Saturday, October 4, 2014

Music Gives So Much to Think About

Seymour Bernstein, who was a student of the late Hans Neumann at the same time as I was many years ago, is the subject of a new documentary by Ethan Hawke.  According to a New York Times report on a news conference with Seymour the reason he decided not to pursue a career in performing was fright.  He then goes on to talk about making use of fright.

A complicated subject, to say the least.  What are pianists afraid of?  My work is based on my realization that it is terrifying to deal with something as variable as the sound of "the" piano (no two of which sound even remotely the same) unless specifically trained to deal with that variability along with the variability of one's own responses to that level of complexity.

Conventional training does exactly the opposite: By analyzing the composition as if it existed independent of the player every attempt is made to get the damn thing to stand still, as if that were the point.  It does not stand still.

The better the musician, the more talented the player - and Seymour was and is both - the less likely that strategy is to work.  So the player gives up on the idea of a performance career.

There are many reasons not to pursue a performance career.  I would have loved to do so but had such a relentless succession of physical problems to deal with that it would have been out of the question.  Perhaps because the problems were so obviously physical I was allowed to go in the direction of the invisible to analyze the dynamics of playing.