{"id":32,"date":"2013-05-19T16:21:18","date_gmt":"2013-05-19T23:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=32"},"modified":"2013-06-18T19:30:51","modified_gmt":"2013-06-19T02:30:51","slug":"six-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/32","title":{"rendered":"Six Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew that the amazing Leonid Hambro had toured as “straight pianist” to Victor Borge<\/a>, but hadn’t known he’d also conducted orchestras for the show. Telling me this—ever the provocateur—he added, “If you learn six words in any language, you can rehearse an orchestra.”<\/p>\n

I took the challenge: “Faster, slower.”<\/p>\n

“Time,” said Leonid. “Very good.”<\/p>\n

“Louder, softer.”<\/p>\n

“Dynamics. Good.”<\/p>\n

“Hmm. Legato, staccato?”<\/p>\n

“Articulation, good. I say longer, shorter.” His words are better: they can produce legato, staccato and anything between.<\/p>\n

I pushed for Sonority, which doesn’t have a nifty word-pair; and he claimed that chord-voicing determines sonority, so it’s actually part of Dynamics. It’s not completely so—players do have their own sounds!—but perhaps it’s a practical approximation for pressured rehearsals.<\/p>\n

His practicality flavored our many conversations, in which I enjoyed his quick mind, his relish in how things work—he would have made a fine engineer—and his anecdotes. I even appeared in a story from my first lesson with him, in 1972: “Thanks for the marvelous session, Lee. But Lee, there’s one thing missing.”<\/p>\n

“What’s that, my boy?”<\/p>\n

“Lee, the cruelty.”<\/p>\n

Thirty years later, he was still telling this with a big laugh; and I still remembered his response: “I just like to hear people play well.” Like others of superlative gifts, he seemed to think the less gifted could do as well as he, if only they knew a few powerful specifics that could readily be conveyed. Sometimes he was right!<\/p>\n

His gifts were<\/i> superlative, that’s for sure. In 2003, he told me of his father—his first teacher—suggesting that the young Leonid listen to a certain pianist on the radio, choose a passage, and write down the fingering he thought the pianist used. Note the assumption that Leonid could take dictation of the music; he was eight or nine at time. And who was the pianist? Art Tatum<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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In the 1990s, I encountered an engineering problem when I tried the Bösendorfer computerized player-piano in David Abell’s store, in Los Angeles, and found its playback accurate but too “smooth”-sounding. A pianist friend, Lincoln Mayorga, who happened to be in the store, suggested that the problem was the absence of finger-on-key noise. (The playback mechanism was internal. The keys moved up and down, but nothing touched their playing surfaces.) I found Lincoln’s suggestion immediately convincing, and it started me wondering if finger-on-key noise was actually necessary to piano sound.<\/p>\n

A few years later, I learned from harpsichordist Davitt Moroney and another friend, harpsichord-maker John Phillips, that harpsichordists play to the middle of the dip, where the string is plucked, to avoid key-at-bottom noise. I tried doing the same on piano, and it seemed to benefit my legato and my sound. In fortissimo, I had to start the key-stroke fast to get the necessary hammer speed; then ease off to minimize the noise at the bottom. <\/p>\n

Despite the difficulty of this, I began dreaming of fortissimos without thunks<\/i>. Someone said the late Theodore Lettvin, a wonderful artist, could do them; and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Leonid could. I’d seen him do amazing things, like playing a note staccato and<\/i> tied. Impossible, right? He did it first time, on a clunker piano he’d never touched before.<\/p>\n

Another noise—an evil noise I’d long been aware of—was damper-pedal thunk<\/i>: it’s ugly, and death to legato. It can be cured in two minutes’ daily practice over a few days; so why do we still hear it?<\/p>\n

Summing up, we can control damper thunk always, finger-on-key noise often, key-at-bottom noise maybe; so Noise is a real category, though it’s like Sonority in not having a word-pair, rather than like Lee’s big three of Time, Dynamics, Articulation.<\/p>\n

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I looked forward to bouncing these ideas off Lee; and then came the sad sad news of his death. It seemed incongruous: with his nonstop energy, death shouldn’t have been in his repertoire.<\/p>\n

And I learned that he’d lately gotten his “Command Performance” list—from which audience chose the program at concert-time—up to 300 or 350 pieces. The “Les Adieux” Sonata was on the list; I remembered when he played it in his first trial of Command Performance, in our living room. I still imagine him there when I practice every day. “Now, my boy, what should the articulation be in this passage?”<\/p>\n

He gave me one of the most important things a teacher can give—and what no real teacher can help but give: insight into the workings of his mind.<\/p>\n

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