Describing Music

After a performance, someone came up to the pianist and asked what he meant by his interpretation of that Beethoven sonata.  The pianist went back to the piano and played the sonata again.

An interesting aside - what elevates this picture to a near-great image?   The theme of black and keys echoed on the boy's shirt.  If you choose a frame of a color that is in a small part of the picture, that same color will pop in the picture.  Here the amplification resonance is within the picture.

Being Simple

Part One
It's not that the male's brain is simpler.  He just wants to reduce everything to its essence, then go from there.  It is not that the female's brain is more complex, but she is comfortable swimming in complexity.  A female Einstein may not have had to reduce the relation of all matter and energy to five symbols, E = MC2.

This difference is often perceived as the difference in men's directness and the women's subtlety.  But what actually happens inside men and women to cause them to think so differently?

In utero, the male brain divides left and right.  A wall of cells dies in the middle.  This does not happen inside the cranium of our fairer sex.

From that early moment, the two brains operate differently.  One result of this difference - if a woman and man damage their speech centers in, say, a car crash or strokes - the man would more likely not talk again; but in the woman's brain with no barrier down the middle, an area in the other hemisphere may take over the speech function, allowing her to use her cell phone to heart's content.

Interestingly, this comfort-with-compexity does not hamper a woman's ability to distill and refine, or to appreciate the aesthetic of simplicity in music, design, writing, or anything else.

Part Two
Simplicity is not just less.

To quote Einstein again, "Everything should be as simple as possible, but not more so."  And we need to take Einstein one step further - to simplify well is not just being moderate in how much to trim, how much to leave.

The pared cello suites of Bach use his few, just-right notes to suggest two voices.  Beautiful simplicity  is not created by stumbling upon a few eureka words or notes.  It comes from a deep understanding of what is essential.

Avoiding Repetitive Stress Syndrome

People misunderstand what causes problems in the hands.  It is not the repetition of hitting the computer or piano keys.  If you do it right, you can play the piano or type 12 hours a day for the next 50 years and never have a problem.  It is the not-releasing between playing each note or typing each character that causes hand problems.

When we keep up the tension between notes/characters, it damages the hands.  There are two related aspects to this.

1.  In learning the cello, I was encouraged to have quiet hands, meaning to not move the fingers around so much but hold the tension on the strings so as little changes as possible were necessary.  I do the opposite, release and move as much as possible.  Which leads into the second aspect.

2.  People play or type too hard.  I can sometimes see and feel the whole table move when others type near me.  Not only are they not releasing, but they are hitting the keyboard too hard.

Now, I have a very quiet touch, and on the keyboard, a quiet sound (not quiet fingers).  Yet I have a very deep sound and can be very loud easily.  Why?

Before I answer, I will make a shocking confession, when I play the cello, much of the time I do not touch the strings to the fingerboard.  Yet I have a loud and full sound unlike m cellist you (don't) hear in ensembles.  If this doesn't shock you, pick up a string instrument and play a string while pressing it halfway to the neck board.  How do I do it?  For this same reason, I can play loudly with ease on the piano.

The small finger muscles in the hand are not for the power of playing.  They are there to guide and direct the large muscles of the arms and chest which should do the heavy work.  The fingers are there to choose the keys to play.  The fingers move to the note so that the larger muscles can transfer their pressure through them.  The great Chilean pianist, Claudio Arrau, cautions against there being any stiffness along the path of your body, arms, hands, fingers.

Arrau studied with Martin Krauss, a favorite pupil of Frans List.  Wow! And taking this into consideration, I still need to disagree a bit.  It's best to keep a firmness in all the muscles so that the work of the big muscles is transferred through the fingers.  Otherwise, the body and large muscles are just positioning the hands and letting them do the work.

When I studied piano from a student of a student of Claudio Arrau, I was taught that Arrau used the Italian method as opposed to the Russian method.  I haven't confirmed how these methods work, but the important thing is the concept behind Arrau's playing.  A pianist is supposed to, slightly, with your entire body, always lean into the piano.  Your hands and fingers keep you from falling into it at, let's say, 45 degree angle.  When I move my hands away while keeping the 'tension' of playing the piano, I actually fall forward into the piano.  The effort in playing is not to press the notes, but to lift them.  This is subtle though.

You will get a beautiful tone this way.  And interestingly, the quieter you play on the piano, the more pressure and work comes from the finger muscles.

I like Arrau's playing, though it was not always, critics tell us, on the level with the supreme top performers.  Yet, when the 2 hour movie was made of the Great Pianists of the 20th Century, which pianist did they end with?  Horowitz?  Gould?  Hoffman?  Schnabel?  Richter?  No, Arrau!

I find I can even watch some of his videos with the sound turned off.  Beautiful.  He was described as playing the piano with velvet paws.  His performance here, at the end of video, The Art of the Piano, is so touching.  Please enjoy.

Arrau's performance only
on Arrau

Goodnight Moon.

I easily overlook the myriad plot holes in Harry Potter.  I enjoy the impossible science of Star Wars.  And who doesn't adore cartoon physics?  So why am I bothered that our moon had been destroyed in Tom Cruise's movie Oblivion?

Well, because it reminded me of a comment made by religious cult leader a while ago -  that the moon would leave us in the Messianic Era.

 If we lost our moon, temperature on earth would fluctuate extremely.  We would have deadly, burning summers and super-cold winters.  Humans would not survive.

The moon does not just revolve around the earth, the earth revolves around the moon.  Not exactly, the size differential causes the earth to just wobble.  If the two objects were of equal size, they would spin around each other.  In equation, as one gets larger than the other, its orbit gets smaller and smaller until it becomes a center of the other planet's circling.

This moon-caused wobbling of the earth makes the earth have a less elliptical orbit, more perfectly circular and even.  As the earth stretches away from the sun at its orbit apogee, the wobble holds it in; when the earth would come in closest to the sun, the wobble inertia keeps it moving a bit farther out.

Alternatively, sometimes its fun to make impossible alternative realities. On the detail of my book cover shown above, the two planets are not revolving around a sun.  This made for fun backpedaling of thought, of how this could be possible, in an alternative universe sense.

Below, I'm giving you a bonus image, a detail from another book cover, a follow up book to the above one.  (And on topic of missing moons!)

How Can a Musician Get a Great Write-Up?

A pianist put an ad on Craigslist today.  Here it is, in part,

Thanks for taking time to read. Im looking to hire an experience and affordable bio writer. Im a pianist who is completely redoing my website, recording a new album, and I just completed another person's album. Im looking for a writer that can use descriptive language that will: focus on what im working on now (and make it sound sexy) and talk about my music and history without using any hyperbole or boring language. The goal is to sound interesting, captivating while being informative.

Writing about a pianist is not hard.  

Writing sans hyperbole or boring language is not hard.

But the pianist needs to be outstanding.

One can describe Artur Schnabel's silences between the notes because they are there.

Or the incomparable precision of variation within one trill by Horowitz because, well, it is there.  Or of his reweighting of Scriabin's chords.

Vince Guaraldi's playing of his own Linus and Lucy can be carefully compared with George Winston's Linus and Lucy, as they both have qualities which lend to descriptions beyond hyperbole.

The same can be said of the differences in Bartok's own playing of his sonatina versus Zoltan Koksis'.

But the best part of praise lies not the wording, but in the speaker.  When Elisha Abas, the great-great grandson of Scriabin, was praised by Arthur Rubinstein as a child, it mattered.  Not the words, but the fact that it was Rubinstein who spoke.

And the best way to get a great write up is to follow the example of the great Bach performer, Edward Aldwell.  He was given a substantial monetary award when he won a major competition, so he dropped out of performing for a while.  He wanted to hone his Bach.  

Play extraordinary, that is how to get a a great write-up.  Sure, there are more cynical ways of looking at things.  "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Every Juilliard musician learns the answer. . . "Connections, connections, connections."  But I prefer Aldwell's way.  I think I'll go listen to a CD of his right now.

Potato, Potahto, Cabbalah, Kabalah

KABALAH means to receive.  People assume the reason for receiving Kabalah privately from a teacher is to keep it secret and esoteric, only for the students who are trusted not to misuse it.

While this is true, the deeper reason is that Kabalah is not like a grammer book to study.  By knowing the meaning of Kabalistic terms and how they interrelate, one has gained little.  It is only by contact with a master that one is really changed.  

It was the blessings of Avraham, Yitzchok and Yaacov that were important and struggled for.  Notice - the blessings were personally transferred, not intellectually taught.  That’s a big part of what Bereshit (Genesis) is about.  

One time, I was in the audience of Stuart Wilde, a modern teacher of energy.  People each paid hundreds and thousands for his lectures and retreats,  He told us from the podium that his long speeches and exercises were just fancy dressing.  Unneccesary.  But if he didn’t have them, his attendees wouldn’t have thought they were getting their money’s worth.  Mr. Wilde said that he could have just stood up and said, “G’day!  I’m Stuart Wilde, have a nice rest of your life.  Thanks for help making me rich,” and they would have gotten his energy and more than their money’s worth.  Then they could have spent the weekend sking or riding a horse of making love instead of sitting in an uncomfortable lecture hall.  (Here, the Wilde story starts to get real interesting, but I can only continue it in person.)

You see, everyone has an energy level.  If you’re depressed, it’s lower.  If you’re consistantly upbeat and highly diciplined in life, say a concert level cellist who runs his billion dollar company with ease and humor, it’s higher. 

What comes to you in life, comes at the energy level you're at.  A car accident, a teriffic job offer, finding a $20 on the sidewalk, or something akin to J. K. Rowling suddenly coming up with the idea to write a novel about a wizard called Harry.  It's not luck or fate, it's the level you choose to live at.  

And just by interacting with someone of a different energy level, your energy levels equalize.  Sometimes a lot, sometimes less than a smidgen - like when you pass someone on the street.  That doesn’t mean you should avoid less advanced people, but you don’t want to spend a whole lot of time with critical, negative, morose people.  It’s common sense.  Everyone knows you get affected by others. 

It was said that in olden times, (whenever that was, mate), a great sage (perhaps Lao Tsu?) would walk through a village and everyone’s destiny would change, people would heal, the drought would stop, only other villages would be pillaged by bandits, or whatever.  

So, should you seek out the spiritual giants and buy the house next to where they live?  Not neccessarily.  You see, when your energy goes up by hanging out with a master, you get uncomfortable after a while.  He will even start to annoy the guts out of you.  You are comfortable living at the energy level you are.  And you’ll just end up thinking he’s a pushy jerk, probably think he’s lazy to boot.  To raise your energy permanently, you have to up your discipline, your balance, and not be critical of what comes your way.  But yeah, it is great to hang with a master or two.

Funny thing though. . . most people wouldn’t recognize a master.  Watch the scene in Star Wars again where Luke and R2D2 encounter this petty, annoying little creature who rudely paws through their foods, talks like a spoiled three year old, and grabs a lamp, banging R2D2 over the head with his stick for it, shouting “Mine, mine.”  He’s dressed worse than a smelly beggar, living in a stinking, backwoods swamp.  

Imagine, not the movie, but you pass by an unshaven, old bum in Everglades on your nature vacation.  He’s living in a leaky shack on a mud island.  Imagine he acts as rudely infantile as Yoda did.  Do you suspect he's the greatest master on earth?  You can’t tell by what people think they can tell by.  Or a master could be that pimply assistant-manager at the Burger King down the road.

You have to have a high enough energy to recognize.  And you have to have the humility to see.  If you over-respect the trappings of your superiors and the powerful, famous, and successful by worldly standards, you will never see.  This is called Daat, knowledge, the ability to recognize, among other things, a master.  Daat is the hidden sefirot, the 11th one.  (This last stuff is for those who want some ancient Kabalah facts.  There’s a great story about how it works.  Maybe I’ll get ‘round to putting it down someday.)

If you want homework, go read Bernard Malmud's short story Angel Levine.  It'll teach you more about Daat in twelve pages than a thick, Kabbalah-theory book.

Grab and Thrill Your Audience!

Some people know it intuitively.  You have to grab and thrill your audience.  It's not just about writing brilliant music or creating accurate paintings, it's about the audience.

Look at Bernstein conducting or Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello.

When Yo-Yo Ma plays, he is not just making great music, he is capturing the audience by adding gestures and facial expressions so the audience can believe he is feeling the music.  A friend of mine who played with him said he kept trying to make her exaggerate her gestures.  Is this bad?  No.  It's a show for the audience.

Joshua Bell is another musician who uses heavy gestures.  Maybe he partly learned this when he played in the Washington D.C. subway and only got a few coins and dollars.  Great music is part of the equation, the biggest part, but not all.

If you're famous already, people will imagine you are playing great.  If you are beautiful, (and aren't most of those successful female solo violinists quite stunning)?  People think you sound better if you look great.

And guess what, even your name makes a difference.  There was a study years ago where essays were graded by teachers.  I remember that the essays with David on them received the best marks, even when they switched names on the different essays.  Yo-Yo Ma has a wonderful name, simple with a familiarity to it that stands out.  You think his musician parents didn't think of this when they named him?  The didn't name him Chou Ming Ma.  Good move.

And who would hear the name Allen Konigsberg and imagine he's funny.  That's why he changed his name to Woody Allen.  And would millions of people pay tons of premium dollars for clothes with Ralph Lifshitz on the the label?   No wonder he changed his name to Ralph Lauren.  He said, "My given name has the word shit in it."  Another Jewish businessman, also from The Bronx, said that some people don't like the Jews, some don't like the Polish or Italians, but everybody like the Scandinavians.  So he called his ice cream Haagen-Dazs to make it sound like it was from somewhere like Copenhagen.

Everything adds up to grabbing and thrilling the Audience.  Bernstein grabbed them with his big, energetic conducting that emphasized rhythm.  You couldn't lean back and snooze.  He played for the audience.  And he conducted with giant gestures and shook his mane of hair.  Now, you have to realize that most of the conductor's work is done in rehearsal.   The professional orchestra knows how just how he wants it.  Hey, the Vienna Philharmonic does it usually without a conductor.

But. . . it's all for the audience and it should be.

Not all successful people know this right off.  But they learn it.  Aaron Copland started writing complicated, modernist music that the common man could never relate to.  He saw what was happening and changed.  That's why we have his simple, direct pieces that are super easy and fun to listen to -  he did it for the audience.  Even the names tell you what he was trying to do  - Fanfare for the Common Man, Hoedown, Tis' a Joy to Be Simple.

Even more surprisingly is a look at Van Gogh.  We all love his vivid, beautiful colors and his painting can sell for over 100 million dollars.  They are gorgeous.  Why did he paint like that?  Because his brother Theo told him that his brown, drab canvases were not what people wanted.  He changed for his audience.

I am going to say it again, even if you think I'm the village idiot,  "You have to grab and thrill your audience."  And you have to use every means possible.  It all counts.  Though it doesn't always have to be with the pyrotechnics of The Stones or Freddy Mercury to wow people.  The quiet image of George Winston walking across the Carnegie Hall stage in his socks had just the perfect resonance.

Achieve That Big Dream

Just because you can multitask, should you?

Not always. If you want the willpower to actually achieve what you set out to do, you need to focus on not being distracted.

Here is the simple and easy recipe for developing the determination you will need to succeed at your big plan, your great project. First, take two eggs and a cup of. . . Wait!

Wrong recipie. Here it is. . .

Even in the little tasks like going to deposit checks at the bank, (an example which Stuart Wilde gave us), do not stop to look at the Banana Republic window display or pick up a newspaper. Go directly to the bank and deposit your checks. Then on to your next task. There is a time to multitask and a time to stop and smell the roses. This is not one.

The determination you will need to get a startup launched, a book written and sold to millions, or a business deal signed on the dotted line, will be built as you become determined with your little tasks. Determination is like a muscle. You need to make your specific intention and complete it. It can be with with anything, like I just did with writing this article.

Your little crowns mean much more than you think.

Choose Your Dreams Carefully

Be specific and clear about what you want. When Donald Trump started out, he consulted a Feng Shui master. The master knew Mr. Trump wanted to make it big in real estate like his father. He asked Mr. Trump one question that determined the course of his life.

The question? ``Do you want to be rich or famous?``

Mr. Trump, I imagine, thought of his father, Fred Trump, who made a fortune developing middle class apartment buildings in Queens. Working just for more money would just be boring. So he chose fame.

The master gave him a piece of advice. `Then put your name on everything you build.` That`s why we have a Trump Tower and a Trump this and a Trump that.

That is why he became a household name. Even after his business fiascos with casinos and helicopters, the bailouts by banks just so they wouldn’t go down with him, big investors still line up for his projects. He is that famous.Remember the tales about genies granting a wish or three? Didn't people often mess up in the stories by not asking for exactly what they wanted? Perhaps if Midas said he wanted the golden touch only for clay, everything would have worked out fine for him.

I don`t think the lesson we should take from these tales is `Think like a corporate lawyer and be overly precise with your words.` I think the lesson is to choose thoughtfully and specifically, like Donald Trump did.

Sure, you need to be flexible and adjust to what life gives you. But decide on the port you want to sail your boat to.

Your Most Important Goal

We all have bills to pay, laundry and dishes to wash, errands to run, and things to learn. So, even when you cut down the dizziness of modern life (from tweeting to gaming) in our lives to focus on your important goals, a lot still gets in the way.

The important thing is to choose one main goal. Pick something you will love. Just one.

Then commit to it and don`t get distracted by other shiny new things, like starting another novel in the middle of your first book, or beginning to study Japanese after you decided to learn to bake breads. 

Decide if your goal is a something you want to do for a month, or until you finish the project, or if you want to spend years mastering it (like the guitar).

It`s often good to set a short time limit on it, say a week or two. After that you can say, "Hey, I ran a mile each morning this week, I did it just like I said I would." Then you can find something else or run miles for another two weeks. And you’ll start again full of confidence and determination. 

How to Stick to Your Resolutions

“All Beginnings are Hard,” we are told in the Talmud. But when we make New Year’s or other resolutions to loose weight, learn to play the cello, or write a novel, no. It seems the opposite. We can easily begin, but sticking to it is hard.

To begin is hard if we do it right. Then it gets easier.

How do you begin well? First, decide what you want. Then make room for it. Decide what it is more important than. We may have time for other things, but they will use up our determination, run down our emotional battery.

Say, if you want to become good at the piano, you may have time to practice at night and then fool around on the computer for a couple of hours. But after a few days or weeks, you somehow stop practicing.

If you decide to quiet your life first, with sleep, meditation, long baths, quality reading, tidying up your home, you may find that you actually did keep up the piano practice. I have been lucky to have three teachers over the years. One thing that each suggested was taking a walk, in nature if you can.

If you are trying to loose weight, it’s not just the not eating and exercise. Look at what is cluttering your life and clean it up. Can you let go of perhaps trashy romance books or constant telephoning? It can be anything, and sometimes when we get rid of one piece of life clutter, we replace it with another, like too much time on the internet or sitting down and finding someone to sit and complain with. Be careful.

In China, there lived one great man a couple thousand years ago, Lao Tzu. We have one very, very short book of his, that’s all. And much of it was probably added later by others. But one of the sentences he certainly wrote was this, “First, practice not doing, then everything will fall into place.” Stop doing clutter in your life and you will magically find the determination to keep going after the goals you set.

Today, more than ever, we need to unclutter our lives. Find that busy, frantic part of your life and replace it. Relaxing and order your live instead. Even putting the bills in order, vacuuming or not rushing with the grocery shopping is good.

The reason beginnings are hard is that we must find and clean out a thing or two to make room. And we are all addicted to our busyness. Compare yourself to the cat in this picture. She is enjoying the simple life.

Begin your amazing life. You don’t know where it will take you.