For the Vibes: Just a Title

“She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately—with a more premediated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish—to clutch at one’s heart.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“My work should be judged as it enters the ears and heads of listeners, not as it is described to the eyes of readers.” -Arnold Schoenberg

In our journey towards abstraction, we are now past the point of visual and textual inspiration. Now we're dealing with titles that point vaguely in a direction—'Nocturne,' 'Ballade'—and leave the rest up to us.

The interpretation chain is now

Vague/Unnamed Inspiration > Composer > Performer > Listener

giving more freedom to the last two links of the chain. The focus moves to how we can listen in different ways, and how different performers treat the same music differently, sometimes even in competition with each other.

The Nocturnal

For many of us, night music was our first exposure to classical music—our parents played us a Brahms lullaby to put us to sleep. This has done no favors for classical music's reputation as sleep-inducing, and those of us who hold it up as evidence of classical music's greatness just make the problem worse.

In this section we'll use the vast world of night music to explore the interpretive range that we're given, including how this music can keep you awake or put you to sleep depending on how you listen to it.

For Chopin, night time can bring many things—it can bring respite, it can bring contemplation, it can bring loneliness, and great sorrow. Always they have “long-necked, sinuous” melodies. They can be played alone in the darkness, or surrounded by close friends.

The first time I heard the posthumous C-Sharp Minor Nocturne, my best friend Brandon played it in a studio class for our teacher, Natalie. It was a small monthly gathering in her living room, maybe ten students and all their parents, reluctantly listening to the other kids. After Brandon finished and we clapped, Natalie said, “OK, this is a tragic piece. Now start it again like your mother just died.” He raised his hand slightly to play with a soft touch and instead started banging the opening chords in mock celebration. His mom groaned, the other students burst into laughter, and Natalie decided it was time to move on to the next performer.^💬

The 2002 movie The Pianist, based on a true story, shows this Nocturne twice, once as the Second World War was beginning, and once at its end.

These images have stayed with me all these years. The privateness and inwardness of the piece and the playing interrupted by bombs and the performer's inability to tear himself away from it. Imagine how that piece felt to play in Poland near the beginning of the war.

And then, when the theme is played again many years later in 1945, it has a very different meaning. There is the viewer's relief knowing that the faces we see on the screen are alive. The great leaps feel almost exultant in their freedom whereas before they felt like they were struggling to climb out of despair. But alongside that relief is also the great tragedy behind it. Somehow the music is able to make space for all of this in the same notes at the same moment.

Now here is a 2015 performance by Menahem Pressler, played at 92 years young.

I can't tell you what Pressler is thinking about while he's playing. I don't think it's the abstract idea of “night time.” But at the same time, there's something about the atmosphere that feels like it would be out of place on a bright afternoon.

There are many descriptions that might feel apt. I like pianist Vladimir Feltsman's description of an “atmosphere of yearning nostalgia.” But I'm pretty sure Pressler isn't thinking about any description. If I had to guess, he's just listening deeply to every note, every sound from the moment it starts to the moment it connects to the next one.

(I had to look this up, to be sure I wasn't hilariously wrong, and to my relief I found this quote from Pressler's interview with Noa Kageyama: “When I have my best days, I don't think about anything. I listen. I'm inside the music. I sing it, I, I play it. I don't think of anything.”)

As both a musician and a listener, this is the gold standard. But to truly exist inside the moment, inside the sound—those are the best days. Natalie called it the “ears flapping in the wind” feeling.^💬

This listening is a kind of intimacy. These Nocturnes from Lili Boulanger and Clara Schumann are so intimate that I almost feel intrusive watching. It's like the musicians are in their most private moments, writing in their diaries, getting ready for bed, while the audience looks in through the window.

These Nocturnes live in the same space as Chopin's—they manage to hold peace and quietude alongside a depth of emotion—mostly contained but occasionally bursting out. These pieces feel like they belong in a dark room, with as few people as possible.

Both recordings were made without audiences, and I can't help but wonder how they would have come out if the seats were full. Would they, like Pressler, have brought us inside the music with them? Or would they not have been able to reach the same level of vulnerability? Maybe this is the true heart of the Nocturne—recreating the atmosphere in which we are our most exposed.

Let's consider that lens in the context of music not labeled “Nocturne.” Chopin's Piano Concertos—some of the only larger scale works that Chopin wrote—were vehicles for the composer to “show off” and achieve some sort of commercial success. But the slow movements of his two concerti still feel like Nocturnes.

There's a natural inclination to take absolute music and put it into a more concrete category, like Nocturne. From a pianist's perspective, it can help you make an interpretation more specific—you might even choose a piano that helps you get a more whispery sound depending on the scene that you have in mind.

From a listener's perspective, it's possible that picturing a clearer scene also strengthens the emotional connection. The irony is that thinking about what the scene might be actually prevents the flow-state listening that a nocturne requires. Can you have it both ways?

Night Music with a Program

Béla Bartók's third piano concerto also feels like it could bring us music from the night. But for Bartók the sounds of night aren't always intimate; they can also be eerie. Maybe you hear frogs croaking, insects humming, or birds twittering.

Let's fast forward through the first movement: we wake up to morning and a relatively simple folk tune. But by the time it returns 5 minutes later, its comfortable melodies have been given slightly uncomfortable nocturnal harmonies. The main theme is broken apart into bird calls exchanged between flute and piano and the movement is gently put to bed.

The nocturnal second movement opens with an evening prayer, a chorale marked Adagio religioso (Slow and religious). The prayer grows more and more urgent, until it is interrupted by what sounds like white noise.

When I was first preparing this piece, I could never understand this effect. Then right before a performance, I traveled to Malaysia for a wedding and spent a week in the Bornean rainforest. In the middle of the night I heard the amalgam of all these animal sounds. When I would walk around, bats would fly right by my head. There is indeed an eeriness to it.^💬

And even though Bartók's night time unsettles us more than Chopin's, his music still benefits from that type of close listening. This helps us to hear not just a couple minutes of noise, but a cricket here and a bird call there.

Does being told about the bird calls somehow cheapen the emotional impact? For me, the only reason Bartók's night music works is because these “effects,” as they're often pejoratively called, are in service of the same vulnerability that Chopin chases.

Bartók's juxtaposition of serenity and anxiety resonates with my own experience of the nighttime. And whether this particular section contains more worry or optimism is up to performer and listener.

Moonlight

But what if we flip the script, and instead of trying to put programs onto absolute music, we try to let the programs recede from programmatic works? Can we apply the intimacy and flow-state listening of Nocturnes to works with specific titles?

The works of Claude Debussy, which live between the worlds of the nocturnes that we've seen so far, are perfect for this.

He provided titles for his preludes, but instead of putting them at the beginning, he put them at the end of the piece, with an ellipsis, like “…Ondine.” When I perform them, I prefer to play the piece and only tell the audience the title afterwards.

Like the impressionist paintings of Claude Monet, Debussy's works blur the edges of what we think we're hearing. We can usually still identify the original subject matter, but piecing together what the original scene looked like “in real life” is not the purpose of portraying it this way.

Claude Monet, Water-Lilies, Reflection of a Weeping Willow

The piece below is Clair de lune (Moonlight), from a poem from Paul Verlaine. In that sense it can be interpreted as a Nocturne or Tone Poem, but I put it here as more of a Nocturne.

For those who want something less well-known, the alternate selections come from collections vaguely labeled Preludes or Images. They lack the operatic melodies that characterize Chopin's nocturnes, and their dissonant depictions of night outdoors sometimes share more with Bartók's nocturnal creatures. What they share in common with both is the vulnerability of night time—and the request to let your attention rest in the colors of the moment.

The pianist Jeremy Denk, a teacher of mine, writes

In French music, often, some part of the sensual clings to even the purest stuff. The explosion of a taste on the tongue, the skin-shiver elicited by a light touch, a rustle of fabric… To play French music without some of this frisson is appalling.

And to receive it as a listener is to abandon oneself to the present sound, as with a Chopin Nocturne. These works all thrive on their privacy and allure that draws you in before opening up. ^💬

It must be said that Debussy actually resisted the label of “impressionist,” which he took to be concerned with the objective, aesthetic, surface-level impression of things. The word was actually invented to mock works like Monet's “Impression, Sunrise,” jeering them as unfinished because the objects lacked definition. Debussy preferred instead to align himself with the Symbolists, like poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whose works captured subjective, internal worlds—the essence of moonlight and the experience of moonlight, not just the moonlight itself.

In today's casual usage, we've largely lost this distinction, and use the word Impressionism to refer to this aesthetic style of blurred colors and sounds, as opposed to the more clearly defined structure and melody of pieces like the Chopin Nocturnes.

The important thing isn't the terminology, but the invitation to inhabit the sound. And if you're not in a place to accept that invitation—or you just decide that it's time to turn off your brain and go to bed—the music might just put you to sleep instead.

Lullaby

So at risk of putting everyone to sleep, I'd like to finish this section by coming back to the lullaby—music that was actually intended to put you to sleep.

Ironically, I discovered this piece in pianist David Kadouch's YouTube series, melodies that keep me up at night. Ilse Weber's Wiegala is a lullaby with a beautiful melody that a child could easily fall asleep to if played in the background. But I find that even this music, if engaged with and truly listened to (its haunting context aside), carries enough musical stimulation to move you.

I wonder if Wiegala would make it onto a commercial album of lullabies. (Those collections often feature music that, if actively listened to, would not actually put you to sleep.)

Schumann's “Träumerei” (“Dreaming”) from his Scenes from Childhood is one of those pieces that often features on commercial albums of lullabies. Even though it's not a lullaby, it's quite understandable how it gets there.

Still, part of me feels like the piece deserves better than to put people to sleep. When someone invites a listener into their innermost dreams, it is a privilege.

Hopefully the night music in this chapter has primed you to listen like you're listening to your best friend. But if you're not currently in the right mindset, there is no shame in skipping this video and coming back when you are ready.

Here is Vladimir Horowitz in his return to Moscow in 1986, 61 years after leaving to go West (more history here). Träumerei, a humble, understated “scene from childhood,” is his encore. For us today it is easy to click a button and watch this online, but it was an emotional and special occasion for the pianist and the audience together. Horowitz is making this vulnerable personal statement and opening his heart to the world, and I feel a bit of a responsibility to listen with the intent of really hearing everything he has to say.

Ballades

A teacher once told me a legend that when Arthur Rubinstein—who many (myself included) consider the greatest performer of Chopin's works—recorded them, he did half a dozen takes, different each time. After he finished, he walked out of the room and told his producer, “You choose.”

I don't know the extent to which this is true, but I love it, the idea that any number of interpretations could be equally valid, and that the ones that we now consider our “reference” could easily have been completely different depending on the producer's mood.^†

The Ballade passes additional responsibility on to the interpreter. It tells us, “there's a narrative here” but then refuses to tell us what it is. Like if a novel was just titled “Story,” and you had to figure out what it was.

What's the point of that? Clearly every piece of music can be interpreted—almost by default—as a story.

To me, the point is not that the piece is a story, but more about what the piece isn't. And what it isn't is a specific story. It is not the story of Ondine, or the story of Night Transfigured. ^💬

For the last several chapters, we've been trying to show how a piece can be interpreted as a specific story. Now we'll take a look at the other side—how a piece can resist that interpretation.

Chopin's Greatest Hit?

For all the ink spilled about Liszt by musicologists and critics (and now, in the Pocket Concert, me), it is Chopin who has become synonymous with the word “Ballade.”

Chopin's first ballade is a favorite from prodigious grade-school students through conservatory-level students, at college auditions and professional competitions, and by superstars on the biggest stages. It's featured in The Pianist, Your Lie in April, and its fair share of r/piano Reddit posts.

It is so popular among amateur pianists that I know of multiple piano meetup groups that had to limit its performances because it was being played at every meeting. Journalist and amateur pianist Alan Rusbridger even wrote a book about his journey to learn it, Play It Again, An Amateur Against The Impossible.

Those of us who have lived with this piece typically have a specific recording that we would default to (for me, it was my teacher Natalie's). But it is a piece you can approach from just about any angle we've discussed so far in this guide. It is featured in masterclasses, films, ballets, and allegedly has a literary basis. So I think now is the time to show what it is like to go beyond the “first listen” of a piece, and accelerate that process of considering different interpretations.

Why do pianists love it so much? Probably not its “story,” the Mickiewicz poem that it is based on. I'm guessing the vast majority of the piece's fans fell in love without even knowing it was inspired by a poem.^💬 But unlike what most concert hall program notes would like you to believe, it is nearly impossible to give a play-by-play of the piece without discussing a specific interpretation.

Below, we'll compare interpretations of this piece, with commentary from Tony Yike Yang and Aurelia Shimkus in a video for the music lesson company Tonebase.

For the first comparison, two of the legends, Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz.

Here's Rubinstein, in the introduction:

It feels like Rubinstein is gathering his listeners 'round to tell an epic tale.

And now here's Horowitz:

Aurelia points out, while Rubinstein is setting up his story, Horowitz jumps into the story immediately.

Tony adds that it feels like Horowitz's playing is in the 1st person, while Rubinstein's is from the 3rd. Horowitz has already given us an entire range of expression just in the first few seconds of the piece, fiully embodying everything the music has to offer. Rubinstein is more of an emotionally distant narrator, not giving it all away just yet.

This distinction of first person vs third person playing has always fascinated me as a performer. I always thought it was more fun to play as if I were a character myself. But the difficulty is—if you reveal so much of the drama immediately, where can the piece go from there?

Let's go to the second theme. Here's Horowitz (warning—PG-13 content):

The way Horowitz manipulates time is also utterly unique—he makes you long for the next note and wait just long enough, and then when it comes its sound still subverts your expectations, being deeper or gentler than you thought it would be. He draws you into the scene with him.

How could a scene like this—so sensual, so personal—work without that first person involvement, let alone from a fourteen-year-old kid? Here's Sultanov.

Compared to Horowitz, Sultanov's playing feels so pure and simple—an uncomplicated serenity. Sultanov might be watching a mother rock her baby to sleep, or he might just be watching waves lapping on the beach, no human in sight. It's wild to me that the same notes can support both.

For one last final comparison, we go to the development section—the middle bit where, like a book or a movie, stuff starts to go down (that's the technical terminology, more on this later). You may use the performance switcher to choose between Horowitz and Michelangeli, two different characters completely.

Horowitz's ability to change character on the spot is incredible—but what really differentiates him from other musicians is his commitment to it in the extreme.

Michelangeli, a brilliant musician himself, opts to play it straighter, giving us what we'd call a longer line. Through hearing these different interpretations, we've gotten a bit of a shorthand to what classical music looks like beyond the first listen.

What is a listener to make of this?

It is possible for a listener to like two opposite things. But the listener has to buy whatever the pianist is selling.

The pianist can do their best to point out a character change, and it could surprise the listener in a delightful or an off-putting way.

On the other hand, if the listener wants to hear a character change that the performer ignores, they can be disappointed.

The thing is, we don't really have to choose which way we like best… unless we do. Expand the section below for a taste of the world of competitions, and a complete performance of the Ballade from a Chopin competition winner.

I'll get down off my soapbox now, but before we get to the rabbit hole where I play critic and give my own recommendations, I want to celebrate reaching the end of the journey from concrete to absolute music.

There are plenty of other pieces with ambiguous titles—pieces with names like Preludes, Intermezzos, or Moments Musicaux—most of which are just shorter pieces or collections of absolute music. I don't believe they require special treatment beyond the way we would approach a Nocturne or a Ballade.

The next section of the book will switch gears to another way to approach classical music—the stimulating, intellectual way in, where we focus on fully abstract pieces that are named after their structure: variations, waltz, sonata, symphony, fantasy, fugue, and the like!