The small practicing creature, Libertango, and sexiness fails
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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I don’t know when it ends, but a not-insignificant part of my post-schooling musical journey has involved retooling my approach to practicing. For the longest time I internalized the frantic, urgent approach that so many teachers applied to practicing: you need to practice now and you need to practice constantly and practicing is the most important thing that you’re not doing enough of, drop the other things you’re doing and practice more, etc. etc.
(To be very fair to my teachers, it’s entirely possible that they really had to double down on this approach with me because I spent a great deal of my youth being a little shit breezily underpracticing because you can go a long way coasting on natural talent with minimal effort.)
The thing is, this approach works and, to some degree, is kind of necessary because kids are little shits young musicians often require more external discipline, and because there are so many immovable deadlines and strict requirements built into the first two decades of musical training. There are performance, theory, and aural exams; there are recitals; there are competitions; there are auditions; there are rehearsals and workshops and festivals. These things are so packed into the academic year that just being prepared for each required thing involves nonstop sprinting to meet the next deadline. And when you’re young, you have way more natural endurance and energy to get through all the sprints.
In the past several years my body has very rudely asserted that it is soft and has needs (??? citation needed) and that I cannot simply squeeze endless frantic practicing out of it for the rest of my life. The nature of how I make music has also changed with the disappearance of exams (good [bleep]ing riddance!) and such things from my life. “Be able to muscle through this Chopin etude at quarter=144 in two weeks for a clipboard-wielding jury” and “Figure out what you want to communicate in this work and how you’ll express it to a paying audience so they leave happy” are two very different missions.
All of this is to say that I have had to patiently dismantle some long-ingrained mental approaches to practicing, some of which involves admitting that it is okay that practicing is not always my #1 life priority even though I am a professional musician now.
This week I had the small revelatory idea that instead of treating practicing as THE THING I HAVE TO DO AT ALL COSTS I can think of it as a little creature that needs tending, separate from myself. Basically, I’m now thinking of my practicing like it’s a little Tamagotchi.
This little Tamagotchi-practicing-creature needs to be fed and maintained, yes, but in order to tend to it I have to also take care of myself. “Put your own oxygen mask on before helping others” and all.
There were a couple of times this week when I needed to do things to get my own house in order and I went ahead and did them first for the sake of enabling myself to be in a better place to practice later, rather than putting them off and practicing while feeling the burden of ohgodIhavetodoallthisotherstuff piling up in the background and then just feeling crappy. None of this is remotely new, or wise, but framing it for myself as “I need to take care of myself so I can then take care of my little practicing creature” was a way more helpful approach for me.
And no, I have not given much thought to what the imaginary manifestation of my practicing as a little creature would be. Now taking suggestions and/or whimsical artistic renderings.
You can’t spell “Libertango” without “rant”
I really enjoyed the LA Phil’s concert at the Hollywood Bowl yesterday, which featured Ciel d’Hiver by Kaija Saariaho (sigh, RIP), Grieg’s piano concerto (a classic banger), and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2.
I am incredibly predictable in that pretty much every time I hear/see a piano work, I immediately want to play it. (Yes, half-marathoning Yuja Wang’s Rachmaninoff endeavor was hard for me for this reason, and I have shelves of sheet music I excitedly bought after hearing certain pieces just once.) As often-played as it is, Grieg’s piano concerto was no exception. I mean, how can you not love this:
I thought the soloist, Anton Mejias, was very good. I particularly admired how he voiced thick passages (of which there are a lot in the Grieg)—his right hand pinky alone deserves overtime pay. (Yes, that is a very funny joke, because overtime pay is not really a thing in music.)
It was also just really fun watching another pianist play a piano concerto shortly after my own concerto performance, and I found myself wondering if Mejias felt any of the same things I felt leading up to the concert. Because I have the weirdest main character energy, I always assume I’m the only pianist who feels pre-performance anxiety and that everyone else has their shit together. Did you feel anxiety before getting on stage too? I wanted to ask him, and, uh, do you also obsessively watch and identify with Formula 1 drivers?
Happily, there was much free music to be had! After the concerto, Tarmo Peltokoski, the conductor, sat down with Mejias to show off his piano chops (which kind of seems to be his thing) in a four-hands arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s “Libertango.”
I am very jaded and tired and am still working through a lot of residual snobbishness so most popular classical works just get a sneer from me. However, I do suffer from strains of basicness (Exhibit A) and for some reason I LOVE! (exclamation point!!!!) Libertango. I love it so much! I know it is so basic and it is so overplayed and I am well aware that Piazzolla wrote so many other things but I am still so filled with joy every time I get to hear Libertango, on any instrument or combination thereof.
(My quick aside on the encore performance: Peltokoski reeeeally milked the hell out of all the glissandi he got to do, which got the audience so worked up to the point of cheers that I turned, astounded, to my husband and exclaimed “But the glissando is the easiest part??” Which was a sober reminder that the really easy flashy stuff is always, always, always the stuff that hits with audiences, and you should never underestimate the power of flash. Note to self.)
When I went looking for videos of four-hands Libertango arrangements, though, I remembered that Libertango’s cultural fatal flaw is that everyone just has to be cheesy as hell about Libertango. I get it: it’s sexy, it’s sensual, there’s an undercurrent of danger and we all want to convey that as much as possible.
Like, this is one of the better videos I watched of four-hands Libertango, and I still find the little smirks and head nods very irritating:
That might be because I have some thoughts, and therefore preconceived feelings, about Khatia Buniatishvili, who is objectively a very good pianist but whose persona just seems intentionally insufferable. I really truly try not to shit-talk other pianists and their non-musical decisions, and I don’t want to be mean-spirited, but (you know there was a “but” coming), have you seen Buniatishvili’s bio? It practically mocks itself.
This is, honest to God, how her official bio begins:
As Pablo Casals once did before, Khatia Buniatishvili places the human being at the centre of her art. The fundamental values handed down from the Enlightenment are not up for discussion. Were there a fire and a choice to be made between child and painting, she would not hesitate for a second. Yet, once she had pulled the child from the blaze, she would take it to the Museum of Fine Arts so that it might become a painter. No need to save “the fire” (as Cocteau replied) because it already burns her eyes, rages in her fingers and warms her heart.
Khatia, born in Batumi, Georgia, by the Black Sea, on the longest day of 1987, knows the price of freedom and independence, and understands the energy needed to stand tall in life. […]
The piano, however, has never posed a problem for Khatia. She has been blessed with impressive ability, giving her first concert at the age of six. For fun, her mother would leave a new musical score each day on her piano and, hungry, Khatia’s long, octopus-like arms would devour them. As she has never had to struggle with her instrument, she has always considered pianos from the whole world as friends from whom she must draw the best, respecting the oddities of their characters and sampling the charms of their personalities; while at the same time never looking to change them or make them her martyrs. Her sister Gvantsa is an excellent pianist too. Together they make a quite complementary duo as one has her feet on the ground and the other is supersonic.
Khatia’s great career has come quite naturally, without a struggle. The sun has no need to move mountains to exist for it rises and shines for all. And these are the words that spring to mind when one sees her bursting onto the stage or in life: her hair flowing, her fine figure quite the Parisian, her lips smiling, her light sylph-like steps and her feline body. But the rose will show its thorns if it feels what it holds dear to be threatened.
It is so hard to pick a favorite line from these paragraphs alone, but I have to tip my hat to the quiet shade of “Her sister is an excellent pianist too.” Incredible.
Anyway. Sorry for that slightly mean detour but I am medically incapable of mentioning Khatia Buniatishvili without sharing her absolutely bonkers bio. Back to Libertango.
[quick exhale]
There are others, but imho the absolute worst offender in the realm of “Libertango, but we are going to be cringey and/or cheesy as hell about it” is Anderson and Roe’s music video:
No hate on Anderson and Roe—I love piano four-hands music and they’re genuinely good at it—but this video is so cringey that it actually distracts me from how good the arrangement is.
I am in pain watching this video, which just has me mentally going “please stop doing that” the entire time. (The setup with the lecture about physical bodies feeling attraction: urghhhh.) The contrived looks they’re giving each other make me so uncomfortable, and not for the reason I think they intend. The whole shtick of they’re using their bodies! in close proximity! and it’s SEXY! makes me feel like I am watching two people with absolutely no game attempt and fail to seduce each other using a questionable instruction manual.
I don’t mean to deny that Libertango is a very sexy piece, and classical music has a very weird relationship with sexiness and sensuality (women having power and agency being bad, predominantly male predators—Lydia Tár being both 1. an outlier and 2. fictional—exploiting the intimate structures of music being somehow okay, and the tendency of opera to portray women’s-suffering-as-sexiness being Art). I generally am pro-expression-anti-prudishness in art but that does not mean I am okay with straight up cringe.
Sexiness, to me, is in the same bucket as humor, in that I want to see more of it in art, but only if it’s done well because most artists are not good at it. I don’t mean that most artists aren’t sexy or funny people, but how you imbue a narrative with an expectation—of power or pleasure or delight or whatever—and then fulfill or upend that narrative is an entirely separate thing from feeling it yourself. Both sensuality and humor tip far too easily into the realm of cringe, because it takes actually quite a lot of skill, self-awareness, and commitment to walk that fine line in performance between reducing your audience into a puddle of quivery feelings or causing your audience to curl up in secondhand embarrassment.
These are the thoughts I have about how people approach a very basic piece that I still like very much. For what it’s worth, I think Peltokoski and Mejias at the Hollywood Bowl nailed the vibe, which was “two people obviously having a lot of fun letting it rip on a banger piece.” That is always a very good vibe!!!
For a cringe-free palate cleanser, here’s Yo-Yo Ma performing Libertango. (You can also stream it.)
Fine, I’ll share my mentor with you
As you might know, I’m being mentored by the legendary Kathleen Kelly through my fellowship with the Spotlight Foundation this year, and one of the things that really struck me in our earliest conversations was just how much she gets it and how good she is at verbalizing things I’ve felt or experienced but didn’t have the words for.
Her advice is so good and I’ve felt so, so lucky this whole year that whenever I’ve had a question or a problem, she’s had spot-on suggestions and advice. So when she launched her own newsletter a very, very tiny part of me was all [whiny voice] she’s myyyy mentor, and I don’t want to share her!!!!
However, her posts are very, very good, and all of classical music does objectively benefit from her insights, so I have no choice but to share her with the rest of you. In the first post I read, I was struck by how she described the straight line from the natural feedback process to the erosion of instinct that leads to systemic issues:
Shortly before the performance you’ve worked on for months, you have to fine-tune your body and mind to new parameters on the fly, incorporating feedback that might seem to contradict the evidence of your own ears. You do it because you’ve learned that you can’t perceive your own performance perfectly. You rely on this feedback, and it’s absolutely in your best interest to find the people who will give it to you straight and clean, and to work at the kind of dexterous flexibility that helps you shift a little in the last hours before the audience comes.
Learning how to do this is an absolute imperative for a professional musician, and it is terrifying.
[…]
By the time we get to college, we’ve had a lot of practice in overriding our own instincts, for better and for worse. The first time a rehearsal leader yells, or makes a joke about someone’s appearance, or singles someone out for uncomfortable attention, we might think it’s unfair or wrong. But chances are very good that we’ll stay quiet, waiting to see what happens next, wondering how to make the road as smooth as possible between this bad moment and the performance to come.
Our industry has numerous issues of unfairness and injustice rooted in all the above, in the way we’re trained to place outside authority over our own gut feelings.
Anyway, fine, you can have her too. Her newsletter, Overcoached, is here. 🎹