I'm regularly practicing piano these days for the first time in.... thirty years? For a kid who hated to practice, I was pretty damn good (not for a mature adult amateur in practice...), but to my astonishment I'm finding myself in short order playing better than I ever did. My 'adventures' in musical performance as a kid are for another day, but what's great is that as an adult, you finally know the kind of music you want to make, and you can put your ideals into practice.
For my entire adult life, I've been playing music mostly as a violinist in popular genres. I don't write much about popular music, but that's something I listen to as well, even if not with the alacrity and passion I have for classical. For seven years after leaving my bands, I basically put the whole thing aside and concentrated on classical music, but rock, American folk, jazz, and especially R&B are an important parts of my life like any good American citizen - even a chapter of it or three.
Playing classical music is something I set aside for nearly twenty years, but now I'm picking it up again on the instrument I'd set aside by the time I was ten years old (we're not gonna talk about that right now..., maybe not ever...). But playing the piano again is the most musically rewarding experience I've had since I've started driving around the East Coast to hear musicians I particularly value live. Once you get the music into your fingers, you find yourself hearing music in a completely different manner than you do merely as a listener. No matter how well you think know a score, it's completely different - the colors and voice leading get into lower parts of your brain, and the music becomes a literal part of you as you can actuate the music from a hundred different angles you only can as a listener from listening to a hundred different recordings.
I will never have the mental equilibrium to be one of those musicians who can play according to a set conception, but once you try an idea, it's important to let it go right away. You don't practice to focus on the interpretation rather than the music itself (not that I will ever have the technique to do that successfully in anything more than intermediate stuff). The whole point is the dialogue between the performer and the music. One vivid musical memory I have is a comment by David Zinman that it took me 15 years to understand. He said: interpretation is not about what you want, and it's not about what the composer wants, it's about what you think the composer wants.
What you can't understand before maturity is that nobody has the authority to know what the composer wants with complete certainty, and even the composer does not necessarily know what they want. The process is never complete, and in working on every passage, you find new things. With every new runthrough of a passage, you find new musical meanings, and by going from a different angle every time, the music digs further and further into the brain's limbic system. You hear music from your innards rather than your ears, and it affects how you hear every other piece of music too.
And just as, when you're a listener, you find yourself hearing music more completely by playing music more often, you find yourself thinking of all those great moments as a listener when you're playing and trying to recapture some of the sentiments of those particularly spiritual moments in the concert hall. I could run through a series of great musical memories, but that's not the point. The point is, when you're playing the music, it puts you in touch with that spiritual essence that lies at the heart of art.
If you have any time at all and any ability whatsoever, go back to playing whatever instrument you play, or in whatever artistic medium you've ever practiced. You needn't ever be very good, but re-acquaintance with that kind of creation is one of the most enriching experiences you will ever have in your life. You go in thinking it will be torture, but as a mature adult who owes practice to nobody but yourself, it puts you in touch anew with all of your life's happiest moments.
No comments:
Post a Comment