Author: brycon
Date: 2021-10-03 03:48
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Admittedly I try to avoid deeper discussions regarding phrasing and such (tending toward ligatures and mouthpieces instead) because there is SO MUCH subjective quality to the discussion.
Sure, because there isn't any subjectivity when it comes to equipment...
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So I ask with some trepidation, are there any straight forward "rules" one can garner from Cristophe's playing that can make playing tunefully easier to understand?
There might be some basic things to consider when it comes to expression. C.P.E. Bach's advice to approach instrumental playing like a singer, for instance, or Chopin's suggestion to increase intensity when a musical line ascends. Probably because C.P.E. Bach and Chopin were fine musicians, they kept things very general.
Other sorts of things to consider might be more specific: "Don't play a deceptive cadence the same way as an authentic cadence," for example, or "Press into the dissonance of an appoggiatura and relax into the consonance." But as Artur Schnabel apparently taught, you have to take each piece and even each phrase on its own terms.
Just because "press into the dissonance of an appoggiatura" is an okay "rule" and something you might even teach someone, it doesn't tell you all that much about how to perform a particular appoggiatura and risks reducing musical expression to a set of inflexible and arbitrary rules, contrary to what Schnabel might've wanted.
With the opening of Saint-Saens's sonata, for instance, the appoggiatura from G to F in the first entrance should probably be played a bit differently from the appoggiatura from Bb to A in the second entrance. Perhaps the Bb to A version should have a bit more tension in the sound because scale-degree 4-3 is a more pungent dissonance than 2-1, because it comes secondly, because the voice-leading is rising, etc.
Or with the opening of Schumann's fantasy pieces, the appoggiaturas in m. 2 might be played less affectively and perhaps not pressed very much at all so that they lead into the C to B appoggiatura in m. 3 because C to B echo the half-step motive introduced by the piano, fall on the stronger metrical placement of beat one, are quarter notes rather than eighths, etc.
In short, expression is a constellation of considerations: rhythm, harmony, voice leading, compositional motifs, and so on. And it takes musicians with skilled ears and intellects to make sense of what often amounts to contradictory information.
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I think I hear a use of wide dynamic ranges within a given phrase. I seem to hear higher notes of the phrase played louder, while lower notes are played softer. Or sometimes just that the terminal notes of a phrase are diminished.
To reinforce my points above, sure, some phrases might warrant wide dynamic ranges. But at the same time, others, such as the "monotone" ending of the Poulenc's first movement, might not. Moreover, piano and forte are colors more than decibel levels (which is why the opening phrase of Brahms's first sonata is marked poco forte). It's entirely possible, then, to play a phrase expressively within a narrow volume range by modulating the color or intensity of the playing (the opening phrase of the second movement of the Brahms, for example, is often played this way, with the intensity leading from the opening F to the D several measures later but the volume staying rather soft).
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What in God's name does "playing a tune tunefully" actually mean?
It therefore means different things in different circumstances. Good musicianship can't be reduced to a set of easily-graspable precepts, no matter how much you wish it to be so.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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