My posts in English
Freedom is not being afraid, says the great Nina Simone in this video. Hopefully research will soon return the freedom that fear is taking away from us. Because healthcare personnel are saving lives in the short term, and we will never thank them enough for their work. But only research will create the conditions to clear the fear that grips us today. Research and the resulting knowledge will make us freer. As it has always been, throughout the history of humankind.
This is a very, very special photo for me. Emilia Fadini and Laia Martín, one next to another. You can not see me, because I was 600 km away, but at the same time I’m there, 100%. From Emilia Fadini, today still very bright at 89 years old, a thousand things emerged in my life. In those distant years 80, my passion for questioning about the music I did found in her and her courses a path that led from then, solidly, to look at the treaties (even more than the instruments) the answers to the questions that arose when observing the scores. Thanks to her I discovered the clavichord, I heard for the first time the names of Santa María, Diruta, and many others whose existence I know that many of my readers have discovered in my books, and I began to live in first person an intimate way of sharing music whose values had nothing to do with the ones that were being proposed to me, in those same years, in the conservatory classes.
This week, at 20th FIMTE – International Festival of Spanish Keyboard Music, so brilliantly organised by Luisa Morales, Emilia has shared the FIMTE Symposium with Laia Martin, who from that lineage is, in many ways, the continuation. Without me being seen, in this picture I am in the middle. As the current teacher of one and the old student of another, seeing them together gives me a wonderful feeling. Without what I saw in those Emilia classes, I doubt that Laia would even know who I am, nor would I be orienting her doctoral thesis at the University of Aveiro, nor would she, most likely, have been in Mojácar this week. And that is the meaning of that peculiar sowing that is teaching. Teaching and also writing, which allows you to share with many people what you consider important even away from your physical presence, in a process that often ends in a future whose trajectories move far, out of sight. But when these trajectories intersect, as has happened these days in the FIMTE, even without having been there, happiness is very deep.
I have just emerged from the performance of Beethoven’s 9th by the OBC, the Barcelona Symphony and Catalonia National Orchestra, which programmed this week’s event to include a bold staging design in the hands of a company with a strange name, one I’d heard in glowing reports from other shows: the Agrupación Señor Serrano.
They probably are great at doing other things, but I found this 9th horrendous, to put it frankly. The orchestra fulfilled its role. The choir (the splendid Orfeó Català) was magnificent. Perhaps some of the soloists could have been better. But it is impossible to view a production of this kind as anything but a whole, and there was no way to make sense of that whole.
You know I don’t like to speak ill of what I haven’t liked, so in such cases I usually keep my mouth shut and let it go (yes, well, there are also times when I don’t respond because I haven’t got time, so don’t go thinking that if I haven’t written about a concert or a CD you’ve given me that it must be because I don’t like it!). In this case, though, I think voicing some thoughts is warranted.
The principal idea, which the project had already announced in writing, was not bad: read this very “European” work as a reflection on Europe. The idea of a garden as a metaphor for the common European project, collectively watered and tended (1st movement); the struggles and clouds that darken it (2nd movement); the nostalgia and consideration of the many things we’ve botched (3rd movement); and a road full of hope towards the future, one built on affection, caring, and hugs (4th movement). Fantastic up to this point.
But hang on: in this all you actually see is plenty of goodwill. The reality, minute by minute, bar after bar, is that there was no relation with the music’s unravelling. No dramatic crescendo (precisely in this work!), no relation between what we hear and what we see (an old and common problem in many operatic staging ideas too). Spectacular—in its absurdity— was the entrance of the theme of the fourth movement, following the recitative: an entrance that went completely unnoticed, lacking even a brushstroke in the staging direction. But this was the tip of the iceberg. In neither the entrance of the “Turkish” variation or the a cappella variation was there any attempt at all to capitalise on these moments by having them coincide with something. Huh?! As if there, in the music, nothing significant happens!
Then there’s the ideological drift. Europe is going bad because we have “let the weeds grow” and haven’t known how to put up the right “fences”. But exactly this, mind (and take note: as if weeds growing in a garden can be avoided by fencing; little do I know about gardening but I think I grasp this much)! Yep, boldly essentialist and ethnicist, straight up. So, there it is, something that can even be seen as a revealing metaphor of the kind of Europe that some really desire: a fenced-off garden, managed from above, and in which we are the plants at the mercy of our lords and masters.
And not one nod to the internal problems, to the hierarchies between states, to what happened in Greece, to the inability to manage Mediterranean conflicts. Not one wink! A few well-known faces (Merkel, Lagarde, y other local figures), all in a directionless succession in which you could find Napoleon, Hitler, Casals, Freud, or Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple. One brief flash, indeed, of Putin, and in another a keyboard with Cyrillic letters. ¿What’s this about? Are we to blame Europe’s problems, then, on the Russians? Well I never would have guessed!
And so, the biggest booing I have ever heard at Barcelona’s L’Auditori. I imagine that what may have most upset many spectators will have been all the explicit phallic images and the salaciousness of the couple scenes in the final minutes. This struck me as nothing more than gratuitous. But for one reason or another, I know this entire spectacle, in all its parts, just did not make sense. I prefer not to know how much public money was spent on it.
The difficulty is that, given its fatuity, the only sensible response was to boo it, which is what many of us did (though clearly wanting to distinguish the music from the staging, because the former was worthy in all ways), and this booing lumps you in with those who would have joined in the catcalls out of distaste for anything that doesn’t conform to the “usual”. But honestly, this is NOT the reason here. And it makes me doubly uneasy because the one time money is invested in something different, programming such a horror show instead of something truly valid and sound makes it more difficult next time the chance arises to be daring.
What a great shame! Truly. And a magnificent reminder that we have to be very, very dexterous when we try something different. People who know me also know how open I am to innovation, and in recent times I actively engage in this as a creative artist. But not anything goes, because there are many different ways to get across ideas within music, especially when words and staging can be used. Yet so often it is banality that rules, and this makes life so much more difficult for those of us who have things to say that do not fit in traditional channels.
I am often told that in today’s musical world everybody seeks perfection. Students, teachers, juries, producers, critics, and concert players; all would be apparently obsessed with perfection. This is not my perception at all. Many students certainly are preoccupied with it, often encouraged by their teachers. And this is sometimes (not always) the concern of members of juries. But my understanding is that many teachers, juries, and musicians are highly attracted to other very different dimensions of music. This, in any case, is not my point here. Nor is it the actual definition of what we call “perfection” that interests me. My focus is: why should we even need perfection?
Perfection is boring, in any aspect of life. It is practical, if we are referring to machines. But in people it is tiresome, and even suspicious. No, I quite definitely do not like perfection. But let’s go further. Perfection is fake. Always. It does not exist. We humans are not perfect. What we call perfection is just the closest possible approximation to an idea. That idea possibly is perfect. But the perfection of the most perfect of our products is not real, never will be. Making perfection the goal of our activity is an escape, a flight from reality. It is an attempt to surrender to something superior, something imagined, a chimera. In a certain sense, it is a religious yearning, a leap of faith. And its pursuance is the best possible way to end up frustrated and uncomfortable with our bodies, our daily life, and our immediate surroundings. If our goal is to remind ourselves that another more perfect world exists, and that it is not part of this life we live, then obsession for perfection is a splendid tool. But if we can think of our life in a radically different way, the quest for perfection is our worst enemy.
I don’t know about you, but by far the three most exciting things in life for me are writing books, travelling to unknown places, and having good sex. And I’ve always thought that writing books is the only one of these three things whose successful outcome does not require the involvement of other people. You have to interact in the other two, and it is from that interaction that an important part of pleasure comes (these two can also be done alone, like writing books, but in my experience there’s no comparison). With books, this isn’t so. You start from what others have written, said, played or recorded (at least in my case, since I write about music), but writing them is up to you, and depends only on you.
Of course, this is what happens when you write in a language you know well. If not, then again you need interaction with other people. It seems to be a problem, but it is not. Above all it is an opportunity, a wonderful opportunity. We are on this planet to share, not to live in isolated bubbles, from which we only exit now and then, out of necessity or for fun. While sharing, we learn and grow.
And this is exactly where I am now, applying the final touches to the new version of my History of Piano Technique. 800 pages in English. Well, none of them would exist without the hand-to-hand work I’ve done with Peter Russell Wix over the past three years. I don’t know how to explain the gratitude I feel for this shared task, which will continue in the future, because I will continue to need someone like him—with his dedication, his love for language and his taste for detail—for a long, long time, especially now, when English is becoming essential in my life. Thanks, Peter.
Finally, the call for our doctoral programme at the University of Aveiro was published! Applications until August 3.
On October 11, we will start classes. Any brave in the room willing to challenge? #Doctorate #Aveiro #SóloParaValientes
https://www.ua.pt/research/PageEdict.aspx?g=9&a=0
https://acesso.ua.pt/upload/editais/e_3955.pdf
In December 2017 I answered the Musikeon version of the so-called Proust Questionnaire. It was a nice way to talk about very different things, from tigers and archeology to Borges and Star Wars. Here are the questions and my answers.