Sitting beside Ms. Bauer in the dressing room before the concert, I was struck by the contained power in her small hands, cigar-thick fingers perched like the hammers inside a piano. They told the story of thousands of hours of dull drills, each muscle reluctantly trained into submission, carving out a memory for itself so that in the shotgun of performance they could fire like a string of perfectly calibrated bullets. These are the building blocks of the Russian school of playing, where the dreamy ad libitum of childhood is transfigured into the lexicon of a mature imagination.
– from String Theory by Deborah Kirshner in the March 2005 issue of The Walrus
Perhaps because photography does not necessarily demand any kind of strict or explicit training, I am, in some strange way, jealous of vocations that do. This probably contributes to my preference for, and pleasure in, compositing — which does require a great deal of training and technique (though not on the scale of the musicians described in this essay).
Kirshner’s piece is absolutely wonderful. I know; I say that about most of the articles I link to, but this one is extra wonderful. Please read it if you have the time. Here is how it begins:
When I was sixteen, I had the honour of being invited to turn pages at a recital in Montreal for the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, one of the last of a generation of Russian virtuosi that included Heifetz and Elman, and his musical partner, the formidable pianist Frida Bauer. Given the august occasion, it probably wasn’t the shrewdest decision to test out my father’s claim that after years of non-surgical experiments he had successfully corrected my “wandering eye syndrome” (the right eye cruised its socket like a lazy pinball), and I could now “see without glasses!” This despite the fact that since the age of four I had spent my life in a pair of bifocals framed like the fenders on a Mustang and as thick as a middle-aged waistline.
Nor was it my most incandescent moment to turn up for the concert at Place des Arts that evening dressed in the latest in seventies discount-mall fashion: a shiny black dress made from some of the first attempts with “unknown fibres” that draped from my waist, briefly, to reveal an entire set of teenage legs which were punctuated at my feet by a pair of really ugly black platform pumps. This outfit, a metaphor, apparently, for “Hey Mista, fifty rubles to heaven,” was entirely unsuitable, a message made clear by the now hysterical Russian impresario who threatened to dismiss me, Soviet style. I managed to keep my job largely through the efforts of Oistrakh himself, who probably welcomed the contrast I brought to the otherwise staid landscape on stage; next to the Russians, I looked like some kind of strange sapling loosely planted behind two sturdy boxwood hedges.
For a young violinist, the opportunity to get this close to one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, to witness first-hand his pre-concert warm-up (Oistrakh repeated the opening bars of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in G major, op. 30, the first piece on the program, over and over and over again), to shake the hand that shook the hand of Prokofiev that shook the hand of Rimsky-Korsakov that shook the hand of Tchaikovsky that shook the hand of Liszt that shook the hand of Salieri who brushed the silver-sweet palms of Mozart was to touch the flesh of a world I had only imagined.
And, one last little bit from near the end of the article:
… The Auer tradition, though limited to the gifted, produced artists whose performances sizzled like sparklers, their interpretations expressions of the dynamic relationship between themselves and the music. In the semantic translation from the musical idea to the instrument, these players created their own inimitable sound, the repertoire of their technique formed around the context and demands of the music. This is very different from the “new school” approach, where the emphasis is on how to produce a sound, not on what sound to produce. Each domain requires accessing a distinct cognitive faculty. I know that when I am faced with a particularly difficult passage and focus my attention entirely on the mechanics of it, I can accomplish it, but the continuity of the music suffers. What I lose in my playing, and what the listener loses, is the musical logic of that phrase, and the large sweeps of the formal outline of the piece are lost in a web of notes. So I force myself to hear something different, to think about the sound I need to produce, and to forget about the many details, the subtle shifts in pressure of my right and left hand that I have spent hours practicing. I force myself to turn my language into the ether of an image and to transform my thinking from the linear to the non-linear so I can take the risk, like Oistrakh and his contemporaries, of navigating the geography of beauty.
This essay is a delight. I’ve only given you a very small taste of it. Most highly recommended. [ link ]
-Julie
