Music Stories

RFT Music Stories Stories, Parables, and Essays About the Transforming Power of Music  by Richard Freeman-Toole  Table of Contents  Introduction......................................................1 General Musicianship .....................................3  $100 Music Lesson ..................................... . 4 The Land Where Everybody Walked with a Cane .......9 The Village Idiot and the Band Leader .............................12  Hit on Head with Hammer ............................15 The Sick Soprano's High Note ................................16  Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps ...............17 A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough .........................20  Bunger/Prodigy/Fingering .............................22 Don't Pound on the Piano .......................................23  UCLA Audition ......................................

$100 Dollar Lesson RFT Music Stories 4 The $100 Music Lesson This story, about the eager young music student and the grand old music professor, is one of my kids' favorites, because when I tell it, I do a very funny German accent for the music teacher. It makes a very important point about the power of the individual to create internally-generated energy. The story is also true—it was told to me by the eager young music student himself. There once was a young boy, 15 or so, whose passion was the piano. He practiced all day and many hours into the night, plowing through all the great literature, all the Beethoven sonatas, the entire Well-Tempered Clavier, all the Chopin Etudes, Waltzes, Mazurkas, all the Mozart concerti. He was considered a prodigy in his small town, where he played the organ in church for the 3 bean salad ladies; he even had a small class of grade school music students. But he was not deceive by his local...

RFT Music Stories  General Musicianship These stories present many basic principles of musicianship. I call these general concepts, "Elements of the Musical Mind". It is the aquisition of the musical mind that transforms a mere instrumentalist (juggler, tumbler, monkey) to the level of a true musician, a true artist. Of course we need to be able to perform the physical tasks in playing music on our instruments, but there are higher energies in play, when you get involved with music, which 3 have a global application to all instrumentalists, and all stylists. These stories have to do with various approaches to practice, interpretation, and psychological states of mind which music-making promotes. 

Archer RFT Music Stories 7 The Archer Once upon a time in ancient Japan, there was a young archer who was a dangerous man. He could shoot the eye out of a hawk a thousand feet in the sky, he could shoot three arrows at once and hit three targets dead center with his eyes closed, and in a duel no man could survive his aim. Very full of himself, he became an arrogant bully, and intimidated all the men in the town with his fatal prowess. One day at the local sake bar, one of the villagers had a little too much to drink, and started ranting against the young archer. "He's not so tough!" he raved, with passionately slurred speech. "If he knew about the old man on the mountain he wouldn't be so cocky! The old man on the mountain could kick his butt with one hand tied behind his back! Ha!" Little did the poor villager know that the young archer had appeared on the scene and had overhea...

Land Where Everybody Walked RFT Music Stories 9 The Land Where Everybody Walked with a Cane Once upon a time, in a far country high up in the faraway mountains, there was a land where everybody walked with a cane. The reason they walked with a cane is unclear: maybe there was an old grandfather in their distant past whom they imitated out of respect, or perhaps it had started out as a disguise against foreign invaders. Anyway, for centuries, in this isolated country the people had all walked with canes. The little toddlers had their baby canes, then they graduated to their kindergarten canes, their middle school, high school, and college canes, and then their walking-down- the-aisle- to-get-married canes. They never thought about it because this is how they had always done it, and life went on with everybody hobbling around leaning on a stick. One day an explorer appeared on the horizon, lost in the mountains, and strode down...

Village Idiot RFT Music Stories The Village Idiot and the Band Leader Once upon a time, in the outlying provinces of old Russia, there was a village idiot. In these days, as in many cultures around the world, the village idiot was considered to be sacred and was allowed to do anything he wanted. This idiot loved to play the tuba in the town band, which he was allowed to do because he was sacred. The band leader always attempted to lead his community group in popular walzes and light opera tunes of the time, but the tuba player always ruined things by showing up and playing a shower of random grunts and farts on his tuba, "Hoo, hum, hoo hum, blat, hbpth." The band leader tried various ploys to get rid of the tuba player: by hiding the village idiot's tuba in abandoned mines, by locking the village idiot in attics, and by attempting to hold secret rehearsals in the basement of the church, etc., but all his efforts failed. Invariably, the moment ...

Hit on Head RFT Music Stories 15 Hit on Head with Hammer Once upon a time there was a guy sitting on a street corner hitting himself on the head with a hammer. A passer-by observed this strange behavior, and could not resist approaching the guy, and asking him, "Why are you doing this? The man looked the stranger in the eye, and answered, as if nothing could be more obvious, "Because it feels so good when I stop." This story refers to the tendency for music to pass through waves of tension and release. If everything were consonant, nothing would sound consonant because there would be nothing to compare it to. We need dissonance to make the consonances feel better when they arrive. One time, a devotee asked a great guru, "Oh Master, please tell us why—if God is so good and loving—why is there pain and suffering in the world?" The guru replied, with a grin, "To thick...

The Sick Soprano's High Note RFT Music Stories 16 The Sick Soprano's High Note Once upon a time, there was a soprano soloist who came down with the flu right before she was supposed to give a performance of a concert aria with orchestra. It was too late to get a replacement, she must sing; but she knew, no matter how well she did on the rest of the piece, there was no way she was going to hit the final high C of the piece—she was sure she would squawk, or crack, or some other ugly thing—so she decided to fake the audience out. She struggled through the aria, cheeks glowing with fever, and when she came to the last note, she raised herself up, opened her mouth wide, pretended to sing, but made no sound whatsoever. The next day, the newspaper reviews came out, all praising her beautiful pianissimo high C. "It was so soft you could barely hear it!" The point of this story is this: as performer...

Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps RFT Music Stories 17 Massive Doses and Quantum Leaps Music camp changed my life. It was there that my teacher picked me out of the crowd, making me feel that I had what it takes to achieve some musical distinction; it was there that I first tasted the joys of being totally immersed in music, and also of being totally free of the tumultuous family difficulties I was having at home. Music camp was a refuge in my mind, so when I graduated from high school I immediately took off for University Town and waited eagerly for the coming of Summer Youth Music Camp, where I would be able to see so many of my old friends who were still in high school and who still were allowed to attend the camp. I went over to visit them so regularly that I was given a permanent guest badge which I simply retrieved at the office every morning with whichever friend I was accompanying. Of course, I enjoyed seeing my ...

A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough RFT Music Stories 20 A Sad Time Leads to Breakthrough I got married to my first wife when I was 19. It was one of those pathetic kid things that was doomed to failure from the beginning, so when she threw me out, two years later, it was a statistically predictable thing; but it also defined one of the lowest periods of my life. I got a little room in a college men's boarding house, a shared bathroom kind of thing, and slouched through the next three months like Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. I sporadically attended classes, I worked a night job at the student union cafeteria, and I hung out with all my old bachelor buddies. My normal waking hours were from 12:00 noon until 4:00 in the morning. I was so sad. I would wake up in the morning, feel my good morning stab of pain through the heart, and then drag myself to the clavichord, my part of the divorce settl...

Bunger Prodigy/Fingering RFT Music Stories 22 Bunger Prodigy/Fingering My piano teacher, Richard Bunger, was a child prodigy; when he was 9 years old he could play the Chopin Revolutionary Etude—he said, "I was the only kid on my block who could play that piece." "The thing is," he said, "I can't play the piece now; if I try to play now I remember all the childish bad habits, tensing, and stretching, and straining, that I had when I was nine, my brain reads back to the program of that piece that was put in when I was a kid. The only way I could play the piece now, is if I completely re-fingered it and made a completely new memory of it." My teacher made a big deal about putting the programming for a new piece into your brain perfectly the first time, so you wouldn't have alternate versions running around in your memory waiting to mess you up in a performance. This is why...

Don't Pound on the Piano RFT Music Stories 23 Don't Pound on the Piano When I was in college, one of my piano projects was Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". The first movement of this piece is a grand chorale—wall-to-wall 10-12 note chords, a real fistful. One day, right before my lesson, I was slugging through this swamp of notes when my teacher walked in. "Richard, please," he said, "stop pounding on the piano!" I took immediate offense at this phraseology; after all I was 25 years old, a professional musician—I didn't ever POUND on the piano! My teacher immediately apologized, and then said, "Maybe I shouldn't have said that, but, to me, whenever somebody plays two notes in a row at the same dynamic, it sounds like pounding." This might very well be the best music lesson I ever got. The idea that music is always going towar...

UCLA Audition RFT Music Stories 24 UCLA Audition One of the best violin lessons I ever got was from my piano teacher. As you have doubtless learned from other of my music stories, it was my piano teacher who taught me the 19th century European method of music practice, which involved very, very slow but perfect self-programing of small bits, then building them into bigger bits. I found his approach revolutionary; in spite of the fact that it was so old, I had never heard of it. I found it to be enormously effective, and it made me a much better pianist overnight. Whatever small success I have enjoyed as a professional pianist, I owe to Richard Bunger. However, I was somewhat reticent to apply the same practice principles to the violin, until this happened: I was getting ready to do an audition for a scholarship to graduate school at UCLA; I was going to play the last movement of the Bartok Unaccompanied Sonata, which is a rea...

Driving Through Union Town The fastest, cleanest way to learn a piece of music is by making your body perform endless repetitions of small bits of material. Your mind may be smart, and understand the music immediately, intuitively, but your body is stupid and must be trained like a baby, taking many many small baby steps. I like to play this game when I teach this concept: I tell the student I'm going to read him/her something and he/she is to repeat it back to me. "I say, you repeat." Then I proceed to read a random paragraph from a catalog, or something, as fast and for as long as I can in one breath. The student laughs, and I say, "Why can't you do it? Too fast, too much." Then, I explained that the brain doesn't like big bits of information, it likes small bits of information which it then links together into one single complex of many interconnected memories. Only if all the little links are perfect, will the big links b...

Electronic vs. Acoustic Piano RFT Music Stories 30 Electronic vs. Acoustic Pianos As with so many things in the art world, people tend take an almost moral position in relation to their electronic-vs-acoustic piano preference. The pro-acoustic piano camp hails the sound of vibrating wood as the only true piano sound; the once-living wood somehow resonates in tune with our natural souls—like mineral water. The acoustic piano has the only true piano touch. The acoustic piano sound is the only one that will blend with other acoustic instruments. As you may guess, I think these attitudes are extremely old- fashioned, and that they do not justify the many, many more dollars you have to spend to get quality in an acoustic piano. What you are trying to buy, when you purchase a keyboard and pay for music lessons, is a musical experience. I would like to list below some of the many advantages an electronic keyboard setup has over an a...

Violin Stories RFT Music Stories 34 Violin Stories Every story in this next section is based on a true event. All the stories relate more or less directly to violin technique, but they also chronicle the events surrounding moments of epiphany, of recognition, in my life— moments when I finally figured something out. 

Heifetz Up Close RFT Music Stories 35 Heifetz Up Close This story concerns one of my great violin teachers, Sam Arron, and a realization he had about violin playing. Sam Arron was a young music student just about the time that Jascha Heifetz burst upon the American concert stage. Sam and another music student friend of his, attended a Heifetz recital together, but wound up sitting in different places in the auditorium. Sam's friend got a seat in the very high balcony two blocks up into the sky, and Sam got one of the cheap seats right up on stage. They used to do this when the concert was sold out—they would actually put chairs right up on the stage, so they could make more money. This sounds fun, but actually up close is a pretty crummy place to sit; if you've ever been in a crowded movie theater and had to sit way up close next to the screen, straining your neck up, you know that that's not very comfortable—you ...

ach Chaccone RFT Music Stories 38 Bach Chaconne The "Chaconne in Dm: for Solo Violin" is one of those immense masterworks of Bach which tower over other works of its period, as do the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, the Divine Comedy, and Hamlet. Not only is this 15 minute long unaccompanied violin piece an anomaly of masterfully intricate musical construction, not only is it an immense outpouring of soul, it is also one of the supreme tests of the violinist's interpretive skill, and technical stamina. I have always loved this piece, and have always been afraid to play it. However, I have twice summoned the gumption to play it in public, and both times were very serious life-transforming experiences for me. The first time I played it, I was attending my little ghetto college in Los Angeles; we were providing "Music for Lunch", short little concerts, once a week for the students at break time. I don'...