Two little Aha! moments yesterday reminded me of how music (as well as every other art, for that matter) is not just valuable in and of itself, but as a conduit into deeper explorations and meanings in human psychology.
The first Aha! was a strange link between the physical and emotional, following an hour of working on about 40 measures of a Franz Schubert Impromptu (Op. 142, No. 1 – D935).
The composer was obsessed with repeated chord articulations as well as solid chords, weaving melody above, below and within — always singing. (The larger musical phrases also repeat, then entire sections repeat, sometimes a bit too often, much to the annoyance of many musicians.)
The piece is in F minor, a sulky-broody key. Despite the fact that a lot of notes go by at times, and Schubert occasionally sideswipes major keys, this is not a cheerful piece of music.
Here, to set the tone, is a magical interpretations by Elisabeth Leonskaja, from a 1997 recording (reissue info here):
My brain and fingers sated with Schubert, I decided to play through J.S. Bach’s French Suite No. 6, BWV 817, in happy-go-lucky E Major (I’m borrowing CBC host Paolo Pietropaulo’s way of assigning personalities to keys; he calls E Major Prince Charming).
From the opening measures of the Allemande, my fingers felt liberated. This is not difficult music, but it is not simple either. Where Schubert repeats patterns, Bach varies them constantly, meaning that every single measure brings something new to absorb mentally as well as physically.
But mine wasn’t a psychological reaction to the sunnier key. My reaction was purely physical. My fingers felt free and happy, sprinting up and down the keyboard much like my dog at the park after a day spent cooped up because of rain.
Here is the legendary Robert Casadesus to lay it out from my aesthetic perspective:
You would think that the highly mathematical, clockwork-architect baroque composer would impose the greatest physical strictures, but for me it was the supposedly free-thinking, nature-loving Romantic who made my body feel all tight and buttoned down.
Could it be that this music was capable of reflecting an unconscious psychological facet to Franz Schubert and Johann Sebastian Bach? If I knew absolutely nothing about these two men, would I be able to deduce from these pieces that Bach had a surfeit of Life Force, whereas Schubert walked around with a little dark cloud over his head much of the time?
Unfortunately, I know more than nothing, but not nearly enough, so I don’t trust my inferences. And two pieces of music out of two huge stacks of opuses is not what a social scientist would qualify as a statistically sound sample. But my little practice moment still leaves me wondering how much psychological resonance there is in the purely physical side of making each composer’s music come to life?
The second Aha! came from reading a New York Times interview with Yo Yo Ma which helped remind me of why I can’t tear myself away from this job.
Among the great cellist’s personal reflections was this one:
Since I always played, as far as I can remember, I never said, “This is what I want to do.” And I think I always wondered: “Gee, could I have been this? Could I have done that? What would have happened if …?” What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I’m interested in, the thing I’m most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
You can read the full interview here.
John Terauds