Practice Party

One of the challenges of this project has been committing to which pieces I’m going to work on now, which pieces I’m going to practice now. I keep wanting to play through, like this…

instead of getting down to work, like this.

It’s really tempting to play through one piece, and then play through the next and the next, without doing very much actual practicing. It’s like you’re at a party full of kind, fascinating people, and you have really fun interesting conversations but then when you refill your drink you run into other people, and those conversations are fun and interesting too. Every once in a while you glance over at a former conversational partner, and you grin at each other—you really did make a connection—and then you whirl into another conversation with still another interesting person. And all those conversations are enjoyable, and it’s hard to pick one to turn into a long intense introvert conversation where the rest of the room vanishes and it’s just the two of you, starting the work of really getting to know each other.

Okay, that might be a fantastical version of a party, the kind of idealized visions I had in the depths of pandemic isolation. Anyway, in this analogy maybe everyone else at the party is from the same family, or the same town, and you’re getting to know the culture and habits of the people. It’s a blast to find out who all is there and get a sense of what they’re about.

All of that is really different from going home and doing the relationship work.

This finger goes on this note, no, this finger (see, I knew I’d get back to talking about practicing music). My hand goes from this shape here to this shape here—no, THIS shape here to this shape here—do it again. This shape here to this shape here, no, to this shape HERE. Again. This shape here to this shape here—yes!—to THIS shape here. Again. This shape? Yes. Again. I can’t do it fast yet but I can do it slowly, and I can trust that doing it slowly today and a little faster tomorrow and a little faster after that will work, will get me to the tempo I want.

It’s easy to take myself out of hard-core practice mode, really being intimate with the piece, and back into flirting: reading through pieces slowly (or faster in a simplified way, like leaving out a lot of the notes) to get a sense of what they’ll be like. And I can feel guilty about that: as a pianist, I have a lifelong relationship with Not-Practicing-Enough Guilt. In the past year and a half since I fell for Agnes, I’ve done some really good focused practice that I’m proud of (no way I could perform the grand sonata if I hadn’t, I tell my N-P-E Guilt) but I’ve also done a lot of sight-reading through pieces that I’m not necessarily intending to perform now. Picking what to program is truly one of the biggest challenges: the sonata, yes, and as many etudes as I can muster, and the Mazurka because it will be a fun closer, and what else? So much else! Idyllen, Fantasiestücke, Impromptus, Charakterstücke, Album Leaves…I want to play them all someday, and it’s not always easy to commit to what I want to play in the next program (right now I’m leaning 2 characterstucke, a pair of Idyllen, etudes, impromptu, intermission, sonata, mazurka). I’ve sometimes felt a little guilty for reading more than practicing, for being broad and shallow rather than narrow and deep.

Agnes described herself, in the frontispiece of her translation of Egmont (into English! Be still my liberal arts heart!), as “a very dear little thing, with an ugly face, but who is notwithstanding as industrious as any living creature.” I gasped and laughed out loud when I found that page in the archive. I don’t think I can live up to that: I’m not as industrious as any living creature. I do have not-practicing-enough guilt. I hope I can do what I tell my students to do: use the fear of not being good enough to get you to the practice room, then leave it on the other side of the door while you do the work.

But I actually think this precious sabbatical time in the past few months has been well-spent, even when I’ve been sight-reading instead of practicing, and maybe even when I’ve been reading novels or taking walks or napping instead of practicing. One of the magical things about reading through the music, even without getting into the hard-core practice mode I do actually need, is that the pieces are showing up in my head. The human brain is amazing, and I’m walking around with Agnes earworms all the time. By reading through so many of Agnes’s pieces I really am learning her style. Imagine playing a Brahms intermezzo without ever having heard any Brahms…that’s what I’ve been doing with Agnes Tyrrell. Maybe flirting with all the other pieces in the room is exactly what I need to get to know any one of them really well.

Independent Arroyo Duck

I want to tell you about the moment I had this morning, which I might choose to interpret as the universe telling me not to take myself so seriously. Or maybe it’s just the very nineteenth-century experience of thinking about music while walking in nature.

I’m visiting Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up, and I’m fortunate to be staying at the home of friends in Corrales, where it’s just ridiculously beautiful. This morning I was walking along the arroyo, looking at the mountains and the sky and listening to a recording of music by Robert Schumann (an Agnes contemporary) performed on a historical piano by someone who has done lots of research about performance practice.*

As always, always happen when I listen to those recordings, I was struck by how free the timing was. Not everywhere—there are moments where there’s a strong, clear beat that you could dance to—but wow are there a lot of moments where there’s not. There’s such a sense of freedom and permission there. I’ve tried for that in my own historical recordings, all my performances really——there’s always always a line to walk between expressive and accurate. And of course the expressive IS the accurate. One of the things I tell my students, and myself, over and over, is to

play the music not the notes.

Yes, practice for hours and hours to get the notes right, but they’re not the point: the music is. The phrasing, the timbre, the emotions—the notes are the means, not the end. When I perform or record music that people have heard thousands of times, I give myself permission to take liberties knowing that people might not like my interpretation, but at least they won’t dismiss, say, Chopin. I’ve been feeling a weight of responsibility about Agnes: because there are no recordings yet, I’m feeling a real responsibility to be true to her meticulous scores, to play exactly what she wrote. But exactly what she wrote doesn’t include subtle timings or where you take a breath or exactly how loud a loud sound is: that’s interpretation, and the notation system just doesn’t tell you.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling like I need to perform a real Accurate Historical Record, and then other performers can take liberties and put their own selves into the music once it’s in the canon, but for now I need to give an exact representation of what’s on the page. I need to play Agnes, not Jocelyn Playing Agnes. That’s been feeling a little depressing. And of course it’s exactly wrong: I AM Jocelyn Playing Agnes.

So I’m walking along the arroyo, listening to a recording with

so         many       expressive         pauses

and

somespeedyparts

and I had the thought:

Maybe one of the best reactions someone could have to hearing me play music by Agnes is: “I hate the way she’s playing this—I’m going to play this piece so people can hear how it ought to sound.”

While I was forming that thought, I noticed a group of ducks paddling along the arroyo. I got ready to take a picture to send to my sister with a note about “ducks in a row” (we have a tradition of duck photos), and right then the last one turned around and clearly decided “Nuh-uh, I’m not going in the same direction as all of you.” And off it went, the other way. I laughed out loud.

So here’s to the independent duck. I know I’ll keep wrestling with these questions of expression vs accuracy in every phrase I learn and play—it’s a lifelong thing—but I hope I can keep that duck in mind when I do. It made practicing the etudes really fun today.

By the way, the other ducks went their own way for a while, but then decided to turn around and follow the independent duck. I never saw them catch up.

*That is, figuring out best we can how people actually played back then. There are no recordings, but there are diaries and letters and other written records. For example, it’s useful to know if a pianist liked to practice with a metronome (I really wish I knew that about Agnes).

Barbenheimer and Agnes

I just saw the movies Barbie and Oppenheimer, a few days apart and in that order, and I can’t stop thinking about the juxtaposition of the worlds of the two films. In Barbieland’s bright colors, the Kens existing only for Barbie’s attention felt to me improbable, too far, too made up. But then the black-and-white world of the Manhattan Project has scene after scene of rooms with only men; the women’s roles are lover, wife, secretary. One scientist does join the team, but after she answers the single interview question “can you type” with “my graduate chemistry degree didn’t teach that” we don’t hear from her again. And if I may get annoyingly meta for a moment, I wrestled with the opening of that last sentence, struck that even though a) I’m the one writing it, in b) an essay about a feminist movie, and c) I’m picturing a particular actress, I still read “one scientist” as male, and wondered if I should clarify the phrase by changing it to “one female scientist.” In the Oppenheimer world (I know, I know, not always only in the film), scientist=man. Sigh.

“Can you type?”

I keep thinking about that one female scientist in the movie. Of course there must have been more women than just the one, but they must have felt so lonely in those rooms. And of course it can still be so lonely in some rooms.

“Can you type?”

What’s the equivalent musical question? “Can you copy my music?” “Can you play my music?” “Can you host me in your salon?” “Can you be my muse and inspire me?”

When I was a girl taking piano lessons in the 1970s, composer absolutely equaled male in my mind. It never even crossed my mind to wonder if there were women composers: it was simply unfathomable to even ask the question. I know now, of course, that they did exist, and I’m so incredibly grateful to live in a time when there’s such an explosion of interest and information about them. But they really were invisible. So many stories are of women denied the training their talent deserved, and that can get disheartening. I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus, but sometimes you can tell that composers didn’t have the training and the support they needed: the counterpoint isn’t quite strong, or the piano writing isn’t quite fluent, or the overarching structure doesn’t quite make satisfying sense, or the pieces are only small and charming and never big and profound.

I’ve fallen so hard for Agnes’s music, and it truly is the music. Her music deserves to be heard because it’s fantastic, and was hidden because she was a woman. I’m wary of promoting her as a woman composer: I want her to just be a composer. I’m sure I’ll be wrestling with that for a long time. But practicing Agnes Tyrrell’s music really does feel like having a conversation with a genius. I think it’s because her story, or at least part of her story, is different.

Not that she lived in the colorful Barbieland where absolutely everything was possible for women, but she did have surprising opportunities. There’s maybe a tinge of pink. She had rigorous training: I’ve seen some of her homework notebooks and how she came by her incredible mastery of chromatic harmonies.  She had a model of a female composer-pianist: when Agnes was 13, she had the chance to see superstar Clara Schumann perform. She had a family who supported her musical training: her mother and sister were also pianists, and her sister Bertha also composed a few pieces. And she did have a musical community where she could be an active performer: she performed as a pianist and had some of her pieces performed, in her town, to positive reviews. So Agnes seems to have lived in a rare situation where she was able to develop and master her craft in a vibrant musical community. The rest of Europe was less supportive, though: she tried, but couldn’t get more than a few pieces published. It’s back to the black and white world where composer=male.

“Can you type?”

I can’t ask my mother anymore, but I think I remember her telling me that she purposefully didn’t learn how to type, so that she wouldn’t be stuck typing men’s papers instead of writing her own. And I definitely remember her telling me that she wanted to be a diplomat. She would have been a great one—her superpower was connecting with people, and she had a PhD in languages—but when she tried to apply to the State Department, they told her they were only hiring women as secretaries. Our country, and all the people she would have worked with, really missed out. It’s at least a little different now: I’m so grateful that I can perform and research and teach and lead. I can have a career as a professor, and it can be completely commonplace for my students to play music written by women. I get to live mostly in the world in color.

When I visited Vienna in May, on my Agnes Tyrrell research trip, I went to a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic at their gorgeous Musikverein building. They played Mozart and Felix Mendelssohn and Hindemith, all great performances, and it was a pleasure to be at the concert and hear that orchestra (which did have a few women in it) in that beautiful hall. And do you know what? The hall is lined every few feet with life-size gold statues of identical topless women. My sister and I laughed and laughted about that: generations of male musicians, playing male composers, looking out at all those topless ladies. The hall was built in 1870; Agnes probably went to concerts there (Brno citizens often took the train to Vienna to go to concerts and the opera). Did she imagine hearing her music played there? I think she must have: she did write a symphony. I want to hear it performed in that hall someday. I want to live in the world in color, yes maybe with a tinge of pink, and I want to hear Agnes surrounded by gold.  

A Flight of Fancy and a Small Win

I’m home now, still working on the etudes, and I’m running into the frustration of working on projects that stretch you: for most of the process, you’re not big enough. Once I can play the thirds and octaves and giant jumps as fast as I want, they’ll sound incredible, but right now I have to play them under tempo (they still sound beautiful—it’s just a different energy). It’s funny that the black key-white key geography of the thirds is so different from in Chopin’s thirds etude—being able to play chromatic scales in thirds in g#minor doesn’t help me play clean turnarounds in thirds in Bb (though it does give me confidence that I’ll get there). And she has spots where the hands jump really fast from one side of the keyboard to the other—sometimes after I practice that I can really feel it in my obliques, which makes me laugh. So I’m getting a workout.

But I also get impatient.

So I’ve been taking breaks and looking at some of Agnes’s shorter unpublished works for piano, and I’m so happy to report that there are some much more accessible pieces, even some I think I can assign to my students. Some of them sound almost like something out of Tin Pan Alley or early Hollywood musicals—that’s an exaggeration, and probably not something I should tell listeners: they’re not “jazzy” or swung, so anyone looking for that would be disappointed. But if I picture people dancing to this music, it’s not the nineteenth century ballroom scene with hoop skirts: it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. That makes me think about all the Tin Pan Alley composers from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century; maybe it’s not all that far-fetched to hear Agnes sounding similar to them.

I had one nice late night of sight-reading manuscript pages straight from the photos app on my ipad (once I really work on pieces, I put them into a music reading app instead), and I fell in love with a quirky little waltz—the very first few bars made me exclaim aloud “what!? sounds like Gershwin!” But then it was missing at least a page, and I agonized. The first couple of pages do end with a cadence that works for a final cadence, with a double bar (that can signal a final ending), but then there’s more: two more pages, where the first one begins in the middle of a thought, so something is obviously missing. I played through it a couple of times and then put it away.

But then I couldn’t stop thinking about it: should I play it without the final pages, knowing something is missing? or should I record the final pages as an extra? or should I try to write some kind of filler to glue them together? Or should I wait till I can go back to the archive next year, and look through the collection of fragments to try to find the missing page? Finally, I decided that I’d see if I could reconstruct what’s missing, so I’d see if the thought that starts the final page is one that shows up anywhere else. So I went through the pages really carefully, side by side, and made a really exciting discovery: the last page and a half is actually just…the last page and a half, recopied. But it’s exactly the same music. I think she wrote it out again because there are some blotches and she wanted a cleaner copy. And now that I see it, it’s obvious (she doesn’t start at the same measure at the top of the page, so I’m not a total dunderhead for missing it). I’m so happy that I went back and checked, and now I can play the waltz without worrying that it’s missing something.

Researching song texts in my backyard

I’ve been so happy sitting outside with my computer looking at old romantic German poetry—pianists don’t get to practice outside, and I’ve always been jealous of people who can. And I keep feeling moments of We Live In The Future: I’m here on my back deck in my small town in Pennsylvania, working with texts from libraries across the world. The process is fun, in a hardcore nerdy way: read on if that sounds interesting, and definitely don’t if it doesn’t.

Agnes wrote lots of songs (“lieder”), mostly in German but a couple in English, and it’s tricky to figure out what the lyrics are, so that’s my main focus right now. Agnes was so gorgeously clear in her musical notation, but for words she uses an old German cursive that’s harder to decipher. I asked a Viennese pal to take a look and she said she couldn’t read it either. So it’s much better if I can find a printed version of the text somewhere else, and then map it on to what she wrote in the music. Once I find the lyrics, Kate the Stalwart Student Research Fellow adds them into the song when she enters it into music notation software.

Usually Agnes names the poet; when she doesn’t, I think it probably means she wrote the text herself (in some cases the card in the card catalog says she did), so those songs sadly go to the bottom of the pile for now. But there are lots of songs where she does name the poet, and often I can find that poet’s work; she set a couple of poems by Goethe, for example. Those two songs will be a really nice set, An den Mond (To the Moon) and Die Liebende Schreibt (The Lover Writes). It’s fun to find a poem, then look at the first few words in the printed version and see if the music manuscript looks like it matches. I tend to squeal when I find a match. When I do, I copy the words into a word document and add that document to the folder with the pages of the song, so Kate can add them into the notation. Then that whole folder goes into the folder called “Lieder with text available.” That folder has 13 folders in it now, so I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to publish a substantial body of Agnes’s work.

Sometimes the poets are published but out of print, or really obscure. I spent a while this morning looking at poems by Franz Keim; Agnes has a set of 5 songs with texts by him. Two I found, and I think the rest might be from the same large collection. I’m still looking for the other three, and it’s hard to see what the first words are, so it might be more of a challenge to find the others. But it’s fun to look at the words and try to figure out what they are and what they might match.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m learning and exclaiming about on my back deck. Agnes has a song called “Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy No.1,” with no poet listed. At first I thought it was a set of songs (“Lieder” means “songs”) with lyrics by someone named Mirza-Schaffy. Well, sort of. Mirza-Schaffy was an Azerbaijan poet and teacher, and a German writer Friedrich Bodenstedt traveled to study with him, publishing a book about him including some translated poems. Bodenstedt later claimed the poems were his own original works, but apparently the original Persian versions exist. At any rate, Agnes set text from the famous German version by Bodenstedt.

Once I figured out that I was looking for the Bodenstedt book, I found a public domain text that’s a pdf of the entire book of poems…in an old English font that’s hard to read and thus hard to tell which poem might match with which handwritten lyrics. My heroic local librarian Clint—this whole project is making me appreciate librarians so much—ran the pdf of the book through an AI program that turned the images into readable text, and I was able to find and read the actual poem once it was in a friendlier font. It doesn’t have a title, but it’s the first poem from the book. Now I know why Agnes titled the song “Lieder des Mirza-Schaffy No.1” (I was hoping it meant one of many, but it’s just one). Once I found the poem, it turns out that other composers have set it too. There’s a translation at the incredibly helpful resource liedernet.

I’m excited and hopeful about another AI possibility that HLL Clint let me know about: AI software is learning how to read old handwriting, and I might be able to teach it to read Agnes’s handwriting. If I can, that means I can go back and photograph her letters and read them, which would be incredible.

Archive visit report

I had such a wonderful time on my Agnes Tyrrell research trip. I have new questions and new answers and new friends and about a thousand photographs of manuscript pages; many are from already published works like the incredible Grand Sonata, but lots are from unpublished songs. I’ll be working with a student this summer—we got research support from the Kolbe foundation—on notating the songs so that we can publish them. This entry will be sort of a babble brain dump about the archive.

I’m so happy with my visit to the Department of Music History at the Moravian Museum (MZM); the staff was so incredibly generous and helpful. I didn’t know what I would find: I didn’t know if my access would be severely limited, or if the archive would be a cardboard box full of coffee-stained unreadable fragments. But everything is beautifully catalogued and organized and kept in acid-free paper. I’m so grateful to the librarians of the past (and today!) for their careful stewardship. It was really moving to see the handwritten cards from the catalog: they had a stamp with a staff, so each card has handwritten incipits of the music as well as the title and other information. Just beautiful. I don’t have permission, by the way, to publish images of documents from the archive, so I won’t be including them, but I’m delighted to report that they generously gave me permission for publication and performance of the work once it’s transcribed.

It was such a thrill to hold Agnes’s manuscripts in my hands and get to know her handwriting. Her musical notation is incredibly clear—she was definitely writing for posterity. It’s harder to read her German handwriting (most of her writing is in German and English); I asked a Viennese pal to take a look, and she said she couldn’t read the old cursive “but maybe my grandmother could.”It’s fun to see Agnes playing with different fancy signatures—I love the calligraphy A she landed on—and to get to recognize her handwriting. Figuring out the texts will be a challenge but at least the musical intentions are unmistakable.

I feel like I got to know her personality better, too. She was ambitious: I knew that from her music, but it’s fun to see that confirmed in her words. In one song (where she wrote the lyrics, in English) she imagines gaining “the gold that comes with an artist’s fame and all the pride of a deathless name.” But she didn’t take herself too seriously: on one title page she wrote “translated by the honourable and noble lady Agnes Tyrrell, a very dear little thing, with an ugly face, but who is notwithstanding as industrious as any living creature.” When I saw that, I exclaimed out loud (and got a good laugh from the librarians in the reading room. Did I mention I love librarians?)

It was also great to see some of her theory homework,working out counterpoint and harmonic exercises. It’s obvious from her music that she got excellent training, but it’s different to actually see the school notes.

I got photos of the manuscripts for the 12 etudes, and also of the letter from Liszt, which was how I first found Agnes in the first place. I had what might have been my most vindicating moment of my life as a pianist (another moment where the librarians laughed at me for gasping). Liszt suggested some fingerings for some of the etudes, and I couldn’t wait to see what he would suggest for the first one. It’s in thirds, and there are about five different sort of okay fingerings but I can’t find the one fingering that actually feels any better than the others. And Liszt couldn’t decide either! He suggested two possibilities and wrote “oder(?)” [or?]. So if Liszt—probably the greatest pianist who ever lived—couldn’t find fingerings either, I don’t feel so bad for not being able to decide on one. I think I’m just going to use Agnes’s suggestion in that spot.

So what did I get photos of? The manuscript to the great Grand Sonata and the 12 etudes, and also lots of songs. There’s a full symphony, which also has a piano reduction, so that will be interesting to think about how she envisions orchestral colors at the piano. I haven’t played through it yet. There’s also a mazurka which she did publish—it’s a cheerful show piece that will be a fun encore—and she also orchestrated that, and I think it will be a really nice addition to the orchestral repertoire. Sadly, there’s no chamber music beyond the string quartet and a couple of vocal duets and trios—I was so hoping for a piano trio or some string and piano sonatas, but no. But there are lots of songs—at least an album’s worth—and I think there are some smaller solo piano pieces that could be accessible for younger students.