A reflection.

[saxikath]

Hey, I wrote something! Not much of something, but it's a something.



On Playing “Saturday Night Waltz”

There are some pieces of music that stir visual images. Some of these are externally imposed, such as the dancing hippos and alligators from Fantasia that are now inextricably bound to “Dance of the Hours” in my mind, or staged versions of musicals or operas that I’ve seen. Others are internal, my own creations based on the words or the sounds or the shapes of the music.

The pieces I play on the piano don’t always have visual associations, though some do. They have muscle associations, kinesthetic memories of the finger motions required. Some have intellectual associations, remembering the difficulty of learning them, or admiring the technical virtuosity of the composition, or recognizing a composer’s distinctive sound. (Mozart piano sonatas cannot be by anyone else; I cannot necessarily tell you what it is that’s different, but I know it when I hear it.)

But Aaron Copland’s “Saturday Night Waltz” makes no pictures in my head. Nor does it make me think, in the intellectual, mostly verbal, sense of that word. My response to playing this piece is, in contrast, almost entirely non-verbal. It is a strictly emotional, even spiritual, experience. My body rocks side to side as the left hand follows the undulations of the music, alternating from the low B flat and E flat to the chords just under the right hand’s melody notes. The right hand dances in the exquisitely simple pattern that creates that melody, using very few notes.

Indeed, the notes in the piece seem somehow far apart (though they aren’t, really). The structure of the melody and the back-and-forth of the bass line somehow capture open spaces — spaces to breathe in, the spaces of the American West that Copland tried to capture in Rodeo.

And then the middle section, the one I don’t still have quite committed to memory, with the complementary descant notes high in the right hand, above the melody, providing clarity in counterpoint to the denser notes in the center of the keyboard. They hover there, their patterns again deceptively simple (yet so hard for me to remember correctly!), constellations high in the sky above the waltzers below. (Odd, though, that I cannot really picture anyone ever waltzing to this music. It is in 3/4, waltz tempo, but the syncopations give it a somehow lopsided feel, so that the accents are in the wrong places for the standard box step of a waltzing couple.)

And then, tension and resolution, the high notes and the mid-notes, still using so few notes in the scale, building slowly in one line of music to the triumphant return of the initial melody. This point always makes me smile, the difficult middle section done, the hope of the clear blue sky melody returning. I settle into the familiar bass undulation, my right hand adding the high grace notes as the dance comes to its end.

And then, and then, the supreme moment of it all, for me. The last chords, flickering grace notes followed by repetitions of the three eighth notes and a half note — and, at last, the mid-notes settle, the last bass note plays, and then the single crystalline high open fifth in the right hand shines out above. I bounce my fingers off the keys, hoping to strike the chord softly, so it shimmers instead of blaring. I leave my foot on the damper pedal long after my hands leave the keys, letting the last chord fade slowly away as the strings vibrate into stillness.

And then I breathe.

Comments

[davehogg.livejournal.com]

You know why you are a good writer? You made that piece work even to someone like me who doesn't understand any of the technical language. Good job. :)

[kayre]

And yet it doesn't 'talk down' to someone like me who does understand the technical language. Amazingly difficult to do both at once!

And now I need to go find my recording.....

[totient]

So have you read Thad Carhart's The Piano Shop on the Left Bank? I'll lend you my copy if you haven't.