Science versus art
Posted on 30 July 2010 | Comments Off
Further to my earlier thoughts about the nature of art, I notice an interesting way in which the idea of scientific rigor and has spilled over into the creative disciplines.
One of the great triumphs of the scientific method is that it is by nature a communal process and therefore far less prone to error than it otherwise would be. The theory is that if one person comes up with an idea and tests it, their work is to be treated with healthy skepticism. If many people review the idea and perform their own tests, the reliability of the result is vastly increased. In other words, Scientist A arrives at a conclusion that he believes to be useful and correct, but his work is not truly valid until it has been thoroughly examined by Scientists B through Z.
I have no doubt that this is in fact a wonderful system. It is especially important to test scientific results that potentially impact many people, such as new medical procedures, crop fertilization techniques, whatever. I wouldn’t want a surgeon to tell me he had a great new brain surgery technique that he was sure would work perfectly; I’d like to hear from a bunch of other experts that it was safe before going ahead.
So, it can be agreed that the scientific method is a useful and productive way to conduct the activities of science. But it seems to me that the idea of communal effort and peer review has reached far beyond the scientific community into the area of art, where it is far less applicable. Excellent examples of this are the reviews I quoted in my last post about Glenn Gould. What we have here is an extension of the peer review process (which may in fact be rooted in a far more basic aspect of human psychology, rather than springing from the scientific method per se): an artist working alone and outside the norm is found to be suspect, and a panel of “experts” feel it their duty to reign in their wayward colleague in any way they can.
Of course it is a terribly appealing idea that there exists a certain truth or “correctness” that can be located if we leave no stone unturned and involve as many people as possible in the search. If an artist works alone and follows only his inspiration and creative discipline then “peer review” tells us that some aspect of what he produces will no doubt be eccentric or at the very least not well-fitted into the appropriate pre-existing set of expectations.
I get the distinct impression from those Gramophone critics’ remarks that they in fact believed it would be better if Gould had not played the way he did. But how can this value judgment even be considered? If a doctor theorizes a new surgical technique, then it is a matter of tremendous responsibility to ensure that the technique is sound and no patients are harmed. If an engineer designs a new airplane wing, it is necessary that the design be fully vetted so the plane doesn’t crash.
But if an artist makes art in a certain way that some person happens to find displeasing, so what? No planes will fall from the sky or patients expire on the operating table. I had a piano teacher a long time ago who made a point of criticizing another teacher whose ideas about technique were “not widely respected.” Well, what does that even mean? Surely there are certain things that we can agree are incorrect, such as playing the piano with the toes instead of the fingers. But I have a feeling that’s not what my former professor was talking about. Rather than issuing a knee-jerk condemnation of anything different, a far more productive path of inquiry would be to determine if in fact this teacher’s techniques helped students learn to play the piano successfully. Although methodology is very easy to argue about, results aren’t.
The result in the case of someone like Glenn Gould was that he was an extraordinarily accomplished pianist and that he was extraordinarily good at communicating his creative ideas through music. Do some people dislike what he did? Of course. Some people are also in awe of what he did. Both positions are fine. What is not fine is questioning his very competence or throwing into doubt that his work was done in good faith.
Art is a profound form of self-expression that exists in a world quite far removed from the objective realities of science. To attempt to make the creative process adhere to a logical methodology is just ridiculous and will lead to only the most pedestrian and boring creations. It’s quick and easy to dismiss art we don’t like, and even to condemn those that create it. I freely admit that most of Brahms’ music leaves me cold, and I could give a whole litany of reasons why. But that doesn’t give me the right to question in any serious way his genius or his sincerity. I suppose I could do so just to be provocative, but that seems like an awfully shallow thing to do.
The myopia of critics
Posted on 13 July 2010 | Comments Off
Several years ago, Gramophone, the venerable classical music publication, did the world a great service by digitizing pretty much everything they ever printed, allowing visitors to their website to search for articles going as far back as the 1920s. Tonight I was browsing through the archives looking for reviews of Glenn Gould’s recordings dating from the time the albums were initially released.
Gould has become somewhat canonized by the musical press in recent years, so most CD reissues of his recordings are greeted by contemporary critics and journalists with good-natured forbearance, if not outright enthusiasm. That’s perfectly understandable, now that we can look back on Gould’s life and career in its totality, perhaps with a more complete perspective on what he was attempting to communicate as an artist.
However, in the 60s and 70s the musical press had no such luxury and often had to get their brains around some very original, unprecedented music making. I figured it would be interesting to see what critics from those decades were saying, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Here’s a handful of the most, um, colorful quotes:
On Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5:
An astounding performance, and that comment is not intended to be complimentary. If you progress beyond the extraordinary heavy-handed opening flourish and the loud groans (presumably from Gould) that accompany it, you will get first a heavy-handed and none-too-exact account of the main tutti followed by a performance from Gould, quirky to the point of absurdity. If this is his now-celebrated idea of replacing live performances with recorded ones, then I cannot think much of his chances of surviving in a competitive world.
[...]
Plainly he was riveted himself by every note he played, and no doubt in the concert hall this performance would have presented a gripping if highly unorthodox experience. In the privacy of one’s own room certainly not – and let that be a lesson to Mr Gould in his crusade to do away with concert-giving.
On Bach’s Art of Fugue:
I am sure Glenn Gould put a lot of hard thought and work into his playing of the Art of Fugue, which he has presumably recorded complete, but the result is most disappointing. At the best he would have had to face the competition of Walcha’s superb playing of the work, on the organ of St. Laurenskerk, Alkmaar, which Denis Stevens recommended so enthusiastically as a definitive interpretation in his review of May 1957, and again in 1960 when the stereo version was issued; but this jerky, rhythmically over-emphasized playing, the constant use of a détaché instead of a legato touch, and registrations far less imaginative than Walcha’s, is very far from the best.
On Brahms:
Hearing this music not for a single moment left alone to tell its own tale, but constantly distorted by this pianist’s eccentric imagination, it took a great deal of determination to make myself sit out the second side.
[...]
Everything sounds short-breathed, myopic, shapeless.
On Prokofiev:
Gould takes a sober view of the Prokofiev sonata, resisting all temptations to virtuoso exaggeration. That’s fine. But there are so many pointless changes to the text, most egregiously a cut of ten bars or so in the finale, that one begins to suspect a case of simple carelessness rather than original thought.
To be fair, I’m picking out some of the harshest criticisms, but the overall tone of most of these reviews is pretty much consistently on this level. Gould’s Bach recordings generally fare better, so at least he was somewhat recognized at the time for his accomplishments in that repertoire.
The most unfortunate thing about these diatribes is that it takes a “critic” only a few minutes to slap together a negative “review,” but it takes an artist literally their entire life to create things that they believe will be meaningful and put them before the public. It’s really completely unfair, and yet this format of one- or two-paragraph summations of concerts and recordings continues to be popular to this day.
In the end it amounts to trying to force the foreign concepts of “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad” into a realm of ideas where such considerations are completely inapt and nonsensical. What is the “right” way to play Bach? Is it to play his music the way Bach played himself? Is it to play in the style of Glenn Gould? Is it to play in the style of Murray Perahia? Is playing the Goldberg Variations on the modern piano inherently “wrong” because Bach himself knew only the harpsichord and organ? Is playing music with no articulation marks in a détaché style “incorrect,” when legato would in fact be “correct?” Etc, etc.
The problem is that we like certainty. Not only do we like it, we crave it. It’s nice to know that the sun will rise the tomorrow, that the weather forecast calls for rain on Saturday, that I’m going to have pizza for dinner on Sunday. But don’t we have enough certainty in this confortable modern world that we can learn and grow from the flights of fantasy that only art can offer? If art meets every single one of our expectations, all the time, what good is it? It becomes nothing more than mechanical clichés, a way for us to kill a couple of hours every day in an inoffensive way.
Is the purpose of art to provide escape, or to provide confrontation, to raise questions? Glenn Gould confronted people with the unexpected, with his own personal artistic vision, and that was clearly way too much for these critics to deal with. If they ran the show and got to dictate what people were allowed to express, and in what way, none of the works of art that we find so enduring and meaningful would have ever been produced.
Technical details, part 2
Posted on 6 April 2010 | Comments Off
I’m currently working on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 in preparation for a recital this summer. While examining the famous octave sections in the last part of the piece, I realized the true source of the primary technical challenge. When playing the F-G-A-Bb-C-Bb-A-Bb-C passage there is one important fact that stands out and of which it is essential to be aware: the distance between the center of each white key is approximately 2cm, the distance between the A and Bb is even less, but the distance from the center of the Bb to the center of the C is 4cm (or greater, depending on the angle).
I use the fingering 5-1, 5-1, 5-1, 3-1, 5-1, 3-1, 5-1, 3-1, 5-1 for the passage. Using the third finger on the Bb makes the distance between the Bb and C less of an issue for the top notes, but the thumb must travel a greater distance than it does between F and G or G and A. Assuming a tempo of quarter note = 120, this means the thumb must travel 2cm in 125 milliseconds between white keys, a little bit less than 2cm between A and Bb, but must travel double that distance in the exact same period of time between Bb and C. This is a considerable difference that must be acknowledged when practicing the passage in order to be accurately incorporated into the muscle memory.
Making good arguments
Posted on 12 March 2010 | Comments Off
While reading a review of a recently-released CD of music by Chopin, I came across the following:
One of the highlights is the B major Nocturne. A delicate flower, this, with middle-ground rhythms so diffuse that most pianists, fancying it as an opportunity for rubatissimo, render the whole thing practically incomprehensible.
Even after accepting that the reviewer’s judgments are to a certain extent subjective, this passage bothered me. I had to think for while before I understood why: it commits a faulty generalization and thus undermines the point the author was trying to make.
A faulty generalization occurs when the attributes of a sample are extrapolated to apply to a population as a whole. In this case, the author no doubt has heard recordings and/or performances of Chopin’s B major Nocturne that he felt were damaged by what in his view was excessive rubato. That’s all well and good, although it would be nice if he provided examples so we could listen and form our own opinions. The problem lies with the generalization that “most pianists” play the Nocturne in this way. Because some pianists play this way, does that mean most do? Absolutely not! And what is meant by “most?” 51 percent? 75 percent? 99 percent? Does every other performance of this Nocturne have too much rubato, except for the one in question?
We’ll never know the answers to these questions; they’re not important anyway. The faulty generalization hurts the reviewer’s argument, and it would have been so simple to avoid:
One of the highlights is the B major Nocturne. A delicate flower, this, but [name of pianist] clearly outlines the diffuse middle-ground rhythms and avoids the use of excessive rubato.
I’m not a very witty writer, so this sounds kind of clunky. A little sprucing up with some more vivid words would make it as enjoyable to read as the original. The end result would hopefully be both entertaining and convincing.
Technical details
Posted on 19 February 2010 | Comments Off
Few piano teachers talk about the extremely subtle mechanics of playing the instrument. Perhaps the reason we don’t often see these issues addressed is because they are very personal; every hand is different and everybody interacts with the piano in slightly different ways.
One big and, in retrospect, obvious issue is the basic physical construction of the keyboard: the white and black keys occupy very different topographies. This can be a good or a bad thing. Good in that it makes scales such as B major easier to play because the position of the black keys fits the structure of the hand very naturally. Bad in that it necessitates constant awareness of the angle of the hand to transition smoothly between white and black keys.
I can elaborate a little bit on this by using Bach’s E minor Toccata as an example. In the first four notes in the left hand three white keys and one black are played (E-D#-E-E). The potential technical issue here is that if the fingering 1-2-1-5 is used (a natural choice), then the size of the thumb and the physical position of the D# can conspire to produce some unevenness in execution. If the wrist is kept straight, as one would do when playing E-D-E, then the leverage exerted on the D# will be different than on the E, thus making it harder to control the volume of the note.
If one reflects for a moment on the physical problem at hand, it is easy to see that by turning the wrist slightly to the left one alters the angle of the thumb and brings the 2nd finger into a more advantageous position. This immediately allows for a more even execution and a greater sense of security in the passage.
The above is a very simple example, but the principles found here can be expanded to any passage in which a combination of white and black keys are used. Of course the level of complexity can increase greatly, but the underlying solution is often the same or very similar.