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Where are we?
Times change our standards of living. Despite of their status, some standards can become eroded. Overwhelmed by the sound expansion in the world, the classical instruments take on new tasks: to awaken the memory of the Pythagorean monochord, and to sensitize the aural faculties to a complex environment full of vibrations to which we are exposed.
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Hopelessly overchallenged, and only approximitately able to continue the linear development, which has historically formed us, the question arises: What value does playing the piano retain? And generally speaking: the role of either general dogsbody or intransigent dictator endows the piano with a dubious fame. Music - it should have once been a spiritual mentor - falls by the wayside.
The failure of the "artificial" degrades the piano lesson to a caricature - indeed that was what it has been like: a mixture of military ceremony and imposed domestic bliss has been the result.
What's the challnge to new piano lessons? The act of playing and the structure of the music await their revival as a part of life. Beyond the differentiation between composition, improvisation and interpretation, it becomes necessary to grant the pianist a personal autonomy in his approach to the instrument, so that the relevance of the act also implies aesthetic competence. What applies to language, should also be true for our approach to the instrument - speak a word such as canary into the open space of a room and whole chains of thought arise in the convoluted inner space of our mind. The thoughts can extend from the trill of trilling, or its yellow colour or the cage to personal experiences and sensations.
On the basis of long experience within the framework of tertiary functions and regional and transregional workshops the insight has arisen, that playing the piano must take on a degree of immediacy which, it seems, cannot be attained along the traditional paths of the classical education. We are therefore presented with the chance of understanding the act of playing as the realisation of imagined sounds in order to give clear expression to structures inherent in the music, to develop them and to fill them with a personal meaning.
In every encounter with the instrument there is a corporal, physical element, which forms part of the music. The sensual dimension finds its expression in gestures, in mimesis, in the choreography so to speak. Wherever a musical tone resounds, something moves. The tone language and the sense of music exist in an intimate relationship to each other. A singer and a player of a melody-instrument experience this constantly. In the case of the pianist and his instrument, however, a distance between the two exists, which can only be called tragic and which necessitates the attempt to achieve the integration between the imagined sound and its expression.
The existential attitude is important in the transfer of the music in the relationship with his instrument. The challenges resulting of the unlimited pluralism we are forced to confront, and the dangers, to which we are exposed in terms of our responsibility, makes it necessary to dive deeper into the waters of our existence. Only so, there is sense to produce tones from an instrument and to acquaint others with this experience - be that at a pedagogical feeding troth, be that at an aesthetic banquet.
© Klaus RUNZE
Practising(<click) or click on the graphic pictures
PUBLICATIONS (PIANO LESSON &IMPROVISATION)
1977 Piano Teaching Book 'Two Hands - Twelve Notes': Schott London / Japan 1986, Nihon Schott Tokyo;
1978/79 Paris, IRCAM: 'The child in the labyrinth of sound', commissioned documentation of children's creativity. Unpublished;Other articles are in German : look at the german version of this page < click
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