An "excellent instrument"!

I'm gearing up for two more recitals of pieces from Austen's notebooks.  Both are on pianos from the early nineteenth century.  In the last few years, I have played several instruments from Austen's time, but period-piano performance remains largely new and exciting to me.  I have to make several adjustments to adapt to pianofortes from the early 1800s; the most significant is getting used to the way that they are tuned, where "A" is about a half-step lower that the "A" I am used to.  It can be pretty disorienting.  There are other adjustments too, including how I use the pedal, articulate, and phrase.  The first time that I performed the Austen program on a piano from the author's time was about two years ago, when I played it on an 1813 Broadwood grand.  I was able to practice on the instrument for a full week before the recital.  This time I'm not so lucky!  I will only have a couple of hours with the piano before my first performance, which is on July 8 at the Cobbe Collection in Surrey.  That said, I am incredibly excited about the instrument that I'll be playing; it's an 1816 Broadwood, which was signed by John Baptiste Cramer.  Since I'll be playing one of Cramer's works, it's an excellent match!  The piano is also interesting because it is almost identical to the instrument that Broadwood gave to Beethoven as a present in 1818.  Cramer actually helped to choose the pianoforte that Broadwood sent to Vienna, and apparently he chose well; Beethoven, who was already completely deaf by that time, was deeply touched by the gift of the instrument.  He wrote in a letter to John Broadwood: "As soon as I receive your excellent instrument, I shall immediately send you the fruits of the first moments of inspiration I spend at it...I hope that they will be worthy of your instrument."

Doctor Elizabeth

This week I defended and filed my dissertation!  This means that I am writing with a newly-acquired fancy title: Dr. Morgan.  Just like my mom.

During my defense, the five members of my committee sat down with me in my advisor's office, and took turns asking me questions about aspects of my research and writing, offering advice and suggestions, and sharing their thoughts on how to best turn my dissertation into a book.  We discussed a number of topics, but the most interesting for me was whether or not I should include bits of original, non-academic prose in the text or not.  In each case-study chapter of my dissertation, I have written something in the style of a late-Georgian woman.  In chapter 1, for instance, I wrote a letter from a young woman to her mother, describing her daily piano practice.  My second chapter features a short story, my third a series of journal entries.  There are numerous reasons why I depart from academic norms and include these excerpts of original fiction.  Since so much private-sphere documentation is difficult to find, and a great amount of it has undoubtedly been lost, I am filling in a hole in historical material.  I am also using my imagination to bring history alive--just as the pianists I write about used their imaginations to bring character pieces and accompanied sonatas to life.  Perhaps the most important reason, though, is that I am engaging in a process of performative writing, something featured in recent scholarship across a range of fields.  My approach to writing my dissertation reflects and embodies my historical subject.  

My committee didn't really come to a consensus about whether or not my inclusion of original fiction strengthens or detracts from my project.  I know I am taking a risk by deviating from standard academic protocol, and perhaps I will reconsider its presence before I expand the project into a book.  But all the members agreed that I could file the dissertation as it was and signed off on it that afternoon.  

I spent the next two days working on revisions based on their thoughts and suggestions, which included adding a few pages to my introduction, in which I discuss performative writing.  The process of filing turned out to be much more of an ordeal than defending.  I had to re-format, deal with copyright for my musical examples, and fill out numerous exit surveys for the university.  I filed with forty-five minutes to spare on Thursday afternoon and then hit the road for the long drive back to the Bay Area.

I have completed my PhD!  Unfortunately, I can't swear off school forever yet.  I still have a DMA in the works.  I should be ready to defend my DMA thesis within a few months, and plan to make another trip to LA to do so before the fall.  And then I'll really be done!

Piano Practice

I used to be addicted to practicing the piano.  In college, and really long before that, I did it everyday, without fail.  It didn't matter if I had a concert to prepare for or not; practicing was a fixed part of my daily existence.  When my family planned a vacation, we made sure it was somewhere I could access a piano.  In college, I often spent six hours a day in a practice room, sometimes more.  My last year in New York, my school lent me an instrument to keep at home.  It took up about half of my studio apartment, but it facilitated my existence as a chronic practicer perfectly.  

Obviously, things had to change to some degree when I started working on a PhD.  When I first arrived at UCLA, I had to commute to campus to use the school's pianos, which were in short supply.  I was juggling coursework and, by my second year, teaching responsibilities.  I moved my childhood instrument to Los Angeles during my third year of graduate school, but as wonderful as it was having it in my living room, I didn't play it as much--or, at least, not as consistently--as you might imagine.  My reality had shifted; I was no longer a part of a practicing community.  Whenever a concert loomed, I jumped right back into practice mode and put in the hours.  But I didn't get up the morning after the performance to start learning new repertoire.  I took breaks, long hiatuses from practicing.  And I didn't miss it!

Or I thought I didn't.  People say that old habits die hard and it is proving to be very true in my life where practicing is concerned.  When I quit practicing for more than a few days at a time, my mood and psychology begin to shift.  I get uneasy.  I feel restless.  It sounds so cliche, but it's completely true.  Something is wrong; I don't feel like myself.  This has happened several times during extended practice breaks, but each time that I find myself moody and anxious, I have tremendous trouble pinpointing the problem.  I haven't been missing the piano consciously; I've almost forgotten that it exists and that I was once its loyal attendant.

Inevitably, I realize what it is that's making me uneasy and I start practicing everyday once again.  And it feels terrific!  I don't even have to ease into it particularly.  I start up full force.

I just experienced this cycle of events for probably the twentieth time or so.  But it has particular significance this time around.  I am in the midst of personal changes, having just moved to the Bay Area and submitted my dissertation.  And more changes await as I plan my moves for the summer and next year.  It is more crucial than ever that I hold onto the things in my life that have always been there--practicing being one of the most important.  

So enough blogging...back to the piano!

What's Cooking?

I have always liked to cook, but in the last year or two it has become, hands down, my favorite hobby.  (I even rank it above watching tapes 4 and 5 of the BBC Pride and Prejudice over and over again, if you can believe it.)  One of my good friends from New York, pianist Kimball Gallagher, who is an excellent and dedicated cook himself, suggested to me what may be the big attraction of all those hours in the kitchen.  Cooking, he says, is the complete creative experience.  You decide what you want to make, create it, enjoy it until you're satisfied...and that's it.  You clean up, turn off the lights in the kitchen, and go do something else.  The more I think about it, the more I feel that it is, indeed, that notion of completion that compels me to cook.  In most parts of my life, the work is never done at the end of the day.  As a pianist, there are always improvements left to make and pieces left to learn.  As an academic, there is always my dissertation left to finish (which, incidentally, does exist in a complete draft now..but next comes the book version!), new scholarship out there to read, another conference or job to apply to.  While I'm sure that plenty of chefs are occupied with the idea of making progress, so far I have let cooking be one activity where I'm not particularly concerned with self-improvement.  When I set out to make something in the kitchen, it is to enjoy it in the moment and share it with friends and/or family.  If the souffle falls or the tart burns, I might get discouraged, but I start fresh the next day on a new task.  Most of the time, my culinary disasters aren't too outrageous anyway, and something enjoyable emerges.  If only I could finish practicing and revising each day with the same sense of satisfaction and contentment that I experience after a good home-cooked meal.

Inaugural Music

I am amazed by the number of newspaper articles that have appeared in the last twenty-four hours revealing that the quartet at Tuesday's inauguration was playing along with a recording that it had made days earlier.  Some of the articles explain very fairly how the elements made that decision necessary, and make a real effort to show that such a choice hardly makes the McGill-Ma-Perlman-Montero ensemble the latest incarnation of Milli Vanilli.  That said, there is a hint of scandal in all of the articles that I've read, and, in general, the readers' commentary is nothing short of a condemnation.  The eagerness on the part of the public to label the performance as a fabrication or deception is deeply disheartening.

When I watched the inaugural performance, I wondered what instruments they were playing and questioned how on earth they could be playing so well despite the cold.  I didn't draw the conclusion that they were performing to a recording, but I was hardly surprised when I learned that they were.  There is nothing scandalous about that decision.  Had those four musicians performed with strings breaking and the piano losing pitch, would that have been better?  I have trouble keeping my piano in tune in a dry, temperate, climate.  Neither of the string players could possibly have used their own instruments--or really, any instrument of value--for the performance, as cellos and violins are not designed to be exposed to sub-zero temperatures.

Moreover, what no article seems to mention is that the quartet was still up there, in the moment, making music together and responding emotionally as they did.  There were unusual musical concerns on their minds as they strived to match the precise duration of each note in the recording with which they were playing, and those concerns must have disturbed their sense of in-the-moment music making to some degree.  But, as I watch their performance now, with the knowledge that the sound I'm hearing is pre-recorded, I am no less moved than I was as I witnessed it the first time.

If I were to get testy about the inaugural quartet, it wouldn't be about the performance at all, but instead, about Williams's composition.  And particularly--surprise, surprise--about his writing for the piano.  Except for one moment in which the keyboard played the melody to "Simple Gifts" and a few places where it doubled the other instruments as they delivered the melody, it was relegated to the role of elaborate accompaniment.  Williams relied almost exclusively on the lyrical capabilities of the three other instruments and ignored those of the keyboard.  For the piano: lots of notes, little glory.  It's certainly not a situation unfamiliar to pianists, but it would be nice to see Williams break with that tradition.  Pianos--and pianists--especially those as accomplished as Gabriela Montero, are capable of much more than an astounding ability to play lots of notes without drawing attention to themselves.

San Francisco Vs. Los Angeles

After a week and a half in the Bay Area, I'm back in Los Angeles.  I've spent much of the last few years going back and forth between LA and San Francisco.  People love to compare the two cities; they usually focus on issues like weather, pubic transportation, diversity, and cultural life.  The only comparison I'm particularly interested in at the moment is how they measure up as places for completing a dissertation!

In San Francisco, I do a lot of writing in cafes.  My favorite is La Boulange in North Beach, where there's spotty internet, hoards of tourists, and really good hot chocolate.  It's a bad place to try to do any research or extensive writing, but I've had good luck proofreading and polishing there.  I also do a lot of writing in sweatpants sitting at Kevin's kitchen table.  Sometimes the distractions of HDTV and TIVO are too much for me, but his apartment has also been the setting for some of my most prolific and productive days.  Sometimes I end up at my mom's house in the Oakland hills.  It's a great place to write; it's quiet, isolated, and really calming.   And on writing breaks, I take her dogs, Seamus and Frieda, on walks around the neighborhood or through the park behind her house.  In fact, maybe what I love most about working on my dissertation in the Bay Area are the things that I do when I'm not writing: running along the Embarcadero and up Russian Hill, cooking everything the Barefoot Contessa has ever made in Kevin's kitchen, meeting up with my sister or childhood friends for tea breaks and happy hour, and...inevitably...everyday...doing large amounts of Sudoku.

In LA, I'm part of a culture of dissertators.  While I spend a lot of time on my own, writing at my dining room table, I also meet up with friends to work in cafes around the neighborhood.  Study dates have their pitfalls.  We always spend some of the time catching up and chatting about non-academic topics.  But once we actually settle down to work, I find that I do really well with a friend sitting nearby.  I'm much less inclined to check my e-mail or read my favorite food blog with Kariann, Pete, or Joanna across from me, staring intensely at a computer screen.  Like San Francisco, LA's distractions are pretty terrific: strolling to the Grove (basically a mall, but that word really doesn't do it justice), eating at the Farmers' Market (basically a food court in the mall, but again...so much better), practicing the piano, baking, and seeing friends, who are ripe for commiserating about our long days writing and ready to have a good time.

Conventional wisdom says that writing a dissertation is a slow, excruciating process, but, as February 1st--my self-imposed dissertation deadline--approaches, I know I'm going to miss this period quite a bit.

AMS

Over the weekend, I traveled to Nashville for the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. I’ve been to AMS several times, but this was the first time I presented a paper at the conference. My paper was an abbreviated version of my chapter on keyboard battle pieces during the Napoleonic wars. It came off well…and by that I mean that it sparked debate and discussion. A friend had told me ahead of time that the only really intolerable response to an AMS paper is silence; what you want is for people to care about what you’re doing, even if they disagree with you.

The only comment during the post-paper discussion that was difficult for me to swallow was one about comedy and the Battle of Prague. While I like to ham the work up in my performances, offering a very comic interpretation, the entire point of my paper is to show how performance choices influence the meaning of the work, rendering some interpretations that are primarily funny, but also those that are tragic, dramatic, and athletic. I argue that some moments might act as brief episodes of comic relief in an otherwise serious performance. I even begin my paper by stating that playing the Battle of Prague was a way that women coped with war, embodying the events of battle, and my paper ends with an account of the work where the audience is moved to silence and even tears. So it was difficult when a very distinguished listener stood up and stated that he felt I was making a joke out of the piece. I have been thinking through my paper to see if I favor the comedic too much, rendering that the obvious interpretation of my paper. I hope not. Perhaps, instead, some of the nuances of my argument got lost to a hopefully small portion of listeners because of several distractions in the room as I read—technological problems, someone getting sick in the front row.

One of the most exciting aspects of attending AMS is the opportunity to get to know musicologists whose work I admire. Giving a paper makes that all the more likely, especially since some of my favorite scholars came to see me present; it is pretty terrific to mention Matthew Head and Dana Gooley in the text of your paper and look up to see them in the audience. Over the course of the weekend—and in the last two days via e-mail—I chatted with some of my very favorite scholars: Elaine Sisman, Kathryn Libin, and Richard Leppert, as well as Matthew Head and Dana Gooley.

And, of course, the best part of AMS this year may well have been seeing Nashville. If you know me, I’m sure you’re aware that I’m a country girl through and through. How could I not be happy in a city where cowboys strut down the street and live music pours through the doors of bars starting at ten in the morning? I visited the Country Music Hall of Fame, and saw, among other things, Elvis’s car, Earl Scruggs’s bowties, and the bodies of four squirrels that Hank Williams shot and had a taxidermist turn into a bluegrass squirrel band. It was a good time.

Now I’m back in Los Angeles (until tomorrow) and looking forward to some concentrated writing this month. The end of my dissertation is in sight.