A Minute with Miles

Anybody who’s been around the music business for any length of time has met performers who are – how can I put this gently – legends in their own minds. Where the ego is large enough, the performer tends to think that the main reason a particular Beethoven sonata, or Tchaikovsky symphony, or Puccini opera is worth hearing is the brilliance of that performer’s performance; that no one else could possibly bring the work to life so wonderfully. Well, I’m all for musicians having appropriate levels of self-confidence, and indeed you should never take the stage unless you think you have something to offer, something personal. But there are performers who are so intent on proving how “personal” their interpretations are that they distort what great composers have written; and there are also performers who forget that Beethoven’s music, for example, has already managed to stick around for quite some time, and that it isn’t, perhaps, just their performances that have convinced people that the music is worth hearing.

The image of the starving artist may be a romantic one, but it turns out that poverty has not always been a necessary condition for writing great music. Sometimes, in fact, great music has gone along with great wealth. Felix Mendelssohn, for one, came from a very wealthy family, and during his lifetime Johannes Brahms made more money than he could ever use. Closer to our own time, the best example of a wealthy genius may have been Francis Poulenc. Poulenc was the grandson of the founder of the firm that became Rhône-Poulenc, an enormous chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturer, and he wouldn’t have had to work a day in his life if he hadn’t wanted to. But work he did, and prolifically. Poulenc composed dozens of important works, including many brilliant and delightful songs and chamber music pieces; sacred music, including a beautiful Gloria for soprano, chorus, and orchestra; and three operas, including his masterpiece, Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Turning pages for pianists is a pretty thankless job—the page turner is usually only noticed when he or she messes up. But for pianists who depend on page turners—and at some point most pianists do, at least those who haven’t switched over to electronic tablets—good, dependable, unobtrusive page turners are worth their weight in gold. They free the pianists from worry and make their lives much easier. Then again… virtually every pianist has a collection of page turner stories that are either funny or horrible or both. Examples? Well, I’m not a pianist, but I was onstage once with a page turner who had eaten a pre-concert dinner very heavy with onion and garlic, and it was all our pianist could do to keep from passing out from the man’s breath. We also once had a page turner, who while leaning over and trying to turn a page during the concert, said to our pianist, “I had an operation on my shoulder. It wasn’t successful.”

Have you ever wondered why pianists need page turners? They’re not, after all, the only ones who use both hands to play their instruments. The answer is that piano music goes by too fast: you can only fit half as much music on one page of piano music as you can on one page of music for a non-keyboard instrument. And that’s for the simple reason that in printed piano music, each line of music takes up two lines, one for the left hand one for the right. Each set of two lines together, for left hand and right, is called a “system.” And I should mention that in piano scores for chamber music, you can fit far less than half as much music per page, because the parts for the other instrument or instruments are also included, printed above each system in smaller notes just above the notes for the piano. To give you an example: in the edition of the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 2 that we use in my group, the violin part is 17 pages-long, while the piano score covers 64 pages.

It was George Bernard Shaw who famously wrote, “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” What Shaw forgot is that teaching is doing. And if you’re looking for a group of people whose unlimited dedication is matched only by their extraordinary skills, I suggest you look no farther than public school music teachers. To me, these teachers are heroes. They take classrooms full of children from all walks of life and with hugely varying skill levels-- sometimes starting as early as second grade-- and day after day, with infinite patience, they teach the children how to play musical instruments, and then how to play them better and better. They give children the gift of music, and they teach the joy that comes from perseverance and accomplishment. Public school music teachers don’t live for the thrill of seeing their names up in lights. They live for the light they see in their students’ eyes, the kind of light that is lit by music.

These days, with convenient hindsight we take it for granted that good music lasts, that pieces that are well known now will remain well known for years -- perhaps even for centuries to come. But I often wonder what was in the minds of the great composers of centuries past whose music we still love. Composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven knew very well how good they were, and where they stood compared to other composers. They were too good not to have known. And they certainly studied the music of great composers who had come before them, so they knew that great music didn’t just disappear with the deaths of those who had written it. But did it ever occur to Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven that their music would be played… forever? Did they hope for that? Dream of it? Could they even have conceived of the idea? I wonder.

One of the wonderful aspects of life as a musician: age differences don’t mean anything.

Singers often have to learn a whole new set of IPA symbols when they’re learning a piece in a new language.

Like it or not, performers can’t help evaluating performance, especially in the cases of pieces we know or instruments we play.

It’s often easier to say what classical music is not, than to say what it is.