Author: brycon
Date: 2023-10-24 03:55
Quote:
I'd like to understand where my original quote is wrong vs just a difference in opinion. This is why I appreciated Paul's response, where he seemed to understand what I meant - and that the degree of freedom provided for in (say) jazz might make the degree of freedom in classical rather constricted in comparison.
Still, I'd appreciate any further explanations/opinions on why what I said was "wrong" or "sad" - I'm trying to regain my appreciation for classical, and would be thankful for any direction toward (re?) gaining that understanding. I apologize for any offense my statement might have caused the professional classical players among us - it was not intended.
I don't think what you said was wrong or sad: you like what you like.
One thing to point out is that you can appreciate a piece of music, say Mozart's piano sonatas, but not appreciate particular performances, say Glenn Gould's dreadful Mozart recordings. It may help to clarify whether it's an either/or or both/and here.
Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. But the other day, I was having a conversation with a student about musical expression. He was asking me whether it's okay to add things, such as crescendi, ritardani, etc., that aren't explicitly written in the music (the answer, of course, is that it depends). I used with him the example of a Shakespeare play: Shakespeare doesn't tell us in the stage directions whether to whisper a line or shout a line but knows that, because we understand English, we can arrive at a suitable interpretation of our character's line.
The issue with classical music, is that mediocre teachers prescribe ways of playing that are abstracted rules not tied to real music, e.g. as a melody goes up, crescendo; as it goes down, decrescendo. Imagine performing a Shakespeare play and whenever your character spoke a compound sentence, you grew louder approaching the comma and then softer as you receded from it. Are you Iago and trying to mask your malice? Or are you Hamlet and struggling to make sense of the world? Doesn't matter, just get louder for half the sentence and softer for the other half. This way of performing Shakespeare is only marginally dumber than this way of performing music. But in music education, it's the way of doing things throughout much of the U.S. (I can't speak for the rest of the world).
To belabor the analogy, music education (again, in the U.S., at least) doesn't train actors but rather reciters. By "reciter," I'm imagining, for example, someone fluent only in French performing Shakespeare exactly as written, sounding out each word and following only his stage directions, or perhaps listening to a recording of Sir Lawrence Olivier playing King Lear, memorizing all the words and all the inflections, and delivering a weird copy of the performance but in either case having no idea what he was saying. Similarly, musicians listen to recordings and copy players they like (while having no idea why their favorite player made the interpretive decisions he or she made) or apply onto the top of their playing half-baked interpretive rules all while not understanding much about music.
I love improvising. But I also love digging into pieces I've played for years and finding new stuff. Why, for instance, does Mozart descend in bar 4 of the concerto down to C-B rather than E-D, which would be "expected" because it maintains the upper thirds with the strings? Is there something I should do with my playing to show this motion into an inner voice (pardon the Schenkerism)? Digging into Mozart is like digging into Shakespeare: as an interpreter there's always more to find. If you play music as a reciter, though, executing someone else's decisions or strictly what's written in the part, then yeah, classical music would be incredibly dull.
|
|
The Clarinet BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
