My public radio debut, ease, and the melodic minor challenge
Some little press updates!
The story that This American Life started and then scrapped has been resuscitated in shorter, cuter form; on Tuesday evening it aired in an episode of WGBH’s The Culture Show. You can listen to it here—my segment starts around 30:30, and goes til the end of the episode (there’s a little coda in which the hosts discuss my interview).
I was also quoted in an essay about the parallels between music and religious practice in VAN Magazine.
Listening to and reading these final products of things I was involved in, it’s impossible for me to not see (and mourn) everything that was cut, hovering on the edges like ghosts. I remember questions my interviewers asked that took me in directions that formed new, insightful (to me) connections on the spot, profound little insights I was rather proud of in the moment, especially when I put them rather eloquently, and witty little jokes that I sprinkled in to demonstrate that I am a funny and likable person, not just a nerd who spends way too much time practicing alone.
What I keep learning at the hands of other arguably more capable storytellers is that the overarching story comes first—what one of my major teachers called the “architecture” of a piece. I had no idea how you were supposed to communicate structure in music (at least, not without treating the audience to an unsolicited lecture about Sonata-Allegro form) until, one studio class, he explained that large musical structures are conveyed through details. How you treat details in music influences how your audience perceives time, signposts, and repetitions. Getting too lost in the details can bloat or distort architecture—overwrought flourishes, indulgent dynamics, disproportionate rubatos, bestowing significance on so many moments that they all become insignificant.
I remembered that studio class when I was listening to the episode I was featured in; if James had included every detail I thought was interesting, it would have been a mess of a story.
Also, I will be returning to the recording studio in June—the plan is to record Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 (which you may recall I brought out of storage and dusted off for the ill-fated This American Life episode) and Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1, the subject of The Culture Show episode. As always, thank you to those of you who’ve chipped in as paying subscribers here for making these efforts possible.
On ease
In garment sewing, there’s a particularly poetic-to-me term that I love so much that I’m in danger of overusing it and wringing all the poetry out of it. It’s the concept of “ease,” which I personally define as the slack required for things to be functional and beautiful.
One time in sewing class (yes, you’re still reading the newsletter of a classical pianist, don’t worry), my teacher demonstrated the practice of “distributing the ease.” For Geometry Reasons, the pieces of fabric that need to be joined up to make clothing are rarely the exact exact lengths, and the seamstress has to somehow make two things that aren’t the same length line up, matched at the ends, and lay them flat all down the seam, with no puckering or bulging. (Once you know this, every piece of clothing in your closet is a miracle.)
My teacher cut two pieces of fabric, one slightly longer than the other, and then proceeded to work black magic before my very eyes. She pinned the mismatched lengths together at the ends, then deftly massaged the two pieces under her fingers, slipping pins as easily into the fabric as if it were water, until a few seconds later both pieces of fabric were laid entirely flat on top of each other, with none of the accordion-style bunching you’d expect when you force two differently sized shapes together. She explained that all she’d done was distribute the ease—she’d spread the excess fabric of the longer piece so evenly over the shorter piece that it appeared to lie completely flat, even though the discrepancy still existed.
It looked so casual and easy when she did it, and the theory of it made perfect sense to me, but when I confidently sat down to piece two shapes together, I couldn’t do it. I pressed and pinned and after fifteen cursed minutes had produced a fussy little ruffle, as if I were making a skirt for a tiny can-can dancer.
Later when I sat down at the piano, I realized that I distribute the ease all the time in music. One of my favorite hallmarks of Romantic-era piano writing is this thing composers do where they give the right hand an absurd indivisible number of notes as filigree over a sensible accompaniment in the left hand, and somehow you have to land them together at the downbeat. Louise Farrenc’s Etude in f# minor, Op. 26 No. 10, has passages like this galore:
As you can see, the runs are helpfully labeled: the first one contains 29 right hand notes spread over 6 left hand notes, while the second has 19 (20 if you treat the rest as a note) over 6. Teach this in pre-algebra.
It’s easy to just embrace the anarchy and toss all semblance of tempo and rhythm out the window, but the left hand is there to maintain a sense of consistency, and so it’s always a fun challenge to figure out how to line up these wildly mismatched strings of notes without nonsensically bunching up the right hand. In 2020, this is how I distributed the ease in this passage:
(If I'm gonna be honest, I wouldn't do it this way now.)
Distributing ease can also look alarmingly mathematical. This week I was working on Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and this relatively innocuous looking measure tripped me up so much I finally paused and started marking the subdivisions out.
What’s going on here: There are 4 beats in the measure. The right hand has 2 groups of 3 notes spread out over 2 beats. The left hand has 2 notes per beat for the first 3 beats, but they’re in 2 groups of 3 with accents at the start of each group of 3, and then the last beat has 3 notes. With all these notes in the measure the hands only line up twice. If that made your eyes glaze over, welcome to the wonderful world of polyrhythms.
Confession: when I played Rhapsody a few years ago, I cheated by just speeding through this measure and not really articulating the left hand, so some slow deliberate work was more than overdue. This week I sat down and started splitting the measure into half, then half again, figuring out exactly where each note was supposed to fall, which reminded me indelibly of the process of methodically pinning a longer piece of fabric (pin in the middle, then pin in the middle of each half, and so on and so forth) to distribute its ease evenly.
There’s a second part to the concept of ease (if there’s a third, I haven’t gotten there yet—I’m still a sewing novice) and that is that well-designed clothes have to factor in space to move. If you make clothing exactly to your measurements, and put it on, it might look great if you’re just standing upright and still, but you won’t be able to bend your elbows or sit down. A good pattern-maker or tailor adds a few extra inches here, a wider spread there, so that the final article of clothing allows freedom for natural movement of the body. It’s why the costume designers for the Bond films make multiple versions of James Bond’s suits—the more fitted suits look impeccable in scenes where Bond is just standing around in casinos or whatever, and the ones with more ease drafted in allow him to run and jump in chase scenes. (Ease doesn’t always mean “more fabric,” by the way—form-fitting clothing made from stretch fabric requires negative ease, which is when you cut pieces to be smaller than the final measurements.)
This aspect of ease, I think, also applies to how we treat rhythm—using the literal beats as a baseline, but building in ease to allow the music to really move. This week I was reading Jeremy Denk’s memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, and this passage on rhythm had me nodding like a know-it-all senior attending a masterclass:
“Rhythms in classical music appear to be notated precisely. But there is an important distinction between rhythms written on the page and the rhythms that you actually play. No matter what your piano teacher has to tell you when you’re little, these are not the same. A computer program can play back for you what’s mathematically written—it sounds horrible. The rhythms on the page of music, interpreted literally, are lifeless, or worse than lifeless, like a zombie. If you play metronomically ‘right,’ it is musically wrong.
[…] The performed rhythm is like a dance around the written rhythm, or a shading around it. The gap between written and performed is not a failing; it is the classical musician’s only hope of success.”
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize this about rhythm—to understand that it needs ease to breathe and to feel human. Really great pianists sound like they’re perfectly placing each note exactly where it belongs, and for the longest time I thought that meant landing the notes exactly at the point in time a metronome would click, like rolling a Skee-Ball perfectly into the center hole. Turns out, perfection is in the imperfection: understanding that notes aren’t just notes but bits of larger gestures that need to be cut with ease in mind.
When I first wrote out my thoughts on ease and rhythm, I extrapolated the concept to other parts of life, as I am tragically predisposed to doing. I wrote several paragraphs on culture and my thoughts watching the response to student protestors this week and then felt that I’d become one of those reductive, intellectually simplistic people who bill themselves as “thought leaders” and write unintentionally comic op-eds. So let’s leave this here as a meditation on fabric and time, and nothing more.
On nostalgia
I really loved Kathy Kelly’s post on nostalgia, which looks lovingly and critically at the glow of an imagined past and draws a clear connection between the pitfalls of artistic nostalgia and the weaponization of the past in politics. (I remember reading at some point that when multiple people of different ages were asked to define the peak of American history, they all pointed to their childhoods or the era right before they were born, no matter what generation they were in—the implication being that certain agitators trying to turn back the sociopolitical clock are really yearning to return to a personal time of innocence.)
She writes:
"Nostalgia is a romanticizing of the past, either your actual past or a made-up one (pro tip: these are not so easy to distinguish)…[W]hen times are tough, it can be soothing and even empowering to remember the happiest, easiest stretches of our lives. But the cold water of historical understanding will inevitably dilute nostalgia’s warm bath. […]
Anyone whose work delves deeply into the past has to contend with the temptations and pitfalls of nostalgia. That’s true of my classical community. We immerse ourselves in the music of the past and dedicate ourselves to performing it. We learn its aesthetics and practices primarily from other people, practitioners who themselves are connected to practitioners, each of us tracing a lineage back to the relatively small number of titanic creatives who dominate our lexicographical and programmatic landscape. Looking backward across those ties with reverence and ambition, it’s challenging to look forward with the same energy."
The descending melodic minor challenge
One of the little tricks I learned from one teacher (the same one who explained that details are architecture) was to drill technical passages backwards to really get your fingers around them. Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 ends with a couple of straightforward scale runs, but I was compressing bits of them, so I decided to use the backwards method to iron out the weaknesses.
The problem: the scales are ascending melodic minor (melodic scales have a raised 6th and 7th going up, and lowered going down) and I hilariously discovered that I physically cannot play a melodic minor scale going back down. My body full on refuses to do it—every time I tried running the scale downwards, my hands automatically lowered the 6th and 7th to turn it into a natural minor scale.
I asked on Bluesky and Instagram if this happened to anyone else, and it sounds like among professional/advanced musicians, the body on the descent automatically defaults to either A) a natural minor scale or B) a major scale. I think this is amazing and hilarious and I immediately want more data.
So musicians, try running a melodic minor scale up and down at medium-to-fast speed, but keep the raised scale degrees going down: can you do it?
Miscellany
This story, headlined “‘Seagull Boy,’ nine, wins European screeching competition”, brought me so much joy.
I also received the final edited photos from March’s photoshoot and now have the somewhat thankless task ahead of updating my entire online presence; expect a website overhaul in the coming weeks.
