From Ink to Intuition

Grownups… try to explain things, dismantle them and quite heartlessly kill all their mystery. –Claude Debussy

Practicing at home is like looking in the mirror and learning what the lips do when they say “I love you.” –Pianist Krystian Zimerman

For an impassioned “I love you” to start in the composer's heart—manifest in his Fantasie as a falling fifth and a rising third—and finally be received as an impassioned “I love you” by the listener, there is one glaring obstacle: the performer.

Without a performance, the composition makes no sound. It is just ink on page (or pixels on iPad).

A program note would inform the listener: The falling fifth is Robert Schumann's shorthand for his wife Clara, and it has symbolized his love for her across his oeuvre. ^💬 But reading that never made me feel loved.

For some reason, Natalie never discussed this with me. Instead, I remember her demonstrating the Schumann Piano Concerto—starting the opposite of the Fantasie's theme, a falling third and a rising Clara Fifth, marked “affectionately” in the first movement, and lively in the third movement.

The piece is difficult to play cold, and more wrong notes than right ones came out of Natalie's piano that day. I could see her arthritic thumb and pinky fighting to stretch the octaves. The flesh on her hands struggled to contain the veins and the bones, which, after eighty years of obedience, seemed to find their way out of her skin, yearning to hear the music they had worked so hard to create.

Occasionally, her fingers would give up and her vocal cords would take over, doing all they could to find the missing notes and keep the melody flowing.

But she didn’t care if the notes were wrong or right. I felt love—from Robert to Clara Schumann, from Natalie to me. As her older classmate and idol Willy Kapell said, “Sometimes my fingers work, sometimes not,—the hell with them! I want to sing anyway. And my heart seldom doesn't work.”

The Interpretation Chain

In the years since, I have brought friends along to several masterclasses, and found that the best teachers consistently bring the audience along for the ride too, whether it's a Schumann concerto or a John Cage piece with screws and erasers inserted into the piano strings to turn it into a percussion instrument.

Today, nobody is better at bridging that connection from composer to performer to listener than the conductor Benjamin Zander, here working on Edward Elgar's Cello Concerto. Listen to the initial performance from student Daniel Hass with pianist Dina Vainshtein playing the orchestra's part. I encourage you to watch only until your mind wanders.

It's excellent playing, and some listeners, I'm sure, were captivated for the entire excerpt. But at some point in their lives, every classical listener—more often than we admit—has a moment when the music becomes a wallpaper for our thoughts (or as composer Erik Satie called it, “furniture music”).

Zander demonstrates this phenomenon in his TED talk:

It is so important for listeners—especially new listeners—to be able to say, “that didn't keep my attention” without it feeling like a pronouncement on the education of the listener or the value of the composer or classical music as a whole. But when as listeners we can't see anything wrong with a performance, when it just “sounds perfect,” it's easy to jump to these conclusions because we can't unpack why.

This is the crux of Zander's teaching—music is storytelling, and, critically, about communicating that story to the audience. It is not telling a story into the ether.

Artist Marcel Duchamp said, “A work of Art is completed by the Viewer.” It doesn't matter how “good” the playing is—the only output that matters is whether the people you're communicating with are moved. In other words, what matters is the connection from composer to performer to audience.

I love some of these moments—that the music is something to be with, not something to play. This is the essence of the connection between composer and performer. In the best moments, you can forget entirely that the performer is just reading someone else's notes, and it feels like Hass's playing has a direct line to the composer's emotions.

Zander, who conducts the Boston Philharmonic and Youth Orchestra, has an unmistakable teaching style. As much as his words hit home, it is his body language that injects passion into the playing—that is to say, he is conducting. ^💬 There is no question about whether he is trying to bring the audience back on a history lesson to the composer's time, or whether he's bringing the music forward to the audience today. The music is alive and relevant today.

But there's still one more link—the music is brought into the room with the interpreter today, but it still must make it out to the audience. Here's the more tender second theme:

Bravo. Zander's mastery, and now his student's as well, demonstrate what happens when the interpretation chain becomes aligned between composer, performer(s), and listener(s).

For me, this is the very definition of the “classical” tradition—the mandatory passing down of ideas from the composer through the performer to the listener. When a composition is brought to life repeatedly, we can say it has entered the classical repertoire. ^📖

This is unlike painting, where the viewer can look directly at the artwork. In jazz, much of the music is spontaneously created by the performers on the spot. In pop music, the audience listens directly to the band without an intermediary; the album, not the sheet music, is its most important artifact.

In classical music, if there is any disconnect from one link in the chain to the next, the music will feel irrelevant to the living listener, and it could be hard to pinpoint why. It's incredible how delicate it can be.

Maybe you just don't like the notes that were written. Maybe you would've liked the notes played by someone else. Or maybe it would have been the greatest performance ever, but you had a stomach ache that was gnawing at you all evening.

Oliver Sacks tells the story of falling into “what is inadequately called depression” after his mother passed away, until a chance phrase of Schubert restored him. “Schubert and only Schubert, I felt, was life,” he wrote in Musicophilia.

So he paid a small fortune—“a small price to pay (as I put it) for my life”—to see Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert's great lamentation, A Winter's Journey (Winterreise).

And yet, in the hall, he was left cold. Looking around at the rapt hall, he convinced himself everyone else was faking their emotion. But the next day, the critics, too, unanimously praised the performance.

“I was demanding that the music work, where experience had shown me that demanding never succeeds,” Sacks reflects. He quotes E.M. Forster:

Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken.

When the Stars Align: Pocket Concert

Sometimes the stars align.

There are a handful of classical works that are inextricably linked to their performers. Glenn Gould so “owned” Bach's Goldberg Variations that I listened to his recordings for ten years before hearing anyone else play it. Sergei Rachmaninoff declared Horowitz “the only player in the world of my Third Concerto,” and legend has it that the composer—a great pianist in his own right—even stopped playing it himself.

But I would give the prize for “Piece Most Synonymous with Performer” to Jacqueline du Pré’s version of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Like Gould’s Goldberg Variations, du Pré brought the Elgar from obscurity to Billboard charts. Like Horowitz, she inspired generations of eager young cello students (little me included) to flock to the piece. And du Pré’s personal story—from the sweetness of her marriage to the pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, to her tragic retirement at age 28 and passing at age 48 from Multiple Sclerosis—formed an aura around the Elgar concerto, a piece now inseparable from her memory and immortalized in film, ballet, and opera.

For this chapter's Pocket Concert, here she is playing the first movement of Elgar's Cello Concerto, accompanied by her husband Daniel Barenboim and the London Philharmonic.

You might notice that many of her decisions are different from what we saw above, but the same core principles apply—a relationship with the silence, and an emotional abandon that makes her one with both music and audience.^💬

The piece continues directly into the second movement. I won't be offended if you opt to just go back and continue watching.

“Difficult” Music

A page from Messiaen's "Contemplation of the Church of Love"

Sometimes you might think there's an irreparable disconnect in the interpretation chain—a composer you just won't like—but the right performer can still build a bridge between the art and yourself.

My first glance at Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus was a shock. Rhythms had to be deciphered like a trigonometry problem, and the notes, spread out over three staves (as opposed to the usual two), had sharps and flats that seemed like they were sprinkled with a salt shaker. A far cry from romantic Elgar.

It was my first year at Stanford University, and I had just begun studying with only my second ever piano teacher. His welcome was a spot in a recital where his students would each play movements from Messiaen's Vingt Regards. It's a religious meditation, written four years after Messiaen was interned at a Nazi prisoner of war camp. It was a modernist masterpiece—or so I was told.

I felt lucky to be given the “Contemplation of Silence,” which sounded easy, and then unlucky when I looked at the score and saw there was very little actual silence, and then lucky again when I saw the much more difficult movements that my friends were playing.

But as I memorized the piece, the seemingly random notes began to coalesce into something that actually felt like contemplation. I realized that the rewards of “difficult” music are often related to its cost—it requires a willingness from both interpreter and listener to engage and probe and not give up. And when randomness coalesces into meaning the result can be deeply satisfying. If I had been given Messiaen's own program note first,^💬 it might even have spoiled my personal pursuit of meaning.

A great performance will make sense of the messiness on the listener's behalf, extracting a low level concept like a chord with the notes C, E♭, D, and F into a higher level concept like pain.

Below, Joanna MacGregor tries to do something like this for the Regard de l'Esprit de joie, Gaze of the Spirit of Joy, with pianist Ji Liu.

Here she makes sense of the pile of notes to reveal shapes and syncopation which amount, ultimately, to a higher-level impression: joy. To the modern ear, the final version can even find parallels to the ways that joy is expressed in jazz.

With a small adjustment like this, the performer begins to bridge the gap between a composer's inscrutable scratchings and the listener's ear. And all these differences come from musicians faithfully reproducing sound from the same ink on the page.

This is the same for something Romantic like Elgar or Modern like Messiaen. But aside from their musical languages, they differ in that the Messiaen is explicitly “about something” whereas the Elgar is just “pure music.” In Part II, we'll start to break down the context that a piece carries with it by virtue of having a title and a subject matter.