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This week on the
blog: from Friday, February 15, 2019
the blog also publishes on Mondays and Wednesdays.
Go here to read those.
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Who's that again? |
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I was blurbing down the highway, which is the best time to be
concentrating on classical music. In the car. On the Radio.
The station was in the middle of a piece of music. Since pieces of
classical music can sometimes take hours, this was not so unusual.
But I wanted to know something about the piece. Specifically, who
was playing the piano. I'd heard the music about a billion times
before, so that wasn't an unknown. But who was playing it?
Unfortunately, I thought that bit too loudly. Then a sophisticated
bit of AI in the radio antennae must have penetrated the tinfoil hat
I wasn't wearing. It said, hmmm, he wants to know who the pianist
is. This information was relayed to the on-air personality, who
waited the necessary 25 minutes until the piece was concluded, and
then, just to make it fair, made sure I was in the middle of a tight
turn between a semi and a bus going through a tunnel over a patch of
ice so I really needed both hands on the wheel and couldn't turn up
the radio. She chose just that moment to quickly mumble the name of
the pianist as the first two words of the sentence while her voice
was still warming up and gaining pitch and volume. She then relayed
the name of the piece and the composer, which I already knew, at
full volume and more drawn out. She was smiling as she said this,
knowing she had won again.
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He was going too fast, I thought. I couldn't
help thinking that Mozart would have shared my opinion. I am
guessing that based on a letter to his father in which Mozart
complained about the speed at which some fellow raced through his
piece, and another in which he complained about that practice in
general.
But what it might really have come down to
wasn't that actual speed, per se, but that he was playing the piece
in a way that made it sound fast. And I began to imagine reasons for
that.
I was in the car at the time. As I pulled into the parking lot, a Mozart sonata
had come on the radio, as played by some fellow who had won some
international competition or other. Recently, I think. And I
wondered whether that had anything to do with his treatment of
Mozart.
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....I think it was famed conductor Arturo Toscanini who said
"tradition is nothing but the last bad performance." It seems safe
to assume he wasn't interested in what everyone else thought you
were supposed to do with a Beethoven symphony.
This seems to be where music and politics diverge, when a strong,
charismatic figure decides to do things his way without caring what
others think. It seems that way, anyway. But often, that individual
is also appealing to precedent--if not to tradition, which may be as
recent as yesterday or storied in the past, it is The Composer's
Authority. That's because, like our political system, the assumption
in art music is still very much that the composer is the final
authority. One way to buck precedent without getting in as much hot
water over it is to appeal to originalism, which is precedent raised
to the third power. Bypassing the traditions that have 'corrupted'
the original intent of the composer, the performer seeks to
'restore' (with or without the aid of a committee of historically
informed musicologists) the true and proper way to approach the
piece. On the supreme court, justices argue about who is realizing
the intent of the founding fathers most accurately. But no one says
they aren't interested in what the founding fathers think about the
issue. They may find creative ways to justify what seem to be new
interpretations, but justify it they do. And they accuse their
opponents of being false to this tradition.
Much like the way harpsichordist Wanda Landowska settled an
argument by telling a rival, "You play Bach your way, dear,
and I'll pay Bach his way."
Precedent is a strange dance.
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Precedent
(the last bad performance?)
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On the Nature of Harmony:
(Orthodoxy and the Overtone Series) What makes
harmony so--er, harmonious? |
The first time I saw the
overtone series my reaction was immediate. "Is this why people prefer major
chords and other 'pleasant' harmonies and don't respond well to others? Is this
what consonance and dissonance are all about?"
My presenter was a college-aged tutor at a summer music camp. She didn't
know; probably hadn't thought about it. She took my question to the chairman of
the theory department. I don't recall getting much of an answer from him,
either. Maybe he just didn't want to open that can of worms.
Let me explain. Whenever you strike a note on a piano,
or play one on a clarinet, you are not simply listening to that one note. There
are countless other notes quietly humming about in different gradations of loud
or soft, all of them below our threshold of conscious hearing.
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