Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Aviva Nassimi When I was seven, my father took me to a classical music concert for the first time and I went out crying. They performed Beethoven's 5th Symphony. (Music) How do you prepare a child to attend a classical music concert for the first time?
A few days before, we sat down and listened to a recording he had. There, he explained a couple of simple things to me, for instance, the insistence of "ta-ta-ta-tan" throughout the first movement. But that it also comes back later in the symphony.
He explained that this symphony had four movements. Or that the end of it would be a victory. A human, musical, concrete or abstract kind of victory.
He explained that what starts with an insistent and sententious call, becomes a triumph, full of validation and optimism. We even played a game: every time a section started, of which we had spoken about, I would squeeze his hand as a sign of recognition. With this information I arrived at the theater.
This, and my natural curiosity filled me with expectations. I was so focused enjoying the music, but also the experience of being there: the public paying attention, the orchestra, the passionate sound. Everything was like what I anticipated, until something incredible happened.
Something that to this day I consider one of the most perfect musical moments ever written. A miracle. The music had been repeating a gesture for quite a while, (Plays the piano) Do you recognize it?
But also, a progression of chords that made me think that after this, surely, this would come. A kind of "musical common sense. " But there is no miracle on that.
Humbly, I could have written that resolution myself, so we would've finished the movement, and let people cough happily and compulsively, or check their phones. But I didn't write this piece of music. And Beethoven is Beethoven for a reason.
Let's go back a few seconds: (Music) All this follows a pattern and we already know how it should end. And this? This is not what I expected.
A child would say: it's like cheating you. That note coming from another musical universe surprises us. The music, the rhythm, barely beats on the edge of its extinction.
Little by little it stabilizes, showing vital signs. From that pulse, the violins sprout and an erratic intermittent melodic line, until both find consistency, too. In that way the music captures our attention.
A moment charged with the promise of an imminent outcome. That something that we know will happen; that without realizing it, we already expected it. (Music) After that my father looked at me and hugged me, deeply moved.
I was crying. I looked at him and said: "I don't know why I'm crying, for it is not sadness what I feel. " That moment marked my life.
At that moment, being seven years old, I decided to dedicate my life to music. Because I wanted to recreate that moment, understand it and then share and spread it. Let's see if we can do it here now, I think it's contagious.
When I talked about this unexpected note, that key to new options that finally become the door to this great musical triumph, I was pointing to a very simple and common phenomenon of life itself: expectations. Had the third movement effectively finished like this, (Plays the piano) our perception of what happened would've stayed within certain range of expectations. We basically receive what we expect.
The music ends, the audience coughs and accommodates their seats. (Laughter) The musicians relax for a second until the director raises his hands again in a sign of onslaught to conquest the last movement. It works.
The music impacts anyway. But it's not the same. This transition Beethoven wrote not only succeeds in connecting one music with another, but it creates another kind of expectations.
From that unexpected note, until the search for new stability in the rhythm, the melody, the harmony and the texture that grows to end up in something even greater. But in the meantime, our mind reacts. It starts looking for alternatives, possible scenarios.
And Beethoven knows it. That's why that dissolution and rambling of the music confuses us. And that confusion brings on expectations which are a mix of prediction and willingness to keep on being surprised, since the same music showed us that everything is possible.
On another extra musical level it looks like my own attitude before and during the concert. The information from my father was an incentive to get to the theater full of expectations. To recognize what I already knew, to verify it.
But once I was surprised, everything was possible. The evocative power of music comes to an extent from its ability to create, prolong, suspend, or even betray expectations. But what do we expect from it, from music itself?
A melody and an accompaniment. An idea that presents itself, talks and finds a closure. A new, more happy idea.
Everything peaceful and expected. Expectations fulfilled. Aha!
An unexpected turn . . .
Drma! Opera! You didn't see that coming.
Because it is easier to predict from consistency. Like in this prelude from Bach. We are designed to look for stability and reaffirm a prediction.
Associations are triggered and our memory draws conclusions. Consistency allows us anticipate and guess rightly. And one of the sources of pleasure when listening to music is when our expectations are met.
But, what happens when we lose control on the predictions? When they are not met? A great tool of Romanticism.
Franz Liszt plays with surprises. A passionate, raptured melody, that begins a journey. But comes back.
And then, when everything seems to go on the same, safe and predictable path, this! A door opens, another alternative. Which destabilizes, but fascinates.
One more! It was like finding options that were not possible. And that challenge to our expectations seduces us.
Or a contrast. Mahler declares: "Dark is life. Dark is death.
" Serious and hopeless, the music takes a new turn. But also, this music has a hint of movement, of a dance, of a waltz. Of course!
The style, tradition and heritage also generate expectations. Because Mahler is an heir of a whole Viennese tradition where this music is part of its DNA. And of ours?
Didn't some of you smile when recognizing this waltz from Strauss? Which is also full of small games of expectations. Like these subtle changes in tempo.
That coming and going, that brings about so much grace. Or more radical surprises. A new waltz!
Like I told you, tradition lies in the collective unconscious and through gestures like this: one two three, one two three . . .
we can even recognize a distorted and decadent waltz written before the First World War. Isn't it like a spooky echo of that Viennese waltz? Those notes, apparently unconnected, are the product of years of transformation of musical rules.
Wagner was one who contributed, in his case, by being a great manipulator of expectations. Suggestive music, full of eroticism where each note, each sound clings to the next one, crawling and sticking to it. But, permanently changing direction.
Not everything that sounds can be unexpected. A silence can also be provocative and leave open questions. The deafening silence .
. . Debussy and his sensual "Prelude to the afternoon of a faun" and that suggestive silence at the beginning.
Silence, that essential element of music. More than an absence of sound, it is a fundamental expressive resource. And one of my favorite silences is that complicit silence.
Loaded with expectations. The one that happens before music is. (Music) But also every new silence.
Giving moments of lucubration. Being part of the speech and connecting ideas that can continue to grow. Contrasts, stability and instability.
By the way, the stability of the pulse, and how we group it is an instinctive reaction we have as soon as we identify regularity. One, two, one, two . .
. But, what happens when we can't even anticipate this grouping? And we are just left at the mercy of the unstable?
Listening to music can be like reading a good detective story. Like those in which you even doubt the dead. (Laughter) Where the plot and the impending outcome will make you more sensitive to how the thickness of the pages decreases.
Expectations on the weight over the tip of your fingers. The state of attention changes, it's active and increasingly speculative. It is no longer, "if this, then that.
" But, "and if this, then that? This other or that one? " Like everything in life, in the nature of art it is also present this idea that you have to expect the unexpected.
But notice that the unexpected doesn't just taste like first time. That's why we read a book or watch a movie many times, or we listen to that music we like so much on repeat. Partly, this is because we like to experiment from security.
Like a child who reads the same story tale every night, with the relief of knowing how it ends. But also rereading through memory gives us other details. It makes us pay attention to other places.
We listen now not to the melody, but the accompaniment for example, to discover that beautiful music that had gone unnoticed, even when it was always there. To recognize, but also to rediscover. An infinite game of expectations.
Or the relationship between the performer and the listener, "How will he do it? Surely different from the recordings that I know! " But that's the idea!
Because music is an organism, that breathes and it's alive at the very moment it sounds. Only there music is. And listening to it live allows us to live that moment full of expectations.
When the concert ended, my dad took me to meet the director. I saw him and I started crying again. (Laughter) Without saying anything, I thought: you are responsible for these tears!
He gave me a puzzled look. He asked if anything had happened, for many reasons can make a seven-year-old boy cry. My father, still moved, summed it up and understanding now the impact that music had had me, the director hugged me and said: "Well, that's why we do what we do.
" That day changed my life. Ever since, my expectations are to change yours. Thank you.
