Over the last couple of months, I’ve found inspiration within my musical practice in two major areas: Debussy’s Clair de lune and David Baker’s short little book called How to play bebop 1 - The Bebop Scales and Other Scales in Common Use.

Moonlight

Clair de lune means simply “moonlight.” Debussy used the piano beautifully in all registers. For example, there are some sections of only very high notes, in a register where I might not normally play, but he shows beauty in that register. In the 2 octaves above middle C, I have discovered that the piano has a very bell-like sound, particularly when letting the notes ring above the lush, lyrical tapestry of the middle section. These bells make me think of, for example, church bells, and then I think of shafts of light — which is partly why, now, the meaning of the title makes sense to me.

There is much beauty in this piece, and it is a joy (and a challenge) to practice it. At times I can’t help but think that Bill Evans had been here. For example, the “So What” chord is heard in passing (4th beat of measure 45), and generally many of the voicings anticipate his work.

I was lucky enough to hear Thomas Stumpf perform Chopin’s Ballad in G minor at Tufts University a couple years ago. What struck me about his performance was the unflinching, unceremonious, the simply.. fast.. way in which he performed that whole piece, but in particular the presto con fuoco (meaning “really fast, with fire”) section at the very end. There was just something.. heroic about it; like he was putting everything into the performance, lighting all the remaining fireworks. In another case (having nothing to do with speed) I remember a similar experience when, during the year of Mozart’s 250th birthday, I heard him play Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in A minor — the piece Mozart wrote after his Mother had passed away (as he taught us).

Here I remember the Ballad in G minor performance because it is interesting to listen to an (alleged) recording of Debussy playing Clair de Lune. As one of the commenters observed, “If it didn’t say Debussy played it everyone would be hating on the speed” — normally the piece is performed much more slowly, luxuriating in its light and colors (e.g. by Evgeny Kissin).

And the transitions! Each is better than the last. Approaching measure 27 I can imagine a continuous curve that describes the increase in motion that leads from block chords to broken chords to the full lyricism of the sixteenth note accompaniment. An awesome transition is from the forte climax of the piece into measure 43 (one of the most difficult, for me). And then another excellent transition into measure 51, as the flowing accompaniment gives way to the first theme, while it hangs around in the pianississimo background.

Another thing that has struck me as I was practicing was the repetitive, looped nature of this piece. There are several sections of repeating or nearly-repeating 2 bar patterns. Sometimes these repetitions are built on the absolute basic building blocks of chords arpeggiated across multiple inversions. One excellent example of the latter is measure 37. I can imagine a simple exercise built on such a measure (say across all keys), and in a way it almost anticipates repetitive beats in hip-hop etc.

I still haven’t mastered this piece, but I did have these thoughts, and I was glad to have had them. And mostly, as I reflect now, having some distance between practicing it daily — I remember simply the gratitude I had felt repeatedly while practicing it — that such a thing should exist — that someone has shown me the way to such beauty.

How to play bebop

I bumped into this book on Amazon and decided what the heck. And wow, it has really hit the spot. The introduction immediately caught my attention:

Almost all later styles—cool, hard bop, funky, contemporary mainstream (4ths, pentatonics, angularity, etc.), thirdstream, fusion, etc.—have all borrowed liberally from the language, structure, syntax, grammar, gestures, etc., of bebop.

Stepping out of, or prior to jazz, my intuition of tonality in Western classical music is that it had been continuously expanding from the humble beginnings of monophonic chant, incorporating more and more “wrong notes” (the devil’s interval, and so on) — with a renegade Bach or Mozart eventually throwing in jarring, obscure dissonances, Wagner delaying “resolution” for the duration of an entire opera, until the likes of Mahler, who incorporated (in the words of Bernstein) nearly every chromatic ambiguity into his late works — until finally, Mahler’s followers, the so-called Second Viennese School, would step firmly beyond tonality and leave it behind. So went the history of tonality from circa 1100 to the early 20th century.

As I’ve been reading through some of the examples in David Baker’s (clearly very well-researched) little book, the thought that struck me is the similarity that binds bebop and the dramatic, late-stage romanticism that had made such an impression on me over the course of my years in California, on the heels of being properly introduced to Mahler at New World Symphony. In both romanticism and in bebop, the name of the game is chromaticism. Each era reaching beyond itself. Well and of course if you listen to Bill Evans and Miles Davis talking about it, they got everything from those romantic composers (one of my favorite Miles Davis quotes on the subject).

One thing’s for sure, as I read through the examples of the bebop dominant scale in this little book, I can’t help but hear Mahler’s appoggiaturas flowing into one another.