“The late humorist James Thurber wrote a fable set in a medieval court, and he has the Royal Astronomer report that all the stars are going out! It turns out that he is simply going blind. I am probably making the same mistake.”
— Dan Wakefield, ed., Kurt Vonnegut Letters, Delacorte, 2012
I needed to be sure to get up at five this morning to drive a friend to a surgical appointment. While I haven’t used an alarm clock in twenty years or so, I figured I’d better set one for this morning to be on the safe side. We had a clock radio in the basement, so I spent a half hour or so figuring out how to make the buzzer go off when I wanted it to, and it did, and I felt idiotically proud. I had pushed the right series of unidentified or insufficiently identified or identified-to-emoji-speakers-only buttons. Triumph of the Will! The damned thing still seemed unnecessarily complicated to me, requiring ten or twelve steps to accomplish what a good old analog alarm clock would have done in only three or four.
Driving to the hospital, my friend agreed with me that natives of the new digital world must have brains that work differently from ours. She found this cause to mourn, as I normally would, but I’d been listening for the past few months to Mitsuko Uchida’s recordings of Mozart’s piano sonatas, and that experience had forced me to think some more about the technology that made it possible for me to experience these miraculous performances.
I’ve pissed and moaned about computers and the mindless rush to insert them into every human activity and tool and their negative effects on human intelligence and self-sufficiency and so on. And on. I take none of it back. But such complaints have abounded throughout history about one technological innovation after another.
After the invention of the Greek alphabet, writes Nicholas Carr, “Early in the fourth century BC, when the practice of writing was still novel and controversial in Greece, Plato wrote Phaedrus. . . [in which] Socrates launches into a story about a meeting between the multitalented Egyptian god Theuth, whose many inventions included the alphabet, and one of the kings of Egypt, Thamus.
“Should the Egyptians learn to write, Thamus goes on, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.’ The written word is ‘a recipe not for memory, but for reminder’ . . . ” (Carr 54). (I’ve frequently made the same accusation against the ubiquitous internet search engines.)
Gutenberg’s invention of printing with moveable type, stimulating vastly expanded literacy, met with other objections: “When Johann Fust (Gutenberg’s neighbor and financier) carried a large supply of printed books into Paris on an early sales trip, he was reportedly run out of town by the gendarmes on suspicion of being in league with the devil” (Carr 70).
Much later, Looking Backward author Edward Bellamy found much to fear and deplore in the invention of the phonograph: “the phonograph has ‘improved the time’ by invading privacy, spewing propaganda, and substituting generic patter for considered responses. It has become indispensable by making its users expect the constant stimulation of news, information, and sound. It has made the skills of reading and spelling obsolete; even more ominous, it has become a substitute for face-to-face interaction. People could communicate by recorded cylinder, or with automatons standing in for moral and political leaders” (Simon 266-267). I and others have made all these accusations against television, computers and the internet.
I could multiply examples of hands wringing and teeth gnashing over one novel technology after another. While tool use is not exclusive to humans, no other species has made it so indispensable to its survival, and beyond question technology has altered our species in innumerable ways. And unquestionably each new technology has come at a cost, causing us to lose formerly necessary skills and knowledge, increasing our power to suicidally manipulate our environment to serve our short-term ends. On the other hand, it has allowed me to come very close to hearing what Mozart heard and left for us with the only recording technology available during his life, the system of notating music with pen and paper, a technology I certainly never mastered to anywhere near the level necessary to allow me to experience Mozart’s genius.
While he was a superbly, thoroughly trained musician, and continued to study the art of counterpoint throughout his life, Mozart was no more able to explain the source or process of his compositions than anyone else has been: “‘I really can say no more on this subject than the following; for I myself know no more about it, and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this or that morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it, that is to say, agreeably to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of the various instruments, etc.
“All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture, or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, gleich alles zusammen, all at once.What a delight this is, I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the tout ensemble is after all the best. What has thus been produced, I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for” (Davenport 283).
As poor an excuse for a musician as I am, even I have had the experience of having at least long fragments “almost complete and finished in my mind,” and “all at once.” I can hear the interplay of Connie Kay’s cymbals, Percy Heath’s bass, John Lewis’ dry piano and Milt Jackson’s shimmering vibraphone cadenzas playing Lewis’ composition “The Golden Striker,” and hear them exactly as they were recorded on the album No Sun in Venice. But in my case, I can only experience pieces of music I’ve listened to or performed hundreds of times, not music that’s yet to be performed, that’s never existed until it performed itself within my mind’s ear.
Mozart believed his extraordinary gifts of divine origin. As an agnostic, I can’t accept this view, having no conception of a Divinity of any sort except that of the universe as a whole. I think it’s certain that much of Mozart’s melodic sense derived from nature. “He took the extraordinary natural beauty of his surroundings so much for granted that he seemed indifferent to it, yet it had its effect in his intense love of birds and the outdoors. He always preferred to work in gardens when he could, and the serene clarity of his music is not unrelated to this early Salzburg influence” (Davenport 66). All his life he kept canaries in his rooms. His astonishing memory for sound must have captured much melody and rhythm from the natural world.
But he was no idiot savant. Schooled from near infancy by his father, later by many other masters, he absorbed both the building blocks of musical construction and, once they were mastered intellectually, a sense of form into which he could pour the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that “came to him.” “One word has repeatedly been used about [Mozart’s compositions]: architecture. And it is a good word to use, for this music is built with the same instinct for proportion and the same fidelity to elemental laws of structure that built the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral. Bach’s music, in a sturdier and less lyric way, is of the same kind. The surface ornaments of Mozart, like the scrolls and cherubs on a baroque façade, have preoccupied many and have diverted their attention from the underlying structure, but those who see it as a whole know its universal value. The accident that Mozart happened also to be full of spontaneous melody, dramatic fire, tender humor, sophisticated grace, and profound emotion is a bonanza of Providence. Such an accident does not happen twice” (Davenport 317).
Mozart’s “sense of proportion” was clearly not only some divine gift, but also the result of much study. “[Baron ] van Swieten had been ambassador at Frederick the Great’s court in the 1770s, where he encountered the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, a discovery he shared with Mozart. . . . It was, for Mozart, a welcome reminder of the long-forgotten lessons in polyphony he had taken from Giovanni Battista Martini in Bologna a decade earlier. Mozart’s reacquaintance with, and new interest in, counterpoint in the 1780s has been called an accident. But it was the kind of accident that happens to the well prepared” (Gay 67-68).
Renowned throughout Europe as a pianist, Mozart paid the closest attention to his instruments and to their physical properties and construction: he wrote to Leopold, “This time I shall begin at once with Stein’s pianofortes. Before I had seen any of his make, Späth’s claviers had always been my favourites. But now I much prefer Stein’s, for they damp ever so much better than the Regensburg instruments. … In whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It never jars, it is never stronger or weaker or entirely absent; in a word, it is always even [italics mine]. It is true that he does not sell a pianoforte of this kind for less than three hundred gulden, but the trouble and the labour which Stein puts into the making of it cannot be paid for. His instruments have this special advantage over others that they are made with escape action. Only one maker in a hundred bothers about this. But without an escapement it is impossible to avoid jangling and vibration after the note is struck. When you touch the keys, the hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them…. The device which you work with your knee is better on his than on other instruments. I have only to touch it and it works; and when you shift your knee the slightest bit, you do not hear the least reverberation [italics mine].”
It is clear from these remarks that Mozart the pianist valued both precision, delicacy and responsiveness in his instruments, for his goal as a pianist was to never “jar” his listeners, but to remain “always even.” “He was uncompromisingly impatient of careless, hasty, or affected playing. When he played the piano, his head, body, arms and hands were as quiet as he could hold them. The pianist’s hands, he thought, should be so light and supple as to turn difficult passages into “flowing oil” (Davenport 228-29).
His technical, physical approach to the piano reflected the beliefs that underlay his entire musical life: “The familiar conception of temperament – the torn hair, the blazing eye, the groaning, the throwing of manuscript into the fire – is totally inapplicable to him. This quietness of spirit has led some critics to interpret his gentleness as weakness and to characterize his music as superficial. Much of the world’s education in music has come from the romantics, in whose eyes rebellion burned bright and who hurled their private lives into their scores. Mozart lived before they did, in a much more objective age. Neither in his life nor in his music was he intent upon proving anything. Pleasure is the first, most obvious reaction to his work. He intended it to be so, for he believed that music should delight” (Davenport 81).
Mozart was not alone in taking an interest in the mechanisms that would produce the music he first heard in his head, though his interest was not the norm. A couple of centuries later, clarinetist Benny Goodman reflected on the norm to author Richard Sudhalter: “When, late in life, Goodman told the author that ‘some of the guys I played with in those days didn’t go around learning more about their instruments from an intellectual point of view,’ he was revealing as much about himself as about them. ‘All they wanted was to play hot jazz [emphasis added], and the instrument was just the means…but I’ve always wanted to know what made music. How you do it, and why it sounds good’ (Sudhalter 208).
While a pianist might take a deep interest in the workings of his own instrument, the modern concert grand has become such a complex behemoth that only a trained technician equipped with an extraordinary ear is really capable of working with it successfully to keep it properly tuned and producing its peculiar tone and response.
This account of one such session of work, on Glenn Gould’s chosen Steinway (CD 318), conveys the complexity and difficulty involved: “It had been nearly two years since the piano had gone to New York for a thorough going-over, and now [Verne] Edquist [Gould’s favorite tuner] settled in for a full tuning and regulation. First he gave the piano a quick rough tuning, then he lifted off the key slip, the long, narrow wooden strip in front of the keys. Next he removed the two screws from beneath the treble and bass cheek blocks, the two rectangular blocks at either end of the keyboard. This enabled him to lift the fallboard from the piano, exposing the action mechanism inside. Then he slid the entire sixty-pound action out and onto his lap.
“Wearing strong magnifiers pressed against his glasses, he took a small sandpaper file and reshaped each of the eighty-eight hammers, which had been lined with grooves after more than fifteen years of hitting the strings. Then he adjusted and aligned hundreds of individual action parts. In order to approach those parts from a series of different angles, he moved the action from place to place – onto his lap, then onto a workbench, then back onto his lap. And to test the action as he went, he often slid it back into the piano, them removed it again to make more refinements, including voicing and fitting hammers to individual strings so that all three strings of each note would be set in motion at precisely the same time. Once he was satisfied with the hammer-to-string fit, he isolated notes that sounded overly bright and needled the corresponding hammers. For notes that sounded dull, he filed the wool, ironed it quickly with a clothes iron, or even added a little lacquer to it until he was satisfied that the tone was evenly consistent from bass to treble.
“Once he had replaced the action for the last time, he gave the instrument a fine-tuning. The process took several hours, and the improvement was dramatic. . . .
“Somehow the soundboard, built to perfection from Alaskan Sitka spruce, did more than perform its basic function of amplifying the sound of the strings: Strong and flexible, it produced sounds that were not only rich but soulful. The piano had a glorious, full-bodied singing treble and a magnificent, refined bass. Still more impressive were the piano’s harmonics – the higher-pitched overtones, sometimes more pronounced than the fundamental tone, that are heard when a single note is played and which are among the key determinants of a piano’s character and sound. CD 318 had some of the most beautiful overtones Edquist had ever heard. . . ” (Hafner 134-135).
It becomes quite clear in Hafner’s book that Gould, who dedicated his life to one instrument, the piano, had not the time to master the mechanical skills and knowledge to make the piano or to make it perform as he needed it to perform. That required the participation of countless Steinway workers and of professional tuners who were not only mechanically knowledgeable and adept but who could understand Gould’s desires – who could “hear” what Gould “heard” and what he wanted to hear.
But Gould added another layer of technology to his playing. Early in his thirties, he almost completely gave up concert work and “performed” solely in the recording studio, which allowed him the kind of control over the sound of his output that no live performance could possibly offer.
“To Gould, a recording was not intended to be a replica of – or indeed a replacement for – the concert experience. It was an art form of its own. He loved the liberating feeling he got when he entered the studio in ‘sixteen different minds’ about how a piece should go and then observed his final opinion emerging only after several hours before the microphone. A live concert would never have given him the luxury of so many options. Also, in the studio Gould could employ what he called ‘editorial afterthought.’ Working in a predigitial world, Gould was an outspoken defender of tape splicing, and he saw no reason why a musician shouldn’t play a piece of music in 162 different segments.
“Unlike many classical musicians, Gould became intimately involved in the postrecording process of splicing and mixing. The engineer would give him everything that he had recorded, and Gould would painstakingly pore over each take, deciding how the various pieces would be spliced together, which inserts would go where, and other sorts of audio manipulation such as the tweaking of the dynamic level of a phrase or a few notes – the electronic equivalent of applying makeup. The resulting whole was a distinct, unique interpretation sculpted from many parts. As he put the pieces together he wasn’t necessarily correcting errors – partly because he rarely hit wrong notes – but actually shaping the interpretation of the piece itself. Eventually, although he did not physically splice the tapes himself, Gould came to understand tape splicing as well as a professional editor, and he came to be regarded as an artist of the studio for his technical astuteness and creativity as well as for his musical genius” (Hafner 152-53).
Have I veered? It seems rather a long way from Mozart to Bach, from Stein to Steinway, from Uchida to Gould. But I’ve digressed to Glenn Gould partly to serve as the greatest possible contrast to Mozart as a pianist and Uchida as his interpreter, and partly to provide an extreme example – Gould’s – of the wedding of technology with whatever musical genius may be.
I grew up listening mainly to jazz – Armstrong, Waller, Rollins, Monk, Gene Ammons, Adrian Rollini, Bix Beiderbecke, dozens of others who exemplified the jazz value of cultivating one’s own sound. While I suppose I knew, on some level, that these unmistakeable, individual sounds I’d come to love were a product of physiology, learning, various instrument makers, and character, I’d never thought much about the how of producing a particular sound on a particular instrument. I was on the end of the spectrum Goodman viewed with thinly-veiled scorn: all I wanted to do was play hot jazz. The individual sound, though, seemed to me one of the main distinctions between jazz and “classical” music.
Classical musicians seemed to accept that there was a standard sound and approach to any given instrument, an ideal they all tried to approach, so that one trumpet player sounded much like any other “classical” trumpet player. I could hear distinctions among classical pianists, but these seemed matters of relative mastery of technique, not products of some search for individuality of sound.
That’s why the very first few bars of Bach’s “Italian Concerto” as played by Glenn Gould on his second recording nailed me to the floor of the little record store on Sherman Avenue where I heard them for the first time. I’d surely heard Bach’s music many times before, but it had never spoken to me until that moment, when it didn’t just speak to me but absorbed my entire, wondering attention. In a New York Times review, critic John Briggs captured what captured me in Gould’s playing: “‘The most rewarding aspect of Mr. Gould’s playing . . . is that technique as such is in the background. The impression that is uppermost is not one of virtuosity but of expressiveness. One is able to hear the music” (Hafner 20).
I still feel this way about Gould’s Bach. On first hearing that Concerto, one of the things that little voice in my head said was, “Well, that swings.” That reaction came not only from Gould’s technique – his “fantastic ability to hold a pulse rock-firm while bringing out every detail of embroidery” in the words of one critic (Friedrich 148) – but from the unmistakeable love for the music the pianist brought to his performance. That love – not solely for Bach, but I think first and always for Bach – was what prompted the endless hours of practice and study, the obsessive concern for exactly the right seat and for the perfect piano, the further hours of splicing together the best moments of a given recording – to enable the music to be heard as Gould heard it in his head.
It’s the absence of that love that makes Gould’s renditions of the Mozart piano sonatas so unsatisfying. For while he admired the early sonatas, “Gould . . . reasserted his notion that Mozart’s growth and maturity was one long decline. . . . . ‘The moment he did find himself, as conventional wisdom would have it, at the age of eighteen or nineteen or twenty, I stop being so interested in him, because what he discovered was primarily a theatrical gift which he applied ever after not only to his operas but to his instrumental works as well, and…that sort of thing doesn’t interest me at all’ (Friedrich 147).
I think the “theatrical gift” Gould discerned could be viewed rather as a melodic gift, a compelling interest in creating music that sings. Early biographer Marcia Davenport writes, “The more he composed for instruments, the more desperately he longed to write for the voice.” That this emphasis held no attraction for Gould was, I think, a matter of taste that Gould was incapable of viewing as such. Chacun a son gout was not in Gould’s vocabulary.
But that vocal quality was exactly what Mitsuko Uchida seemed to hear in the piano sonatas, and what her recordings of them captures. As did the great improvising musician Adrian Rollini, Mozart highlights each significant note in each melody rhythmically with both pickup phrases and decorative clusters. No decoration is ever merely decoration. Every note, even the most minor passing tone, contributes to the sense of the melody. The origins of those rhythms and melodies in the natural world are also apparent in Uchida’s performances. The patter of falling leaves, the various impacts of rain, surf, waves, the sudden leap to the sky of a meadowlark . . . Uchida appears to hear as well, capturing all these incredibly subtle rhythmic variations with her completely controlled attack and release and her remarkable ear for dynamics.
Yet another branch of digital technology, youTube, allows direct viewing of Uchida at the keyboard, performing a number of Mozart sonatas, and her physical approach to her piano seems almost to mirror Mozart’s: “When he played the piano, his head, body, arms and hands were as quiet as he could hold them. The pianist’s hands, he thought, should be so light and supple as to turn difficult passages into “flowing oil” (Davenport 228 -29). Uchida’s poised, peaceful demeanor while she plays contrasts strikingly with Gould’s: “He brought his own personal chair…which enabled him to sit just fourteen inches off the floor, so that he could keep his wrists at or below the level of the keyboard….When he played, he often gestured like a conductor with one hand while he attacked the keyboard with the other. And he sang, groaned, sighed” (Friedrich 49).
In contrast to Gould’s obsessive fiddling with the mechanics of his Steinway, Uchida owns four Steinway concert grands, which she describes as “a different animal” that she “looks after.” Elsewhere she says of her pianos, “one I call “the Oldie”, who was born in 1962 and I bought in 1982. He is now full of new bits but the body is the same. . . . They’re like human beings – all men. Number 2 is good for practising on. The third I call the Boy from Munich – the kind that would drive a sports car. The fourth is the youngster, just getting nappy trained. I’ll probably find somewhere in Europe to house him so I don’t always have to transport a piano – which is quite a business.” Clearly she respects, even cherishes, the individual peculiarities of these instruments, “raising” them like children by playing them, by playing with them, rather than disciplining them into greater conformance with some ideal piano.
Without a whole string of technologies, the “pleasing, lively dreams” of Mozart, the cathedral sonar structures of Bach would have remained their private pleasures. Without the long, mathematical development of musical notation, the long development of the keyboard instruments, the long perfecting of sound recording, from carving sound impulses into wax cylinders to capturing them precisely in strings of digits, we would not only have forever lost the minds and spirits of the great composers, but those of the great interpreters and performers. How can I condemn technology wholesale, if its loss would entail, as well, losses such as those?
I wonder if Gould’s and Uchida’s contrasting approaches to the technologies of instruments and recording exemplify a similar set of contrasts in approaches to living this life. We can use our peculiar human powers of reason, memory and invention to try to make the rest of creation conform more closely to our imagined ideals, or we can use those same powers to try to find our own place within creation, to fit properly into the great harmonies of living. We can play ourselves, play with living. In Frank Morgan’s words, we can “try to have world harmony” (Frank Morgan, “Gratitude,” Mood Indigo, Antilles 91320-2, 1989). In the end, as I listen again to Uchida channel Mozart on one of her boys, I can only echo Meister Eckhart: “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘Thank you,’ that would suffice.”
Works Cited
Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows, Norton, 2010.
Davenport, Martha, Mozart, Scribner, 1932/Barnes&Noble, 1995.
Gay, Peter, Mozart, Viking, 1999.
Hafner, Katie, A Romance on Three Legs, Bloomsbury, 1998.
Morgan, Frank, Mood Indigo, Antilles 91320-2, 1989.
Simon, Linda, Dark Light, Harcourt, Inc., 2004.
Sudhalter, Richard, Lost Chords, Oxford, 1999.
Wakefield, Dan, ed., Kurt Vonnegut Letters, Delacorte, 2012.
