Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau: - PowerPoint Presentation

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Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau:A Guide to his Philosophy and Techniques

Victoria von ArxSlide2

The recorded lessons

Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau: A Guide to His Philosophy and Techniques

includes

transcriptions of five piano lessons that were given by Arrau.

The

students who took these lessons tape-recorded them for their own use sometime during the 1960s. The tapes added up to

approximately

18 hours of playing time. They

included:

three

private

lessons

given in Spanish to Mario Miranda, a pianist from

Chile;

two lessons in a master

class

setting were

given in English to Bennett Lerner, an American.Slide3

Transcribing the lessons

Transcribing

a piano lesson into written words

involves

special

challenges.

In a speech or lecture,

information

comes

primarily from

the spoken word. Transcribing

a verbal communication

is a matter of getting the words down. In a piano lesson,

communication

takes

place partially

through words

;

but in addition, there

are

meaningful

gestures, both on the part of the teacher and the student, that convey something about the expressive or technical elements of piano playing.

Unfortunately,

body language is

not visible in

a sound

recording; yet,

with a knowledge of elements of Arrau’s technical principles

,

one might try

sometimes to

infer

its

presence and meaning.

Arrau

also used various vocal inflections and non-verbal vocalizations that

might be termed

“piano teacher

singing” to convey his thoughts.

Sometimes

his

singing communicated a musical point different from the one he was conveying in words

.

Capturing Arrau’s meaning is a matter of capturing such things as inflection, choice of vowel sound, and articulation of consonants.

Finally, because

both Arrau and his student could

see plainly

what they were doing

,

they

sometimes did not

bother to finish their sentences.

The challenge in such cases was to

use context and the sounds coming from the piano to create

a coherent account of

words

that

appear

quite fragmentary.Slide4

Correlating text and music

Each

of Arrau’s comments in these lessons had to be connected with the musical passage that it referred to. Since both Arrau and his student had

scores in

front of them, they

did not identify passages by

measure

number.

They

could simply

point

out the passages in

the

musical score. A listener to the tape recording could locate the relevant

passages

quite easily if

each

was

played

immediately

after Arrau spoke about

it.

At times, however, Arrau gave

more extended comments dealing

with several different passages in succession, or he skipped

backwards and forwards

among

different passages within the

piece. If the student simply listened to the comments without playing the passages they referred to, the passages were difficult to locate. In some cases, Arrau provided clues to finding them by singing

some

part of passages he was commenting on. Slide5

Transcribing lessons given in Spanish

Transcribing

the three lessons in Spanish was an even more complex matter. The sound quality in these tapes was

generally quite degraded so that

some parts were unintelligible.

Arrau and Mario Miranda seemed

on quite familiar and

friendly terms. They

tended to finish each other’s sentences, and frequently both talked at once or over the sound of the piano.

Although this was likely perfectly

clear to

them, the

tape recorder

microphone made no sense of it. For a later listener, meaning had to be discovered from the larger

discussion,

rather than from individual

statements,

and from evidence provided by the piano playing, which sometimes offered contrasting or differing performances of the same passage.

Although

Arrau was

born in

Chile, he grew up and was educated in Germany. Therefore, both Spanish and German were natural to him. He

was a proficient English speaker and also

seemed to have some competency in French and Italian. But

as a result,

his

speech in a lesson given in one language might include stray bits

of

the others. At times

, when he could not think of a

word he wanted,

Arrau

invented one

. Transcribing and translating these unexpected and colorful linguistic devices requires a certain amount of detection. Slide6

Chopin Ballade in F major, Op. 38

Claudio Arrau and Mario Miranda

ExcerptSlide7

Chopin: Ballade no. 2, Op. 38 mm. 51-52.

Miranda

plays the first, then the first two octaves in the left hand, m. 51.

CA

: Haber

haz

. No.

Ahí

tienes

que

tomar el quatro, cinco, cuatro. Let’s see. No. There you have to take four-five-four.  Miranda plays m. 51, A E G# B, repeating some notes several times in succession.  CA: Puedes con el tercero, o no?Can you do it with the third [finger], or not?MM: Hacer en SOL sostenido? [G-sharp]Do it on G-sharp?CA. Sí. Yes.MM: Ah. Miranda begins playing the octaves [A] as Arrau speaks over the piano.  CA: Y después entonces viene el problema, [G-sharp] caer [G-sharp, B] en el quinto, [B] eso es, y [G-sharp, B] después [A] cuarto y quinto otra vez. And then comes the problem [G-sharp] of falling [G-sharp, B] into the fifth [B], that’s it, and [G-sharp, B] then [A] the fourth and fifth again. Arrau and Miranda decide the rest of the fingering. MM: [Playing octaves B, A, m. 51 b. 4-5], quinto, quarto.Five, four. CA: [Reciting finger numbers as Mario slowly places the remaining octaves, m. 51-52] Quarto , quinto , quarto , quinto , quarto , quinto , quarto. Four, five, four, five, four, five, four. CA: Y tenemos un saco de arena en el teclado. Que lo que me da miedo, te lo he dicho muchas veces. Aquí más que nunca, si suena TAC TAC TAC, es horrible eso. Suena brutal y es muy feo. Una linea melodica!And we have a bag of sand on the keyboard. What I’m afraid of, I have told your many times. Here more than ever, if it sounds TAC TAC TAC, it is horrible like that. It sounds brutal and very ugly. [It should be] A melodic line!MM: Contrabajo Contrabass [Singing the left hand passage.]CA: Con esos, cincuenta contrabajos. With those, fifty contrabasses.