I May Cry "No, No, No, No", But...

Ok, I'm quoting Gershwin out of context, but I have been having musical dreams recently. Which is rather disturbing, considering that I usually dream about totally irrelevant stuff.

The night before my piano tuner came for my piano's tuning, I had a dream that I sat down to play, and realised that the piano was a lot shorter than I remember (I've got a professional class Yamaha, they don't get much bigger than that). After confirming that I had not gone through a delayed growth spurt, I realised that it was a totally different piano, a shorter Yamaha that is NOT very good, and was just like one a friend of mine has (totally untuned, with the dampening pedal permanently down- it's just wrong, but that's another story), and that I ended up playing like that friend's kid (not that I have ever heard the kid play, but I have my preconceived and totally baseless impressions). And it turned out that my dad had exchanged my piano for a much cheaper and vastly inferior one with the piano tuner (who also happens to be the one whom we bought our piano from in the first place) because we needed the money (don't ask me what for, I can't remember). And I had to go and get money to redeem my piano back. Had a Dorothy feeling about it. But it was a very upsetting dream.

On a happier, if slightly bizarre, note, I had a random dream about playing the Mozart slow movement. I have been reading Mozart's letter to his pater, and he had written about how this slow movement was just like a girl who was playing it. I vaguely remember (or imagined) that Mozart saw his music in colours, where each piece was a colour, and each phrase was a shade of that colour. In my dream, I was walking around a house playing the slow movement as I saw each phrase appear on a painting on a wall. In the end, someone put all the paintings together on a large wall and the music looked so beautiful on paper that I started writing it down... and then I woke up. Can't remember much of what the actual colourings were, except that they were dark reds and rich purples.

I think I'm becoming a bit of an aesthetic (no, that's not someone who believes there is no God), trying to play it the way that the composer played it, the way they meant it. You can play Bach (or anyone else for that matter) as notes rather than music, but I think once you appreciate where the composer is coming from, and what he's trying to do in a particular piece (and it doesn't need to be a change-the-world thing), when you understand the philosophy behind it, and when this shows in your interpretation, it will just sound right. As Stokowski once famously said, "we write black marks on white paper- the mere facts of frequency; but music is a communication much more subtle than mere facts. The best a composer can do when within him he hears a great melody is to put it on paper. We call it music, but that is not music; that is only paper. Some believe that one should merely mechanically reporduce the marks on the paper, but I do not believe in that. One must go much further than that. We must defend the composer against the mechanical conception of life which is becoming more and more strong today." Our task as musicians is to go beyond looking at the mere notes, and to breathe life, as the composer intended, into it. And just like in acting, or painting, or in any other art, one's ability to do that is the difference between the exceptional and the ordinary.

Four weeks to recital, two weeks to festival competition... *gulp*

What Causes That?

I better explain myself and what I'm doing (not that I'm entirely clear myself).

I live in New Zealand, and have done so for more than half of my life. I have also spent some time in South East Asia. I study not music, but law and accounting, and I'm just finishing off my final papers right now (yippee!).

That's actually not entirely true, I am studying for a DipABRSM in piano performance, but have never done music at university. My exam is in about a month's time, and it's quite scary to think that 11 months of hard work will culminate in an hour-long 'exam'. I finished Grade 8 years ago, and had always wanted to do a diploma, if for no other reason than to prove to myself that I could actually play well if I tried harder (I'm a last minute crammer when it comes to study, and that doesn't tend to work too well with piano exams and concerts). It also means that I am more able to find work as a piano teacher if I get sick of my desk job. And also, it adds to my superiority complex (and believe me, it's big). The thing is, lots of people get to Grade 8 in piano or whatever, and then they stop and never go near a piano again, which is a great pity. And I don't want to be like that. My performance for that is in about a month's time, and I'm playing in a couple of competitions in the time leading up to that. So it's all go from here...

And I love Gershwin!!! He is a genius... Aside from Gershwin, I also love musicals, JS Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Darius Milhaud, and Glenn Gould (another great "GG"). But that's stuff to talk about another day.

How did I get hooked into Gershwin? It's a long story... I was watching The Les Mis 10th anniversary concert, and I was listening to Ruthie Henshall as Fantine sing "I Dreamed A Dream", and I thought she had a very nice voice so I went on a big search for music by her. She had recorded a Gershwin CD called "Love Is Here To Stay"(which is sadly out of print, I would dearly love to get it), and a couple of others (which I have). BUT I found she was in the cast recording of the London production for "Crazy For You", a musical loosely based on Gershwin's "Girl Crazy" with a whole lot of other Gershwin music tossed in (like the Concerto in F, third movement, and The Man I Love as a bridge between scene changes). And that was the beginning of the craze...

Fast forward a year or so, when it came to choosing the programme for my diploma, I saw that Gershwin's piano transcriptions of "The Man I Love" and "I Got Rhythm" were on the list, and I had to play it... To be honest, I had only heard "The Man I Love" only a couple of times and thought it was orright, and I figured it was worth it to be able to play "I Got Rhythm", but now I really like "The Man I Love", even more than "I Got Rhythm". But they are both up there in my Gershwin top 10.

Aside from that, I'm also playing JS Bach's Prelude and Fugue in F minor BWV 857, Mozart's piano sonata in C major K309, and Chopin's Nocturne in E major Op 62, No 2. It's such nice music *sigh*. Which reminds me, I better go practise before my lesson.

The inspiration...

I'm A Poached Egg
by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

Way back in Noah's Ark,
When couples came to park,
It is stated
They were fated
To be truly mated.

And so I dreamed a little dream:
Like them we’d be a team,
The tightest two-some
Hist’ry could reveal;
But the way you act of late
Had made me feel that

I’m a poached egg without a piece of toast,
Yorkshire pudding without a beef to roast,
I’m a haunted house that hasn’t got a ghost
When I’m without you.

I’m a mouse-trap without a piece of cheese,
I’m Vienna without the Viennese,
I’m Da Vinci without the Mona Lis’,
I’m skies without blue.

When you don’t hang around
I’m a kangaroo without a hop.
When will you show me
that as Romeo I’m not a flop?

I’m a western without a hitching post,
I’m a network without a coast to coast,
Just a poached egg without a piece of toast,
Each time I’m without you.

I’m Las Vegas without a slot machine,
I’m a gypsy without a tambourine,
I’m Napoleon without a Josephine
When I’m without you.

I’m a letter without the right address,
I’m a sandwich with only watercress,
I’m a tenant, the kind they dispossess,
I’m bill without coo.

There comes a time I don’t know
If I’m I or a wrestling match.
The way you treat me,
They’ll greet me at the booby hatch.

I’m a lawyer who never won a case,
I’m a missile that can’t get into space,
Just a poached egg with egg upon its face,
Each time I’m without you.