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The U.S. Air Force found that pianists\u2014who simultaneously command ten fingers and two feet, read notes, interpret, and collaborate with colleagues\u2014would make good drone pilots. I\u2019d also add organists (whose performing stations can resemble cockpits!) to the group. Photo of organist Albert Sch\u00f6nberger (public domain<\/a>)<\/p>\n Pianists: Air-Force-Certified Masters of Complex Tasks<\/strong><\/p>\n Several years ago I had the privilege of listening to a talk by Lex Braun, Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, at an annual Advisory Board meeting of the Texas Medical Center in Houston\u2019s National Center for Human Performance. The Pentagon, Mr. Braun told us, was concerned that the drones we were using in the Middle East crashed much too often, not only causing all sorts of unintended collateral damage, including innocent human lives, but at a cost of $10 million a crash.<\/p>\n In all such instances, two Air Force officers, on board a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, were working together to operate a single drone by remote control. One of them was charged with synthesizing two dozen incoming visual signals relevant to the drone\u2019s performance: changing air speed over time, altitude, relationship to the intended target, and incoming enemy missiles, among many others. A colleague was tasked with synthesizing two dozen incoming audio signals stemming from 24 other variables. The two officers were supposed, between the two of them, to work out meaningful courses of action, under pressure and in very limited amounts of time, but the drones continued to miss their intended targets.<\/p>\n Puzzled, the Pentagon had invested, we were told, large amounts of money in an effort to determine which kinds of young Americans might best be able effectively to synthesize large amounts of incoming data while under pressure. And the answer turned out to be \u2026 pianists!<\/p>\n A pianist myself, I was not surprised to learn of this conclusion, though I supposed that the Pentagon seemed to have missed organists in their net. In what follows I shall try briefly to outline the process I believe should take place when any young musician learns a new work.<\/p>\n A Performer\u2019s First Task: Understanding the Composer\u2019s Intent and When to Take Liberties<\/strong><\/p>\n In tackling a new work, to begin with, one should try to find an edition of the music that stems from the work of reliable musicologists to assemble a publication that comes as close as possible to a printed realization of the composer\u2019s intention. This, however, is not always as easy as it might seem.<\/p>\n Years ago, as a Princeton graduate student in musicology, I was given the privilege by Arthur Mendel of editing for the Neue Bach-Ausgabe, Bach Cantata 176, \u201cEs ist ein trotzig und verzagt Ding\u201d (\u201cIt is a defiant and despondent thing\u201d). The alto aria of the cantata, sung no doubt in 1725 by one of Bach\u2019s Thomasschule students, begins \u201cErmuntert euch, furchtsam und sch\u00fcchterne Sinne\u201d (\u201cTake courage, fearful and timid spirits\u201d) and has an obbligato part for two oboes and oboe da caccia (\u201chunting oboe,\u201d pitched a fifth below the modern oboe) playing in unison. Not surprisingly, the extant original performing parts, then the property of C.F. Peters in New York City, show that when the aria was rehearsed, Bach found that three unison oboes, played at least in part by other Thomasschule students, were too much oboe for the contralto soloist, and asked oboes 1 and 2 to mark their parts \u201ctacit\u201d during the measures when the young alto was singing. Under pressure during what was probably a Saturday rehearsal for a performance the following day, oboes 1 and 2 put the tacit marks in the wrong measures, thus resulting at Sunday\u2019s performance in what Bach must have found at least mildly disconcerting. (All this is, appropriately, indicated in my Kritischer Bericht, which I don\u2019t imagine many Bach performers have ever read.)<\/p>\n That leaves open what has always seemed to me the central question of this aria: though Marianne von Ziegler\u2019s text refers to the Trinity, I still cannot fathom why so skilled a composer as Bach would ever have dreamed that the trio made up of two unison oboes and oboe da caccia was an appropriate allusion to the text, even before listening to the necessarily hurried rehearsal of his tyro [novice] oboe players. Put another way, even with the most presumably reliable notation records, a conscientious young musician cannot be anything like certain that (s)he is achieving the composer\u2019s intention. The instrument on which (s)he is playing, the acoustics of the hall in which the performance takes place, the ears of the audience (who have heard more music from the past two centuries than Bach had ever dreamed of), and the accuracy of the score will all impact the possibility of realizing Bach\u2019s intention.<\/p>\n