While giving an interview recently, I was asked the following question: “Which kind of musician do you consider yourself - an emotional one or a cerebral one?”
I’ve heard this question - in varying iterations - many times, and so I had an answer ready: my first response, to any piece of music, has to be an emotional one - I’d never play it otherwise. Understanding is useful - necessary, even - to any successful performance, but the urge - the need - to play comes straight from the heart.
The answer may have been pre-prepared, but it was honest. Nevertheless, the question troubled me, as it always does. I’m generally uneasy with dichotomies: I never did well on multiple choice tests in school, and I still find it difficult to comply when asked to check the box that best answers the question. Codifying things (or people) may have its uses, but it does not - cannot - bring you any closer to the thing’s essence.
But beyond that, the question always bothers me for a more specific reason: the implicit suggestion that heart and mind must always be at odds with one another. Either you follow your deepest impulses, the question seems to suggest, and keep your music-making unfettered by context, an understanding of the music’s structure, or any other such issues, or you play as the score dictates you must, and thereby ignore any personal connection you feel to the music.
It’s probably pretty clear that I don’t subscribe to this line of thinking. What’s more, I don’t even understand where it comes from. Is life supposed to be like this? Do our emotional reactions lose their potency as we begin to understand them? Does learning to think mean forgetting how to feel?
My impression is that it is exactly the opposite. The more our feelings are given context, the more powerful and complex they become. And as is so often the case, the analogy between life and music fits perfectly. One may not need to know anything to have an honest response to a piece of music. But the more you understand - about the way it is built, where its main structural events occur, how it conforms to other pieces to which it is related, how it diverges from other pieces to which it is related, the expectations of its audience, the composition of its audience, the way the world looked when it was being written, the way the world sounded when it was being written - the deeper that response becomes.
Last night, I played Beethoven’s c minor concerto. I first heard the piece at least fifteen years ago, and I first performed it in 1999. Since then, it has been a fairly regular presence in my life, which means that I’ve gone through many cycles of playing the piece, and then leaving it for a time. And just as it would be with any great piece, each revisiting has revealed aspects I had never seen - in some cases, never even imagined - the previous time. There is probably an infinite amount left for me to know about the c minor Beethoven concerto, but I daresay I know more about it now than I did when I was eleven.
And last night, when my favorite moment of the piece - the hushed entry of the timpani after the cadenza - came, it hit me so hard, I stopped breathing. Now, as you might imagine, this is not the wisest course of action when playing a concerto, but I can honestly say it was involuntary. This music, which has been with me for more than half my life, seemed at that moment more potent, more confrontational, more vital than ever.
Was it what I know that moved me, or what is unknowable?
To the extent that the question can be answered, I would say that it was both. More precisely, it was the intersection between the two: the way in which music can be simultaneously so mentally stimulating, and so utterly ineffable.
And that is the way I should have answered the question that was posed to me. Not the emotional, and not the cerebral, but rather the space in which the two become indistinguishable from one another; that is what makes music-making so challenging, and so magnificent.
