Mark Walsen - Parallel Intervals for Piano

[Mark W]

Hello MG,

I'm thoroughly enjoying your philosophy of music.

... someone said to me more than a half century ago, that you hear something new every time you listen to a composition. I think she meant that each time you become aware of what you may have heard many times and the new "information" contributes to your feeling for the music.

That insight is worth deeply pondering.

I believe that the reason music arouses our emotions so much is that, like stationary art (e.g., paintings), the images trigger memories of places, events, and emotional stories in our lives. But music also has the dimension of time, as so do plays and films have, for example. That extra dimension of time is extremely important in arousing our emotions, because our emotion lives are experienced in time, just not snapshots. We know very well the feeling of ramping up in excitement, or calming down from excitement, or relaxing with seemingly endless time, or struggling with uncontrolled anger or frustration. All of these emotions that we experience in time in our lives are recalled by the music we hear in time. Probably a major reason that we hear the same music differently each time, is that we come back to the music with new fresh memories in our emotional lives, that the music abstractly recalls.

It's quite coincidental that you mentioned Chopin's Prelude in A Major. It is perhaps the piece I most remember my mother playing when I was a child. Chopin was her favorite composer, and she played some of the fairly difficult pieces. But that prelude particularly stuck with me. It was my mother's piano playing that led me to playing the piano myself.

My 90-year old mother has been in fairly severe dementia for 10 years now. We communicate verbally well enough that she can still share in what is happening now in the lives of our families, as well as recall the past. But she is limited in her thinking. She doesn't seem to be limited, however, in her ability to still appreciate music. Every time I visit her, about once a week, I play the piano for her on the console piano that she and my dad got for me in high school, and which she kept after I went off to college. Chopin's Prelude in A Major is one of the pieces I player for my mother the most.

Each time I play that piece, I play it differently, sometimes quite differently. It's seemingly random how I play it. Sometimes I'll play it with a grandiose flair of exaggerated emotions, tempo changes, and tempo changes. Other times I'll play it in complete modest simplicity. This Chopin Prelude in A Major holds up to any playing along the spectrum of very simple to very showing, very calm to very flamboyant.

Is there a "right" way to play the Chopin Prelude in A Major? I don't think so, except that the right way to play it is to play it sincerely how you feel it that time. That might or might not satisfy the listener, depending on what the listener's current emotion state is.

If one were playing Chopin Prelude in A Major as, say, an encore piece, one would probably be well advised to choose a middle-of-the-road interpretation, that would more likely appeal to the average listener in the audience rather than one in an unusual state of mind, such as perhaps having broken up with a lover. On the other hand, maybe in this encore scenario, one would be best advised to play the piece the way one felt about it that moment, so that even if it didn't appeal to the average listener, it would especially touch the soul of the listener who was in an emotional frame of mind similar to yours at that time.

Does this forum need another section for the philosophy of music? MG, I can tell that you and I like to indulge in this.

Cheers
-- Mark