Fundamentalist Pianism

One of the big issues that musicians think about, generally from a fairly early point in their musical growth, is how to approach a composer's expression markings: dynamics, tempo indications, suggestive instructions about emotion. My guide towards expression markings is often a sort of "spirit over letter" approach, one informed, in part, by my knowledge of the composer's process of creation. For instance, much of Liszt's music was conceived in a kind of improvisational fashion. He created a piece, in part, by experimenting on stage, eventually wrote out a version of that work, then changed it up and wrote out a new one. If you look at his dynamic markings, you'll see that they reflect this process of composition; they are often inconsistent and elusive. So, when I play his music, I feel free to experiment in my approach, sometimes doing the very opposite of what Liszt indicated in the score, if I think it captures the spirit of the piece. I would not take the same kind of liberties in works by Webern, Beethoven or Mozart, where a literal approach to the expression markings seems much more suited to those works' history. You can still find ways to assert your individuality in pieces by these composers; the hope is that their expression markings, which were so carefully decided upon, will aid you in the process of capturing the true spirit of each piece--in other words, that in these cases, spirit and letter are one and the same.

A few years ago at the Tanglewood Music Center, I performed in a master class for an eminent pianist and teacher, whose name I think I'd better not mention here. One of the other performers in the class played Liszt's First Piano Concerto, and the pedagogue spent the duration of his time with her correcting her dynamics and tempo markings so that they matched those in the score. The interaction seemed inane. He never bothered to explain why he felt she should adhere closely to Liszt's markings, and I simply couldn't understand how doing so arbitrarily had any inherent artistic merit. Over the course of his thirty minutes with the pianist, the teacher transformed her Liszt concerto from a living, breathing, entity to a set of instructions on a page.

I'm not a big fan of fundamentalism of any kind. In music, it may not have the kinds of dire consequences as in other forms of fundamentalist thinking, but it still has the potential to transform us into blind followers, robbed of our individuality and capacity to reason.

La musique en papillote (F&M III)

Last night, I cooked cod en papillote for a small dinner party. En papillote basically means "in parchment paper"; it's a method of cooking where you seal your food in a little paper pouch and bake it in the oven. It's particularly useful for cooking seafood; the fish steams in its juices, emerging from the oven tender and delicious. I first learned about cooking this way from reading Julia Child but had never tried it myself until last night.

My plan was to make halibut or sea bass, but when I went to the store yesterday morning, there were no fillets of either. I decided on wild black cod instead, which looked delicious. I had done a lot of reading during the week about options for cooking fish en papillote, and bought some clams to incorporate as well.

Since I wasn't exactly using a recipe, I was a little nervous about the meal, and decided to do a quick trial run when I got home that afternoon. I made an Asian-themed sauce, with sake, soy sauce, and green onion. I cut out a circle of parchment paper, placed a piece of fish in the center, covered it in sauce, adding some sauteed shiitake mushrooms and a few clams, and sealed the pouch by folding all of the edges under. Into the oven for 12 minutes at 400 degrees.

The fish was delicious! There was just enough butter from the sauteed mushrooms to sweeten the sauce a little and the green onions gave it a nice kick. The best part was that I could make all of the little paper packages that afternoon and pop them into the fridge. When our friends came for dinner, there would be nothing left to prepare.

The corresponding music? En papillote may not be an exclusively French method of cooking, but I certainly think of French cooking first when I imagine food in little paper packages. So my mind is drawn to French music, and to works which, like fish en papillote, don't reveal their entire meaning to you at once. Just as you have to unwrap your package of fish to find out what's inside, you have to play to the end of each of Debussy's piano preludes to find out its title. (Many modern editions put the title at the start, but the composer specifically wanted the title to follow each prelude.) Cod en papillote and Debussy's preludes are both elegant and whimsical, engineered specifically to spark your imagination.

Dinner Tonight! (F&M II)

I'm cooking chicken tikka masala for dinner this evening. I think of CTM as one of the most classic Indian dishes, on the menu at every Indian restaurant I know. But it isn't actually 100% Indian. Chicken tikka comes from India. The masala sauce was added in Britain, where people preferred gravy on their meat. It became so popular that numerous restaurants in India actually serve it now.

The music that best fits with tonight's dinner is fusion too. There are countless examples of musical fusion, including many that marry Indian music with Western idioms. I'm listening to tabla player and percussionist Badal Roy, and particularly to his collaborations with Jazz musicians including Ornette Coleman and Herbie Hancock.

The 19th Century's 19th Century

As I gear up to start teaching a portion of the music history sequence at UC Santa Cruz, I've been thinking about the purpose of music history curricula, especially in serving college music majors. In a ten-week period, I'm covering a large portion of the Classical period, as well as Western music through the entire nineteenth century. As I designed my syllabus, I had to make some tough choices about which composers and pieces to cover and which to leave out. I based those decisions partially on personal preferences (which pieces I particularly like) and partially on practical concerns (which pieces are easy to access, covered in the textbook, possible to get through in a 70 minutes class session.) But another major factor is which works best represent musical trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And that's a tough one to address. Because the issue begs the question: whose 19th century?

As a twenty-first century musician, I value the works of the musical canon: that is, the pieces I grew up hearing on the radio and in concert halls, the works that people told me were really important. They were written by an "A-list" of Romantic composers: Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, and Mahler. These are the bigwigs. But our A-list looks quite a bit different from the 19th century's. Meyerbeer, for instance, was one of the biggest musical celebrities in mid-nineteenth century Europe. His operas drew massive crowds. So did Weber's. And Donizetti's. And Bellini's. All of these composers are still performed in opera houses, but our century, for the most part, does not value their place in musical history as it does Beethoven's or Brahms's. Yet our 19th-century musical canon is a product of the culture from which it sprang. And in that culture, Meyerbeer was a lot more important than Schubert. So, as a teacher of music history, should I strive to tell history as it actually went down, or should I weave my tale through the lens of the twentieth century's musical canon?

The way I see it, I should aim to do both. My responsibility as a historian is to give the most accurate picture of the past as I can. But in training musicians, music educators, and future academics, I also have a responsibility to get them acquainted with the canon. These students need to know the works that their culture values, even if they aren't the ones that the 19th century cared about.

Culinary Concoctions and Musical Montages (F&M I)

San Francisco is one of the great culinary cities in America. It is also a mecca for classical music. Like most sentient beings, I love both food and music, but I rarely think about them in conjunction with one another. From time to time, Kimball and I have thrown around the idea of coordinating food with music. How wonderful would it be to attend a house concert of Schubert's piano sonatas followed by a Viennese meal? A recital of works by George Antheil coupled with dishes from the Futurist Cookbook? Pieces for odd ensembles with unusual culinary combinations? The possibilities are limitless! So in that spirit, I am now inaugurating a new kind of entry on my blog: I will describe a dish or meal that I'm cooking or eating and the music that, in my mind, best fits with the food.

With my hat tipped to Kimball, I am writing my very first Food & Music entry about pesto, which I first made in his company a number of years ago. I decided to make pesto this afternoon because my basil plant was beginning to look a bit overgrown. I started off by making the very same mistake that I always make when concocting pesto: I threw in about ten times more garlic than I actually needed. After tasting the amalgamation of basil, parsley, parmesan, pinenuts, olive oil, and garlic and being overwhelmed by the burning sensation in my throat, I started adding more ingredients to temper the taste. My pesto ended up as a mixture of the aforementioned elements along with a host of other foods found in my fridge and pantry: cilantro, spinach, sundried tomatoes, and flat-leaf parsley. Surprisingly, it tasted great! It was sweeter than my usual version, thanks to the tomatoes.

So, I suppose the obvious pairing here must be Puccini arias; they're Italian and sophisticated, but not so much so as to intimidate the average eater...I mean listener. But considering my pesto-making debacle this afternoon, I'm going with something else: the Argentine tango. As Al Pacino says in Scent of a Woman, "No mistakes in the tango...not like life...You make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on." So it is with pesto!

Check out my New Column on Examiner.com

I've just started writing for Examiner.com, which is an online news source, centered in several cities throughout the US.  I'm contributing articles about classical music in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area.  You can check out my column here!

The Case of the Missing Piano

Last Wednesday, I played the first of two Austen concerts that I'm performing in the UK. The recital was at Hatchlands, which is a National Trust property, and home to the Cobbe Collection of Keyboard Instruments with Composer Associations. After the recital, I had a great time trying out a few of the other instruments housed at Hatchlands, including Chopin's Pleyel piano. (See photo to the right!) The story behind how his instrument ended up in the Cobbe Collection is incredible!

Chopin brought his Pleyel to England in 1848, when he came to Britain for a series of concerts. He moved into an apartment in Mayfair where he kept both a borrowed Broadwood and Erard, as well as his Pleyel; Chopin wrote in a letter that he preferred his own instrument to the other two. Before returning to France, Chopin sold the instrument for 80 pounds to an acquaintance. After he died the following year, the piano was passed from one owner to the next, until its whereabouts were unknown. For almost 160 years, scholars assumed that the instrument had been lost. But a few years ago, Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, a Chopin scholar, identified the serial number of Chopin's Pleyel by doing some detective work in the Pleyel archives. He soon traced the instrument to Alec Cobbe, whose collection of keyboard instruments is on display at Hatchlands. Cobbe had purchased the piano for 2000 pounds in 1988, not knowing that it had once belonged to Chopin.

You can read more about the story of Chopin's Pleyel here.

I had a terrific time playing Chopin's piano. The tone is incredibly warm and the varied palette of colors is striking. It's not difficult to understand why the composer favored this instrument.

My next concert isn't until July 24, so I'm enjoying some free time in London. Yesterday I went to the Wallace Collection, one of my all-time favorite museums, and looked at French eighteenth-century paintings by Boucher, Greuze, and Fragonard. Other items on the agenda include going to the RAF Museum, which I've always meant to do, taking trips out of town to York and Kent, and enjoying any good weather that comes our way by visiting every outdoor pub in town.