Saturday afternoon I attended a panel on "music and mind" at Stanford. Famed soprano Renée Fleming, who's edited a book on the subject, moderated three Stanford professors of neuroscience and a dean, who described research. One professor talked about training for people with cochlear implants to get them to hear music properly (the implants are designed to clarify voices only). Another described some sort of tactile glove he's developed that helps give Parkinson's patients better control over their limbs; he's hoping to transfer this research into dealing with musicians with focal dystonia (cramps and contractions that affect them particularly when they're playing or singing). The dean spoke of a Stanford arts therapy program open to help students who feel lonely, depressed, etc. Sending students to concerts, museums, etc., may seem a dorky idea for a program, but the therapists, after determining your tastes, find appropriate venues, pay for the tickets and arrange transportation, and above all they match you with other students who want to go to the same things, since not having anyone to go with and not being able to find anyone is a major student complaint.
The third professor spoke in more general terms about brain and bodily states, discussing neural control over exhalation, which all speech and singing is. He said that open improvisation is less traumatic than anything formal or scripted - he cited waiting your turn to introduce yourself at a meeting as particularly anxiety-inducing; it's better to go first. Fleming disagreed; it's when she's practiced an aria to perfection that she gets into the zone, a flow state as she described it. Whereas improvisation - which she's done as a jazz singer - requires thinking, analytics of the accompaniment, etc.
I'm not a performer as Fleming is, but my ideas fall on her lines. Listening to others doing the introductions gives me a chance to mentally draft my own words and a database of others to model myself on, and I get less anxious as it goes along. Whereas free improvisation, like improv theater, panics me, because I don't know what to do, and I can't think of anything under pressure. (My brother, on the other hand, loves improv theater, and does it regularly.)
After the panel, I had just under two hours to travel successively by car, BART, and bus 40 miles to Herbst in the City for a piano recital. Having prepared by stuffing portable food in my car so I wouldn't have to stop for dinner, I managed it in exactly 90 minutes.
Pianist Marc-André Hamelin began by applying his clear, precise, and liquid tones to a delightfully crisp and chipper performance of a Haydn sonata. He then spoiled the effect by playing two pieces of atonal modernist crap, one messy and one stodgy, and one piece of postmodernist pastiche crap (lots of Debussy quotes, a Scott Joplin quote interrupted by Igor Stravinsky, that sort of thing).
The second half was all late Romantic Russians, Sergei Rachmaninoff and his almost-forgotten epigone Nikolai Medtner. I actually liked the Medtner better: it was lighter and less turgid. But the Rachmaninoff pieces, including his rare Second Piano Sonata, could have been chosen specifically to make him look bad, because he's often better than this. Performance: A, insofar as it was possible to tell; Program selection: D.
The program note writer was interested in one thing, describing how hard all this music was to play. Haydn: "these sonatas are at times very difficult." Crap modernist 1 (Frank Zappa, no less): "Zappa himself described the solo-piano version as 'very, very, very difficult.'" Crap modernist 2 (Stefan Wolpe): "this exceptionally complex score." Crap postmodernist (John Oswald): "two measures of the score were possibly impossible to play." Medtner: "a study in fiery virtuosity." Rachmaninoff: "The one thing clear about this music is how difficult it is."
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