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Score: http://www.issuu.com/jacquesbailhepublishing
Video: https://youtu.be/-Hpb4KxaQec
Variations for Two Pianos and Two Cellos on Pawel Syzmanski's Dwie Etiudy na fortepian
How do we "get" jokes or understand metaphors—or understand both at the same time? For example, "The euphonious subtitles of this piece, Superior and Inferior Temporal Gyrus, roll right off the tongue!" Our ability to make sense of nonsense apparently resides in those two parts of the brain, just above the right ear.* When we respond to jokes and metaphors, our Temporal Gyri show high activity, but even more interesting, this is the area of the brain that lights up when we have epiphanies, or what we sometimes call a Eureka Moment: a sudden insight into something we previously could not understand. In formal scientific terminology, this is called the "Aha! Effect." No kidding.
Jokes, metaphors, and epiphanies, are each the result of finding connections and similarities between non-sensical abstractions. Abstractions are often maddening things: impenetrable riddles without clear answers and seemingly devoid of practical use—until we make sense of them. Most often, we do so not by beating our head against the wall and grinding out a solution. Epiphanies more often come when we're relaxed, floating in a dream-like state. Thoughts about unrelated things rattle around in our minds until our Temporal Gyri come up with something and we're suddenly snapped out of our dream state by a Eureka Moment.
Pawel Szymański's Dwie Etiudy for solo piano is, I suppose, what could be called abstract music, but that might be a mistake. It's filled with wit, similes, and references to music from hundreds of years ago, in particular, the music of Bach. I was working on a piece by Bach when I first heard Dwie Etiudy, thanks to pianist Anna Von Urbans, and immediately imagined fragments of Bach's fugues and cantatas echoing back after hundreds of years floating around the cosmos. These fragments and oblique references apparently lit up my Temporal Gyri. The abstract aspect of Szymański's music vanished. His ingenious form, cadences, and melody became clear and I was suddenly filled with ideas.
And that's what these variations are about—the nether world of floating in relaxation and then out of nowhere, that sudden burst of Aha!
*Imagine: How Creativity Works, Jonah Lehrer, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012
- Genre
- Classical