The Way of Bach by Dan Moller

Author:Dan Moller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

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For the better part of a year, I played almost nothing but Mozart’s K. 545. Try as I might, I couldn’t play the series of descending scales at the beginning of the piece fluidly. My right hand resembled a crab scuttling sideways, with one ragged claw—that ring finger—poking out the front; or sometimes my hand was an elephant blundering through the bush, its trunk flopping about uncontrollably. Mozart was the ultimate simplicity, but he exaggerated every little flaw.

It started to become clear that you don’t really learn a new piece of music, you acquire new skills. Each new piece asks the student a fundamental question: Can you play arpeggios? Can you play a trill? Can you play counterpoint? K. 545 asks the simplest question of all: Can you play a C major scale? No black keys required, just the white ones. But to my exasperation, C major ended up being the hardest scale to play. There was nowhere for the fingers to hide, no little hill or crevice to conceal a small awkwardness, no change in hand configuration to offer flagging muscles a rest. It was just an endless sea of flat, undifferentiated white, like Moby Dick, whose terror consists in the whiteness of the whale. It should have been easy, but making the fingers, each different in length and strength, to land exactly flat was excruciatingly difficult, even now that I had learned some basic Bach, which didn’t require the same skill, since there are few extended scales in Bach, and none so naked as in Mozart. And yet the music itself brought me endless joy. Playing thus involved a jarring incongruity between the divine innocence and elegance of the music, and my clumsy attempts to perform it, between the master’s blueprint and the pile of rubble I built out of it.

I began focusing on my fingers more. Instead of looking at the keys or the music, I just stared into the mirror of the fallboard which reflected back my hands in black. At first, things looked all right, but eventually I saw that everything was wrong. My pinkies would fly out at acute angles; my second finger often over-rotated and skated across the key; the fourth finger flipped up instead of arcing. I was determined to get those clumsy American fingers, shaped by subway straps and soda cans, to curl gracefully around Mozart. After countless hours of philosophical analysis and observation I finally realized what I needed to do: I needed to push my fingers down from my hands onto the keys and then lift them back up again. Two years in, this was my great revelation. If it sounds ridiculous, all I can say is that before I wasn’t doing this, not even trying, really. What I was doing was closer to clenching my fist against the piano. Changing my technique and readjusting everything seemed like a heroic task, though, especially since I found that once I’d learned some music, my technique was baked in;

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