Author: kdrew922
Date: 2008-01-07 08:30
oboeblank wrote:
> I personally think one of the greatest failings in music education is this idea of
> absolute freedom when it comes to music-play what you want, how you want
> and do whatever as long as it sounds good. Music is information and there
> IS a right way and a wrong way of playing things. That is the truth many
> just do not want to accept.
Hmm... this statement needs some clarification. To be sure, there are unequivocally verifiable statements that can be made about music. "There are four quarter notes within a bar of 4/4 time. Not three, not five, but four." But such statements typically deal with very elementary matters. When we talk about interpretive freedom, I don't think anyone is advocating that we encourage students to play as many beats in a bar as they like. We're talking more about choices of phrasing, articulation, tempo, etc. These are highly subjective matters. One cannot say that a certain way of phrasing is "wrong."
Is music really "information?" Take, for example, the well-known oboe solo in the first movement of Beethoven's 5th. To an extent, the notation is informative. But, again, only regarding some very elementary matters. It tells the performer a few things, like what notes to play, and the relative duration of these notes. But, beyond that, it conveys little that is concrete. The rest is up to the performer. Even when composers of later eras have attempted to be more precisely prescriptive, their attempts have often backfired, resulting in increased ambiguity. Using a dozen dynamic or articulation indications, instead of just two or three, doesn't necessarily lead to greater specificity. Since the meanings of musical markings are not set in stone, but rather vary according to context, more black ink on the score often just means more to set the interpretive gears turning.
And then we could get into some really dicey ideological disputes. If the composer has written one thing, is it actually "wrong" to play something else instead? I think that to some degree we would probably all say "yes" to that. After all, we were all born and raised in the twentieth century, when the ideology of the performer's subservience to the composer was hugely influential. But even in its heyday, that ideology was never 100% dominant. And in the long history of music, it's actually a relatively new way of thinking, today almost entirely relegated to our beloved, yet fairly small and culturally almost irrelevant, sphere of "classical" music.
Alright, enough of my rambling. I'm getting a bit removed from the original topic of this thread. But it's still a great discussion.
Cheers,
Drew
Post Edited (2008-01-07 08:37)
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