Slurs and humility

I took piano lessons for six years as a child.  During my final three years, I would practice one and a half hours each day, usually before school.  I enjoyed it, but -- like many kids -- once I was 15, I decided that enough was enough.  I quit.

Years later, near the end of my legal career, I resumed piano lessons from a teacher in Seattle, dropped out again, and returned to the same teacher several years later.  She was an excellent teacher, far more accomplished than my childhood teacher, having studied at the Leningrad Conservatory as a young woman.  She seemed pleased to have me as a student.

She asked me to perform at a couple of student recitals -- which I did, feeling somewhat awkward among a flock of child and teenaged performers.  I recall performing the second movement to Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata.  To a limited degree, I'm a perfectionist, and I wasn't too happy with my playing. But my teacher told me that it had gone very well, and I took her word for it.

I suppose that compared with her sixth graders, I was a delight to teach.  If I learned all the notes to a piece, followed all the printed notations in the score, and in addition brought some sense of emotional feeling to the piece, she professed herself very happy.  "Good sense of musicality," she would say.

What brings all this to mind is my current reading of Every Good Boy Does Fine, by Jeremy Denk.  I hope to review this excellent book once I finish it, but what I've read so far impresses me with how little I knew about any of the classical pieces I played, with whose playing my teacher had professed herself satisfied.  Denk is not only an outstanding pianist, but an excellent teacher, and his book -- published this week -- is a memoir of his life (written at age 51), intertwined with discussions of the difficulties he had mastering the pieces he was taught.  These discussions are, the reader quickly realizes, a vehicle for teaching the reader an appreciation of musical theory.

For me, it's also been a vehicle for teaching me humility -- although, insofar as my musical training was concerned, attaining humility has been hardly an accomplishment.  I learned to play entire pages, listening to the melody where there was a discernable melody, juicing it up with a bit of emotion, and otherwise just playing the notes.  Denk will spend a number of paragraphs discussing the profound musical effect of omitting just one note in a flight up a scale.  His discussions are a revelation, and what they reveal is that no one ever perfects the playing of a classical piece, because there are always new subtleties to be discovered in a good composition -- subtleties that augment the pianist's understanding of the composer's vision, and that can be incorporated in his performance.

A few minutes ago, I looked over my copy of the score to the second movement of Beethoven's Pathétique, and noted the composer's copious use of "slurs" -- those curving lines above or below the flow of notes.  They indicate phrases, notes that should be considered together, like words in a sentence.  I always ignored them, because the phrasing seemed obvious without them.

Denk, as a college student, tended to ignore them as well.  His teacher demanded otherwise, making him sing nonsense lyrics while playing.

The point of the lyrics was that they would force me to observe the slurs written on the page, taking breaths with the words.  Painstakingly, I played , while Bill made me sing along ....  We practiced until I could do all the slurs exactly as written, which seemed fussy and prissy ....

But Denk appreciated the teaching, once he got the hang of it.  But then a later teacher called the slurs simply "sloppy notation" by Beethoven, notation that should be ignored.

Sometimes, learning from two teachers with opposing views can be valuable.  Denk appeciated the opinions of the second teacher, but ended up siding with the more exacting demands of the first.

These days, I find the slurs almost more beautiful than the notes.  They tell you about the play of the music against the beat, the visible against the invisible. ... Slurs look like an arc, and imply a journey.

I don't offer these quotations because I have any feeling, one way or the other, about slurs.  But Denk's discussions remind us that highly trained musicians can argue over matters that are far above the notice or understanding of a novice pianist -- even one who has been praised for his "musicality" by his well-meaning (and probably long-suffering) teacher. 

Denk's entire book -- in the guise of a well-written, humorous, self-deprecating memoir -- is an encouragement to everyone, whether music novices or experts, to avoid complacency, and to realize that no matter how well you think you know a piece of music, there's always something more to discover. 

Usually, a lot more.