Speech given by Peter Basquin '64
Carleton College Commencement, June 13, 2009

Thank you, President Oden, and thank you, Steve, for those wonderful comments!

President Oden, trustees, faculty, friends, parents, grandparents, and especially Carleton graduates:  I’m honored and deeply moved to be here today, and I’m very grateful.

Carleton College is hardly a music conservatory, and it’s rare for a pianist graduating from a liberal arts college to achieve professional success as a performer.  In earlier decades, musicians generally spent so much time and energy on developing technical skills and learning the repertoire of their instrument that intellectual development was merely incidental, acquired if at all by desultory reading and informal discussion. There has always been something unlikely in the combining of academic and on-stage excellence.

Mine was therefore a paradoxical career choice. When I entered Carleton, I was quite undecided about my major and eventual career, and had chosen to come here because I could test the waters in mathematics, music, and literature in both French and English. Although I loved playing the piano, I was uncertain about a career in music.

I was inspired and guided to this career choice by a wonderful Carleton professor and mentor, Bill Nelson, along with his wife Mary, Anne Mayer, Harry Nordstrom, and other members of the music faculty. Bill went far beyond helping me to improve my piano technique. He taught me to merge my emotional response to music with a deeper intellectual grasp of musical structure. He taught me how musical phrases ebb and flow, and how to express that through nuance and subtle changes of tempo. He taught me to analyze each piece’s melody, harmony and rhythm, and to use that understanding to deepen my interpretation.

He also recommended that I read Denis Diderot’s essay “The Paradox of the Actor” (Paradoxe sur le comédien). The title is sometimes translated “the Paradox of Acting,” but it might well be called “the paradox of performance.” How does the actor (or any performer) maintain the discipline and control to give a fine performance, while conveying deeply moving emotions in a convincing way? Diderot argued that great actors must avoid “sensibilité”–what we might call sensitivity or more simply, emotionalism. Convincingly to portray emotion, actors must avoid feeling it! This idea struck me as strange and challenging. When I practice a piece such as Schumann’s great C-major Fantasie, I’m sometimes overwhelmed by the sense of longing, love, and frustrated desire that Schumann conveys with yearning melodies and richly expressive harmonies. At times I have to stop practicing in order to catch my breath and regain my self-control.

So I wanted to learn more precisely how music conveys emotion. Now, not every work is explicitly emotional–indeed, Stravinsky, for one, insisted that his music is merely what one hears, that it conveys nothing beyond itself. But most composers have written music that does intend to express a mood, a story, or an emotion. I saw that part of my purpose as a musician was to understand how music does this, and to transmit that mood or emotion to an audience, as well as to teach the technique to students.

Some expressive sounds are commonplace in their effect–a loud sound startles us and may evoke fear. A few sentences from an 1896 review in a Boston newspaper of a now-familiar classical work suggest the result: “Now followed a sweet little slumber song entitled the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky. On a second hearing, or rather a second deafening . . . the coda was as loud as the explosion of a powder-mill. ... It is sound and fury signifying–something.” Not all musical effects are bombastic; others  are more subtle, but also directly expressive. For example, the gently rocking triplet rhythm of lullabies evokes feelings of family warmth and comfort. Bach uses this rhythm to beautiful effect in many works; for example, it shapes the counter-melody in his arrangement of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

The best composers also create powerful messages by their mastery of large-scale form. Most of you have probably listened to Beethoven’s justly celebrated 5th Symphony, perhaps without even realizing how the simple but powerful connection between the angry C-minor first movement and the triumphal C-major finale resonates with people worldwide. The interplay of these major and minor keys also explains a part, although only a part, of the emotional power of the Schumann Fantasie.

Guided by insights like these, I have continued to deepen my interpretations and strengthen the emotional understanding that I project to an audience. However, connecting to an audience has its paradoxes, too. Should I, like a ham actor, wave my hands in the air and bob and weave at the keyboard to show how deeply moved I am as I play? Is the approach of a Lang Lang the best way to convey emotion? Or should I follow the tradition of the earlier generation of pianists who believed that physical movement should be minimized, in order to focus the attention of the audience on the sound of the music? An article by Bernard Holland in the New York Times last year was headlined “When Histrionics Undermine the Music and the Pianist.” Holland, after witnessing two pianists contorting themselves at the keyboard, points out that “lugubrious gymnastics like these advertise the feeling of performers, not of Beethoven or Schumann. Music is asked to stand in line and wait its turn. ... Elaborate arm waving and heaven-bound gazes . . . seem to have become part of the conservatory curriculum, like accurate scales and counterpoint.” I’m essentially of Holland’s opinion, and yet I also see that physical motions, within reasonable limits, help to dramatize the spirit of the music. Schumann himself wrote about Liszt’s piano recitals, “really to appreciate him, one must see as well as hear him.”

These paradoxes defy simple answers, but I have found in wrestling with these problems a lifetime of fascinating study and personal satisfaction. I have tried to impart this same spirit of inquiry to my classes and piano students at the City University of New York. At the same time, I’ve tried also to abide by Bill Nelson’s injunction–I suspect he said this to most of his students, distracted as we often were by emotional turmoil and confusion–to “get the day’s work done”!  How often he said that! By this he meant to keep us students focused on regular, thoughtful practicing. Over time, this daily work came to exemplify for me a precept of the Bhagavad-Gita: that fulfillment derives from the performance of selfless actions without worrying about the result. Practicing the piano is just such an action, even though, as a performer, I still worry about the result!