don't put sugar in the gas tank, lucas!

hello everyone.

Last week I played a concert-Richard Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder arranged for voice and piano quartet (piano, violin, viola, cello) rather than the original which is for just voice and piano. We played at Geneva's Palais de l'Athenee, in the 'bee room.' It was a funky venue. The ceiling of the concert hall was painted with a swarm of bees arranged in a very orderly swirl around the chandelier in the center of the room. Behind us on the stage there was a fake curtain painted on the wall.

After the concert we moved to another room for schmoozing/apero with the wagner fans of geneva. The walls were covered with 18th century portraits, and again, the walls painted with fake wood and bricks, lending an air to this building of being very old an ornate until you look just a bit closer.

I chatted with the professor who had worked with us on these songs, a professor that I have recently been very inspired by. He is quite a character: an american originally from northern inland maine (he told me he was self-taught as a musician until going to music school) who runs the opera program at the conservatory in Lausanne. What I find inspiring about his teaching is that 1) everything that comes out of his mouth is about the music (as opposed to the technicality of playing an instrument or so singing) and 2) he has a quite developed pedagogy that makes it easy to understand what he is going for. Quotes are constantly tumbling out of his mouth like "in music the notes attempt to express emotion but it is the silences that expresses the inexpressible"...

in other words, it is the spaces, the breath where the music lives. working with him has given me a lot of food for thought.



Let me unpack this a tiny bit: in told the effect of working with him on this chamber music piece was that I was able to play better than I usually do just by changing my thoughts. I've learned a lot working with him and with vocalists--singing is just so much more natural than playing a stringed instrument. He led us during one lesson through some very simple breathing exercises, but it really made us play much better together, simply by breathing together in a relaxed way.

I said this already, but it's also inspiring to have a professor who is really just talking about MUSIC and not about technique. So often teachers in chamber music will say, that's not together, make it together, that's not in tune, make it in tune. But it is, in the end, remarkably inefficient to go about playing music this way. They don't bother to help you understand the root of the problem, why something is not together--they only expect you to fix it somehow, wave your violin around, look at each other. What I've learned from working with this voice teacher on chamber music is that it is about understanding the music together, and from there, simply listening, focusing and reacting.

I've started to recognize in my many years of playing and studying what makes really great musicians great. it is this, that they are always thinking of the music rather than the details that make it up (ensemble, intonation, balance) and they teach about music in this sequence as well, and ultimately it makes you think more and play better.

during one coaching we hit a spot where we were not together and the teacher yelled at the swiss french pianist..,"don't put sugar in the gas tank!" I wasn't even sure what he meant, but through context I knew he meant, don't mess this up, don't disrupt, don't complicate. I thought it was funny that he chose to say this in this way to our pianist who speaks english but not amazingly. but maybe it doesn't matter if we don't always understand what our teachers say as long as it makes us think.