A Review of Gurdjieff, de Hartmann, music for the piano, Volume III, by Charles Ketcham and Lawrence Rosenthal

It is interesting to compare this CD, done digitally, with the original analog recordings of Thomas de Hartmann circa 1950.  Technically, the recordings of Charles Ketcham and Lawrence Rosenthal are far better than the de Hartman which was done on amateur equipment. The instrument itself is better, the micing and mixing is better, and the recording equipment is all better than what was available to de Hartman. 

With regard to the playing there are also many differences—not necessarily better or worse, just different.  Ultimately, it may be up to the listener to decide if he or she prefers one over the other—personally I like them both, but if I had to choose, I would choose to listen to the de Hartmann.  

Charles Ketcham and Laurence Rosenthal are modern world-class pianists with wonderful touch, and tasteful use of dynamic change, nuance, and use all of the elements of musical language like acceleration, ritard, ritinuto, legado, staccato, etc. They bring a kind of clarity of line and structure to the music. And, listening to them, I feel their connection to the sacredness of this music.

So why do I still prefer the de Hartmann? There is just something, for me, in hearing the squeak in de Hartmann’s chair, the very occasional miss-played note, the slightly out of tune piano that brings me back to a moment that has passed, a moment, yes, to move on from, and a  moment to be both enshrined and built upon…

  There is a story attributed to the Sufi Mullah Nasruddin.

“A man knocks on the Mullah’s door introducing himself as a friend who has brought a chicken for the Mullah’s wife to cook into a soup. The Mullah invites him in, the wife cooks the soup, and the Mullah and the guest eat it.

“The next day there is another knock on the door. ‘ Who is it?” asks the Mullah. ‘I am the friend of the friend who brought the chicken—can I have some soup?’ The Mullah invites the man in and goes into the kitchen. There is a little soup left, but not enough, so the Mullah adds some water and serves the soup. The next day another man comes, ‘I am the friend of the friend who brought the chicken—can I have some soup?’

“Again the Mullah goes to the kitchen, adds more water, and serves it to the guest. This goes on for seven days, seven friends, seven watered down soups. Finally the last guest says, ‘This does not taste like chicken soup, it tastes like water!’

“The Mullah responds, ‘That is because it is the soup of the chicken, of the chicken, of the chicken, of the chicken, of the chicken, of the chicken, of the chicken, that your friend, of the friend, of the friend, of the friend, of the friend, of the friend, of the friend, brought to me!’”

                                                                                                 (c) copyright Michael Kovitz , 2016

The Alchemy of Transfiguration in Music

“A blueprint is a guide for making something — it's a design or pattern that can be followed.” —Vocabulary.com

After listening to John Fahey’s vintage album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death, I began thinking about transfiguration. My first step was to look up the word.  Transfiguration is type of transformation.

Transformation has many nuances of meaning. It could be something as mundane as simple change or something as profound as metamorphosis, or something even more than that— like transfiguration.  Change implies making different and different does not, in and of itself, imply either better or worse, while metamorphosis implies a change to another level, a higher level of consciousness or structure, like when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

Transfiguration is something even beyond metamorphosis; like metamorphosis it is a change to another level of consciousness or structure, but additionally, that new level seems to imply aspects or qualities associated with divinity, perfection, ultimate reality, infinite beauty, infinite, bliss, and infinite consciousness—in other words, the highest strivings of creation. In music, transfiguration is when a musician raises his or her expression of the music to a level that inspires the mind and heart of the listener to contemplate the infinite and the eternal.

For there to be transfiguration, a kind of alchemy is required between the composer and his music, the musician who plays that music, and the occasion, or performance, of that music.

Andre Segovia was once asked by Studs Terkel about this alchemy and Segovia answered him by saying, “Lazarus was dead and in his grave and Jesus walked up to him and said, ‘Lazarus arise!’ and Lazarus arose and was alive. At that moment, Lazarus belonged as much to Jesus as he did to his own mother and father.”

The Scriptural context that Segovia was paraphrasing is found in Acts 20:7-12 “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with grave clothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus said to them, ‘Loose him, and let him go.’”

So, the musician brings the music to life by playing it and, in that moment that piece of music belongs as much to the musician as it does to the composer. That is what Segovia was saying. But what I wonder is if all the music I hear is truly alive? Can the singular act of translating a blueprint into sound be enough to bring a piece of music to life? After all, the notation of a piece of music is only a blueprint that enables the thoughtful musician to arrive at an expression of the music that is acceptable to the composer, the musician, and the audience.

On another occasion Segovia told a young woman that she was disrespecting the music. She gasped and then fell silent. Segovia said that he would try to explain and went on to say that both the good musician and the bad musician disrespect the music. He said that difference was in how they disrespect it.

My understanding of his statement was that when Segovia said “the music,” he meant the notation of the music—the blueprint. I think he was saying that the lesser musician does not extrapolate all of the information from the blueprint and makes mistakes with it and therefore, what comes out, does not respect the music and the composer’s wishes. A good musician, on the other hand, goes beyond the limitations of the literal blueprint, understands beyond the explicit information of the literal blueprint, and creates an expression of the music that disrespects the literal blueprint by transforming it into something more.

As a musician and as a listener I begin to lose interest if a musician is merely translating a musical blueprint, even if the expression is superficially different than other expressions I have heard. I get more interested if the expression of a piece of music reveals something new to me about the music, something that I was not formerly aware of—something about its harmonies, or melodies, or rhythms, or structure. I am interested, yes, but still wishing, still yearning, for something more—something that can take me to a higher level of consciousness, a higher experience that touches the highest expectations of what art is and can be and inspires the deepest of longings for a real fulfillment of myself and the meaning of my world.  

When music realizes its potential to take us into places that cannot be described in words, places where one sees a glimpse, or hears a whisper, or senses an awareness of that which is real, that which is infinite, and eternal, then that music is not merely inspired, it is transfigured and it is the nature of that which is transfigured to transfigure all and everything that it touches.

© copyright, 2016, Michael Kovitz

  

Improvisation in Music - What is it?

I’m a questioner, always have been, probably always will be, but I’m not really looking for answers. I’m also not just trying to be contrary, but there are times when answers do not have that so-called ring of truth for me—do not leave me satisfied.

And so, I sometimes end up stopping others in the course of their explanations to question one or another of the assumptions upon which their explanations are constructed.

A good example is the numerous assumptions about what constitutes improvisation in music. The general thinking is that most classical music is not improvised and that most jazz and blues is.

Fair enough, until we dig a little deeper. Yes, classical music is written down and classical players play what is written. Jazz, on the other hand, is often based upon a form—a harmonic or melodic progression, or a tune—upon which the player is free to, so to speak, change it up and find places within the forms to create their own mini-creations—like solos.

Again, all well and good, but only until we begin to ask some of  those inconvenient questions like—is a classical musician just some kind of machine, like a CD player, that reads the information on the disk—in this case the musical notation or the music played from memorization—and then, via the body, convey that information into sound?

Studies have shown that different areas of the brain are activated when musicians are asked to play a scale or a melody from memory and then asked to improvise on that scale or melody. Specifically, an area of the brain involved with the process of self-monitoring is deactivated during improvisation. But my own experience of playing memorized music and improvising shows me that the situation is not quite so simple—not quite so black and white.

 What I observe is that when I play a piece of music, whether I am improvising or playing from memory, the music never comes out the same way twice. When I’m playing well and I'm in control of the piece, it comes out differently depending on my mood, the acoustics of the room, the instrument I am playing, and also what music and musicians I have been listening to recently.

So the question is this, if I really know the music and am not thinking about how to play it, but what I want to hear, and in the here and now of the moment I am intentionally projecting my vision, am I not improvising?

 But perhaps the answer depends on one’s definition of improvisation. If you think improvisation is only that which creates new melodies, chords, and chord progressions—new notes and different rhythm—then what I am describing is not improvisation. Again, all well and good, but personally, I am not satisfied.

Why not? Because I begin to question what is this new stuff that the improviser is improvising? Where does it come from? How did it get there?  And is the improviser channeling something beyond himself—something from the Universal Mind, or God or the cosmos?

Most jazz musicians will tell you that what comes out in an improvisation is what is already inside of them—is stuff that they have in their minds and have already programed into their bodies—the so-called muscle memory. How it comes out, when it comes out, and why it comes out is sometimes a mystery, but there does always appear to be some cause and effect at work in the process. Elements that I described that impact my expression of classical music seem remarkably like the elements that influence the improvisation of a jazz or blues musician—elements like the musician's mood, the room, the energy of the room, etc.  

In other words, it is my experience that when classical musicians play a piece of music that they have fully internalized and when jazz musicians improvise, there is not as much difference as is sometimes assumed. Of course, the deeper question for me still remains—how does either of them do it in the first place? Where is the line between musician and machine, or is the inconvenient truth that there is really no distinction all? Without the machine of the body and the impressions stored in the mind, neither the classical musician nor the jazz musician could play their music.

And so, I wonder, is the musician—is man—really a kind of sophisticated cyborg—not just in music, but on the whole vast field of life itself, running and being run by their impressions—their physical and mental programing?

My coffee cup sits near me next to my computer; I reach for the cup and take a sip. What just happened? Mind, monitoring my senses, becomes aware of the cup and desiring the experience of the coffee commands the body to do my mind’s will. The body is programed for the task of picking something up and moving it, in this case, to my lips to taste—to experience—the coffee.

But where am I in all of this? Who am I in all of this? And am I ever even here at all? One thing I know for sure, it is in the act of playing music that these questions are raised to a level beyond the theoretical and the abstract and in their contemplation I experience a unique joy and happiness—and can I ever ask for more?

                                                                                              

                                                     © copyright Michael Kovitz 2016

"What the world does not need is another guitar player."

I am helping one of my guitar students prepare for her college auditions.
I was struck by the wording of two of the requirements,
“two pieces, one of which is technical and the other melodic.”

The meaning is not unclear; they require one piece that demonstrates
the performer’s technical proficiency and another piece that demonstrates
feeling and expressiveness.

But if one looks a little more closely at these requirements, the distinctions between technical and musical
are not as obvious as they first seem and even seem to promote, perhaps at a subliminal level, a duality in music that is most unmusical.

Technique is, or always should be, the servant of the music.
Technique is the wings that allow musical vision to soar into the angelic realms
of the miraculous.

Though he was not speaking directly about music, I think this statement by

Meher Baba hits the nail right on the head:

“Mind and heart must work together.
Mind without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Heart without mind is like a river without banks—the water having nowhere
to flow, becomes a swamp. Mind and heart working together is a beautifully flowing river,
lovely to behold.”

Paraphrased, the statement becomes:

Music without heart is like a river bed without water—lifeless and dry.
Music without mind is like a river without banks—the music having nowhere to flow,
becomes like a swamp. Music that has heart and mind working together is a beautifully
flowing river, lovely to hear.

Andres Segovia once said, “There are no technical problems—only musical problems.”

What this means to me is that a musician can only teach her hands to do what her mind conceives of—no more, no less. This is not to say that different bodies don’t have different capacities, but whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the body, somehow a good musician finds a way. Take for example the legendary jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt who made incredible guitar music with only two functional fingers on his left hand, or George Allen whose fingers were so thick that he was unable to fret a string without holding down another.

In other words, if the mind accepts a buzz or a wrong note, the body will create wrong notes and buzzes and this will establish a technique predisposed to wrong notes and buzzes. On the other hand, if a musician does not accept wrong notes and buzzes, she will create a physical technique that tends to keep them from creeping into her playing. As my old teacher Jack Cecchini used to tell me, “A good musician gets it right, even if he needs to play it with his nose.”

So, what was my student or I to make of this requirement? Did a ‘technical’ piece mean that it needed to be fast, or complicated, or really stretchy? And did a melodic piece mean a piece with a tune-like melody—like a song? Really, I could name many pieces that are slow and do not sound ‘difficult’ yet demand great control—a balance of head and heart—like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Leo Brower’s Un Dia De Noviembre. And also, are there not many pieces that sound really ‘difficult’ that are in fact relatively easy to learn and to play?

In conclusion, I think that the requirements and pedagogy of many music schools and many teachers are promoting and sending the wrong message. With regard to the very wording of my student’s requirements they seem to be fostering a separation of the head and the heart rather than a harmonious union of the two. Again to quote Meher Baba, “There should be a balance between the head and the heart, but should one err, it should be on the side of the heart.”

Or finally, as Andres Segovia once said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player; what the world does need are musicians and artists who also play the guitar.”

Structure and Function in Bookshelves and the Music of Phil Spector

What do bookshelves and Phil Spector’s music have in common? The answer is structure, but you can’t talk about structure for very long without talking about function.

For example, you decide to build some bookshelves because you need a way to store your books and yet keep them accessible.  Storing books and accessibility is about function; how that is accomplished is about structure. But first, some questions need to be asked and answered:

   

    1. How many books are we talking about?

    2. What are the sizes of the books?

3  3. Where will the bookshelves go?

We need to make sure that we build shelves that are roomy enough to accommodate the books and that the space between the shelves is sufficient to accommodate our larger books.

Will the bookshelves have to fit under a window? Then the shelves need to be long and not very tall. If, on the other hand, the space is limited but the ceiling is high, then the bookshelves can be tall and narrow.

Now we need to consider some other things with regard to ability:

1.      How much are we willing, and able, to spend on materials and necessary tools?

2.      How much time are we willing to commit to the project?

3.      And, realistically, is our skill level and knowledge up to the realities of the project we envision?

Makes sense, but how does this all apply to music? With music as with carpentry, no one just begins to build something without reason and motivation and without some idea of what that something is going to be. Creativity is not the exercise of the infinite freedom of possibilities; creativity is the process of the limitation of possibilities. One needs to start with an idea, and, no doubt, the idea can develop and change as the project progresses, but one does need to start somewhere—with some idea.

Do I envision a song, a motet, a sonata, or a symphony? Do I have the tools and skills to succeed at the project?

Before the beginning there was nothing and that nothing held infinite possibilities. After something emerged, the very nature of something eliminated the state of anything. The first something became the cause and what followed was the effect, and that effect, became a further cause.

I was ten years old when I first went to summer camp in Hayward, Wisconsin. I think I went to that camp for three or four consecutive summers. It was called, Camp Big Chief, if anyone is interested.  Hayward Wisconsin was about 500 miles from Chicago—where I lived. We travelled by train in Pullman cars—you know, the ones where the seats convert into bunk-beds at night. Our train was always a milk train that stopped at every stop along the way.

I liked the lower bunks because they had windows, and I liked to look out the windows at night while I listened on my little transistor radio to whatever rock and roll station I could find. We’re talking somewhere between the mid and the late fifties here. “Sh-boom, sh-boom, life could be a dream sweetheart.”  And life definitely was a dream for this little kid—come to think of it, it still is…

It was an interesting time for pop music—a time of change. Influences were changing from white to black—or maybe white to blues—and then a new white emerged—maybe something more grey—and then a new black—and then there was Elvis who absorbed and reflected all the influences from pop and blues to gospel and  jazz and what eventually emerged was called Rock and Roll—and I loved it!

It spoke to me; it was my life; and I still listen to it, still love it, still respect it, and I still learn from it. In fact now, I feel that I am only beginning to really understand and appreciate the music of the 1950’s and 1960’s.

And Phil Spector; was he a musical genius or what? Consider his famous Wall of Sound.  I know we’ve jumped into the early sixties, but the sixties were the natural emotional and spiritual evolution of the new music of the late fifties. Everything is connected, nothing just comes and goes by itself—could there have been an Elvis without first an Ellington? Did Miles, or Monk, or Coltrane, just emerge from thin air?

Anyway, Phil Spector was a master of structure and function. When he worked with a song he knew what he wanted, and he was very particular—very demanding—in the recording studio. The Wall of Sound was something more than just filling all the space on the sound stage with sound. Sound without structure would just be noise. Putting shelves just anywhere in any way in our bookshelves would satisfy neither the demands of function or structure. And remember, that every sound takes time, and so sound is not just about pitch it is also about rhythm.

Sound has to respect and support the underlying structure of the music. Take for example, and we really could take any one of dozens of Phil Spector productions as an example, the 1963 mega-hit, Then He Kissed Me…

He asks her to dance, he walks her home under shining stars, they kiss, eventually fall in love, and one day he proposes marriage. “I felt so happy that I almost cried, and then he kissed me.” – sung wonderfully by the Crystals.

Not a complicated song; 4/4 time, key of E Major, pretty much a lot of I-V-I-IV, etc., but the arrangement is very intelligent and fully respects and highlights the structure of the song.

The song begins with an instrumental guitar lick—dum da de dum, dum da de dum, etc. —between the I and IV chords.  That same lick, joined by an organ, and later strings, colors the empty white space of the sound stage with a kind of gray under-painting.  It stays with us to the end of the song, also filling the space between the vocal phrases.  

That little lick catches your attention, no doubt, but really what grabs you are the drums—that tambourine on the high hat—is that not the coolest little titillating rhythm? It gallops all the way through the song. And then there is, in the lower frequencies, the thundering drums and bass. Phil Spector really knew to use drums for both tone and rhythm.

Oh yea, and then there is the saxophone which moves to the front of the sound plane to underscore the verse’s change to the sun-dominant IV chord.

And we can’t overlook the use of the strings and upper range of the organ during the bridge section. Listen to it with good head-phones; these are in your face sounds that all but scream at you and are perfectly placed to heighten the climactic moment  of the song, musically and lyrically, that comes at the end of the bridge.

Contrast this use of strings with the instrumental interlude between the last verse and the repeat of the last verse. This is the verse where he asks her to marry him. It is not the climax of the song, more the anti-climax, that which begins to bring the energy down enough to give the song a satisfying ending—like beginning to apply the brakes to your car  in order to stop without going through the windshield.. Here the strings have quite a different feeling than they did in the bridge. They don’t scream; they express a sweet, soft, melody, which enables a subtle lessening of the energy in the repeat of that last verse.

Again, consider how important the repeat of the last verse is. Without it, the song would not have had such a smooth ending, and even so, the last line had to be repeated three times to bring it to a close.

And what do we hear at the very end of the song? Yep, that same little lick we started with:

                                           dum da-de dum,

dum da-de dum,

dum.

Oh, and by the way, all that I described, and more that I haven’t,  actually takes place in a mere two minutes and thirty two seconds!                                      

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