Not Just a Pretty Face

We all talk about timelessness of certain pieces of music, particularly music from the baroque period. Can music be truly timeless? Certainly some music ages better than others, and it seems that our current aesthetic says baroque music seems to age particularly well.  However, musicians who lived in what we now call the Gallant and Classical periods thought baroque music was very much out of fashion. “Timelessness,” which is used frequently just as a synonym for “beautiful” is only a surface level description to a piece of music. We as musicians need to step it up a notch, and study the “untimeless” parts of baroque music, so that we can both better understand the music, and that we can make the music more relevant today, rather then just recreating pretty sounds.

We see these pictures of long dead composers, with their wigs and fancy clothes, and forget that they were actual living people, with rent to pay, with children to feed, and messy lives to clean up. They experienced loss, joy, and sore feet. They had times of unemployment, boredom, and too much work. White, dead, European males, they are just like us! It is easy to understand that composers who live today are humans, because they are right in front of us, they live, they breathe. We know them, we went to school with them, we talk to them, we make late night drunk decisions with them. They are not gods; they create music that is both sublime and crappy. 

When was the last time someone said “Oh, well that piece by Bach is a little weak,” or “Yea, the 2^nd movement of Beethoven's new symphony just kind of drags on and on. I wish he would get to the point.” It is much easier to criticize living composers rather than dead, because we have lifted the dead so high, so that every note suddenly becomes divinely inspired.  We forget that a lot of the “perfection” of Bach’s music comes from him knowing the rules of counterpoint in and out backwards and sideways. We criticise Hindemith because he wrote a lot of duds, but he wrote some incredibly sublime music. Some pieces of music we have heard so many times, we know longer think with our critical minds, rather it is something we go back to like a comforting blanket. Which is doing the composers and the music of the past a great disservice. We cannot forget that no piece of music is perfect.

Bach wasn’t the first choice for Cantor in Leipzig. He wrote the first half of the B minor mass in order to curry favor with the elector in Dresden, not because he was inspired by some greater calling. It was a financial move. Telemann married a woman who gambled so much he had to create additional revenue sources for his family. Famously Mozart enjoyed scatological humor. I guess it is human nature to feel that the people who came before us aren’t real humans. But for people in the field of classical music, I believe it is part of our job to bring the music to life, to find ways to make it relevant today. When we elevate “old” music or composers to a godlike status, the music looses its humanness, the ability for it to resonate with our current life. It just becomes something pretty, something to decorate our wall. If we whitewash the music with instruments that are too perfect and implement romantic phrasings on the music, because music is “timeless...” then we are doing the music a disfavor. 

In a way we cannot fully appreciate the music of the past. We cannot possibly get into the past “earset” so to say. There is so much noise in our modern world, and we have so much access to music of all varieties. I am definitely not unhappy with this, but it means that we loose some of the sensitivity that is required to hear the real language of early music, the play of consonance and dissonance. The rhetoric, the gestures, of the music we play. For me, part of learning early music is to re-sensitize myself at least a little. To make sure the music isn’t just pretty, but that is says something.

It is much easier to hear the rough edges in baroque music on baroque instruments, as I have said before in this blog. For example, the f minor sonata by Telemann. OK, f minor, not the most friendly of keys, but I played this sonata for the first time when I was in middle school, on modern bassoon. It was probably wildly out of tune, but I could technically play the music. The key signature wasn’t a problem. Press down the keys, at least a close approximation of the notes comes out. Modern instruments are too exact for baroque music.  Now, take the same sonata on baroque bassoon. Infinitely more difficult. Four flats, while not as difficult as four sharps, makes the piece unstable in a way that cannot exist on a modern bassoon. Even when the piece is completely in tune on a baroque instrument, (and don’t get me started on what is in tune or not) there is a certain crunchiness, a certain feeling that one cannot create on modern bassoon. Dissonances become all the more relevant, all the more real, because they will never sound smooth on a baroque instrument. So in this way, we reintroduce the dirt of baroque music. Telemann’s piece goes from something slightly melancholy on a modern bassoon, to something so much more deep and meaningful on baroque. The piece is no longer washed over with a sparkly glaze, the piece becomes real and alive again, something that isn’t perfect, but something that is real.

For me, that is what playing baroque music is about, reintroducing the dirty parts of life back into the music, the imperfect, the messy. People lived, breathed, loved, and died just like we do today, and the music of the past that we play today should reflect this. The composers of the past were not gods; they were living, breathing, people, with the same hopes, dreams, and nightmares that we have. Well, probably not that nightmare about the carnivorous iPhones…

So no, I do not think music is timeless. There are aspects of all music that can have a sense of timelessness, but to simplify music this way I believe is to do it a disfavor. Music is so much more than the simple labels that we attach to them. Isn’t that the point, to create something that cannot be created with words alone?

The Dead Still Speak

This past week, this past month really, the world lost a lot of talent, talent that influenced and shaped many people's lives. It always seems like people who live in the public eye tend to die in clusters. Someone should really look into this problem.

I have to say, with all the public mourning on the Internet and in real life, I have felt a little out of loop. I have found it very interesting that so many friends have marked how influential David Bowie was to their lives, where I have to say I had not until this week, ever heard a song by him or seen a video by him. Of course I knew of him, and that he was a highly talented, influential, and beloved person, but somehow I kind of missed the Bowie Boat.

It probably has to do with how I was raised. My family was very conservative catholic, and there was very little variety in the music that was played at home. Christian instrumental music anyone? Rock was not something that was played, and when I started listening to my own music as a teenager, it was Beethoven, not Bowie. I didn't even know the bands that were popular with my school mates in middle school. Sure, I pretended, but I have to admit, never listened to Green day. To this day I feel woefully behind in listening to all the wonderful music created in the last 30 years or so that isn't classical. So much talent in the world, so little time.

Though I find it a little ironic that I didn't discover Bowie's music earlier. What I hear over and over again from mourners is his message was that it is OK to be different, it is OK to be the weird one. Coming from a conservative family, home schooled, working in a library, playing bassoon... I was strange all right. It is a shame that I didn't discover his music when I was younger. I am still strange, but as a child I didn't think I was strange, rather I thought everyone else was.

Since his death, I have actually started to listen to his music. I have yet to listen to his newest album, but plan on after writing this blog post. I could see how coming across his music during one's youth could have a highly influential effect. No matter what time one lives in, it is (I can't come up with the right word here: wonderful doesn't quite work, awesome is dated, meaningful? fun? great?) to observe such an artist who embodies the Zeitgeist of the time, how relevant his music was, and apparently still is. The ability to tap into the group subconscious and create something out of it, creating something that speaks to people. I know I am saying this on a blog about early music, but it is a very important point that some classical musicians forget.

Whether you are creating your own new music, or recreating music from the past, it is important to find something that can speak to your public. Your public that is sitting in front of you or listening to your recording. It doesn't really matter if your audience is only a handful of people or millions of people, tapping into that source, finding relevancy, this is important. This is the key to finding one own creative greatness. As a classical musician specializing in music of dead white European males, this can sometimes become a challenge. We get lost in our own head, forget why what we do is important. Why do people still listen to Beethoven, Mozart, Mahler, etc? Because there is still that connection, but in our case, it must be found. We must lead people to the deeper meaning other than the music is pretty. Pretty isn't the point of what classical musicians do,  and this sometimes is forgotten.

So off I go to begin dinner and listen to Bowie. There are worse ways to spend an evening.

Breathe

Today I rode my bike for the first time in several months. I actually made it to the third trimester with biking, but then it just became too tiring. Some people seem to get through pregnancy and birth smoothly, without much of a hitch. This was not the case with me. I managed to play until 3 weeks before birth, but it was a fight, both mentally and physically. I am happy that I begin to feel a little more normal, but it has not been easy.

Breathing was a real difficulty the entire time. Not so good for an individual who makes their living breathing in a controlled manner. However it forced me to think again about how I breathe, in part because I couldn't physically play the way that I had in the past. I have to say that in the past several years I became lazy about how I breathed while playing. I felt that I had figured things out mostly, and that it worked for me. Sure, one can always improve, but I felt like I had the basics down.

Boy was I wrong. Since I was having such a hard time with breathing, my baroque bassoon teacher and I had a long conversation on the subject, and I have to say she blew my former concept of breathing out of the water. My breathing had previously been something of an on off switch, either I was blowing air through the instrument at a certain speed, lower abdominals engaged, or I was not. Of course I varied the speed depending on which register I was playing, but the general concept throughout the bassoon's range was basically the same.

This concept of breathing seems to work pretty well with modern bassoon, but I was working too hard on the baroque bassoon. She showed me that one could have a big sound while keeping the abdominals relaxed. With the the modern airstream I ended up working against the instrument. I didn't need that much air. In fact, with less air it is easier to phrase appropriately. The difference is a little bit like the difference between a baroque and modern string bow, as far as I understand it. A modern bow one can keep the sound "stream" the same at all points ad nausium. With a baroque bow one cannot create huge phrases, but there is a flexibity within the phrase that is impossible to get on a modern instrument. This difference, big long phrases vs small phrases is one of the key
differences between baroque and modern playing. The more relaxed breathing allows for that
flexibility that is required for baroque music to be interesting.

This new concept helped me to not try to kill myself when playing, since I simply was not able to use as much air as before. Now that I have my lungs back, I am trying to incorporate this new concept perminantly into my baroque and classical instruments. I am also trying to see how I can incorporate some of the relaxed way of playing into my modern instrument. This is more difficult, as you do need a certain amount of pressure on the modern that you don't need on the baroque. I plan to play around with it on modern, and see what type of airstream I can discover. Breathing is oddly such a complicated subject, considering, or maybe because, we do it so easily without thinking most of our lives.