But the only question about McNaught’s upside-down version of Schumann’s song,
Die Lotosblume…is why?
The Scotsman
Middle-D-Mirror
I can say without any exaggeration that the research began when I was about four.
Its origin was nothing at all unique to my preschool self but rather something we all share as children.
Let’s state the obvious. (Please forgive the obvious. It may come up a lot.)
We are all made of two parts and exist as two halves. Left and right. Arguably, these halves become increasingly differentiated throughout our lives but they share an original symmetry and equilibrium, one side, outwardly at least, the mirror image of the other.
In the most usual series of events, our first visual focus and stimulus is of a face which, with its vertical symmetry, mirrors our own.
Studies, too numerous to list here, tell us that while preference for symmetry seems to develop later, recognition of vertical symmetry is innate, matures quickly, or is learned very early.
Everyone remembers the wonder of opening the central fold of primary school paper in the simplest and perhaps most satisfying of art classes. Coloured drips and paint-blots had swapped sides to reveal butterfly wings. Symmetry turned random splashes into order and beauty. It was the magic that appeared to make artists of us all.
The very first words, formed by hungry infant mouths, mimic the feeding action. Amma, abba, nana, baba, maman, mum and dad. Countless other simple phonic reiterations and palindromes from countless diverse cultures, Korea to Iran, bear this out. To open, to close. To vocalise. A word. Mom. A mirror word. It may be a demand for food but it’s music to every parent’s ear.
Motor skills begin with mirror motion - like pushing and rolling, clapping and two-legged kicking. Smiles involve both sides of the mouth. They win smiles in return. Mirrors mirror mirrors in an infant’s life.
In swimming, earliest records say the breast stroke came first. It is also, through its symmetry and relative ease, the first swim stroke to learn. The crawl and butterfly came, and come later.
To forge any path towards independence; to perceive, to communicate, to move with efficiency and subtlety, we each evolve, leaving simple symmetry behind, while holding on to balance.
As a four-year-old I could be kept busy, if not exactly quiet, for hours in the rarely heated front room at my mother’s parents’ house, where my breath turned to steam. It was my favourite playroom. There was an upright piano to explore.
The initial attraction seems to have been predominantly visual, albeit with sounds attached. While others might have tried to coax out a familiar tune, I looked and looked at the pattern the notes made. Black keys in groups of two and three protruded from the white, arranged in pure symmetry. Like an upturned book spread open, the central group along the spine, it stretched wide in opposite directions. A book, a leaf, a face, an aeroplane…one side a reflection of the other. Judging by the look of it, all music seemed to emerge from the middle. Most things did. I didn’t know the key in the centre had a name. I didn’t know it was the note that tradition had failed to call Middle-D.
The Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget said:
“Every time you teach a child something, you deprive them of the chance to invent it for themselves.”
Two or three years later, in first piano lessons, much was made of Middle C. You had to remember where it was. It was the master key, the key to everything.
Middle-C. I wasn’t going to risk it. I said nothing.
It then proceeded to get even more confusing.
Middle C was the first note. But yes, A, another note entirely, was the first letter of the alphabet. It went from A up to G, but usually C up to B (weirdly), because that sounded more like The Sound of Music. Seven white notes. A, B, C, D, E, F, G…A. A was G’s neighbour, because it started again. Rows of sevens. A to G. A wee bit of the alphabet - just as much of the alphabet as necessary - as if perfectly nice letters like L and M didn’t exist.
To avoid confusion, they maybe could have used the days of the week. Sunday after Saturday made more sense than A after G. Everyone knew that.
First piano lessons were confusing for all sorts of reasons, even before the arrival of the tiny yet ferocious-sounding hemi-demi-semiquaver, not least because folk didn’t seem to be able to spot the middle.
My knowledge of the world of sport and, in particular, bodybuilding is rudimentary. My experience of it, it will be no surprise to anyone who knows me, is pretty much nonexistent.
The promoters of Health, Fitness, Beauty and all-round Sexiness agree: Symmetry is God and God is desirable. You exercise one half like the other. A weaker left arm gets no sympathy from the stronger right or from the head that governs them both. No favouritism, no special treatment. Symmetry is it. A wink and a blink are a world apart.
“Powerlifting”, I read, “is a strength sport that involves the athlete attempting a maximal weight single-lift effort of a barbell loaded with weight plates.” Curiously there’s no mention of loading the barbell equally at each end, though you can be assured that’s what they do. I dare say that bit’s obvious. Sometimes, often in fact, symmetry is taken for granted, like matching socks.
Musicians are athletes too, athletes and dancers, just without some of the accompanying physical attributes, or with others. Guitarists, like professional tennis players, are famously lopsided. With one it’s the ostentatiously muscled arm that holds the racket, with the other it’s the long, manicured finger nails of the plucking hand. Asymmetry, whether in the form of a single glove or the so-called “fiddler’s neck”, can give the game away.
Ruggiero Ricci, the legendary American virtuoso and supreme athlete of the violin, used to maintain that pianists have the easier life. He’d smile and say “On the violin you’ve got to be a surveyor with the one hand and a tennis player with the other. On the piano it’s not so bad because both hands are doing the same thing.”
Ruggiero was a hero of mine and a huge influence; already in my thirties and after years of full-time piano study, I thought about it and got on with literally that. Thanks to keyboard symmetry, I got the hands doing exactly the same thing at the same time…at least every so often.
The result might not have made compelling listening but it certainly satisfied the demands of my inner child and my inner personal trainer.
While others warmed up with scales, I increasingly favoured my mirror-image workout.
(Scales are invaluable and are wonderful educators in tonality but, in largely ignoring the smallest finger, our fifth, they aren’t ideal finger exercises.) Similar motion scales, what’s-more, seemed to me so weirdly dissimilar in motion that the term was bound to have been handed down by the same bigwig who thought Middle C was close enough. What they call contrary motion is, contradictorily, the hands moving the same way, if not in the same direction.
When the hands are doing exactly the same thing, the more able one can help the less able one and the player can see and feel how the two hands experience the same movements. Identical twins at the gym, best friends, the stronger helping and encouraging the weaker.
With Middle-D in the centre, I’d place the longest fingers on the three black notes:
12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 24, 25, 34, 35, 45 - 1234 - 54, 53, 52, 51, 43, 42, 41, 32, 31, 21 - 54321
Single trills, double trills, warm-ups, stretching. From the middle out and from the outer extremes back to the middle. Every passage can then be isolated and mirrored in practice.
One hand leads and the other follows without thinking. Not thinking too much is fairly crucial. So, when practising a difficult passage in one hand, the other needn’t be idle. It can get the benefit of the same training.
A Russian student of mine once said “But we do that in Russia all the time” and proceeded to play a passage with the hands an octave apart. Playing in octaves is something else entirely, requiring the hands to do quite different fingerings and opposite shapes.
Some pianists use variants of it. Others spend a lifetime of piano practice and either see no symmetry in the keyboard at all or have no use for it.
One world-renowned and much recorded Austrian pianist once confessed to me that the idea of flipping notes upside-down this way was entirely new and, he had to admit, “quite intriguing”. This was one of the most brilliant minds in the western musical world. Our brief exchange, and my chats with many other established pianists, have taught me two things:
Firstly: The deployment of Keyboard Symmetry, while dear to me, isn’t a given and certainly isn’t a necessary component of success as a pianist.
Secondly: Keyboard Symmetry is a secret to some that’s hidden in broad daylight and hidden, in the most literal sense, right in front of their noses.
It’s a question of perception.
Here the placement of coins prompts us to see the same thing one way, and here another.
I was only recently introduced to the Reflective Keyboard Studies by the American composer pianist Vincent Persichetti.
These symmetrical exercises employ the principle of mirror movement, a method their author states “has been neglected throughout the history of keyboard instruments”. They claim to promote the “Equal and Simultaneous Development of Both Hands”. They embrace and explore techniques such as leaps, chord playing, repetition, legato and staccato with the addition of character, mood and dynamic indications to kindle the musical imagination. As such the collection is a valuable addition to the argument for mirror image practice. While every and any right or left hand passage in piano literature can be “reflected” by the other hand without the need for notation, it is useful to have these well constructed and challenging short studies written down. Only the notation itself seems a bit cluttered and inconsistent, as sharps and flats are used fairly randomly; it seems to me that, for the sake of clarity, a sharp in the right hand is better translated as a flat in the left and vice versa.
Here I seem to have become a bit of a purist. In the final bar of this example, the note D sharp is paired with a written C sharp, rather than D flat, and an E sharp is partnered with a B natural, rather than C flat. I find these enharmonic relationships confusing. They also conceal the natural correlation of opposites inherent in “reflective thinking”.
Mirrored in Middle-D, an F sharp has its partner in B flat. The “first sharp” translates as the “first flat”.
The second sharp, C, becomes the second flat, E, in the accepted order of key signatures.
This leads us to the question of tonality in the mirroring of music - and it’s intriguing.
An E major triad is none other than a reflection of an F minor triad,
just as a C minor triad becomes an A major triad.
Four sharps will, therefore, through mirroring, turn into four flats and vice versa, simultaneously turning major into minor and vice versa.
Five or six sharps or flats translate as five or six of their counterparts in the “opposite mode”.
Only C major and A minor adhere to the relative major/minor convention, neither having a sharp or flat in its key signature, zero of each.
Over many years, in the course of countless conversations, it has surprised me that this simple mirror pattern of key signatures and relationships is unknown to composers and pianists alike.
Symmetrical piano practice has a fascinating parallel in the world of medicine, where a simple visual reflection is employed to astonishing effect.
Middle-D practice requires us to imagine the presence of a mirror.
Mirror Box Therapy requires the user to imagine the absence of a mirror.
An effective, non-invasive treatment for stroke patients and amputees, it uses a mirror and the power of the mind to achieve remarkable results. As shown here, it’s a kind of magic trick.
Although the patient is fully aware of the illusion, the mind chooses to believe what the eyes tell it. Through seeing what looks like the affected limb moving normally, they begin to believe that it can. This belief, and the complementary (rather than contrary) nature of mirror motion, have the power to reactivate the neural pathways that produce genuine movement.
Which thumb a one-to-two-year-old chooses to suck already determines their preference, some experts say, for one hand over the other. For reasons that science still cannot fully explain, around ten percent of us are left-handed, a state that brings a whole load of disadvantages and very few advantages in a world conceived for and by the other ninety percent. From the direction of writing to the design of tools and implements, right-handers have it easy. In some sports, however, where the element of surprise and of catching the opponent off-guard play a significant role, left-handers fare disproportionately better.
A tennis racket can be held in either hand but golf clubs for left-handers have to be fashioned. Left-handed polo, if mixed with right-handed polo, is too dangerous to contemplate and is therefore forbidden. To allow it would be like giving vehicle owners the choice of which side of the road they want to drive on.
On the subject of right- and left handedness, a brief video interlude…
What about music?
Guitar and electric bass players frequently customise their instruments to suit their needs or preference.
However, the proximity to one another of the orchestra’s army of string players makes divergence from the right-handed norm virtually impossible.
From Horowitz to Barenboim, left-handed pianists have coped remarkably well with a keyboard tradition which clearly favours the right-hander.
In the belief that left handed players should play music the other way round, the English pianist, Christopher Seed, had his mirror-image fortepiano constructed. What I find extraordinary is that he was then able to invert scores in his head and read them with fluency, the left hand playing the top notes on the left, the right hand playing the lower notes on the right. He writes:
“Nowadays, I perform on both my left-handed piano and a right-handed piano. I have discovered that playing in opposite directions is an advantage and has improved my all-round pianistic skills. I never get the two mixed up, although that can produce some interesting new compositions! One hand can now teach the other, suggesting fingering patterns and phrasing, now that they have the ability to copy the roles of each other precisely… And there is a new independence and freedom of movement in my playing in general.”
***
It was only after years of using keyboard symmetry as a practical and pedagogic tool that I got curious. What would complete pieces of music sound like turned on their head? The method is simple. It involves a 180 degree revolution, with Middle-D as the axis. With this inverted music hanging from a hovering bass-line, would anything make any kind of sense? Every Middle-D would remain Middle-D, the axis of rotation, but everything else would swap places.
Think of the butterfly painting, made by pressing two halves of a sheet of paper together. Now imagine opening up the resulting artwork to discover that the original marks have disappeared and only the new ones remain.The left has gone to the right and the right has gone to the left. The middle remains the middle.
I started with Der Leiermann, the desolate final song from Schubert’s Winterreise. What we know to start like this: (play) was transformed. (play) It had its own other-worldly logic, a haunting beauty and a sense of poetry that I hadn’t dreamt possible.
It’s clear that turning music on its head is going to be greeted with a variety of reactions from those who know it, play it, sing it, teach it and hold it dear. We invest time, passion and deep respect in the pursuit of a composer’s original intentions and unique language.
Such a radical reorganisation of the score will, understandably, be viewed by some as an amusing party trick and by others as something indefensible, verging on the sacrilegious.
I’m the first to admit that some upside-down pieces are the aural equivalent of a well-known painting hung clumsily, even willfully the wrong way round. However, there is no doubting the beauty and thought-provoking quality of others, a quality that, in its simultaneous sameness and otherness, deepens our understanding of the original.
Here you see the inversion of Debussy’s prelude “…des pas sur la neige”, a piece which begins on Middle-D and normally progresses upwards.
Turned upside-down, the footsteps in the snow take an altogether different route.
The practical value for the pianist in this diversion is twofold: the hands are challenged to adopt opposite functions and shapes (the functions and shapes required by a “left-handed” piano) and the musical mind is challenged to adapt to and make sense of the text as viewed in the mirror.
A lifetime of working with singers and other instrumentalists has taught me the value of thinking down as you go up, the “lift shaft principle”. In the cellists’ case, descending the fingerboard produces a higher pitch. These contradictions, some literal, some invisible coexist throughout the act of musical performance.
Mirroring music in its central point sets up an equal and opposite logic: sharps turn to flats, majors to minors, highs to lows (the vice versas a given). The resulting pieces are the equivalent of photographic negatives. Bach, inverted, works on the same contrapuntal logic as Bach as he intended it. Those fugues in the minor key which end in the major take us by surprise, however, when, in their reflected form, they sail along in the major and plunge into the minor in the final cadence.
We have looked at some of the exercises in mirror motion. Their developmental merit for the keyboard player is recognised, though famously underused.
The artistic value of inverting perfectly complete music is, naturally, more open to question.
A recent performance of a song reflection clearly left one music critic unconvinced. He wrote:
“But the only question about McNaught’s upside-down version of Schumann’s song…is why?”
It’s a fair question and one you may be asking yourselves.
Another fair question is “why not?”
Whether as a playful exercise or a brief excursion through the looking glass, this seems to me to be a thing worth doing.
The addition of the written word makes the inversion of songs all the more provocative and intriguing; our perception of major tonality as bright and aligned to a positive verbal stimulus and emotion, with minor representing the darker side, is turned on its head, just as striving upwards toward a high-point is replaced by plumbing the depths of the vocal range. In seeming to contradict the text, the vocal line and its corresponding harmony turn into a question rather than a statement. The game has a point, a point all the clearer when we listen to the song again. Our journey into what the thing is not has made us become more conscious of what the thing is. What had formerly been major and minor emerge, for want of a more elegant way of putting it, as major-ness and minor-ness, the essence of each. Composers survive this temporary redistribution and emerge refreshed and reaffirmed.
In Schumann’s song Die Lotosblume. Heine’s text talks of the lotus flower, whose fear of the sun’s power make her bow her head by day.
By night she greets her belovèd moon. Staring heavenward, she blooms and glows and scents the air.
Here, to conclude, we have the song turned upside-down and sung by the gloriously voiced mezzo, Beth Taylor. There is harmonic shade where the original was most radiantly lit. The sun and the moon have changed places. The ending has the upward, questioning inflection typical of mirror-music. We seem to be looking at the world on the surface of water - a world where the middle is constant and gravity pulls us into the sky.
