An Experiment at the Keyboard

Learning a new piece is a complicated process.  I need to understand the music, how it works, what it has to say, what I want it to say.  I also need to figure out how to play the damned thing, and that means learning the notes, working out fingering, practicing technical passages, etc.  But arriving at musical understanding often depends on being able to execute.  You don’t know what the music is until you perform it, even if you can’t.   And blind under-tempo execution can be devoid of musical intent.  The two areas depend on each other.  Chicken and egg.  Adam’s navel.

I’m a good faker and a good sight-reader.  So I generally take a dual approach.  I spend some time faking through the piece at tempo just to achieve an understanding of how it works and what I want.  (I confess that this betrays a certain impatience.  ‘Let’s just make believe I can play this.  I’d really like to think that I can play this.’) I also spend time working out the technical passages slowly and, I hope, accurately, but sacrificing musical intent. Ideally the two approaches eventually meet.

A version of op76 #1 in Brahms's own hand.

The disadvantage of faking it is that we learn whatever we do.  Every time I fake my way through (to develop understanding, or just for self-deceptive fun) I learn to not execute cleanly.  And that makes it harder to learn to play it well down the road.

So I’m going to try something different.  Lately I've been learning Brahms op.76, a set of eight ‘short’ pieces.  They really are spectacular, and I've never taken the time to study them closely.  But I know some of them well by ear, so I have a pretty good concept of what I want from them.

Op. 76 #1 is a piece I’ve never really learned, but I do (I think) understand it.  So there’s really no need to fake it.  So I’m trying to learn it without EVER faking it.  Just play it ever so slowly.  Never make a mistake.  If I do, I need to go even more slowly.  That means I won’t ever play it up to tempo until I’m ready to do so flawlessly.  No faking.

It’s a little frustrating.  I want to wing it.  But I’m not letting myself do that.  I so hope that playing it slowly over and over will not chip away at the expressive concept that I have for the piece and turn it into drudgery.  I don’t think that will happen.  I’m pretty clear about what I want, and I can imagine it happening, even if I’m playing quite slowly.

Do I have the discipline to stay with this approach?  We’ll see.  I've never attempted it in quite this way.  The best possible outcome would be to arrive at a reliable performance of the piece which says what I want to say and involves minimal technical risk.  On the other hand, I could become frustrated that I never seem to be able to play it cleanly at tempo, and just stop trying.

I’ll keep you posted.

Warm-Blooded Murder

Banville’s ‘The Book of Evidence’ is a short novel written in a peculiar way: it’s a first-person account of a murder written by the murderer while in custody. The criminal then submits the document to the court as evidence. It is both a confession and an attempt at an explanation. The protagonist, Freddie Montgomery, is a well-off Irishman who almost inadvertently commits the crime (the murder of a stranger, a maid who interfered with Freddie's theft of a valuable painting) as part of a scheme to rescue himself and his family from financial difficulties.  Banville certainly makes the events seem possible; I’m sure that law enforcement around the world deals with crimes like this one every day.  Banville carefully explains (or has Freddie explain) every step of the way.  We come to know the events of that fateful day in excruciating detail.  We understand what led to those events. We understand what happened after the murder.  We understand these things because Banville explores Freddie’s feelings, observations, and motivations along every step of the way. The usual Banville sensibilities are on display here.  Even the most subtle emotional reverberations are up for examination.  Also lots of irony and a good bit of humor here and there.

But how probable is it that such a criminal have enough self-awareness to be able to produce such a document?  That’s where I have trouble with the book. Near the end of the book Banville takes a stab (oops) at explaining the moral deficiency which allowed the criminal to act as he did:

‘This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her [the victim] vividly enough, that I never made her be there sufficiently, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told that policeman is true – I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what that means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative. How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy? I am puzzled, and not a little fearful, and yet there is something stirring in me, and I am strangely excited. I seem to have taken on a new weight and density. I feel gay and at the same time wonderfully serious. I am big with possibilities. I am living for two.’

Yes, it’s very poignant, insightful, even moving. But the same person whose limitations as a person led to murder is now, just a few weeks later, capable of this deep self-reflection? For most of the book Freddie is drifting through life, and seems not to be concerned with concepts like moral culpability. Indeed Freddie describes his thoughts and feelings at the moment of the killing as confesses that his real crime may be his tendency to let things drift:

‘There is no moment in this process of which I can confidently say, there, that is when I decided she should die. Decided? – I do not think it was a matter of deciding. I do not think it was a matter of thinking, even. That fat monster inside me just saw his chance and leaped out, frothing and flailing. He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him. I could not stop him. Or could I? He is me, after all, and I am he. But no, things were too far gone for stopping. Perhaps that is the essence of my crime, of my culpability, that I let things get to that stage, that I had not been vigilant enough, had not been enough of a dissembler, that I left Bunter to his own devices, and thus allowed him, fatally, to understand that he was free, that the cage door was open, that nothing was forbidden, that everything was possible.’

Is it possible to have such insight and such lack of control at the same moment? If you can understand what's happening, would you just let it happen?  Banville writes in the first person, but with the insight and detachment of a third-person narrator.  I would venture to guess that most murderers are so screwed up emotionally (or just plain emotionally deficient) that they will never have the insights that Banville describes so beautifully, or if they do, it would take years and years of therapy to get there.

Contrast Banville’s approach with ‘In Cold Blood’, for example, where the criminals’ utter lack of perspective or feeling about what they’re doing is both stunning and chilling and of course part of the point.  It’s more believable, perhaps, but also more depressing.  For such a person there is little hope. Freddie is well on his way to some kind of redemption at the end of the book.  That may not be credible, but it is comforting.

Banville also writes crime fiction under the name Benjamin Black.  Never read any.  Will have to try one soon.

All that being said there is much good writing here, and lots of insight into how we can be led (or lead ourselves) to actions that we will later regret.  I don’t think it’s Banville’s best book, but it’s a courageous experiment and a short and easy read. 

A Fork in the Road

In a piece of music there are almost always repeating patterns of one sort or another.  But the repetitions can lead to new places.  That’s part of the musical narrative.  First A leads to B.  Later A reappears, bit this time it no longer leads to B; instead it leads to C.

The process of learning and memorizing those passages is interesting to me.  I learn A.  I can execute it easily.  Then I continue to B.  It may take some effort, but I learn B and I learn that A leads to B. Now I can execute the passage A-B just fine. I've built the A-B entity in memory.

Who's old enough to remember the
 Slauson cutoff and the fork in the road?

Next I have to learn a new passage, where A leads to C.  I can execute A, but it takes considerable conscious effort and concentration to get A to go directly to C.  It wants to go to B.  But with time and repetition I get it.  A goes to C.

Unfortunately now I've lost the A-B connection.  In my memory, A now leads to C, not to B.  Now I have to go back and relearn the A-B connection.  It won’t take as long to learn it as it did the first time, but it will take some effort.  And doing that may make the A-C connection a little shaky.  Now that path has to be reinforced.

Eventually I get to the point where I can execute both A-B and A-C without a problem.  But it’s quite a complicated process to get there.

The brain seems have a hard-wired proclivity to assume the highest level ‘truth’ that it can find.  That’s what makes us so smart.  We look for large patterns that will help us survive.  But sometimes the largest pattern needs to be broken, and a smaller pattern added at a lower level.  We can do it, but it seems to run counter to our nature.

We find patterns that help us.  We jump to conclusions. It’s part of who we are.  But we have to be willing to go back and reconsider another outcome.  There might be possibilities that we might not have imagined at first. Might some of those conclusions be faulty, or at least incomplete?

But we can’t consider every outlandish possibility.  Up is not down, right?

Or might it be? Do we have courage to find out?

Sleep

Why do I think about how I think?

I do find it fascinating.  Hoping that it’s not all rooted in some hideous narcissistic obsession. 

I worked hard at the keyboard yesterday to cement in place a particular passage in Brahms op. 76 #2. I made progress, but at the end of the day I still couldn’t get through it reliably and without considerable anxiety. I tried hard, but it just didn’t stick; countless repetitions didn’t make it natural. I was a little discouraged, but I didn’t freak out.

What's happening in there?

Today, I sit down (without warming up) and play through that piece, and all is well.  I execute that passage in the new way without a problem. Why is that? Today was many hours away from yesterday’s practice. If anything, I would expect some backsliding from yesterday's endpoint, but instead today it works, with no practice between yesterday and today. What changed?

Can it be that the brain sometimes needs time to process a new approach?  “Do it this way now!” may not be enough, especially if this way is very different from the old way.  We somehow understand the new way, but can’t get far enough away from the old way so quickly. It takes a little unconscious mental effort to shelve the old way and accept the new.

I’m starting to think that a particularly important factor in making that transition easier is a good night’s sleep.  There really does seem to be some kind of hard drive defrag that happens while we sleep that makes everything work more efficiently.  Part of that defrag may be that we archive more deeply the old pattern that we've decided is no longer optimal.  Maybe we can’t so easily move it off to a remote folder with different access rights when we’re awake and conscious.  It took effort to put that pattern into memory, so why should we surrender it so easily?  Perhaps that pattern was part of a crucial survival mechanism?  If so, we give it up at our own peril.

We understand so little of what sleep really accomplishes.  Surely it has nothing to do with physical exhaustion or lack of energy.  We consume enough calories to keep us going for more than 14-18 hours at a stretch. But our brains seem to require time to recalibrate and move thoughts, patterns, and memories among the various levels of storage that are available to us. We need a period of time without new input for the brain to sort through recent data and experience. Without it, we get confused and frustrated.

And that same ability to recalibrate and re-store is what makes memory so subjective and so unreliable. We remember what's useful for us to remember.  Truth be damned.

The computer hardware industry doubles capacity and processing speed every few years.  The human brain evolves much more slowly.  I’m ready for an upgrade.  How about you?

Memory

Memorizing at the keyboard.  As a young classical pianist I didn’t think too much about it.  I just did it.  And I clearly could do it, in one way or another.  I gave many recitals, even before going to college, and memory was not an issue.

But at the keyboard, memory is a complex issue.  We don’t just have a single capacity to remember.  Instead, we have many abilities which are called on in various proportions.  Different strokes for different folks.

Sentamentalists to the contrary, it all seems to come down to brain chemistry.   There are multiple mechanisms for what we cavalierly call ‘memory’.  What’s your mix?

Imagine yourself as a classical pianist onstage at Carnegie Hall giving a solo recital.  You  walk onstage, bow.  You sit at the keyboard.  What neural mechanisms will allow you to perform?

In my experience, there are at least three distinct types of memory at the keyboard.  There’s visual memory, aural memory, and muscle memory. We all have all three types, but in various proportions.

The pianist with a predominantly visual memory is essentially reading from a photographically-induced imaged of the score.  That pianist is in a permanent sight-reading mode.  It’s not a bad spot to be in.  When things get spotty, just slow down.  You can always read more carefully. You can sight-read it at a slower tempo. Squint a little, squirm a little.

For a pianist with dominant muscle memory the situation is just the opposite.  The connection between one muscle memory movement and the next is tenuous.  Slowed down, those connections disintegrate into chaos.  Instead, we speed up in an effort to minimize those intolerable spaces in time between muscle movements.  Keep them connected at all costs.  Sometimes, that gets us through. But other times, it’s a rushing disaster.  Well learned passages go out the window in an effort to just get to the next phrase before it all falls apart.

And then there’s an aural memory.  We remember exactly what it sounds like.  And if our musical training has been exacting enough (solfege, dictation, score reading, etc.), we know what to do at the keyboard to create the sound in our mind.

So our musical memory is multifaceted.  Like other areas of our lives, we tend to rely on our strengths, and neglect our weaknesses.  At our own peril.  There’s nothing that will increase empathy more for our fellow man than attention to our own weaknesses.

Nothing.

How do we promote that?

An Unexpected Pleasure

Book prizes do serve a purpose of sorts.  When an author I've never read and know nothing about wins a major prize, I take note and often add him to a list somewhere if the work sounds appealing. That's what happened when Julian Barnes won the Booker last year.  This smug little American didn't have a clue about him, and I was intrigued by the reviews of 'The Sense of an Ending'. Turns out I love the soft self-doubting meditative tone of the book.

While wandering around Kepler's the other day (the newly revamped, i.e. shrunken independent local bookstore that nonetheless continues to please me), I noticed lots of other fiction by Barnes. I wasn't sure that I was in the mood for more foggy metaphysical speculation, having just finished the latest Banville, but I don't get to Kepler's that often, so I included one Barnes book in my haul. I chose it almost randomly.

'Pulse' is a new (2011) collection of stories, most of which had previously appeared elsewhere.  Not sure how I missed the ones that had appeared in The New Yorker, but I did. Started reading the first story and was very pleasantly surprised, indeed. Finished the book in a couple of days.

Here there is none of that 'Sense of an Ending' brooding.  And these are old-fashioned short stories.  No tricks or tweets. No vague connections among stories.  No experimental forms, no self-referential circles, no questions about writing while writing.  And unlike Carver, for example, very little happens in these stories.  Not much plot, and a narrow emotional range in each.  Just a snapshot of characters at a moment in time. How refreshing is that?

Within those boundaries Barnes is remarkably versatile. Very different settings, characters, and tones.  Dialog is a major strength.  He can absolutely nail a character with dialog.  Also very British. Very urbane. And very good on relationships and couples.

I try to stretch myself as a reader.  DFW, for example.  Now Proust is on my list.  Recently tackled Barthelme for the first time. And of course David Mitchell. So it's a relief to easily find pleasure in a more traditional high-quality author.  There's so much there to enjoy, and it feels good to have at least the illusion that my ability to understand and appreciate the writing need not be questioned. Maybe it's like swinging the weighted bat in the on-deck circle.  A normal bat then feels light and easy to control.

But enough about me.  How are you enjoying my blog? :)

Again

John Banville has delivered another stunning novel.  The main character in ‘Ancient Light’ is a man in his sixties.  In much of the book he recounts his love affair with an older woman when he was only fifteen.  There is insight here into the nature of eroticism and what it might mean to a boy. There is little that is titillating, but much that is fascinating.  We also learn of his adult life, the loss of his daughter, and of the circumstances of his life in the present.  The language is, for Banville, typically lyrical and poetic.  I just adore his writing and take such pleasure in reading and rereading the sentences.  I have to mark favorite passages as I read.  The ending, where we finally learn yet another and very different version of some important events described in the book, was for me very moving.  How wonderful that mere sentences on a page can magically evoke such a fascinating and complex image of life.

I’ll just mention some of the themes and quote some relevant passages.  Banville speaks best for himself.

Even in the present, we can hardly know in any objective sense what is happening or who or what is in charge.  We can only see through the tiny keyhole of our own selves at that particular time and place.  We can never truly know what another might see or experience.

Hence, about his daughter, the protagonist speculates:

'What may one know of another, even when it is one’s own daughter: A clever man whose name I have forgotten – my memory has become a sieve – put the poser: What is the length of a coastline? It seems a simple enough challenge, readily met, by a professional surveyor, say, with his spyglass and tape measure.  But reflect a moment. How finely calibrated must the tape measure be to deal with all those nooks and crannies? And nooks have nooks, and crannies crannies, ad infinitum, or ad at least that indefinite boundary where matter, so called, shades off seamlessly into thin air. Similarly, with the dimensions of a life it is a case of stopping at some certain level and saying this, this was she, though knowing of course that it was not.'

And about his lover, he confesses that though intimately involved with another, he was actually totally self-absorbed:

'Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that? I wonder. I used to watch Mrs. Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.'

'I should say that I did not imagine myself so treasured, I did not think myself so loved. This was not from diffidence or a lack of a sense of my own significance no, but the very opposite: engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through another.'

And when looking into the past, we deal with memories, which are by definition even less reliable than our limited perception of the present. The passage of time enables us to make our own version of the past that serves our present-day needs:

'Images from the far past crowd in my head and half the time I cannot tell whether they are memories or inventions. Not that there is much difference between the two, if indeed there is any difference at all. Some say that without realizing it we make it all up as we go along, embroidering and embellishing, and I am inclined to credit it, for Madam Memory is a great and subtle dissembler.  When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the general wreckage – and what is a life but a gradual shipwreck? – may take on an aspect of inevitability when I put them on display in their glass showcases, but they are random; representative, perhaps, perhaps compellingly so, but random nonetheless.'

Even the recollections of specific, seemingly objective ‘facts’ are suspect.

'Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible.'

Where, exactly, does that leave us?  How are we to live?

'I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realize that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions.  Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be.'

'I see nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.'

With Banville perhaps words can at least portray, if not bridge, the gaps among people, among times. Maybe words can, if carefully crafted, represent the shimmering set of overlapping realities that is our reality.

'Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. … Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.'