’m ******* authentic and if you don’t like it you can . . .” etcetera; the sort of contemporary classical which does much the same with a sneer replacing the howl; and, of course, almost anything that has English words to it. It’s bad enough when I can actually hear them, in which case I start paying attention when I don’t want to, or (strangely often) when the singer hasn’t got the idea that a listener needs to and I can’t help trying to work it out.
Oh, yes, and the sort of rock that’s just a bellow of factitious rage – rage for the sake of rage – at some unformulated state of things. Are there any actual notes in there? I wouldn’t know. Anyway there seems to be less of that about.
The other evening, (or was it the same one?) one of you sent R a link in which some senior musician held forth, with musical illustrations, about very few people being truly tone deaf. Don’t worry, whoever you are, she really enjoyed it, but I found it so irritating that I had a choice between leaving the room and stuffing my fingers in my ears.** **
This chap didn’t actually get what it was like not to be musical. A lot of my friends are musical, and none of them can. They think I’ve only got to open my ears and hear. I know about blocks because I used to be good at maths. I can remember to this day my sense of delighted wonder when we were learning our tables by rote and I realised that 12×2 had to be the same as 4×6. Or later, when I first learnt about the two imaginary cube roots of 1.*** Unfortunately when I went on to calculus I didn’t get it at all. So I know what a mathematical block is like from both sides. A musical block is much the same.
Anyway the musical chap got on my wick because he seemed to me to be making a basic semantic error and I couldn’t argue with him. He was muddling up two different meanings of “tone”, tone as in tone-deaf, and tone as in, say, tone of voice. † The medical term for being tone-deaf is amousia. It’s the musical equivalent of dyslexia. There aren’t many true deep amousiacs. But, as with dyslexia, it’s a spectrum and there are plenty of us in the middle.
I’m somewhere nearer the deep end. The musical chap started by playing two notes of the scale. A deep amousiac wouldn’t have been able to discern that one was higher than the other. I could do that, but I mightn’t have been able to if he’d played them a minute or two apart. Let alone if he’d played them on different instruments. He went on to say that the second note “made” the first note “sad.” Sad? He expected everyone to hear that, because he could. I accept that musical people can hear what he was talking about because they all agree that such and such a key is a sad one††, but for me these are just wavelengths coming out of a machine. No doubt a good player can make a note sound sad, even to me, but then he’s putting the emotion into it, by playing it with a different touch or use of the pedals, or whatever.††† I can just about hear that, because of our common humanity. That’s the other sort of tone, as in a tone of voice. A leaf is a leaf, but we all know what a damp crumpled autumn leaf lying in the driveway means by way of sadness.
Sorry, I’m going to have to stop. It’s getting too late, and it’s beginning to take me longer to correct the errors I’m making than it did to write the stuff. I’d like to come back to it soon, though.‡ I haven’t finished, and I want to say something about the music of words. No doubt R will want to pad this out with one or two footnotes.‡‡
Goodnight, and musical dreams (you who are capable of them.) P
* * *
+ Flapdoodle. (Sorry about the rogue footnote marker. Trying to enforce order on two lots of footnotes is way too challenging at this hour.)
*The Abbe Liszt
Hit the piano with his fist.
That was the way
He used to play.
That’s one of the original clerihews, now updated to suit local circumstances
Chaos and Darkness
at the piano look joyless.
It’s as if they were saying
“You call that playing?”
* Yes I do. After he’s gone to bed. Apparently it wafts gently up through the floor, which is mostly okay except when he wakes up enough to look at the clock and get on me the next day about how late I was up. I was a little more dismayed when his visiting daughter made reference to having enjoyed the concert the night before. Peter’s bedroom is right over the piano: I thought the guest room was safe.
** I chose the latter, for company’s sake, though you could hardly call it companionship.
** Yes, and it’s very disconcerting to be sitting eighteen inches away from someone with his fingers in his ears
***x cubed = 1, so x cubed – 1 = 0; the factors of x cubed – 1 are x – 1 and x squared + x + 1. So either x = 1 (that’s the root we know) or it’s one of the factors of x squared + x + 1. I can’t print these out for you because I don’t know how to do maths symbols, but they each involve the square root of -1, and so are imaginary numbers. The fascinating thing is that if you multiply one of them by itself you get the other one, therefore multiply one of them by itself four times and you get it back. Beautiful. But I don’t expect everyone to get it.
† Yes well his point is that the two are the same thing: discernment of difference of pitch. I thought it was very interesting and a point worth making. But it’s true that he is trifle over-convinced of not merely the force of his argument but his personal charm.
†† Well, that the progression sounds sad, and if you hang around in this key signature your piece will sound sad. And I do find it interesting that Peter does not hear this. Peter is still not as amousic as he thinks he is though^ or he wouldn’t love Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, which he does, and it’s not a, you know, easy piece. He would probably say^^ that it’s the words that make it work for him. Well, there are a lot of settings of a lot of poems out there, and he likes this one.
^ It seems a curious point of pride to him that he should insist on this
^^ He’s now gone to bed so I could take his name in vain as much as I like. [resists temptation]
††† I think he’s recognising that the second note is making the first note sound sad, when some annoying man isn’t getting up his nose insisting so.
‡ So would I! Peter keeps promising me guest blog entries and when is the last time we’ve heard from him!?
‡ Well . . .
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