kip/bot/blog

I’m starting to look for a piano teacher (my previous teacher has, alas, moved to the west coast. A moment’s homage to her: she was awesome, played my piano beautifully when she walked me through Mozart sonatas and had a fun mix of stern teacher (reflexively pushing my elbows up and straightening my back) and music lover (listening to any vague musical connection I made between a theory assignment and something I was listening to.

So, a teacher I’m looking at has all sorts of things to love, chief among them his professional/academic work around Mahler. But he has a section on his site called Why study music? which highlights some of the benefits of taking a craft seriously and going deep into something. His key reasons, paraphrased below:

Dealing with pressure — the site refers to children learning to deal with pressure, but there’s something impressive for adults to, on a weekly basis, confront a piece of music that doesn’t come easily to them. Knowing that a lesson is coming up is just enough pressure to force you to take a longer view, break the piece down and work on it. It’s also long enough to be rewarding when, by the end of the week, you being to master it.

Responding to Criticism — I’m surprised how many design focused places don’t ‘workshop’ things and how many times we hold back from really working over a piece of work. One of the key, but most frequently overlooked, tenets of design thinking should be/is iteration and revision. While anyone’s first rev should be excellent, it should be understood that further revs will only improve the final product. Even if you come back to the original design, you’ll have a stronger, more confident understanding of it.

Persistence — in my world of marketing and interactive, there’s a borderline obsessive interest in the next thing, newness, novelty and never seen before. Sitting with someone for a while, working on something for longer than a quarter, doing a truly better v2.0 that is continuous with the previous version is not only hard to do, but often scorned. That said, however, there are a lot of creative types in the field who know when to dig in and fight the good fight or keep on pushing to validate an idea.

Multi-leveled focus - inset Steve Jobs quote about zooming in and zooming out and the design trope of ‘rinse and repeat’.

Project management - taking a long view of mastering a craft or something within the craft requires some PM like thinking. For a piano piece, my instructors regularly tell me how to break it down: “start with the left hand until it feels smooth and you find some melody in it, then focus on the melody right hand only, and work on the middle section until it feels clean, then you can add the intro, do dynamics last.”

The bolded names of the benefit are his, the interpretation mine. His page about why we should study music is pretty nice read, highlighting brain age as well as craft/life lesson benefits . . . and, oh yeah, the joy of playing music you love!

Re-reading Ralph Ellison’s amazing Living with Music. The title essay is an excerpt from an article Ellison did for High Fidelity(!) magazine. The setting is his early days as a struggling writer living in a back-room, first floor apartment, surrounded by record players on the left, a singer above, and an airshaft/courtyard with variously entertaining, articulate, and annoying drunks (plus one very sad drunk who spent his last three days on earth yelling at the world to ’shut up’). Ellison, a once fervently devoted student of the trumpet, decides to take control of the noise and buys a sound system and records:

Between the hi-fi record and the ear, I learned, there was a new electronic world. In that realization our apartment was well on its way toward becoming an audio booby trap [his phrase for a place filled with wires, cables, boxes all in service of the ever-elusive perfect sound]. It was 1949 and I rushed to the Audio Fair. I have, I confess, as much gadget resistance as the next American of my age, weight and slight income, but little did I dream of the test to which it would be put. I had hardly en tered the fair before I heard David Sarser’s and Mel Sprinkle’s Musician’s Amplifier, took a look at its schematic and, recalling a boyhood acquiantance with such matters, decided that I could build one. I did — several times — before it measured within specifications. … I built a half dozen or more preamplifiers and record compensators before finding a commercial one that satisfied my ear. … There were wires and pieces of equipment all over the tiny apartment (I became a compulsive experimenter) and it was worth your life to move about without first taking careful bearings. Once we were almost crushed in our sleep by the tape machine, for which there was space only on a shelf at the head of our bed. But it was worth it.

Gotta love a guy, a literary genius no less, who professes to gadget aversion but who can consult schematics, revisit childhood tinkering memories, and then go on to build sound systems — just so he can listen to music and get back to his writing. The people at MAKE would love it . . .

When I was in college, striving to be an evolved male, I bought a fair amount of Wyndham Hill music. It was all very groovy, trippy, good pot-smoking stuff with folk and burgeoning world overtones. At some point, though, it devolved into a sign of new age triteness — above the level of patchouli and wymmyn retreats — but it sank pretty low.
Imagine my surprise, then, to hear, in the space of a week, two Wyndham Hill artists being used on creepy crime shows, during creepy moments. A theme from Shadowfax’s only album is cop-cum-tortutred-serial-killer-of-bad-guys Dexter Morgan on Showtime’s Dexter. And a piece from Michael Hedges’s Aerial Boundaries is the chase music on Bones when they capture seasons-long bad guy Gormogon (a cannibal with dentures made of human canines). (On a sidenote, I very nearly wept tears of joy when it was revealed that Booth was not in fact dead, but was faking it so he could catch a bad guy.)

And on the subject of music, is anyone else bummed out that M.I.A.’s wondrous “Paper Planes” is being used as cheap trailer music for the new Seth Rogen film?

Watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last night, I had some musical moments that brought me much joy. They involve Patrick Doyle, a wonderful and rarely trumpeted movie music composer.

The first moment came during the scene in Goblet of Fire in which Harry enters the ballroom. The fanfare sounded really, really familiar to me. I listened to it twice more until it hit me: it’s like Claudius’s entrance fanfare in Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet! (This is one of my all-time favorite movies, like top ten, and blah blah blah about his lips and the spittle, just go away.) I looked it up on IMDB and sure enough Patrick Doyle did the music for Goblet of Fire. I take great pride in little catches like that, I drive people nuts when I obsess over where I’ve seen bit actors before (and those that love me have learned to pretend they find it useful).

One of the things that’s interesting about Claudius’s march is Doyle’s thinking behind it. In an interview on NPR, Doyle said he wrote the fanfare to indicate a time of hopefulness: there was a new king following the death of a beloved one, and people’s support for this new one was a sign of great hope and averted crisis. This plays right into the strength of the Branagh Hamlet: the recognition that killing a king is a dangerous and difficult thing to do, that it is, in fact, treason and potentially disastrous for a country. The Oedipal, ennui-ridden interpretations of Hamlet’s difficulty in acting is a recent thing in the play’s history — going back to Freud mostly, and somewhat to Nietzche. Branagh’s Hamlet is set in a 19th century court and in a castle court lined with mirrors and filled with false panels, secret passages and a two way-mirror, highlighting the danger and duplicity of court politics and taking us out of the realm of the psyche and placing Hamlet’s dilemma in a very real world of court politics. While most movies introduce Claudius as a villain and an incompetent, Branagh introduces him as a sign of hope, and shows him forcefully negotiating with Fortinbras (the dramatic tearing of the letter causes great patriotic cheering in the hall). So, when the king enters the court, and confetti falls, people cheer, and the fanfare is buoyantly optimistic. Hamlet’s darkness and isolation are immediate and palpably felt. (The black clothes in a well-lit room helps too.) In that same interview, Doyle noted that he paid special attention to Hamlet-Ophelia music and worked hard to make it a love theme for a couple that could have been quite happy and would have been wonderful to see - not the doomed lovers in Hamlet’s angst-ridden world.

But where Doyle’s music really shines is in support of the the spoken word. Possibly because Doyle has been an actor (he has some lines in Branagh movies), or because his first gigs were for Shakespeare movies, there’s a wonderful connection between the words and the music that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. So much so, that I will sometimes play the music just so I can read along (out loud or silently) with it.

The best moments for me are from Henry V and Hamlet not surprisingly — Shakespeare comedy is even harder to hold onto than most Shakespeare.  So, a call-out to best word and music moments in Patrick Doyle’s work:

• Crispian Day — duh, but seriously, reading along with the music and doing so to support the transition to the rush to battle that abruptly cuts off the speech adds depth to my appreciation of the movie, the play and the music.
• “I loved you once” The last moment of tenderness between Hamlet and Ophelia. (* extra tidbit below)
• “Oh what a Noble Mind” Immediately following the scene above, Kate Winslet is on the floor weeping not only for Hamlet’s rejection of her, but for the loss of Hamlet and all that he was.

The “Now could I drink hot blood . . . my thoughts be bloody” music is pretty rousing, too. I expect someday soldiers and football players will use that to get pumped up instead of “Ride of the Valkyries”, but the three above are just killer.

(*) This scene has a favorite, non-verbal, acting moment that always amazes me for its power and acting genius. When Ophelia attempts to return Hamlet’s letters (or tokens), Hamlet’s line is “Ha, ha! Are you honest?” Branagh does a beautiful thing here. He slaps the letters away and holds her arm, the eyes tear up, and for the line “Ha, ha!”, he makes a quiet noise, twice, questioning her, asking what she’s doing. It’s not an attack on her, it’s not anger, it’s the bitter sadness of having his happiness betrayed, and not even necessarily by her, but by the court and the world that he lives in. It’s the most heartbreaking line/noise ever.
I like to compare that moment to one in Emma Thompson’s Sense & Sensibility when Edward (Hugh Grant) bumbles through his “my heart is and always yours” explanation and Elinor (Emma Thompson) waits a beat and then goes into a glorious release of sub-lingual sobbing and exhiliration. For some reason, I always fantasize that Thompson and Branagh, as young RSC fast-trackers, thought about trying this.

Damn. All this from my least favorite Harry Potter movie.

So, I’m somewhere around a year 2 piano lesson taker (as opposed to player). For three weeks, I’ve been learning a piece that’s kind of complicated. This is a plateau piece, like the Bach Minuet in G (in the picture), so my teacher told me it would take some time. It’s got some distinctive features:

- 6/8 time

- lots of broken chord accompaniment

- left to right hand phrasing and vice versa

- little grace notes

- a complex melody (doesn’t trip off the fingers like the minuet)

As I had my third lesson dealing with the piece, my teacher told me the next step was to start being expressive with the piece. So, there’s a process, leading up to that last expressive piece:

1) Break it down — most songs have different sections requiring different moves, fingerings, techniques. With most songs, I break it down into component parts, such as a tough left hand position change, getting the grace note in before, after, or on the beat, a long finger reach, contrary hand movement, and the like.

2) Add it together — after breaking it down into component parts, you start to pull it together and adjust the pieces so they flow together, and so you can prepare your hands to lead into or out of sections.

3) Clean it up & Understand — smooth out the edges between sections, and then start to look at the harmonies and music ideas. Once my hands are moving through it OK, my teacher starts to point out the tensions, resolutions, harmonic moves, the vertical harmonies, the Is, IVs, V, V7s.

4) Make it Expressive — once I have the component parts mastered, flowing, and have digital memory (digital as in finger) and a deeper sense of the music, I pull it together as something expressive. Then I can get all Ray Charles or Ashkenazy at the keyboard.

Of course, these phases aren’t completely separate or sequential. Even as early as when I’m breaking it down, I find exciting musical moments that will be part of the final expressive phase and I’m constantly refining the basic key striking throughout. It’s also interesting, because some of the adding it together (which has a lot to do with flow) will change in order to accommmodate some of the musical understanding in step.

Feels like a design process: break it down, add it together (repeat as needed), look at the whole and get the bigger picture, and make it sing.