On this occasion, the curtains served as a focus, a resting place for the eyes as much as the performer. Some people just shut their eyes – and still others just fall asleep.
I have failed to find a neat tabular presentation of the variations, but a performance, consisting of the theme followed by 33 variations lasts about an hour. So an average of around a couple of minutes each.
Having also failed to register at that point that the theme itself was not included in the 33 variations, I made it 34 or 35 rather than 33, not being sure of what might have been a break between what might have been the penultimate and last variations. And even giving me the benefit of the doubt about that, it seems quite likely that I put some breaks in where they were not and missed others. That said, I expect that I still got most of them right.
Furthermore, contrary to expectations, the business of counting enhanced rather than diminished the performance. The business of counting did not occupy that many of the available brain cycles and did mean that one concentrated, perhaps more than one might have otherwise. Less wandering of thoughts to matters irrelevant, less thoughts altogether – with, I imagine some cognoscenti arguing that during the course of a successful performance the audience should have no inner thoughts at all, not even inner thoughts directly connected with the subject matter. So, for example, one should experience the cunning shift from key A to key B at bar C of variation D, but one should not put that shift into polluting inner thought, at least not until after the music has stopped. A standard I rarely achieve: maybe a few minutes at a time but certainly not hours or even quarter hours. Guessing, I should think I am in inner thought mode at least 25% of the time that I am listening to music at a concert. Quite likely 100% of the time when the music is on in the background, at home. For inner thought more generally, see reference 3.
Maybe the counting, in some obscure way, enabled the brain to focus on the task in hand better that it might have otherwise. Rather as some people claim to be able to work better – say at writing their essay on William the Conqueror’s settlement with the Anglo Saxon church – with music on in the background – although that is not my own experience. I find it distracting – to the point that I am often irritated by Chief Inspector Morse’s habit of having loud music on in the background – although I suppose there is a middle ground, where one knows the music in the background well and at intervals of, say, 20 seconds or so, one is happily switching between William the Conqueror and Alban Berg. Maybe, by pushing William the Conqueror out of the foreground, by enjoying a snatch of music, one is allowing the unconscious processing slots in which to do work on the Conqueror that one might otherwise find difficult. Rather as one sometimes goes to bed with a problem and then wake up in the morning, refreshed and with the problem all solved, as if by magic.
Other people have physical ticks which accompany mental work, perhaps tapping their feet or scratching behind an ear. Ticks which perhaps function in the same way, at least in some sense, as the counting. Perhaps they tap off energy from parts of the brain not engaged in the matter at hand, energy which might otherwise be disruptive.
I associate to a former colleague in IT who, when, he got home in the evening, might take a cigarette or two and a pint while he mulled over, and usually solved, some technical problem which had cropped up in the day. In much the same way as the fictional Sherlock Holmes had one, two and three pipe problems and aforementioned Chief Inspector Morse cannot think without some beer inside him. Maybe the brain can get overheated and needs to be calmed down in order to do really productive work.
There is also the point that one needs language, quite possibly quite technical language, to describe what is going on in the music, how it has been put together and to talk about that sort of thing with others. Other cognoscenti might argue that having inner thought of this sort, language more or less in the foreground, adds spice to the musical experience. I associate to some eager student of Shakespeare knowing and having inner thoughts about the full import of some phrase or other in a play being performed in front of him, inner thoughts quite probably connected to the pleasurable but vain emotion of pride in one’s superior knowledge, or, more kindly, just simple pleasure in one’s knowledge of the inner workings of the play.
Perhaps the answer is that we vary in the extent to which we can or want to erect verbal scaffolding around our raw experiences. Scaffolding which might well, in the world of LWS-N of reference 4, map neatly onto layers.
Back with the business in hand, the chosen method of counting, not having paper and pencil and not caring to use the OneNote feature of my telephone, either of which might have been irritating for those around me, was the bank of six (unlit) lights suspended from a bar, maybe five metres above and over the stage, with these very lights being visible in front of the curtains in the illustration. Moving from left to right, marking off two sixes made a dozen, with the total coming to between two and three dozen. This proved to be both effective and relatively unintrusive; much less so, I think, than trying to keep count without any kind of a prop: I find that I have to work quite hard to remember where I have got when there are significant gaps between the counts. Say counting the number of buses that pass one in an easterly direction while one is walking along East Street, from Epsom to Ewell.
One feature of spotting the breaks between the variations was that, quite often, I did not actually notice and count a break until some seconds after the break itself. It was as if the new key, the new tone took a while to sink in, to register. Perhaps that is part of the point: the composer has managed to achieve a seamless transition between what really are two quite different parts of the music. Perhaps a considerable technical achievement, which he wants to share with his audience.
I think that the reason that I like to have separate parts to longer pieces of music is that I like to know where I am on the map, as it were. My musical senses are too weak to manage without some pointers. Perhaps people with stronger musical senses just know where the music is going and when it is coming to an end – without needing to articulate this knowledge in inner thoughts – but frequently I do not and so I like a bit of help. Furthermore, I believe that there is something of a fashion in the musical world for playing music which is nominally arranged in movements, without breaks, sometimes on the instruction of the composer, on which point see reference 5. But it is not a fashion that I care for. And while the lack of clear breaks did not seem to matter on this occasion, more often than not it does.
Reverting to the matter of musically relevant inner thought, I almost invariably listen to music without any awareness of matters musicological at all. I may have read the programme notes at a concert or the notes on the cover of the record at home, but this very rarely has any bearing on the conscious experience, if indeed it has any bearing (for me) at all. Beethoven’s achievement in spinning 33 very different variations out of the one simple tune works for me, without my needing to know what is going on. I don’t need to know, for example, that variations 11 and 12 provide more development of the upbeat (a quote from my ancient record sleeve); it is enough to experience that upbeat. But would thoughts of this sort intrude in the experience of a more musically literate person, ‘aha’ thoughts slightly after the event, getting in the way of whatever was coming next? Never mind understanding Diabelli’s achievement in coming up with a simple tune which admits such treatment, admits all these variations.
And picking up on the interaction between the conscious and the unconscious, I have also noticed, perhaps when counting the steps when climbing up a long flight of stairs out of tube station, that one’s counting sometimes goes underground, as it were, while one thinks or looks at something else, to find a few seconds later that the counting has continued, uninterrupted. Hard to be sure that such counting is correct, that it has not missed a few beats, but the impression usually given is that it has not.
With the difference that in this case there is a two way interaction between the climbing and the counting, perhaps resulting in their synchronisation. In the case of listening to music, as opposed to performing it, the interaction is all one way. The music might entrain the count, but the count cannot entrain the music.
Not sure where all this takes one. Beyond asserting that the business of listening to music is, or at least can be made, more complicated than one might at first think. Perhaps I should try transcribe these thoughts to the business of looking at old master paintings.
Reference 1: Diabelli Variations – Beethoven – 1819/23.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabelli_Variations.
Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/progress-report-on-descriptive.html.
Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/an-introduction-to-lws-n.html.
Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/sacconi-one.html.
Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/new-game.html.
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