Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2016-07-09 06:13
Anyone else find their music affected by outside events? All the violence in the news lately, and some of the responses to it that I've read, build up and sit heavily in the back of my head, and they demand my awareness even when I'm trying to think of other things. It puts me in a sad and angry mood, and that carries over into practice. It makes it harder to focus. Today I got in three hours practice, but it wasn't good. Technical things were tight, expression was rough, sound wasn't good. I ended up spending all the time on relatively few things, just playing slow to make them smooth. I'm glad it was just practice - what if performing was the order of the day?
How do people filter real, important, frustrating, external stuff out? Or better, turn it off so it can't even be felt. Or should it be felt?
I recall something about the great pianist, Josef Hoffman; his astounding Casimir Hall recital (recorded) was played just after he'd been told he was being canned as director of the Curtis school. I wonder how much of his in-your-face interpretative choices that day were expressions of anger.
Ha, another time, the great pianist Maria Yudina gave a recital during WWII, and another great pianist, Heinrich Neuhaus, was in the audience. After the concert, a skeptical Neuhaus asked Yudina why she chose to play an introspective Bach Prelude at fortissimo from beginning to end, and she snapped back, "Because we're at war!"
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