I wanted to write a column on speed in music to highlight the holding of the Montreal Grand Prix, then I learned that this issue of your favorite daily newspaper would be on the theme “slow down”, so I eased off.
Posted at 1:01 a.m.
Updated at 8:15 a.m.
We take it a bit for granted that playing slowly is easy, because by learning a musical instrument, we work for years to develop speed, the gymnastics of virtuosity. The fingers must acquire the ability to move independently at breakneck speed, a speed where the camera no longer quite follows, creating a halo around the hands.
Playing slowly also takes years to learn, but there’s no question of gymnastics here: it’s the weight of life that will make the difference.
Warning: alert to clichés, which I hasten to demolish here.
Slow like pilates
No gymnastics in the musical slowness? Completely wrong if your fuel is breath! Playing slowly means managing your breathing, preferably with killer abs. This is true for all wind instruments, and of course for singers. In their case we could say “slow as pilates”, this minimalist gymnastics which invites the deep muscles to give their all.
I asked a soprano friend which work embodied for her the difficulty of slowness. She did not hesitate for long: “The And incarnatus is from Mozart’s Great Mass in C: a nightmare to sing, but a dream for those who listen. »
Slow like an old soul
I spoke about the weight of life, which creates beauty in slowness: another cliché. Because it can happen that a young Polish pianist, with a physique reminiscent of the comedian Matthieu Pepper, plays as if he were 72 when he is 27. This happened at the recent Montreal International Musical Competition.
If the singer must work with all her muscles to sustain the sound of her voice, the piano must make us believe that the sound lasts, even if the hammer of the piano has only struck the string, without rubbing it continuously like a bow. It is the musician’s thought that we must hear between the sounds: yes, it sounds esoteric, but the pianist must actually render the intention of the sound audible.
Slow like a meditation
Sometimes we have to accept that time stands still. It’s no longer just about playing slowly, we’re talking about emptying our minds because the music presents itself as a meditation. A word often associated with the works of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose piece I was able to play Tabula Rasa a few times. The second movement, Silenciumpresents itself as a long meditation, without the slightest dramatic twist.
It is said that meditators must move beyond the discomfort of the body. In the same way, the musician will have to play infinitely soft repetitive motifs extremely slowly for more than 17 minutes! No question of having an itchy nose or the beginnings of a hand cramp; you have to get out of your body, while remaining focused on rhythmic precision and the beauty of the sound. A challenge that is worth it: this piece written in 1977 has enjoyed constant success since the ECM label made it known in 1984.
Slow as a confidence
The famous Adagietto of the 5e Symphony by Gustav Mahler, it is the emotional antipode of Tabula Rasa. We are not making a clean slate, on the contrary, we are putting everything on the table!
The complexity of life, of feelings, wounds, flashes: everything happens in slow motion, sehr langsam (very slow), so that the weight of each note says a little more about the human condition.
Each listener creates their own scenario based on this music, but the cinema has produced several remarkable ones. Death in Venice by Visconti, Tar by Todd Field, Happy Days by Chloé Robichaud, Maestro Bradley Cooper: Every TimeAdagietto is a turning point, a revelation.
Cooper uses the work to shift to the less happy days of the union between conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia. We see Felicia listening from the wings as she often did, elegant and motionless, enveloped in the smoke of her cigarette mixed with the black, moving and sensual silhouette of her husband conducting Mahler.
The director-actor did an extraordinary job (guided by Yannick Nézet-Séguin) to evoke Leonard Bernstein, who remains an absolute master of inhabited slowness.
