The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

From Piano Pieces

From Piano Pieces To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor, or viper, as well the sweet incense of love’s distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist. The result may be a mess or a blessing, but too often resembles a de facto hand-me-down, a vestigial imitation, a weary if wily synthetic. Sound is the ether which sustains and infuses the universe. But not the one isolated sound, always groupings and multiples of sound. A single sound is but a vanity, a betrayal of communion and community. The presumed beauty of a single tone is rather like Helen without Troy: a narcotic without dreams. Before the invention of ecology there was merely consort: a calculus of variegated sonorities in a four-dimensional phase, a topological dance choreographed by Balanchine but in sound. When the shepherd sings, the earth moans, the wind murmurs, the aspen trembles. Each refrain is but a response to a chorale audible only to Schumann ’s elect, to the better and silent portion of human character. When Artur Schnabel said that he played the rests, if not the notes, better than other pianists , he was acknowledging that subliminal choir only silence can reveal. Cantabile is the cartilage connecting any two sounds, whether made by bone or braying. It is the silken fiber which binds two grains, two islands, two exiles. It is the urge to fathom, to accept, to exonerate the alien gasps of mistrust, the lonely pleas, the harsh deeds, the frigid icons. It is the necklace and dna of the chain of being. It is, according to Beethoven, the most important thing in piano playing. By itself even the sweetest tuned tone is an aberration. Beautiful tone, the adornment of our profession, is ultimately a narcissistic void. There are only tones, tones to be gathered like berries or shells, and to be strung together after scrupulous investigation of the chemistry of shells and berries and of their mating habits. And how do shells and berries mate? Listen to the left hand in re- [ 84 ] russell sherman ⢇ cordings by RachmaninoV, to the network of responsiveness it authors and its relationship to the melody. A tone is beautiful only in context. Or as Edward Steichen pointed out, in the first stage of photography one is interested exclusively in the foreground tree. In the next stage, the surrounding shrubs and grasses become the focal point. Then finally we turn back to the tree, but within the dynamic of reciprocal planes. The conductor Charles Munch once said that the reason God gave us two ears was so that what goes in one may go out the other. God also gave us two hands. What one reports, the other retorts. Each hand has two parts, in dire and direct opposition. Thus the thumb works against the fingers, creating two prongs which form a flexing claw to explore the spectrum of sound. But most pianists play with one hand, all quarters falling into an amorphous and garbled blend of sound, whether smooth or coarse. A minority play with two hands, approximating the zones of high and low. A few elect to play with four hands, the thumbs like horns and violas. The eVect can be like spinning objects in curved space, near and far, the fixed poles of illusion and reality dissembled, disarmed, and disarming. John Constable observed that the art of reading nature is no less “acquired” than the art of reading hieroglyphics. To grasp and delineate the relationship between melody and bass is no less elusive. One may speculate that the topic of free will versus predestination should be thoroughly researched (or splendidly intuited) before melody and bass, the surrogates for fantasy and fate, can be properly matched. Therefore, the logical starting point for the education of a pianist might well be the study of Greek tragedy. The idea of technique is consistently misunderstood. People think that piano technique is a matter of double thirds, fast octaves, and such specialized tricks, analogous to the current debasement of figure skating into nothing more than a series of triple axels and toe loops separated by long intervals of coasting and prayer. Technique, like poetry, is but handmaiden to the music, and should be entirely at the service of the imagination. Without imagination there is no technique, only facility. Catching a sound, like catching a fish, is a function not of physical prowess but of the hand’s sensitivity in gauging...