Saturday, October 13, 2012

Vox pop

I've heard some strange criticisms of popular music over the years, usually from people trying to claim (or at least trying to imply) classical music is somehow inherently better. One of the most common complaints I've heard is that popular music abuses the song structure. I admit that it is ubiquitous. I think it would be fair to say 9 out of every 10 songs you hear on the radio are written thusly: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, with the possibility for minor variants, such as an intro or an extro (if it doesn't get cut for the radio edit), or a pre-chorus/extra bridge. Unless you listen to very progressive music, it's unlikely there will be a lot of variety on any given CD.

Alright, that's a little strange then, isn't it? And it must get boring to listen to songs written in the same structure over and over again! After all, people keep complaining about all these songs with "catchy choruses" and "sweet hooks." On paper, it looks like they all sound the same.

Except. Except. Except. Classical musicians are totally hipsters and were doing it way before it was cool. Remember the sonata-allegro form? I have never heard anyone complain that composers relied too much on the sonata. Why is that? After all, it can be quite simply broken down into three sections (exposition, development, recapitulation), and more often than not has a plain overarching structure of I-V-I. Why would composers keep coming back to this same form for sonatas, songs, symphonies and movements of suites? What could possibly make the sonata interesting after Beethoven and Schubert and Haydn wrote so many of them?

Content. It's all about content. And structure has no bearing on it. I could write a sonata that sounds just like any other sonata, the same as I could write a song that sounds just like any other song. But I don't because /that/ would be boring. Structure helps give me a guideline for organising the music I write, but does not dictate what the music is.

Of course content is subjective. That's the whole point of music. Music is a universal language, and everyone understands it, but not everyone speaks or understands the same dialect. After Nightwish's Once came out I often used "Nemo" as a way of getting people familiar with Nightwish. It embodies a lot of their qualities, it's short and straightforward, it's catchy, and I think a very nice piece of music. I once played it for someone who I thought might appreciate its beauty and who should know better than to say to me, "Well, it's just circle of fifths, isn't it?" This person is a highly educated musician, and I think that's a very basic way of talking about music. I don't care if they didn't like the song, but to debase it like that is unacceptable because if "Nemo" is "just circle of fifths" then what are all the sonatas written during the classical and early romantic period? And the worst part is that "Nemo" isn't even based on circle of fifths. Taken from the official Once Notebook, the verse is: ||: Dm, C/D, Bb/D, Dm, Dm, C/E, Gm, Csus, C :|| (or i, VIIadd9, VI6, i, i, VII6, iv, VII) and the chorus is ||: Dm, Csus, C, Dm, F, C :|| (or i, VII, VII, i, III, VII). And when it does modulate during the second verse and at the end of the song, it goes to Fm. That is not the circle of fifths that I learned about.
Also, I once heard someone complain that Nightwish never changes the tempo in their songs. That's a ridiculous complaint because there are hardly any tempo changes in any single piece of music in any style of any time period. Sonatas will change tempo from movement to movement, but rarely during.

So why do educated people persist in talking about "popular music" as if it can't be taken seriously? For all the times in school I was told to keep an open mind about serial and 20th-century music, I think I should be allowed to say at least once that you should keep an open mind about any type of music. No one genre is the be-all end-all of music. I never want to restrict myself to listening to or composing one style because there are too many emotions, and too many things to be said. Sometimes I need to listen to Sibelius, and sometimes I need Andy Moor, and sometimes I need to listen to Ryu Kyu Freestyle. Some days I want to write piano quartets because I feel that's the best way to express myself, and other days I want to write a heavy metal song because that's the only way I can tell my story.

Saturday, October 6, 2012

Memory

One time in my fourth year, I performed the first movement of Bach's f minor keyboard concerto during our regular studio masterclass. It was probably November, and I had started working on it in July, but it was the first time I'd worked up the courage to play it in front of the class. Afterwards I was asked how I could have memorised it so early in the semester; in fact, at that point, I had already memorised not only the whole concerto, but most of my other repertoire as well. I don't say this as a means of bragging, and I never considered my ability to memorise superhuman by any stretch of the imagination. I think too many people have the wrong approach to memorisation--precisely because that's what they're trying to do.

It's frustrating returning now to some pieces I played during my undergrad because of the disconnect. I know these pieces very well even after several years. I can sing along to them, I can feel the shapes of the phrases and the harmonic shifts. But my memory of them is much poorer. So as I'm reading along I know where it's going, but my hands can only vaguely remember how to do it.

Admittedly, I do consider myself to have a good memory (for some things), but really what I'm doing is learning a piece of music. I do have to memorise certain things about it, but I think it's more accurate to say it's a learning process. I don't have any secrets either, but there are some things that help me along the way.

Harmony. This one is easy for me, but I think one of the harder things for many--or so I've gathered from talking to people about memorisation, as well as theory discussions. It's one of the most important steps in learning new music, and with my strong attachment to theory possibly gives me an advantage to learning common practice period music over newer pieces with unfamiliar harmonies.
Learning the harmony of the piece doesn't help you so much at the end of it all, but it's a good place to start. Analyse the overall structure just to see where the music goes. Then you can start breaking it down into smaller cells. Especially in piano scores, memorising a few bars of music can seem daunting at first, but it's almost never as complicated as it looks. To take the f minor concerto as an example, the first three bars are: i-VI-iv, all using the same figuration. Not surprisingly, this figuration and chord pattern is repeated in mm.5-8, as well as a half a dozen other times in the piece (with slight variations). Once you have those first three bars down, Congratulations! You now know about 20 bars of music! I know it sounds really simple...but that's just it. It is that simple. And while you're analysing harmony, take a look at how many passages you'll play that are literally fancy arpeggios or scales. Sometimes you'll luck out and you'll have measures upon measures of standard chord progressions laid out for you in easy-to-read broken or solid chords.

Visual memory. Here's an interesting test: start to learn a piece of music, then switch to a different edition and see if it feels different reading it. There are times when it's helpful to remember key points in the music based on their physical position in the score. Often it's around a page turn; sometimes it's helpful to learn these passages first so when you're still learning you're not fumbling around the page turns. But other times I've been able to visualise the score, not necessarily in perfect detail, but enough that I can find where I am and keep me on track.

Tactile memory. I sometimes lament being a pianist. Tactile memory is a double-edged sword for me. On the one hand it gives me the freedom to stop thinking about the music. There are countless passages where it's easier to let my fingers do the work so I'm not working overtime processing the harmony and trying to remember where I am in realtime. There is a massive downside to this, however. If I slip up, I'm lost because I've given up my performance to my hands, and if they don't know where they are, I'm put on the spot to try to figure out the nearest available pick up.
This wouldn't be such a problem if I wasn't continuously practicing on different instruments. During my undergrad, from the first day I read the score to the day of my jury I would have played it on a minimum of five pianos (my own, the teacher's, a practice room piano, a piano in a masterclass room, and the concert hall's piano). The number is more likely to be double that. Not all pianos are created equally! That means while I can usually rely on the general shape, that's it. I might get used to practicing on a piano with a nice grip and springy action, which throws me off when I have to perform on a keyboard with sluggish keys and a propensity for allowing perspiration to build up. And I cannot tell you the number of times I've felt off because the bench was too high or low or because I sat slightly to the right of the centre and my hands are no longer in their regular positions and I feel like I'm an octave too high.
One interesting thing that ties into tactile memory is technical practice. For a pianist, practicing scales in double thirds and doing arpeggios of both triads and seventh chords prepares your fingers for holding the memory of musical shapes. Once you have the basics down of knowing the feeling of a third between your index and ring finger, or the feeling of moving a third and then a second, you free up your fingers to move on their own. They recognise the patterns and can feel the distance between notes, allowing you to gauge your position on the keyboard.

Aural memory. This one's a little different from the other two types of memory I mentioned. It's also something I discovered much later on, and didn't necessarily help in the ways the other tools do, but it was useful at the beginning. Using your aural memory to help you learn involves listening to recordings of the music. Unless you're already familiar with it, I recommend listening to several different performances. I was worried at first that I might be tempted to emulate the recordings, but I focused instead on using it as a guide--a general template to work towards. Since I didn't know the music beforehand, hearing what it will eventually sound like pushed me in the right direction. I found this helpful while learning Debussy's Pagodes. As with much of the romantic repertoire, the music often looks more difficult than it actually is. Some parts just looked like a complete mess to me and I had a hard time wrapping my head around it, but once I knew what it actually sounds like I could use this aural memory to guide my practicing. It's similar to having a finished image to help you along with a puzzle. It's not exactly the same because the puzzle is just a picture and there's only one final product. A piece of music can come together in so many different ways and aural memory is really just a suggestion.

Enjoyment. Never underestimate how much your enjoyment of a piece of music can affect your ability to retain information about it. If you have five pieces in your rep and you really like two of them, chances are you're going to want to play them more anyway, so repetition will factor into it (as my sensei says, practice makes permanent). But if you're relaxed and in a state of mind where you want to learn something, you'll have a better chance of absorbing information. In each of my years, my baroque and renaissance music always came together more quickly and coherently than the others. I practiced it more and I thought about it more. I carried the music around with me even when I wasn't practicing. I saw this phenomenon shift from one end of the spectrum to the other when I was learning two Bartok shorts. I started out avoiding them, failing to understand them, struggling with them. I finally reached a point where something fell into place and I noticed I changed my attitude towards them. After that the practicing flowed more smoothly and I started drawing on my aural and visual memory and I applied harmony to the music. It was no longer a chore.

Stay tuned for a new entry in a couple of weeks where I'll be doing a small giveaway!