Requiem for a Piano

One of the few things I look foward to every day upon arriving at this campus, is the exquisite piano North Park owns which is the main piano for concerts and all other like festivities in the chapel. It's one of the most beautiful instruments I have every seen. Like any other grand piano, it is black but the finish on it glistenes in the light. The sound is equally exquisite. This is not the piano for Bartok or Prokofiev. The touch is refined and singing tone is made so much more possible by the delicate touch that this instrument caters to. When played right, the slight strains that ebb from this fine fushion of ivory and wood can melt the listener into thoughts of another time, another place.

Recently, this piano has become marred. The finish soiled by fingerprints, the wood chipped in places by movers oblivious of the piano's dimensions, the intonation non-existant, the touch spoiled. What has happened?

Every so often, I pass by this same chapel on Wednesday morning or Sunday night, when worships is going on. What I see and hear appalls me. The worship team, without any regard to the lush tone and delicate touch this piano is so capable of, plunks and bangs on it so as to get their own monotonous chord progressions heard. The approach is to hit, not to brush. Performer after performer sits in front of this piano and beats on it mercilessly. The casual passer-by also succmbs to this method of playing, as I have observed.

Perhaps it is too hasty to judge that the recent misfortunes befallen on that poor piano are due to the careless whallops of musical dilletantes. But it is what I've witnessed time and time again. Amateurs approaching an instrument not even I profess to do justice to.

The tuner came yesturday. After I saw Meredith off to her class, I headed down to the chapel to play a little and collect my things. The tuner was already there in the middle of a recording log of her tuning exploits, I suppose. She brought it to an abrupt close

Me: Are you the tuner?

Tuner: Why, yes I am.

Me: Oh wonderful! The piano really needs it.

Tuner: Oh, I'm only here to tune the harpsichord. But I have some time to tune the piano if they want it...[sits down and plays the piano]...yeah, it's really bad...

Me: It would be nice if it were tuned.

Tuner: They didn't say anything about tuning it. I'll ask and see what happens.

I grabbed my Mahler score off the piano and turned to leave. I nodded a thank-you to the benevolent woman. The way I saw it, she was that piano's hope. I left equally hopeful.

The same evening, while waiting for Meredith to arrive out of orchestra, I stopped in to see if the piano had been tuned. I slowly took out my newest piece (composed in C-sharp minor, a key particularly suited to the piano) and carefully placed it on the piano stand, as if I was afraid a sudden jolt or change in air speed would abolish anything the piano had going for it intonation wise.

I sat.

I breathed.

I waited.

And then I played.

How lovely it all sounded. The melodius strains of my piece flowed so naturally from the instrument, so sweetly enticing even the overtones to act in their favor. All chord-tones restored, voicing appropriate, I beamed ear to ear as the soulful phrases progressed. The tuner had blanketed that piano in her magic - it was in tune and the touch restored.

I worry though. This morning, there is yet another worship service scheduled. I hope that piano will at least remain as it was last night when I played it (I'm recording my piece tonight and would give anything for it to sound as it did last evening - that piano is the saving grace of my piece).

Someday, I'm going to kidnap that piano and we'll play Chopin together for the rest of our lives.

Not really, but I do hope that somewhere along the way, North Park realizes what they've got and will be better about informing students of said fact.

A Follow-up

The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanisation and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.

-Twentieth Century Czeck composer, Bohuslav Martinu

To see understand the pertinence of this quotation, please read the last post.

And...out.

Tonality - The Musical Element you love to hate

This weekend, I finished the latest piece I've been working on and a few days ago, I finished putting the score into Finale.

Now I know what it sounds like but just for my own amusement, I like to use the playback option in Finale. It really lets me sit back and listen externally to what I've conceived, admire that which I like and change that which I don't like (although, to be quite honest, I change relatively nothing - I don't write anything down unless it's finished in my head and by that time I've worked it over and over again so that the aspect of writting music, at least for me, is a matter of dictation...the chicken scratches are in my head).

Anyway, I converted the playback file to an mp3 format in I-tunes and sent the result to myself to download to my own I-tunes library at home. I then got the idea to send it off to one of my professors...the teacher of my 20th Century Music class, someone whom I respect, admire, and emulate much more than I will admit to anyone.

And although I respect him and admire him a great deal, we diverge into two different paths when it comes to compostion, the former preferring a more abstract, atonal style of composition as oppossed to me who composes in a very tonal (albeit dissonant and chromatic) style of composition.

Acutally, I like atonality. Often I find the sounds of dissonance are more pleasing to me than any sonorities of resolution or even hints in that direction. I love the spiky dischord that characterizes this music and yet all of it so logically and painstackingly written. It's all wonderful stuff and just as expressive and descriptive as the most expansive Mahler orchestral canvas.

But it's not the way I conceive music. I have no greater interest in music right now than to understand the theory and construction behind these formidible and poignant works and the unbearable tension and intensity created by dissonance, dense texture and/or complex rhythm within them render me a captive listener but I cannot, I am unwilling to write this kind of music. It doesn't come from me.

It worries me only because I am not a progressive. People were writting the music I am now writing, hundreds of years ago. I may seek to fuse elements of today with elements of yesturday, but I am no modern trailblazer and in a society were connosseurs are looking for the "daring" and "shocking" and "new", I must seem "altmodisch" to not only musicians but also to listeners as well.

Not that I wish to cater to the public. I don't and I think that any composer who does without remaining true to his intuitive creative side is a coward. Say what you have to say. Peer pressure in this instance produces superficial effects and I personally believe that composers ought to write music of lasting significance and inspiration for the coming generations.

I am outnumbered. Most every new classical composer is constantly pushing the envelopment, not just with atonalism and total serialism but now they are heading to a philosophical level and asking the most basic question of all "what is music". But their musical products conceived that attempt to answer this question are make progressive steps foward. Every generation of composers it seems, makes one step ahead of the previous generation and since no one has yet said "enough is enough" this continues toward obscure and sometimes incomprehensible results.

Not my stuff but I worry. Are the melodies predicatable, the harmonies overused, the rhythms commonplace, the form conventional? Is this how my stuff will be seen? Will I be known as a composer who had talent but was a coward and refused to put a foot foward? I wonder if my professor sees me this way. He's progressive himself. My stuff at times must seem puerile to him.

Is there any room for tonality? I keep a written journal and this question within the last month or so, resurfaces many times.

I voiced my concerns to Meredith earlier this evening, in no less eloquent terms, and without so much as batting an eye, she looked up from the towels she was squeezing in her dresser drawer, turned to me and almost indifferently asked: "Is it from your soul". I answered in the affirmative. "Then what are you worried about?"

She has a great point and I shut up after that. I still worry about the lasting power of my music but at least I'm true to myself.

Ironically, I'm currently pirating a bunch of 20th Century compositions of my professor's listening log URL by composers Ligeti, Xenakis, Messaien, Penderecki, Bartok and Berio to name a few and importing them into my I-tunes here at home.

G'night.