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*
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