Castalia 351

Music as flesh and word

Dear Friends,

I’m so happy to share with you…

Mazurka in C major, Op. 67 #3

by Frédéric François Chopin

performed by Ishmael Wallace, pianist

Dear friends, not only what we do is of importance, but what this doing transmits. Mstislav Rostropovich spoke of this on a visit to Curtis: music is like the breeze used in the production of perfumes — as the breeze carries a fragrance, so the sound carries what is in the heart.

He told of an experience with hypnosis: unable to sleep, he had sent for the doctor; the doctor had come, seen his glassware collection, named a fee and departed. Months later, they met up on the street: “How did you cure me?” They had not spoken of sleep. “Oh, what I said was not important, but what was in me as I said it. We could have spoken of anything”.

It is the most wonderful story — expresses well why bots cannot suffice. We need the inner — need the fragrance of the heart. I would only add that, in a truthful performance, what is in the heart is of the music.

We listen, not to hear Ishmael’s heart conveyed through Chopin’s notes, but for connection with something beyond notes, beyond Ishmael, beyond Chopin even, but including all three. In the end, all these divisions mislead: as Ouspensky suggests in Tertium Organum, the inner world is not other than the outer, but the outer world more fully perceived.¹

The great violinist and teacher Lorand Fenyves, with whom my sister and I worked at Banff, used to say a performer must convey the composer’s idea (or perhaps one could say, the idea which has possessed the composer) to “Mr. Smith” — Mr. Smith, another name for “the fat lady” of whom Salinger writes in Franny and Zooey. Something is being conveyed, an idea to which, as it takes on flesh, one must be faithful.

Here, Schoenberg’s account of “the musical idea” can very helpful:

“Every tone which is added to a beginning tone makes the meaning of that tone doubtful… In this manner there is produced a state of unrest, of imbalance which grows throughout most of the piece… The method by which balance is restored seems to me the real idea of the composition.”²

What is so helpful here is the understanding that idea and tone belong together — that, as Carl Schachter puts it, “the technical and intellectual in music are not completely separable”.³

Tones possess will and aspirations; what is in our heart as we play should be a response to these.

But how shall we govern the heart — the heart which so often appears incorrigible? After all, the pretense of feeling is not the same as feeling! In my case, what has been most helpful is to be empty — to make space in which the spark may arise.

Thank you so much.

With every good wish,

Ishmael

Coaching for musicians: I help performers and composers find deeper meaning in their work through insight from music theory. For details and testimonials, please see my website!

1. “…there is no greater error than to regard the world as divided into phenomena and noumena — to conceive of phenomena and noumena apart from one another, and susceptible of being separately known… The ‘phenomenal world’ is simply our incorrect perception of the world.” Tertium Organum, Chapter XII

2. “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and Idea”, in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black

3. “The Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 4 for Violoncello Solo: The Submerged Urlinie”, in Current Musicology, number 56 (1994)