Rules of Musical Life (Robert Schumann)

RULES OF MUSICAL LIFE

ROBERT SCHUMANN

1845

1. Ear training is of utmost importance. Make sure in good time to know how to recognize every sound and every key. Furthermore, occupy yourself with examining which sounds of the scale correspond to those produced by a bell, window panes, or a cuckoo.

2. It is an excellent thing to play scales and technical studies often and diligently. There are many individuals who believe they can obtain the maximum useful result by dedicating many hours of the day, always and until the latest age, to purely mechanical finger exercises. Doing so is like reciting the alphabet daily with ever-increasing speed. Use your time better.

3. Mute keyboards have been invented; try them for some time to convince yourself that they are worth nothing. The mute cannot teach how to speak.

4. Play in time! The execution of certain artists resembles the gait of a drunkard. Beware of taking these people as models.

5. Study the fundamental laws of harmony in good time.

6. Do not be dismayed by terms such as: theory, partimenti, counterpoint, and others similar; with a little goodwill, they will soon become familiar to you.

7. Beware of playing carelessly! Execute every piece with accuracy; never cut it off halfway.

8. Playing too fast or too slow are equally great defects.

9. Make an effort to play easy pieces well and with expression; this will be much better than executing difficult compositions mediocrely.

10. Take care that your piano is always perfectly in tune.

11. You must know not only how to play your pieces, but also be able to sight-sing them without a piano. Cultivate your imagination to the point of being able to memorize as much of the harmony given to a melody as the melody itself.

12. Strive, even if you have little voice, to sing at sight without the help of an instrument. In doing so, you will perfect your ear. If you are fortunate enough to possess a beautiful voice, do not neglect to cultivate it, and consider it the most precious gift bestowed upon you by heaven.

13. Try to be able to read any music and understand it at first sight.

14. When you play, do not pay attention to who is listening to you.

15. Always play as if you were in the presence of a master.

16. If someone presents you with a composition to have you perform at sight, read it entirely with your eyes before playing it.

17. When you have finished your daily musical study and feel fatigued, do not continue studying. It is better to rest than to work listlessly and with a tired mind.

18. When you have reached maturity, do not play the fashionable little compositions of the day. Time is precious: one should be able to live hundreds of human lives just to know all the good compositions that exist.

19. Children raised on sweets, pastries, and delicacies will never be healthy men. The food of the spirit, like that of the body, must be simple and nutritious. The great masters have provided this in abundance: stick to their works.

20. Virtuosic compositions quickly go out of fashion. Agility has value only when it serves to make the execution of musical works of real merit more perfect.

21. Avoid contributing to the spread of bad music; rather, seek to suppress it with all your strength.

22. You must never play bad compositions, and do not even listen to them unless you are obliged to do so.

23. Do not seek that brilliant execution called bravura. Rather, strive to make an impression by reproducing the idea that the composer intended to express, and nothing more; wanting more is ridiculous.

24. Consider it an abominable and monstrous thing to practice even the slightest change in the works of good masters, to omit some part, or to add something new. This would be the greatest injury you could do to art.

25. Regarding the choice of pieces to study, turn to the opinion of people more experienced than yourself; by doing so, you will avoid a waste of precious time.

26. Apply yourself to studying the masterpieces of the most famous masters little by little.

27. Do not let yourself be seduced by the applause that great concert artists obtain from the multitude; always prefer the praise of artists to the acclaim of the crowd.

28. All purely fashionable music has a short life, and if you persist in cultivating it, you will be regarded as a fool whom no one respects.

29. Playing much in social settings is more harmful than useful. You would do well to take into account the intelligence and taste of your audience, but always refrain from playing things that you yourself would be ashamed of.

30. Do not miss the opportunity to perform music together with other people, such as in duets, trios, etc.

This exercise will make your performance fluid and give it momentum and color. Do accompany the singers often.

31. If everyone wanted to play the first violin part, an orchestra could never be put together. Therefore, respect every musician, wherever they may be.

32. Love your instrument, but do not regard it with vanity, as the only one or as superior to all others. Remember that there are others, and they are equally beautiful. Also remember that singers exist, and that what is most sublime in music is expressed through the choir and the orchestra.

33. As you progress in art, seek to become more familiar with scores than with artists.

34. Diligently play the fugues of the great masters, before all those of Bach. Let The Well-Tempered Clavier be your daily bread. Then you will surely become a most excellent musician.

35. Among your companions, always prefer those who know more than you.

36. Recreate the rigor of your musical studies through the diligent reading of good poets. Likewise, walk often outdoors.

37. Much can be learned from singers, yet one should not believe them in everything.

38. Remember that you are not unique in the world. Be modest! Have you not perhaps thought and invented something that others before you have already thought and invented? And if this should truly happen to you, consider it a gift from heaven that you must share with others.

39. You will soon be cured of all vanity and presumption if you study the history of music and go to hear the masterpieces of its various eras.

40. A very beautiful and useful book on music is that of Thibaut (1772-1840), titled: On the purity of the art of sounds. Read it often when you reach maturity.

41. If passing by a church you hear an organ playing, go in to listen to it. If you then have the good fortune to be able to sit yourself before this instrument, try its keyboard and you will be amazed by the surprising power of music produced by your small fingers.

42. Do not neglect any opportunity to practice on the organ; there is no instrument that more effectively reveals the incorrect playing of the performer and the bad style of the composer than that one.

43. Never refuse to sing in choirs, and particularly in the middle parts. This practice will contribute to making you a good musician.

44. What does it mean to have musical feeling? You do not have it if you play your piece from beginning to end with great difficulty, anxiously staring at the written notes, or if during performance you stop abruptly, absolutely unable to continue, should two pages be turned at once by mistake. But you undoubtedly possess this musical feeling if, while playing a piece that is entirely new to you, you approximate what follows, or if you know it by heart when the piece is already known to you; in short, if you have the music not only in your fingers, but also in your head and in your heart.

45. But how is this musical feeling acquired? This, my dear boy, is, like all other things, a gift from heaven. It consists mainly of a fine ear and a rapid faculty of perception. Such happy dispositions can be cultivated and perfected; however, not if you shut yourself alone in your room, dedicating yourself only to mechanical studies; but rather you will achieve them by maintaining yourself in lively and multifaceted musical exercise, specifically with the choir and the orchestra.

46. Apply yourself in due time to the study of the range of the human voice in its four main modifications. Study it particularly in choirs; examine in which intervals its greatest power lies, and in which others one must seek effects of tender and delicate expression.

47. Listen carefully to all folk songs: they constitute a rich mine of the most beautiful melodies, which give you an idea of the character of different nations.

48. Apply yourself in due time to reading old clefs; otherwise, many treasures of the past will remain unknown to you.

49. Penetrate in due time into the tone and character of various instruments; try to impress upon your ear the sound color that is characteristic of them.

50. Never neglect to listen to good works.

51. Honor the ancient highly, but also take a warm interest in the modern. Have no prejudice against names that are not yet famous.

52. Do not judge the merit of a composition after having heard it only once; because what pleases you at first is not always the best. Masters must be studied. Many things will not become clear to you until a more mature age.

53. In judging compositions, first distinguish whether they are works belonging to true art, or if they merely aim to entertain amateurs. Value the former: but however not"}

and go angry at the others.

54. "Melody" is the battle cry of amateurs; and it is certain that music lacking melody entirely is not music. However, you must properly understand the meaning they give to this word; for amateurs, it applies only to melodies of a pleasant rhythm that are easy to hold onto. But there are others of a very different kind; if you open the works of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, you will find that their melodies present themselves in a thousand varied ways, and I believe you will soon grow weary of the paltry rhythmic forms of melodies in modern Italian works.

55. If you compose small melodies while sitting at the piano, it will certainly be a very beautiful thing; but it will be far better if these come to your mind without the aid of the instrument; rejoice then, because it will be a sign that your inner musical feeling is awakening—the fingers must do what the head wants, and not vice versa.

56. If you begin to compose, first ideate everything in your head. Do not try any composition at the piano until you have well established it in your mind. If the music comes from your innermost feeling, and you yourself are moved by it, then it will also have an effect on others.

57. If heaven has gifted you with a lively imagination, it will often happen that you sit at the piano, in hours of solitude or as if under the influence of an attraction, trying to express with harmonies the feelings of your soul; and the more obscure harmonic science remains to you, the more magically it will seem as if you are being drawn into enchanted circles. These are the happiest hours of youth. However, beware of giving yourself too often to the productions of a talent that can induce you to waste time and strength equally, chasing ghosts. You will not achieve mastery over the forms of composition, nor express your ideas clearly, unless you set your concepts down in writing; therefore, it is better to write than to improvise.

58. Try to acquire the art of conducting early on; frequently observe the best conductors, and try to accompany them silently with your thoughts. By doing so, what you hear will become clearer to you.

59. Seek to acquire dexterity in your fingers, and never neglect the study of other arts and sciences alongside music.

60. The laws of morality are also the laws of art.

61. With diligence and perseverance, you will always progress for the better.

62. From a pound of iron, which costs only a few cents, one can derive many thousands of watch springs, the value of which, compared to the original, is prodigious. Therefore, use conscientiously the pound of intelligence that you have received from God.

63. In art, nothing great is achieved without enthusiasm.

64. The purpose of art is not to procure wealth. Seek to become as proficient as you can; the rest will come by itself.

65. The spirit of composition will not be entirely clear to you until you properly understand its form.

66. Perhaps only genius can fully comprehend another genius.

67. Some have believed that a perfect musician must be able to see in their own mind, as if they had the written score before them, an orchestral piece—even a complicated one—after hearing it for the first time. That would indeed be the superlative of musical intellect.

68. Study is endless

Some are moving. The 60, for example: it makes you understand the difference between art and spectacle (which has absolutely nothing to do with morality!).

Others are a bit banal or "showy," a bit like... his music (a very personal judgment and free not to be shared). By the way, what note of the scale does the sound of glass and the cuckoo correspond to?!

pestatasti wrote:

Some are moving. The 60, for example: it makes you understand the difference between art and spectacle (which has absolutely nothing to do with morality!).

Others are a bit banal or "showy," a bit like... his music (a very personal judgment and free not to be shared). By the way, but to which sound of the scale does the noise of glass and the cuckoo correspond?!

Many, many people have written about the cuckoo in so many pieces; there is one by Pasquini where you can almost hear the Cu-cu of the cuckoo.

I have never played a window... but I think he generally meant to use an hyperbole....

pestatasti wrote:

Others are a bit banal or "showy" a bit like... his music (a very personal judgment and free not to be shared).

If you wrote "free not to be shared," you already know that it is not shareable, especially because I think it is a judgment of taste and therefore does not go with "banal," but at most with "I don't like it." I say this because if there is an author who is difficult to understand among his contemporaries, and specifically Schumann... for which... I would have also expected "difficult"

Rotore wrote:

I have never played a window...

... the lowest sib of the pf?

Ettore wrote:

If you wrote "free not to be shared" you already know that it is not shareable, especially because I think it is a judgment of taste and therefore does not pair with "banal," but at most with "I don't like it."

You are right. Anyway, I feel in good company:

"[schumann, n.ed.] did not even have competence as a pianist and if it hadn't been for that clever little wife of his who undertook to perform all those mediocre compositions of his, we wouldn't even know of his existence" Glenn Gould, quoted from Piero Rattalino, Glenn Gould, il bagatto, p. 4.