They're Playing My Song….Or Is It Really Mine?

[University of Michigan, 2006]

The summer after my sophomore year of high school, I was accepted to the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA) in Baltimore, Maryland.  So I packed my bags, kissed my parents goodbye, and moved to Lutherville, Maryland, where I lived with my aunt and uncle to attend BSA in the city.  By June of my junior year, however, I had decided to move back to my hometown of Trenton, Michigan, to finish my high school education at Trenton High School.  When I think about my reasons for moving back home, Johannes Brahms' Intermezzo in A Major Op. 118 No. 2 sticks out in my mind as a deciding factor.  This piece not only shaped my high school and college education, but it also shaped me as musician and defined the ways that music is a part of my life.

            BSA is one of the top five public music high schools in the country.  The students there all took their art form very seriously, often practicing four or five hours a day.  Upon arriving at BSA and discovering this, I was immediately up for the challenge.  I worked hard to keep up with my classmates, practicing diligently all of the pieces that my piano teacher assigned me, in addition to working daily on scales, finger exercises, sight reading, music theory, and sight-singing.  I plowed through an entire Mozart sonata in the first month, putting aside small differences in opinion that my teacher and I had on two of the three movements.  I wanted to make a good first impression on my new teacher, my new school, and my new classmates.  I completed every task exactly as it was asked of me without asking any questions.  Then I started playing the Brahms.

Of all of the piano pieces that I have played in my sixteen years of playing, eight measures of this particular intermezzo are my favorite to play.  When I play measures 50 through 57, I am able to express the passion that I feel for music; my skin gets tingly and my fingers seem to move on their own accord, gliding across the keys in intervals and crossovers that normally might be awkward for my tiny hands.  Oddly, I'm able to sit down at the piano with those eight measures in almost any kind of mood.  For me, it has the ability to function as expressions of melancholy, happiness, frustration, or even anger—not an easy task for a piece of music.  But when I studied this piece with a particular teacher at BSA, I found that my passions were temporarily inaccessible; not only did I cease to enjoy playing this piece, but my love for music was slowly drained from me.  My teacher and I had held different opinions on the way that the piece should be played; he contended that Brahms intended it to be played one way, while I felt that I could both express myself and perform the piece with emotion best a different way. 

            Tempo is one aspect of the intermezzo in which my teacher and I held differing opinions.  I prefer to play the piece slowly, freely, and with a few rubatos on the longer chords (measures 49 or 75, for example).  I felt that "andante teneramente," while literally meaning "moderately slow and even, tenderly" could be applied at the performer's discretion.  I feel that there is no harm in enjoying a beautiful chord for a few extra seconds, or pushing the tempo a bit in a climatic phrase (as in measures 30-31).  I believe that musical breathes are very important, but my teacher insisted that I learn the piece with a metronome (while other teachers have forbid me to use the metronome with

composers such as Brahms or Chopin). During my lesson, I often felt out of breathe by the time the piece was completed, completely dissatisfied with the way it had sounded.

            Dynamics, one of the most expressive and sometimes interpretive elements of music, was actually an element of the intermezzo that my teacher and I mostly agreed on.  The dynamics really helped me to express myself when playing this piece, and it is this aspect of music which I feel best articulates passion.  The echo effect was used liberally, as there were many repetitions of melodies (measures 9 and 50).  I loved swelling the phrases with "hairpin" crescendos and diminuendos (measures 3-5, 11-13, etc.), building up to a climax (measures 26-31) and then gradually coming down (measures 31-35) both in dynamics and pitch. 

            This piece also really helped me to appreciate pitch on a different level.  My teacher really helped me to appreciate subtle differences in large chords, like the difference between a half step in just one note of a chord when played a second time (the c/c# in measures 17-18 or the c/c# in measures 33- 35).  In addition, I have never before enjoyed the left hand part of a piece as I have in the Brahms; in measures 43-49 I loved articulating the stepward descending motion of the rich, beautiful bass line as it dove deeper and deeper into the depths of the piano. 

            Rhythm is another important aspect of this piece, and one that I struggled with a bit.  However, since working with this piece I have never had any problems with two against three rhythms (as found in measure 50) or temporarily adjusting to duple meter (as in measure 30).         

Studying the Brahms intermezzo with limitations on my personal expression dampered my enjoyment of music to a point where I didn't even want to play music anymore.  When articulating my contradictory musical opinions to my piano teacher, he asserted that if I was a serious piano student, then I would have to start listening to the opinions of my teachers.  In a conservatory setting, he said, my professors would insist that I play musical selections as the composer intended, and that the professor's interpretation of that intension was the final say in a student's performance (this now reminds of the introduction to Richard Crawford's book, as he defines the classical sphere as music with the authority of the composer, intended to outlive its time and place of creation.  Perhaps I was wrong in selfishly insisting on my personal expressions of emotion; is that how Brahms would have wanted it to be played?). To what extent this statement about conservatory playing was true, I wasn't sure, but after my experience with the Brahms I knew that I did not want to study the piano at a professional level.  I realized that I wanted to play the piano for me, to express myself and to enjoy music without the constrictions of differing interpretations.  I stopped researching conservatories and decided that I would attend a college or university to pursue other academic interests.   

Since a conservatory was no longer in my future, I returned home for my senior year in high school, continued studying the piano with my former teacher (who allowed me to express myself within reason) and applied to the University of Michigan with an interest in English.  At U of M—which has a musicology department superior to many conservatories—I took a musicology class out of curiosity, fell in love with it, and am        

now majoring in it.  Had I not studied the Brahms intermezzo in Baltimore and had a temporary falling out with my passion for music, I might have gone to a conservatory that focuses on music performance and failed to discover my field of interest.  
            Regardless of the negative connotations that the Brahms may appear to have, every time I hear it I fall in love with it all over again.  I can once again sit down at my piano in any mood, and my fingers know exactly what to do—they go straight for the Brahms.  Sometimes they skip to that eight measure block, and in less than a minute I can feel my heart rate slow down as feelings of calmness and peace overcome me.  While sometimes I think of Baltimore and the experiences I had with my teacher there, the Brahms intermezzo mostly represents my passion for music and how I came to understand what music really, really means to me (expression) and the specific roles that I want music to have (or not have) in my life.