Geoffrey Thomas

Women Found Handel Attractive: Sonatas and Stories - Geoffrey Thomas

Leicester Early Music Festival, Leicester Cathedral

Leicester Mercury

27th May 2009

There must be many accounts of Haydn’s life and music, but few interpretations can provide as engaging a portrait as that provided by actor and pianist Geoffrey Thomas.

Thomas’ dry acting style and vocal delivery provided an intriguing, lively and humorous picture of Haydn’s life through words, interspersed with excerpts from some of Haydn’s many piano Sonatas.

The music itself was played with feeling and intensity where a movement was played in full, while for more illustrative purposes, a more relaxed and perhaps even playful style might be adopted where a brief excerpt was used.

Using a small number of props and limited space around the piano, very effectively, Thomas drew the listener into Haydn’s early life as a chorister, his attempts at busking, early composition and accompanying, his marriage and his daily routine, culminating in an inspiring performance of the Adagio e Cantible from the Sonata in E flat Hob XVI/49.

The story continued with Haydn’s move to London, his years in Vienna and his death.  Interspersed with a bright performance of the Sonata in E flat, Hob. XVI/52:  A fitting reminder of the real legacy that this great composer has left us, which concluded an engaging evening of informative entertainment.

Konzerthalle Ulrichskirche, June 20, 2009, 19:30

Handel program with the kammerchor cantamus halle and the Männerchor bouquet vocalis Halle under the direction of Dorothea Köhler

Klosterkonzerte Maulbronn, July 26, 2009, 18.00

Händels Duelle

If you want your results to be creative, it stands to reason that the process of getting there should be creative. Put another way, uncreative practice will yield uncreative results.A recent conversation with composer Charles Young led me to a more creative practice method. The conversation was not in fact about practicing, it was about composing. Charles stated that his starting point was to generate gestures based on the emotional, physical, mental and attitudinal affects he was after. I am very kinesthetic, so the idea of gestures was very appealing. When I write gesture, I mean that quite literally. I mean moving hands, arms, feet, whatever to find shape and character. As a composer the gesture will suggest musical ideas. As an interpretive performer you reverse engineer; you attempt to find the gesture underlying a musical idea.If you introduce improvisation into the mix, the process becomes much more dynamic. Instead of focusing on notes and parroting back a musical text, you can become consumed with the underlying gestural dynamics. This is fun, it’s creative and it will move you forward much more quickly. 

Twyla Tharp, the choreograph, has a brilliant book called The Creative Habit. Can’t recommend it enough. The book includes a number of exercises, one of which was to list the fundamental skills in your art form.  Here is my list:

Skills List   

Accompanying Affects   Analysis   Arranging   Articulation   Arpeggios   Chord recognition   Chord voicing  Clefs   Composing   Conducting   Copying scores   Concentration Counterpoint   Dancing   Dichords   Dictation   Ensemble playing   Ethnomusicology  Figured bass  Form recognition   Formal analysis   Harmonizing   Heptachord shift in real time Imitation   Improvising   Interpretation   Listening   Memorizing   Notating    Pitch vowels   Polyrhythms   Orchestration   Octaves   Repertoire   Satztechnik   Scales Score reading   Separating all parts Sight-reading  Sight singing   Singing   Solfège  Style recognition   Rhythm skills   Touch   Thinking multiple parts   Transcribing   Transposing   Tuning   Variations   Vocal coaching   

Wind and string players spend endless hours maintaining and improving their tone. The great Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma once told me that a string teacher can forgive a student who has better technique, but will hate a student who has better sound.

Very few keyboard players pay such close attention to their tone. After all, the glorious sound of a French horn or the haunting tone of an English horn are completely unattainable on any keyboard instrument. But, careful focus on tonal quality brings unexpected benefits on the keyboard. Clearly, having good tone will make your playing more pleasing to the listener, but it will also improve the quality of your practice. You can solve many technical problems more effectively by paying attention to tonal quality. Getting the correct notes is a fairly low order problem for the perception. Playing the notes with the idea timbre and color is a far more intriguing problem for the perception. As a bonus, the right notes will come.

Just Concentrate! How many times have you said that to yourself? Has it actually ever worked?

Just Concentrate! is the sort of thing the inner coach is always yelling at you. The inner coach is a notion developed by Marianne Ploger. If, like me, you have a constant inner dialogue, you are sure to have some version of the inner coach. The inner coach wants to get in the pool with the swimmer and try to help her swim. That’s not where the inner coach should be. The inner coach needs to be outside the pool to teach and give helpful feedback after the performance.

Just Concentrate! is not a very helpful visual metaphor. It suggests contraction, furrowed brows, intense stares and physical rigidity. It does not suggest poised awareness of the present. It does not suggest the spiritual flexibility that enables the performer to respond to the moment, to create something afresh.

A fundamental reason my inner coach has yelled out Just Concentrate! so often is that my mind wanders. What Buddhists call the monkey mind has taken me on a largely irrelevant mental journey instead of attending to the business at hand, which is playing music. Perhaps the greatest joy you can have as a performer is at the moment when you are riding the crest of time, when you are in a state of flow, when you are not divided.

How to enter this state is the critical question. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, a book recommended to me by Marianne, is providing direction. The first question that truly shook me was this: can you turn your mind off? My personal answer is, regrettably, no. A second observation that struck me was the simple fact that we can only be in the present moment; the mind can of course race across the universe of time and space, but we live, willy-nilly, in the eternal now.

I now understand, for the first time, why archery could be a Zen practice. What one would consider to be a physical activity – archery – is in fact a highly mental and spiritual exercise. The practice of being present is the key underlying skill.

Recently I taught a master class at Colorado University School of Music and worked with pianists and a harpsichordist. They all played well and so we were able to discuss musical issues. When I asked each player what he or she thought the piece was about the answers tended to be vague.  This is no indictment of a group of talented students. There responses were like those you would hear at any good music school

It is curious that musicians can spend enormous amounts of time preparing a piece and never consider the meaning or extra-musical content. I must include myself in the indictment, because I have frequently failed to put meaning into the forefront. We musicians got so caught up with technical aspects that we generally neglect meaning. An actor would, of course, immediately dive into the problem of meaning and would continually wrestle with it throughout the study, rehearsal and performance process. If you are playing the role of Hamlet you will immediately consider what Hamlet is thinking and feeling, what motivates him, why he says these words and not some other, why he takes these actions and not some others.

Musicians need to engage in this process of discovering meaning. The answers are of a different nature and the clues are not as clear as in a literary text, but the exploration is just as essential. It is simply not enough to be satisfied with a ‘correct’ execution of the musical text. The question of why is central. Why did the composer write these particular notes? What was his reason for the notation he chose? What should we communicate? How can we do this? The composer intends meaning. What is that meaning? To discover this is our central task.

While teaching a master class at the University of Denver I frequently asked the audience their reactions to the way a musician had just performed. This feedback was enormously valuable to the performing musician and to me. It was gratifying to note that the audience was generally supportive of what I was doing. They often wanted more of a process I had started; playing with more flexibility and more organic gestures, for example. I don’t know yet how it could be done, but building up a performance with direct audience feedback, as we had during the master class, would be a very powerful way to discover how best to communicate.

New solutions to problems often come in reframing or even inverting the original question. I have been wrestling with the question of establishing the affect for a piece of music. By affect, I mean the external expression of a mood, a state of mind, or a situation. Ideally, the affect or range of affects should quickly become apparent. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find clear answers. The notion of restating the question came to me in reading Cracking Creativity by Michael Michalko. Instead of deriving the meaning from the musical text, I am now trying on affects, like so many hats. This removes the problem of finding the right answer and substitutes a more playful, experimental approach. This approach can be improved with a sensitive listener who reacts to your experiments. Because you are attempting something new, you may not have sufficient awareness to judge the quality of what you are doing.