Duet by Ratbag
Despite my frantic struggles I was obliged to play my four more lines yesterday with Oisin.* I tried my best: I got him talking. ** But eventually I had to admit that I had brought my music, hidden as it was in my book of Kuhlau. Not that not bringing it would have done me any good: Oisin has the original book, with, you know, both parts in it.*** And he was in full evil-teacher mode: we got to the end of my four new lines and he made me go on.† I don’t sight read! I know all of you think that I sit at home constructing new ways to do myself down, but I do not sight read, and Oisin would agree. However we ‘played’–Oisin played, I clattered and crashed and squeaked and produced inappropriate silences which were on the whole to be preferred–to the end of the second page and at least it appears to have no horrors like the Demon Run. The Demon Run really is too–I was thinking, as I played it for the 1,000,000,000th time this past week, well, hold on, at least whatever is going on in the first part will cover up what I’m doing–wrong. This is one of those moments when it’s all about the stupid sausage-fingered second part: Oisin’s just sitting there going plink occasionally and my run is running all out there in the open in front of everybody. Arrrrgh. I didn’t agree to this! Second parts are supposed to be secondary!
But I should get to the end of the first movement of the piece this week and might conceivably even make it into the second movement, which, gasp, is andante. This first two pages of ratbaggy Mozart are allegro, which is part of the problem. Especially on the Demon Run. I spent my piano time this afternoon hacking my way through the frelling fingering of the second page: very, very slightly in my defense yesterday some of the fingering is the stop dead and shout SAY WHAT variety, which doesn’t help your sight reading any: and while most of the notes are the same ones repeated in little bursts, quite a few of them hang well off the bottom of the bass clef which means room for fingering, let alone correcting fingering, is limited. My next Piano Tableaux series will involve person paralysed with confusion, squinting at the claw marks on the pages in front of her. . . .
Meanwhile there have been all these fascinating comments about music and listening and playing on the forum which I never have time to answer properly so I thought I’d rip through a few here–as well as using them to pad out the word count. I’ve been planting roses††, and I’ve managed to get a tiny hair-like thorn in my right thumb.††† The outside of my right thumb. The keyboard contacting side of my thumb. IsupposeIcouldwritetonight’sentrylikethisbutitwouldprobablymakeyoucrazy not to mention what the computer would do when I passed the line length with no space for breaking–? Besides, after forty-six years of typing you can’t remember not to hit that space bar. But you can imagine that tonight’s rhapsody isOUCHwrittenOUCHlikeOUCHthis.‡
Jeanne Marie responded to Peter’s Mozak:
. . . Here’s the link, for those who’d like to check it out:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_ and_passion.html
. . . . Since I’ve been vocally oriented from an early age, I don’t actually know what it is like to not make aural musical distinctions easily. But, I have done a fair bit of teaching, and a lot of that teaching has been with middle-aged people who were informed (often by a music teacher or other individual with authority) when they were in junior high that they were “tone deaf.” Telling a junior high kid that they are tone deaf is, in my opinion, just as bad a telling a kid with dyslexia that they are stupid.
Yes. Although I’d add that the underlying or base crime is the and you therefore can’t learn which is at least implied and frequently baldly stated.
I just read a comment . . . that noted that aural discrimination is a learned skill – and, in my experience, this is true. I have taught individuals, who previously labeled themselves as “tone deaf,” to hear the difference between pitches. I’ve taught them how to be able to tell when they are or are not singing the same thing as I am, by demonstrating what matching pitch sounds and feels like. . . .
Yes. This is a trap that I fall into all the time, and I am not alone. How has it become so rampant in this society that you’re either ‘good’ at something or ‘bad’ at it? That if you’re not naturally enormously gifted you might as well not bother? That the concept of learning is, I don’t know, frivolous or irrelevant or something? We venerate degrees but we don’t believe in learning? Uh . . .
I think the reason this is such a passion of mine is because I’ve seen so many people who are wounded by the careless application of the label “tone deaf.” (in the same way that others are wounded by the application of the label “stupid” if they are dyslexic). I believe deeply that everyone has the right to enjoy musical expression to whatever level they can and desire to, but I’ve seen so many people who accept the label of “tone deaf” and therefore avoid participating in any kind of musical (usually singing) activity – such as singing Happy Birthday to the office secretary.
. . . I still won’t sing Happy Birthday. I’ll make the cake, I’ll wrap the presents, but don’t make me sing. . . .
. . . Often, it’s music teachers themselves who’ve been at fault in those situations, either because they had a bad day, or they didn’t want to spend the extra time with someone, or were just perfectionist elitists, who knows. A few years ago, I was working with someone who had been told he was tone deaf in 8th grade, and so he didn’t open his mouth to sing anything for 15 years. Despite the fact that he loves music, and whistles with perfect pitch. He isn’t, in fact, tone deaf, but he had accepted that label because someone with authority applied it to him at a vulnerable age.
I’m absolutely willing to concede the existence of amousia. But, like dyslexia, I think there are ways to work around it, and still participate in and enjoy music. . . .
And, OK, I’ll grant that the speaker’s use of “sad” in his musical example is pretty sad. . . . Not only too simplistic, but as another forum-er noted, ethnomusicologically it’s a bogus determination.
I really don’t want to defend Zander too extensively because his egotism really irritated me but I do want hesitantly to point out that he was trying to make a very big point in a big punchy way in a very short period of time–he was trying to give people something they couldn’t help but take home and think about. I am interested that ‘minor’ key music and intervals as sad or eerie however is a western construct . . . but that’s another topic for another day. (And forgive me for heavily editing you . . . people who want to read Jeanne Marie’s full rant, it’s at the end of the Mozak thread.)
AJLR writes:
. . . Having had no ‘learning music’ episodes in my life until two years ago, since school umpty-thousand years ago, I find that what I remember being told then and what I’m learning now bear little resemblance. I have learnt that my music teacher (when I was 13) was wrong when she told me it was no use wanting/trying to play the piano because my hands were too small – OK, I have to stretch to reach an octave but it’s worth doing!
Of course it is worth doing if you want to do it!!!!! This story makes me absolutely crazy. I mean, yes, much of this conversation (on the forum) has been about the awful things that people tell other people–especially children–which may blight them for life–but sometimes you flatly cannot believe that anyone would say such a thing and especially not to a child. This is one of those occasions for me. Don’t take up running because your legs are too short! Don’t learn a second language because you’ll never know it as well as you know the first! Don’t tell someone you love them because you aren’t really a good enough friend! My piano teacher at my first college was Korean and tiny, including her diminutive hands: I used to wonder how she managed to play what she did, but she had a career as a concert pianist outside Dickinson‡ College‡‡ so she obviously did somehow. I know when she was demonstrating what I should be doing her hands flashed across the keyboard faster than the mere clumsy student eye could follow.
I would say that this kind of abuse was commoner in the so-called arts–lots of people get told they can’t draw or write either: do these big arrogant mouthy villains forget that there is something called doing something for pleasure? Yes, it’s true, very few people can draw or paint or write stories or articles or play an instrument or sing well enough to earn a living at it . . . but at least almost everyone can learn to do one or more of these things well enough to enjoy it. And I agree with Jeanne Marie and everyone else who’s written in to say that it makes you feel good too. The usual dorky phrase is ‘life enhancing.’ I’d say it makes your life bigger. And you really notice learning stuff, and the effect it has on the rest of your life, when you get old, I think, because learning stuff is no longer the sea you swim in, the way it is when you’re young.‡‡‡
Although my own best tale of the appalling things teachers will say to or about children has to do with maths. I was in the fast track, so I hit algebra with a very nasty thump in eighth grade. My algebra teacher told me–and repeated it to my parents on parents’ night–that I was the stupidest child she’d ever tried to teach, that I’d never get it, never pass the course, and that I should drop out of college prep now. If I knew her name I might have sent her a copy of BEAUTY when it came out. Signed ‘neener neener’. But–maths anxiety? Fear of numbers? I can barely write the date without hyperventilating.
Jeanne Marie also provided the link for the last word on the small hands topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKKlhYF53w
I’d stumbled across it months ago–I don’t think I ever posted it here?–and then lost it again. Snork.
. . . To be continued. If I remember.
* * *
* The ME continues in full diabolic tyranny today. Sigh. I think it’s being assisted by some impropriety committed by the restaurant where I had lunch with a friend on Wednesday. Teach me to eat out. But I like this restaurant. They’re used to me and my peculiar food stipulations.
** Tell me why everything to do with human beings always sooner or later comes down to politics? Cathedral choirs. Bell ringing. Recommended reading lists. Arrrrrgh.^
^ Yes, arrrrrgh is political too.
*** It’s horribly long. Mozart wrote a lot of piano duets.
† I told him that the blog forum was teeming with evil music teachers who torture their students with duets and he looked distressed. I have to remember not to tease him when I’m white-faced and trembling.
†† Surprise!
††† Ordinary rose thorns are not that big a deal. They’re big, they’re brutal, if you don’t see ‘em coming you bleed. But the hooked ones–Mermaid is a sterling exemplar of The Rose with the Hook–are positively life threatening. But perhaps worst of all are the nearly invisible, the gossamer ones that you don’t see coming and very often don’t feel go in . . . and then they stick in there and get all hot and red and fester which is the only reason you know they ARE there because you still can’t find them with your tweezers and your magnifying glass.
‡ And the really interesting thing is that I can still play the piano. It’s only the computer keyboard that hits the spot–the exact, the THRIIIILLING spot. There is no doubt a moral here. Let’s not pursue it. I’m not ready to earn my living as an accompanist.
‡‡ sic
‡‡‡ Presumably not a first-rank career or she wouldn’t have been paying the rent teaching college freshpersons who had a struggle with Clementi sonatinas, but I went to one of her concerts and was blown away. Which is interesting, because she was playing chamber music with lots of strings and that was in the era when I was really sorry Beethoven and Mozart and Haydn had wasted so much time writing string quartets and piano trios and things.
§ This unfortunately does not guarantee a nice big clean open sea free of trawlers, sharks, and pollution
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