Books by Charles Rosen and Jeremy Denk on piano playing and the nature of music

I just read two interesting books by classical pianists: Piano Notes by Charles Rosen and Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk. Both addressed the connections between the physical act of playing the piano and the intellectual and emotional aspects of listening to music. This was all interesting to me because I enjoy listening to music (including classical piano music), but I can’t play or read music, nor can I sing in tune, nor can I recall any piece of music or even any long passages of music (setting aside a few very short songs such as Row Row Row Your Boat and Happy Birthday and songs such as The Star Spangled Banner that I’ve heard thousands of times). I can recognize any passage from my favorite music, but I can’t hum anything from beginning to end.

I was discussing this with musician/composer/music-theorist Dmitri Tymoczko (one of whose sayings is “Math is like flypaper for smart people”) and he had some interesting but not completely conclusive responses. Here’s our conversation thread:

Me:

It struck me that when I read a book or see a movie–or follow a spoken story or a logical argument–I see the entire narrative as a sort of fixed structure, within which I can scan forward and backward or jump around at will. This is helpful to me when I am giving a talk–I can pretty much ad lib and feel the structure developing as I speak–or I can see the structural flaws of talks by others. But when I listen to music–even familiar music, pieces I’ve heard hundreds of times, and even when I’m focusing–I’m more like a Turing machine, perceiving only the current instant and with only a vague, peripheral-vision sense of everything that comes before or after.

I’m sure that you have a vision of each piece of music as a whole. But you’re an extreme case. What about people who are not professional musicians or composers? I’m not quite sure how to think about this. Part of it must be the ability to read music (which I don’t have)–if you can attach the sounds to the images, then there’s a direct visual mapping. But I’m guessing that many people who can’t read music can still envision an entire piece. I’m not quite sure what that would feel like–but, as noted above, I can analogize it to my ability to store an entire 3-hour movie (yes, we just saw The Brutalist, and I highly recommend it!) in my head. Conversely, I imagine there are people who perceive books and movies the way I experience music, only in the moment.

Any thoughts? This is perhaps something that William James figured out many years ago…

Dmitri:

I see several interlocking problems

(1) you lack the conceptual categories for making a musical map

(2) a lot of music involves really subtle distinctions that take training to hear – e.g. a Mozart symphony can be pretty similar from part to part unless you know what to listen for (In other words, you are what we musicians call “a muggle.”)

(3) you lack confidence. there’s something weird going on where you can make maps of a certain crude kind, but you discount that, because you want something much more detailed.

(4) you lack experience playing a rock band, where people literally use maps to tell people what to do

What if you took some song you like, I dunno, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” and made a little map? Use the words to guide your sense of the parts.

Part 1a: “That’s great it starts with an earthquake …” Part 2a: “It’s the end of the world” Part 1b: “Six o’clock TV hour” Part 2b: “It’s the end of the world” (Introducing “time I had some time alone”) Part 3: “I feel fine” extended, wordless vocal Part 2c: “It’s the end of the world” Part 1c: “The other night …” Part 2d: “It’s the end of the world” (Time I had some time alone there the whole time) Part 2e: “It’s the end of the world” (two voices in harmony) Part 2f: “It’s the end of the world”

Now if you want you can get more precise: for example, part 1a is twice as long as the other part 1s, and it introduces two new chords at the end.

The more maps you make the more you will start to hear these things.

You gotta crawl before you walk. I worry like you are expecting either automatic or nothing, rather than being willing to take the baby steps. Like “I can’t understand this graduate text in statistics so I am not going to even try …” So much science involves the long, slow accumulation of knowledge. Music too!

Rock bands use these kind of maps all the time, when teaching songs to each other. Part 1 is the verse, part 2 is the chorus. Usually there is a 3rd part called a “bridge.”

Now imagine some classical piece that is really simple: say a slow part, a fast part and a slow part. There’s a map. Here’s a beautiful piece by Messiaen that uses that map. (This should be listened to really loud.)

When I do improvised pieces I often have a little map just like this, maybe with five parts.

Or try Mozart’s Turkish march. I bet you can hear the parts coming back.

I do think there’s a basic thing going on which is that music is like a language, and you are sensing that you haven’t really been trained in the language. You like music, but feel frustrated because you can’t connect with it intellectually. That’s all very reasonable and fair. This is one reason why we like to train kids in music when they are young.

I mean, I go to Italy and see all these glamorous people happily yapping about risotto and such. I always wish I could join in. They are happy to speak English with me but I feel like the risotto yapping would be richer if I could learn Italian. Unfortunately I wasted all my time learning music and figuring out what the Grothendieck construction is …

Dmitri adds:

You might like a book by Jerrold Levinson called “Music in the Moment.” He’s anti-map and pro turing machine. I think he takes things too far but it is a good book, a bracing challenge. He’s right about a lot.

OK, I went to the library and checked out the Levinson book, and I absolutely hated it. I found it so annoying that I blogged something about it–or, at least I thought I did! But now I can’t find the post. Anyway, here’s the story. Right near the beginning of his book, Levinson writes that music is inherently “in the moment” in a way that visual art isn’t because music is perceived over time, whereas you can look at a painting all at once. My problem with this argument is that stories are perceived over time: we read books one paragraph at a time and rarely go back, and we watch a movie in sequence just as we listen to music–but for books and movies I can hold the entire structure–plot, themes, scenes, characters–in my mind, while the story is being told and after also. I have no problem watching a movie or reading a book, partaking in its instantaneous nature, while still holding it in my head as part of a coherent whole. And I’m pretty sure that Dmitri can do this with music too. To my mind, Levinson’s argument was entirely ruined by him not addressing why it doesn’t hold for stories.

To get back to the music-understanding thing, I talked with someone I know who is a good singer and I asked her if she visualizes all of a song at once. She replied that sometimes she’ll start with one passage in the middle and then track the song backward and forward until she’s built the whole mosaic. She also said that if she likes a song, she’ll listen to it over and over until it all makes sense to her and she can see how the chorus, the verses, and the bridge fit together.

In my post, Playing music, listening to music, background music, talking about music, I wrote:

Many writers have discussed how the experience of music has shifted over the past century or so from playing music, to listening to music, to background music–and this all affects how we hear music and how we talk about it. The story is clear enough. Until very recently in music history, if you wanted music you had to sing it or play it yourself, or go somewhere where people were performing. Changes in performance spaces corresponded to different developments of musical style and content. Records and radio made it possible to just listen, and to listen to a much wider variety of music than you’d encounter in your daily life or even going to the occasional concert. And then, as the decades progressed, we gradually moved to the modern condition of music always being available in the background.

It’s my impression that, in general, music is more interesting to play than to listen to. Combinations of notes that don’t sound like much can be interesting to explore, and playing music is a form of exploration or experimentation: even if you’re playing a piece note by note, at each step you’re implicitly experimenting in that you always have a choice to play it differently. Beyond this, I can well imagine that some music can be more interesting than to compose than to listen to or even to play–indeed, it’s not hard to compose patterns of notes that are unplayable by a human using traditional musical instruments. So some of the development of modern music has to be a move from interesting-to-listen-to to interesting-to-play to interesting-to-compose.

Charles Rosen discusses this in his book. One thing he points out that I hadn’t thought about is that if you’re playing music at home, or if you’re in someone’s living room listening to someone play, you can read the music along with hearing it. In a live concert you might not be reading the music but you can watch the playing, which is particular helpful if different themes are being played by different instruments. As Rosen puts it:

Playing Bach for oneself or for a friend or pupil looking at the score (the way the Art of Fugue or the Well-Tempered Keyboard or the Goldberg Variations would have been played before 1770) raised few problems; nothing had to be brought out, the harpsichordist . . . experienced the different voices through the movement of the hands, the listener saw the score and followed all the contrapuntal complexity disentangling the sound visually while listening. Bach’s art did not depend on hearing the different voices and separating them in the mind, but on appreciating the way what was separate on paper blended into a wonderful whole.

Rosen continues by explaining why it is a challenge for modern performers to bring out these patterns through sound alone using various tricks of phrasing and emphasis that would not have been needed in Bach’s time. I’d say it’s an interesting paradox, that the most faithful presentation of the music would not be the same as its original form, but I guess this occurs all the time when appreciating art of earlier centuries. We can’t read Chaucer straight-up, and even Shakespeare presents some challenges; when looking at old Italian paintings it helps to have some background on the Biblical scenes being displayed; etc.

Regarding music: its traditional form is haptic and visual as well as aural. If you listen to recorded music, it’s just aural. Listening to music without playing it, reading the score, or watching the players is a little bit like hearing a Carl Stalling score and only imagining the actions of Bugs Bunny and his pals. It can still be great, but it’s only part of the experience.

Rosen’s book had many other insights too. I recommend it. He jumps back and forth between his own experiences playing the piano, more general reflections on the history of classical music, and discussions, too technical for me to follow, of particular pieces of music.

Rosen is different from me! He writes, “When I hear music, I prefer to lose myself in it, not to drift outside in my own personal world with music as a decorative and distant background.” Rosen thinks about music the way I think about books and music. I wonder if there’s anything that Rosen did like to have in the background, the way I like music in the background. Baseball, maybe? I think of the ideal baseball-game experience as being outside on a nice day, eating hot dogs and having pleasant conversation with the sights and sounds of the game in the background, with occasional periods of intensity and focus.

Rosen also wrote, “The life of music is based not so much on those who want to listen, but on those who want to play and sing.” I guess this isn’t quite true of pop music, or of the careers of musical performers–if you play in a wedding band, your job is to play what the guests want to hear–but I can see how it would be the case when considering what of the music of the past will survive.

Jeremy Denk’s book is a lot like Rosen’s–indeed, the younger man thanks the elder in his acknowledgments–with lots and lots about what it feels like to play the piano, the way that it complements other instruments, the way that different styles are appropriate for different pieces of music, and the sense of a musical community that encompasses teachers, students, performers, and composers. As with Rosen, Denk has some technical bits that I couldn’t really follow, but when the book was over I felt I had a better understanding of music than I had before. When it comes to learning about music, I found this inside-out approach to be much more helpful than various books about how to understand music. I did get a lot out of David Byrne’s book, but that was really more about art and culture in general, not much about music in particular (despite the book’s title).

Most of Denk’s book was about his experiences as a child and youth learning how to play the piano, and it includes many inspiring and heartfelt tributes to his teachers. As a teacher myself, I appreciated that! And it was interesting to think of the ways in which teaching music is different than teaching statistics. He also talks a bit about the social environment of being a music student, and some of that sounded horrible. Not that Denk was a horrible person, more that he was inside a horrible system. It’s so competitive! He went through recital after recital, competition after competition. OK, sure, you could say that all of academics is competitive in that you need to get good grades if you want to move forward. The piano competitions seemed different, though, in that the different students in the program were competing with each other in a way that I don’t see in schools and universities. Maybe part of it is that so many kids are good at music, but there are very few touring-pianist careers of the sort that Rosen and Denk have had. The other funny thing about the Denk-in-school thing is how easy it all came to him. I mean, sure, he had struggles and frustrations, but pretty much his school experiences were a series of steps forward. This reminded me of my own path through school: many of the students struggled but it all came easy to me, and I could focus on my interests without having to worry about not being able to keep up. It was kinda fun to read a memoir by someone who’d had the same experiences.