The Effect of Paul Manz

Since Mr. Manz's death last Wednesday, I have listened, re-listened, and re-relistened to the three Pipedreams shows on Manz.

No two people are touched by the same thing in the same way. I knew a cleric who could hear Christian rock music of the lowest music and theological quality and say, "That touched my heart." Thus, these things are impossible to measure. That said, I have in these days been so touched -- in fact blessed -- by Mr. Manz's playing of his own music. It has "jumped out at me."

There are several qualities which make this man and his music remarkable and, well, touching.

A composer playing his own music. Without question, my greatest dilemma as a musician has been the inability to replicate how the composers played their own music. Even if, by some miracle, we could be certain of every articulation, rubato, and inflection of a composer, even by reproducing every one of these details, the personality, the "spirit" (and spirit is real) would never be right. Chopin is an extreme example. We know almost nothing about how he played. (Yes, I own Chopin: pianist and teacher, The Chopin Companion, and every other relevant book. So what? We still don't know what he sounded like. Or as Baron Munchhausen said, "Vass you dere, Sharlie?")

Then in 2001 I discovered the recordings of Ernesto Lecuona, playing his own music. From the "classical" point of view (I don't know what that means, but I said it anyway), the music is not on the level of Chopin, Liszt, or Debussy. But hearing Lecuona play it, it moved me on a profound level. It sounded ... well, right. Not just musically right -- spiritually right.

In 1989, in Newport, RI, I heard Charlie Callahan play the world-premiere of his Partita on "Slane." I remember seeing members of the audience in tears -- and they were musicians. Someday, a student of a student of a student of Callahan will exhume this piece and play it. And it won't be the same.

As a teenager, I played a lot of Neobaroque chorale-preludes, published by Concordia, of various composers of the Manz mold. Useful stuff for church, not all of it great. Today we know a lot more about how Baroque music was constructed. Improvisers like Bill Porter and Harald Vogel are not as rare as they once were. There are quite a few musicians today who can fashion Baroque-style music. We hear it, and in our snobbery we wonder, "How 'authentic' is it?" This week, hearing Manz play his music, the question instead was, "How right is it?"

In the context of church. The music of Manz seems even more right, because he wrote it for use on Sunday morning, during actual worship. Manz went one step further: instead of giving traditional organ recitals, he gave hymn festivals, playing hymn-based compositions and improvisations interspersed with hymns sung by all present.

I could not applaud this more loudly! We have dissected Bach's music from every angle and with every rationale. The composer whose music I most love to play is Bach. And the composer about whose music I feel the most subconscious is Bach. Every time I play a note, I imagine that I've broken ten rules. Maybe it was too legato or too staccato or, worse yet, it "wasn't in the style." What that "style" is, of course, no one knows, a fact that we've already established. It's a rather fluid thing; in ten years the "authentic style" will suddenly be something different.

But hearing Manz play his Neobaroque compositions, in the context of worship, I feel like I'm brought closer to the spirit of Bach. While the organ professors were out having fistfights over articulation, here in the Midwest, far from Boston, was a fervent Lutheran musician, improvising on Lutheran hymns during a Lutheran service. That is much closer to the Bach experience than some Bach recital by some top teacher on the trendy tracker of the time.

A good person making good music. Around 1991, I was at Duquesne University, playing what I think was the world-premiere of the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano by Elliott McKinley. It was some sort of new music festival organized by David Stock. One day, Bill Bolcom did a composition masterclass, during which the discussion somehow meandered to "good" music written by "not necessarily good" human beings. Bolcom mentioned Wagner and admitted that he wasn't sure how to reconcile the fact that great music was written by ... well, Wagner. I admired Bolcom's candor about it; he was brave enough to say, "I don't know the answer to that one."

It is a question that I've thought often of in the almost 20 years since.

There's no question that great people sometimes write bad pieces, and bad people sometimes write great pieces. And frankly, we can't always judge how "good" or "bad" a historical figure was. Some claimed that Verdi, Brahms, and other composers "believed in nothing." Chances are, they very much believed in a Higher Power but did not believe in the church hierarchy. Put differently, God's laws and church laws are not necessarily synonymous. The latter they were happy to break -- and historically the clergy themselves have been only too willing to break both categories of laws. ("Do as we say, not as we do," proclaims their conduct.)

However, what I do know is that when you have a great person writing a great piece of music, it transcends all earthly stratospheres. The greatest music of Perosi is greater than the greatest music of Wagner or some other reprobate. We have, for instance, a recording of Perosi conducting his "Giudizio Universale." This is a musical/spiritual level that Wagner never reached.

And so there is "a certain something" about the music of Paul Manz. It comes across that there is a great human being making this music. There is a simplicity -- a quality that is not childish but childlike. Manz, in his music, seemed to be behaving the way Christ admonished us to behave.

Here are the Pipedreams shows. Experience them for yourself:

http://pipedreams.publicradio.org/listings/2001/0114/

Long live the memory of Paul Manz.

In Search of Sound II

More often than not, Vladimir Horowitz was appreciated for the wrong reasons. Yes, in the 20s and 30s, no one had a technique like him. But later we had people like Pollini, a veritable computer taken human form. I juxtapose these two names for a reason: Horowitz's technique included SOUND, which he never for a moment allowed to be absent from his playing. Pollini is simply a Godowskian mechanism (and without the tone or lyricism of Godowsky's era).

This is what I felt has always been underappreciated. When at the triumphant Moscow return in 1986, someone commented, "Horowitz is the only pianist who plays with colors," there, finally, you had a listener who understood what Vladimir Horowitz was accomplishing.

A scale can be scale, or it can be a fire cracker. An arpeggio can be an arpeggio, or it can be ocean waves. Octaves can be octaves, or they can be a cannonade. Horowitz's sensitivity to sound has probably never been equalled, not by Liszt or Anton Rubinstein, not even by Chopin or Debussy themselves. In fact, I want to say that Horowitz never played notes -- he made sounds. (Very musical ones, naturally. For Horowitz really was one of the great musicians, even if his musicality was sometimes sui generis.)

There was talk that "The Horowitz Piano" was somehow "rigged." For starters, there were at least four "Horowitz pianos" over the years. Secondly, it has been well-documented, by those who have played his piano after his death, that it was harder to play, not easier. The weight that would produce a mezzopiano on a regular Steinway thundered a fortissimo on Horowitz's. So to play all the gradations of p, pp, and ppp, you needed a transcendental digital sensitivity. Only Horowitz possessed it.

Somehow I realized that the technique-through-sound approach worked for me on the piano before realizing that it could work for organ, as well.

Last June -- six months before Jon Gillock's life-changing advice described in the previous post -- I was to play Chopin's Piano Trio in G minor with the Lavazza Chamber Ensemble. The strings have little to do, while the piano part is like Chopin's Third Concerto. I wasn't sure how to approach it, especially since I just did not have a lot of time in my schedule. I tried budgeting my practice time, practicing only the parts I didn't know. I practiced "just the notes," in other words.

And let me state: you do really need to practice notes! Not that I like to admit it. But there is no substitute for technical woodshedding, when necessary. And there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do it. The unhealthy ones can ruin both hands and psyche.

So I did the woodshedding, but it just wasn't coming together. As late as the dress rehearsal, I simply could not play the piece coherently or cohesively.

Meanwhile, in an earlier rehearsal, I was enjoying the music and less worried about the concert deadline. Kristina Nilsson, the violinist of the trio, remarked, "It's amazing that an organist can play the piano as well as you do." I said simply, "I just try to make the sound that I want to make." You know, the whole "water instead of arpeggios" thing described earlier. But more than that: when a pianist plays cleanly, doesn't it SOUND a certain way? And I think every pianist in the world thinks that only by playing every note with computer accuracy produces that clarity. It's simply false -- the proof being that Horowitz sometimes made mistakes. So to be honest, I tried to make the sound of a clean pianist. I simply approached it from the opposite side. A sparkling arpeggio sounds a certain way -- I tried to make that sound.

But as it got closer to the concert, I got more and more nervous about the notes. Then there was the problematic dress rehearsal at which I (and undoubtedly the others!) wondered what was to become of me. Because on top of it all: I had tendonitis.

Now ... before you start interpreting that word I just uttered ... a doctor will tell you that the term "tendonitis" can mean anything or nothing. It is like the terms "illness," or "treatment." They are undefined and undefinable.

So before rumors circulate that "Ciampa has tendonitis," I assure you that tense tendons come and go and can be as curable as the reduction of caffeine intake. (The notion of tendonitis being "permanent" was yet another misconception injected into me from my piano teacher of yore. Perhaps what she really was saying is: "If you get tendonitis, that's the point at which I give up on you and concentrate on the next competition-winner.")

I had a couple of days left before this concert. I asked my dear friend Anne Conner, "What am I going to do? I have to practice, but my tendons hurt." She said, "You know the piece. And even if you don't, nothing you do now is going to help you at this point." She was right. She continued, "Just run through the piece once, or twice if you feel up to it."

I played very little in those couple of days, and I was sure to practice from the standpoint of sound and to forget technique entirely.

I sat there at the piano, the downbeat came, and ... I knew the piece! No one could believe it (least of all the long-suffering string players!). It wasn't a note-perfect performance. But I realized that I really had practiced. All of that woodshedding really did happen, and the notes were there, in hands and brain. All I needed to do was to make music and, well, to sound good. It was one of those personal triumphs that make a career feel fulfilling.

Why it took me so long to realize that I could approach the organ the same way, I cannot say. I guess I'm a little slow that way. But I must leave you with a Horowitz anecdote which was told to me personally by Franz Mohr, his piano technician. Franz arrived at the Horowitz's 94th street mansion. Franz entered. Horowitz was playing. Franz said, "I see you're practicing." In feigned indignation, Horowitz declared, "Franz! I never practice! I REHEARSE."

And if you rehearse the sound as carefully as you want to rehearse the notes ... well ...