The Imprint of Intention

My colleague Tony Tommasini wrote a piece in the New York Times this week that skewers excessive expressivity. His specific target is a new recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations by the star pianist Lang Lang, whose playing he calls overindulgent and “marred by exaggerated interpretative touches.” (Quick disclosure: I agree.)

We don’t know why Lang Lang plays the way he does – with phrases stretched, massaged and seemingly milked for sentimental impact. But Tony offers a telling clue: Lang Lang’s own annotations on the sheet music of Beethoven’s “Für Elise,” which his record label included in a recent gift box set. “Don’t just play,” Lang Lang advises his fellow pianists, “feel the notes softly come out from your fingers and heart.”

I suppose there’s no harm in that kind of mush. But it’s hard to think of it ever having much of an impact. (Perhaps when addressed to a critic? “Don’t just write, feel the words softly come out from your fingers and heart.”)

But what makes for a helpful performance instruction? And – seriously now – what would happen if they were addressed not just to the musician but to the listener, too?

Performance instructions are essentially like an intention set by the composer or player that leaves its imprint on the music. Because it’s a verbal imprint on a non-verbal form, we listeners can never decipher it with precision. But we’ll receive something of its residual energy.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading Satie, the French composer whose work prefigures Surrealism, Minimalism and a host of other 20th-century innovations. (The illustration is Man Ray’s homage to a piece Satie wrote “in the shape of a pear.”) Satie was the master of performance instructions that hover between the silly and the sublime, the absurd and profound. In A Mammal’s Notebook: The Writings of Erik Satie the musicologist Ornella Volta lists them all. A few examples:

With inane but appropriate naïvety. Hypocritically.Like a nightingale with a toothache. 

Some instructions are more mysterious: Courageously easy and obligingly alone. Put yourself in the shade. Or: Be unaware of your own presence. 

In her introduction, Volta writes that the “seductive absurdities” of Satie’s instructions “upset pianists’ reasoning, undermine what they had been taught, and make them more open-minded and receptive to the message he wanted to put across.”

What that message is, or whether in fact there is one, is a question for another day. But what about the audience? What words would get a listener to release the mush of conditioning and hear with an open mind?

In Beginner’s Ear sessions, I often start by inviting the audience to consider their role as an active, even a co-creative one. I say: it’s through our attentive stillness that we create the conditions that make the performance possible. I tell participants that listening is always an act of generosity.

I’ve found that this verbal cue — setting the intention to listen co-creatively and generously — leaves a profound imprint on the performance. The silence holding the sounds is different from that created by shushing patrons and electronic reminders to turn off your cell phone. It becomes warmer, more relaxed. Less like a flock of New York pigeons with toothaches.

There’s no reason why we shouldn’t set intentions in other areas of life. Imagine driving with Satie as your co-pilot: “Slow down good-naturedly.” Or taking a walk in nature, unaware of your own presence. Or see what happens next time you talk to your kids if you silently vow to put yourself in the shade.

As for Bach, I like his music best when played courageously easy and obligingly alone. See how this one lands with you this weekend.