----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Sayers" <mjsayers@yahoo.com>
To: <Pianophiles@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 6:09 PM
Subject: [Pianophiles] Adrian Brinkerhoff
> Perhaps some of the knowledgeable pianophiles here have information
> to offer on pianist Adrian Brinkerhoff. From the link below, it
> would appear that he disappeared to a monastery in the Himalayas,
> where he was recorded.
>
> http://www.soundstage.com/music/reviews/rev201.htm
>
> This excerpt from Brinkerhoff's writings, from
> http://www.himalayasessions.com/, deserves airing:
>
>
>
>
> Time
>
> [Herewith a fragment from Brinkerhoff's recently uncovered notes. --
> The Producer]
>
> I would like to discuss four bezels of the same diamond: tempo, the
> need to slow down to include inner voices, repeating pieces for
> greater comprehension, and slowness.
>
> A. TEMPO
>
> Like rays of light from a stylized bronze sun, tempi all start
> the same and end up in wholly different countries. A tempo tells us
> as much about a piece as its notes. In varying tempi every few
> seconds, Bernstein, in as seemingly straightforward a piece as West
> Side Story, gives us the scattered nature of modern society.
>
> Elliott Carter is even more notorious for complex rhythmic
> changes. If we move backwards from our own fragmented world of
> hiphop, where a disk jockey collaborates with the record itself to
> provide even more spontaneous rhythmic changes, we can see the
> presence of such hesitations in Mozart's operas, in Schubert's
> hesitant fatalistic dances, in Chopin's rubato, in the pulled
> bittersweet three-quarter waltz bar of the Strausses.
>
> As Christa Ludwig, the mezzo-soprano, said of Bernstein:
>
> ...with every other performance he was different. And you know the
> same thing Karajan made also. He said: "If I make always the same
> tempo, you are in a routine after two or three performances." And so
> they do it on purpose, to be different. Also it has something to do
> with their constitution, how they feel when they wake up in the
> morning! It is the question of how is the weather, how is the pulse;
> so they are never the same. It is always different from the last
> performance.
> We spend our time trying to catch up to the future when all
> along, as Proust felt, what we are chasing is in fact behind us. We
> need to slow down to see it or hear it, the way only children get
> excited by falling snow . We have inherited a tradition of speed
> started for good reason by Toscanini and later, Casals, to erase the
> sentimentalism of lugubrious salon music. Slow tempi can be gimmicks,
> attempts at grandstanding.
>
> But in fact changed tempi are ways of strangifying familiar
> pieces in order to hear them freshly. Slowness creates space in which
> the magic of a piece can function, it gives the mind time to make
> associations, it provides a soothing environment in which nuances of
> tone and touch can be harmoniously evoked. Virtuosic displays leave
> us feeling cheated, our lowest instincts exploited, while moments of
> great silence and beauty are what we feel, what we remember.
>
> When we play a piece for the first time, we take it slowly,
> astonishing ourselves as we hear miracles unfold under our uncertain
> fingers. We even play passages over and over, wondering at their
> structure, their revelations, their unexpected turns, their quirks.
>
> Later, once we've memorized the piece, we're bored by the easily-
> grasped tempo through which we learned it, and the only challenge
> becomes to play it faster and still retain much of that initial
> information and dramatic unfolding. But, alas, we are habituated to
> it, and we fail. What seems apparent to us, the jaded, contemptuous
> with familiarity, is however uncharted territory to our listeners,
> who are baffled by so much, so fast.
>
> And in this way music is lost forever, driven by performance
> cliches. Bach's Partita in E major is played by everyone as a
> virtuoso piece, and in fact, it is simple and lovely, so to play it
> fast is like teaching a turtle to run. In the self-conscious panic of
> that speed, all the detail of the piece that attracts musicians to it
> is lost. It is like Ralph Fiennes rushing through Hamlet to replace
> emotions he seemed to have misplaced, at least the night I saw him.
>
> As Bernstein said of Glenn Gould:
>
> I admired... his constant inquiry into a new angle or a new
> possibility of the truth of a score. That's why he made so many
> experimental changes of tempi. He would play the same Mozart sonata-
> movement adagio one time and presto the next, when actually it's
> supposed to be neither. He was not trying to attract attention, but
> looking for the truth. I loved that in him.
> Pianists, when they are alone, will play for themselves, to move
> themselves. Pianists, even in the presence of a tuner, a producer, an
> engineer, will play to protect their reputation and the legend of
> their technique, and the music disappears, veiled in defenses. This
> is why Gould tried to empty the room of listeners. Only then can the
> audience hear what the musician hears, oxymoronically, when there is
> no audience.
> B. INNER VOICES
>
> The other advantage of accommodating tempi to the complexity of
> the music is that it allows time for inner voices to be heard and
> understood. In the rush to impress the topmost melody of a piece on
> an audience in a concert hall, inner voices must be sacrificed, as
> they are hard to hear in such large rooms. But what made Horowitz so
> wonderful as he aged was his insistence on those voices, which made
> his interpretations so fresh, so exciting. It wasn't just the sudden
> power, the dynamics. It was the detail.
>
> Glenn Gould was a constant advocate of the need to vary tempi,
> reverse emphases, make new accents, and generally surprise oneself,
> in order to revitalize music, to keep it new. Gould found he had to
> retire from the stage to follow his own inner voice, to include the
> inner voices of others, as concerts tempt us to reach the rafters.
> Such revolutionary playing is easier to understand on a disc at home,
> where it can played over and over, than in the one take of a concert
> hall. Gould always disparaged the "non-take-twoness" of the stage.
>
> C. REPETITION
>
> Much music from the classical era involves repeating long
> sections, which can be either boring or stimulating, depending on how
> the repeats are played. I once asked a well-known pianist why he
> played the repeats differently.
>
> "Never bathe in dirty water," was his answer, one I found
> somewhat lacking in subtlety. To me, a repeat is a chance to bring
> out elements in the music which couldn't be included the first time
> around. It is an opportunity to deepen our perception of the music.
> Music contains more than it can present. Not only must the pianist be
> given several chances to reveal intricacies which often happen too
> rapidly to appreciate, but the listener must be allowed to
> familiarize herself gradually with the themes and their variations.
>
> One piece in its timing serves many masters: changing melodies
> flow from similar notes as marble cities are issued from the same
> dark quarry. A film depends as much on its audience as on its
> director, even though the projection remains the same. Some films
> improve with the viewing, because our perceptions change with
> familiarity. Experience is the constant shimmy of chaos over order,
> like changing light in a meadow.
>
> When musicians perform, the music changes with the angle, the
> seat, the hall, the prior steak or the cognac to come. When you build
> a Steinway, nothing is certain: the same process produces beauty as
> beauticians. As in the making of Burgundy, regularity is sacrificed
> to the possibility of sporadic bliss. To set a piece in stone is to
> lose the mobility of it, to abandon the suddenness and
> strangification that comes from sublime ignorance. Composers in the
> classical era put repeat marks around their music to, as Dickens
> says, do the police in different voices, to give the patient a second
> opinion. The only way to do that today, an era without second
> chances, is to play the piece twice. When I was young, I used to
> listen to the DJ Watson each night on WNCN. One morning at around 2
> a.m. a woman called up to complain that the Bach B minor Mass was too
> long. "Well, obviously you weren't listening," he said, and played
> the entire piece again.
>
> D. SLOWNESS
>
> Lente lente currite,noctis equi, said Faust to Satan. To expand
> Faust's Latin, what he meant was: I gave my soul in order to sin
> without any consequence but one, my soul, which goes to hell at
> daylight, and so, slower, slower, let my nightmares run.
>
> And so here in the Himalayas, where nightmares run as slow as
> yaks, where time flows no faster than rocks fall or streams freeze,
> my own cells merge with the revolution of the earth to ignore the
> arbitrary miles and mills and smiles of cities, to ride the bucking
> horses of the night.
>
> As Lukas Foss said to W. W. Burton about Bernstein's tempi at the
> end of his life:
>
> [It] came from Lenny's desire to really pump the most out of the
> music, to milk it, to get everything out of it that was in it.
> Sometimes he would do that by driving home the point, by being
> totally emphatic about every detail. I think that is how the tempi
> became slower... If you want to make sure that people hear the detail
> in a piece then you slow things down.
> As John Mauceri said of acoustic reasons for Bernstein's tempi:
> I think there is something here with Lenny that is rarely discussed
> and that is that Lenny in a recording studio and Lenny in a concert
> hall were two very different people. Very different in the sense of
> how to use the room and also the medium. Lenny in the studio tended
> to be slower, because, like all of us, he wanted to hear everything.
> It also depended, obviously, on the acoustics of the room and the
> microphone placement; if the room was dry he tended to conduct
> faster; if the room was reverberant he tended to conduct slower.
> Brendel notes that the Hammerklavier was marked too fast by
> Beethoven. All meaning, detail, emotion is lost by that tempo. Yet
> times dictate such mechanical speeds as proof of passage: they want
> to get there, but not be anywhere while they're going.
> You're watching TV with its soundbite beat and suddenly a slow
> Dvorak comes on, and the blood freezes, the pulse pauses. Here is the
> shaded grove where emotion plays: no perky, theme-park fountain-
> foaming fireworks of a muzak-molting motion can match the movement of
> the mind.
>
> If velocity were the fluttering pennant of authenticity, then the
> fastest performances would be the best. When Rubinstein asked
> Lhevinne why he played a piece so fast, Lhevinne replied
> simply, "Because I can."
>
> A pianist I knew heard a friend play the Schumann Toccata faster
> than anyone he had ever heard.
>
> "Why did you play it so fast?" my friend asked.
> "Oh," said his friend. "I can play it faster than that."
>
> We find ourselves eavesdropping enviously on previous decades,
> wondering what distinguishes them from our digitally perfect discs,
> and the answer is, often enough, that our forebears took time with
> the music. Just because we are digital doesn't mean we are alarm
> clocks.
>
> Every age suffers from what Liszt called:
>
> a fruitless virtuosity,... a soulless, senseless delivery of
> masterworks, which for sheer thumping and thrashing cannot be
> comprehended.
> It is more difficult to learn a new language when a native races
> through it, and music is a new language for much of its audience,
> even for musicians. We learn the notes slowly, with a sense of awe
> and discovery, and then as soon as we can, we throw away the great
> spaces that moved us, to flaunt our airtight polish.
> Rapidity has never been a trait associated with romance: we court
> in slow motion. Girls distrust the whirlwind romance, rightly. A
> performer is charged with recomposing the music, and the revelations
> of creation are not subways, but pastures. Cows ruminate effectively;
> roadrunners do not. Sarabandes give us pause, not polkas. As
> Brinkerhoff said, music is fastidious contemplation. We are an age
> embarrassed to dwell on things, perhaps because we are understandably
> enthralled by a different sort of speed, that of the fast cut, the
> montage, the music video, the movies.
>
> I feel a no doubt Don Quixote-like obligation to free meter from
> the metronome, to cut space loose from its Einsteinian slavery to
> time, which after all is a man-made division of a rather more flowing
> universe. Deadlines are a recent metaphor, a new opiate, a clever
> oppression. Music needs time to think. The fast lane has overridden
> time, and with it all the artifacts of leisure, such as family, or
> frisbee golf. Our musicians are businessmen, striding briskly down
> the corridors of Chopin.
>
> The world can never go home again, probably, but that is what
> certain meditative artists attempt, such as Proust and Nabokov, to
> revisit lost worlds, and I think it might be a good time to locate,
> in the coves of our frenzied cortex, those musical madeleines,
> fragrant with our former innocence.
>
> The idea is not to drag race a piece, but to convey it without
> becoming occupied in the day-to-day struggle of the notes. To become
> a statesman, not a showman, a politician. I'm reminded of the woman
> who approached the great pianist Paderewski.
>
> "Are you the great Paderewski?"
> "I am, madame."
> "And aren't you Prime Minister of Poland?"
> "Indeed I am."
> "And didn't you use to be a pianist?"
> "Yes, madame" (getting impatient).
> "What a comedown!"
>
> Someone else said to a film star, "Didn't you use to be James
> Garner?" I'm sure I have the star wrong.
>
> To lose oneself in the battle of the notes is to become a
> commando, a Rambo, to miss the high road. Mere speed is the low road,
> a sort of cheap pandering to the worst expectations of all of us, and
> we are all susceptible to the sheer electricity of a Horowitz or a
> Volodos. Both musicians know, to their credit, how to amaze the
> public in order to prepare them for a moment or two of quiet truth,
> the author's message. Perhaps we must earn the right to be peaceful
> with noise. But if I only had one chord to play, it wouldn't be the
> first chord of the Tchaikovsky.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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