Introduction by Helen Smith Tarchalski
any years ago, a colleague played a live broadcast
concert at the Phillips Collection of all 20th-century music.
I couldn't attend the concert, but I heard the broadcast. After
making my apologies, I mentioned that the applause seemed to represent
a fairly large audience. "No, the acoustics are very live
there," he explained. "Advertise an all-contemporary
program, and watch 'em stay away in droves!"
Why are audiences sometimes resistant to music they consider "too different"? What defines "different"? What qualifies as "too" different? And how do we, as teachers, explain how the music of our time is relevant to our lives and therefore, worthy of attention?
David Kraehenbuehl addresses some of these issues in the guest article which follows. As a pianist and teacher, Kraehenbuehl had a passion for creating and promoting quality music for students. He felt a commitment to influencing the future and recognized the important role of children in this pursuit-the children we teach, and the children within us.
In his article, Mr. Kraehenbuehl adroitly articulates how many intelligent teachers "go wrong" when introducing new music. You will find clever gems here that may enlighten, or even change your approach to "different" music.
Editor's Note:
The following article was originally written for The Piano Teacher magazine back in the late 50's. In 1964, it was included in a book titled Selections from the Piano Teacher, 1958-1963, and published by the Summy-Birchard Co. KEYBOARD COMPANION thanks Summy-Birchard and its exclusive distributor, Warner Bros. Publications, for granting us permission to reprint it here.
Article by David Kraehenbuehl
or a composer, this is the easiest
question in the world to answer. Modern music is no more different
than modern music has always been. This means that it is a
little bit different from music written ten years ago, very different
from music written two hundred years ago. And that is why so many
find it too different to enjoy. Most of the music that is taught
today was written a hundred to two hundred years ago. Many of
the teaching pieces we use, although written this year, are in
styles that are a hundred to two hundred years old. By comparison,
even the mildest of modern idioms is very different. It is this
shocking difference between the very old and the very new that
makes the new so difficult for many of us. But this is no problem
for a child; and, if it becomes one, it is our fault as teachers.
For a child, modern music is not different at all. What could
it be different from? It relates to the world around him, the
world that he knows first-hand as a kaleidoscopic variety of exciting
experiences and exciting sounds. He hears it every day in the
rumble of a distant expressway, in the sound of the midnight plane
as he lies awake, in the rhythm of dead leaves rattling in the
wind, in the summer night's orchestra from the nearby swampy place.
Like a good composer, his ears are always tuned for the new and
different in the vibrant world of rhythm and sound that is all
around him. Then, too, he hears modern music constantly in radio
commercials and as the background to movies and TV shows. Modern
music is everywhere; he can't miss it. Obviously, he enjoys it.
Perhaps we should take a very old
piece of advice and become as little children. We may discover
that it is really very easy to enjoy our own music, the music
of our own time. Unfortunately, for us to become as little children
is not easy. But let's try an exercise in it. We will try to experience
a piece of modern music as a child would.
The piece we will use ("Vacation") was written expressly for children by a university professor, Ross Lee Finney (see below). Before you look at it, I should tell you that Mr. Finney is a very advanced musical thinker who teaches graduate music courses at the University of Michigan. To understand his very modern music, you must know something about an involved contemporary technique of composition called twelve-tone technique. This is the same technique that Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern used to compose their dissonant, atonal music. This piece is atonal because, although its key signature is C major, it uses lots of flats and sharps. Atonal music isn't really in any key. This piece ends with a kind of A major chord, but this isn't a proper tonic. That is because it is atonal. In any case, the piece couldn't be in A major because it uses d sharp right at the beginning.
What are you thinking? If my guess is right, most of you are thinking that you would rather not look at this piece after all. I wrote that last paragraph deliberately to show how easy it is to leave the impression that modern music is strange, inaccessible, and probably not particularly desirable. The paragraph includes a number of irrelevant, trivial, and possibly prejudicial observations regarding a fine children's piece by a fine modern composer. And yet it includes nothing but statements that I have heard from teachers. Let's see what is the matter with it.
To begin with, we are talking about music that may not have been heard by our audience. Furthermore, we are telling them that it will be no use to hear it until they "understand" it. Put that way, it is a pretty silly request. How can anyone understand a piece of music that he has not heard, and what better way is there to understand a piece than to hear it? We should never talk about, or listen to talk about, music that we have not heard. How many are there who are certain that Schoenberg and Webern wrote ugly, distasteful music? And yet, they have never heard a note of either. A child wouldn't make such a mistake. Children have opinions about only those experiences that they know first hand. Their prejudices about what they do not know first hand are learned from us. If we wish to be like little children, we must reserve judgment on any musical experience until we have actually had the experience. More often than not, we will be pleasantly surprised.
My paragraph has another glaring fault. We never find out what Mr. Finney's piece is about. Knowing that it is entitled "Vacation" explains its whole nature. Vacations are something we all know about; we look forward to them eagerly; we make lively preparations for them; we feel like jumping up and down with excitement as the time for departure approaches; we anticipate freedom ecstatically. Hearing "Vacation," remembering what this meant to us as children, we understand and enjoy Mr. Finney's piece at once. He has captured vividly every facet of his subject. What difference does it make that the piece is constructed from a chromatic scale? Are not the occasional sharp dissonances a perfect way to express the confusion of vacation preparations? Do not the bright, parallel triads make us feel excited? Isn't everyone satisfied with the finality of the ending, proper triad or not? What does it matter if some of the sounds are a little unfamiliar? The enthusiasm with which a child approaches a vacation is perfectly depicted. This is what a child asks of music. He wants a clear re-creation in sound and rhythm of an experience that he knows. We, like children, should ask first what a piece is about, and second, is it really about it?
I see some puzzled expressions. Is that all there is to it? Don't we need to know a lot more about a piece of music than that? Of course we must. But do most of the things we tell children about music really tell them how it is made? In fact, do most of the things we tell ourselves about a modern composition help us to understand it very much? I'm afraid not.
Let's look again at our unhappy paragraph. We say that "Vacation" is atonal because it has the key signature of C major and uses lots of flats and sharps. What does all that mean? What is an atonal piece? One without tones, perhaps? And does an absence of sharps and flats at the beginning of a piece mean the key of C? Not necessarily. And, on hearing the piece, are we not completely convinced that it ends clearly in the key of A major on a tonic triad with an added second?
Our difficulty with modern music is largely our own fault. We have turned a number of half-truths and even falsehoods about the nature of music into value judgments. And, worse yet, we pass on these hazy value judgments to our students. Keys and scales are all-important to us. A piece that isn't clearly in a key, that doesn't make obvious use of the notes of a particular key-scale, becomes suspect. Parallel fifths are "wrong" and a piece that uses them is therefore "way out." Music is made of dominant-tonic progressions; a piece that isn't made of such progressions may not be music. The list of our requirements for a proper piece or the proper understanding of a piece is endless and largely beside the point. If a child can read and play effectively a lively piece of music, is his understanding improved by telling him that it is made of dominant and tonic chords in the key of A major, and the complicated parts are accidentals? Of course not. Who would assume that a child's understanding of a lively story would be improved by telling him that it uses verbs and nouns from a six hundred and fifty word vocabulary, and the complicated sentences are the ones with adverbs and adjectives?
What, then, would improve our understanding of a piece of music, any piece of music, modern or not? To think as a composer thinks; and, happily, good composers think like children. They think about sounds-bright sounds, dark sounds, sharp sounds, soft sounds, thick sounds, thin sounds-a whole wonderful palette of sounds. And they think about time-time going fast, going slow, going steadily, going jerkily, flowing, stopping-all the many delightful, dancing shapes that time may take. And they shape time to say what they have to say. How do they shape time? By controlling the changing of sounds. To play a piece well, we must observe and understand, in its proper proportion, every kind of change in it. We must play the piece in such a way that important changes sound important, unimportant changes sound unimportant. A distorted performance results when we emphasize what the composer considered unimportant, when we overlook what the composer considered essential.
Let's look again at "Vacation" to see what we can find out about change and the shape of time in it. These are the things a performer must understand about a piece. The first eight bars fall into four two-bar groups. Notice how the composer makes one surprising change just before the beginning of each two-bar group. At the end of the second, fourth, and sixth bars, he brings one chord in the right hand that is different from the A major triad. It is this really different chord, put in just before the bar line, that makes us feel the beginning of the third, fifth, and seventh bars as new starts. A composer in the eighteenth century would have put a dominant chord before each bar line, not because dominant chords must come before tonic chords, but because the dominant chord would be a surprising change. Mr. Finney, living in the twentieth century, finds dominant chords a rather dull change. He chooses a brighter, fresher change to express his lively feelings about a vacation.
Now let's look at the third line. Here, Mr. Finney wants a real change in order to start an important new section of his piece. He adds a new highest note and a new lowest note to his music. And what notes does he add? G's. And if we look closely, we will see that these are really brand-new notes. Mr. Finney has never used a g of any kind before this ninth bar of his piece. The g's then are a real change, an exciting surprise; and, as performers, we know that they are so important that we must bring them out.
There are other differences between the first eight bars and the second eight bars of the piece. The second section still has triads in the right hand, but they change more often; likewise, the left hand has many more sixteenth notes. Time seems to be racing. Why? Because changes are taking place much more frequently. As performers, we know this will be a dangerous passage. When time gets hectic, we get hectic. We rush or we stumble. Also, the sound of the whole passage is more complex, more dissonant, more strained than the opening eight bars. The notes do not fit together as neatly as they did in the first part. There are many different kinds of sounds instead of just a few. Where the bass clef sign appears in the fourth stave, the composer has added a lot of notes in the left hand that have never been used before. It is with a sense of relief that we come back in bar 17 to the more reasonable music that started the piece off.
For Mr. Finney, an exact restatement of the beginning of the piece would be too dull to represent real excitement. He has heightened the liveliness of the music by making everything higher than it was at the beginning and by putting the fast notes on top where they will surely be heard. And, in the last line of the piece he uses the highest note of all, a b that he has never used before. The piece rises continuously, getting more and more excited. As performers, we must make sure that the right hand is clearly heard through the fifth and sixth lines of the piece. It is the right hand that makes the return of the opening so fresh and exciting.
And now we go off on our vacation, disappearing into the distance. Having reached the peak of excitement, we finally relax. How does Mr. Finney shape time to depict this? The changes in the music become very few and very familiar. Time slows down. The b, which was the last important new element to be added, just stays on and on, right out to the end of the piece. We are so familiar with it that it doesn't disturb us at all when it lingers on in the middle of the A major chord at the close of the piece.
This is the way a composer makes a piece. He doesn't think about keys and key-scales, about "proper" progressions, about parallel fifths. He thinks about what he has to say and how he can shape time with sounds to say it. He starts with a sound, any sound, and then makes a different sound, a lot different or a little different, as he wishes. If we could learn to look at music that way, we would discover that no music is really different. All music is a lively, expressive pattern of sound in time telling us again about ourselves, our experiences, our feelings, the universe around us. Any child knows this. Why is it so hard for us to learn it?
Back to the editor
As audiences are evolving beyond the experience described in my opening paragraphs and yearning for something unique, modern music can help to fulfill that desire for enrichment.
Films permeate our students' lives; their conversations are
peppered with "in" vocabulary and lines drawn from popular
movies. Try asking your students to imagine music they consider
"too different" as a movie sound track. (The modern
version of asking a student to write a story about what he hears.)
This exercise frequently causes a shift in perception; the imagination
is off and running. Suddenly, the music isn't so "different"
after all. It is relevant to the students' lives, which makes
it worthy of their attention.