music, music, music to my ears
Apr. 22nd, 2007 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI was basically incommunicado for three days. I was attending a musicology conference at Stanford. Sessions lasted all day from 9 AM, with concerts in the evening. And as I was attending at the behest of my editors for SFCV, who will line my palm with gold for the writeup that's due this week, I count it as paid work.
Not that I wasn't planning to go anyway. It sounded fascinating, and I now have twelve big pages of handwritten notes to decipher. And five CDs of one sort or another that I picked up.
The topic was the history of classical performance practice, the history of recordings, and their effect on each other and the way we perceive music. The focus was mainly on piano music, with small excursions into string quartets, and mention of orchestras and singing.
Listen to a "historical performance" recording from before about 1925, and you can hear works that are still played today, but played in a startlingly different manner than anybody today would do it. Mind you, the kind of differences we're talking about are minute next to the differences in the average pop cover arrangement from its original. But to classical ears they loom large. Major and apparently erratic tempo variations, notes played off the beat, piano chords rolled instead of played together, strings played with swooping portamento but without vibrato, ensemble that's not together, and so on.
Why did they play this way? Why did they stop? Why does hardly anyone play like that today, even if they profess "historically informed" performance of late 19th century music? Did they play differently when being recorded than they did in concert? (Recording music was a rather difficult, against-the-grain process in those days.) How did they play before there were recordings? Can today's performers learn anything from these predecessors? If a composer wrote a work one way, but there's a piano roll of him playing it totally differently, which should you believe? And, above all, did the growing ubiquity of recordings during the 20th century have anything to do with any of this?
These were among the questions posed during the conference, and many were the suggested answers: some tending in one direction, some in another, but not necessarily contradicting each other, for this is all multi-faceted and what's true of one era, or of one composer or performer, might not be true of another. And I may pass along some of these answers later, or you can read my article when it's published next week.
Instead, here's what it was like to attend. Intense. Brain-expanding. The speakers and most of the audience are professionals at this, while I was skating the edge of my musical knowledge, and my ability to discern effects, for the whole conference. But it was satisfying, because the intellectual exchange was so solid. The conversations were at the deepest level of thought, without any of the noise and misalignment and simple lack of perceptiveness that characterize most conversations. I could follow everything they said, and I got most of the jokes.*
In many of these respects it was like a Mythcon. It was very small, considerably less than a hundred people, and all the sessions were in the Music Department's tiny raked-classroom-cum-smallest-concert-hall. Half of the attendees were presenters. Far more than half of the audience comments came from that half. Most of them knew each other.
I'd heard of many of them - people like Malcolm Bilson and Robert Philip are mighty names in this field - and a few I was even slightly awed to be in the same room with. (Most awesome - even terrifying - of all (to me) was the biggest name who was not presenting, Richard Taruskin, who is something of the Harlan Ellison of musicology, or at least the Harlan before Harlan started groping people: loud, opinionated, combative, insanely prolific, and often annoyingly right.)
But the only person I knew there was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
irontongue. We sat together most of the time, two small figures afloat in a sea of erudition, sustaining ourselves by scribbling occasional notebook comments to each other. At a Mythcon I get to be one of the experts. But here not only was I unknown, my introversion and lack of social ease were a handicap. I did get to make a couple comments in class, when something I had to say really seemed to me to measure up to the prevailing standards. But outside during breaks in the hallways, anyone I wanted to talk to was usually talking to someone else, listening to someone else, or hurrying off somewhere. Often I just tagged along behind Irontongue. She's better at this, and is more learned in musicology too. That way I got to meet a couple of people, including Jonathan Bellman of the University of Northern Colorado, contributor to Dial M for Musicology. He'd spoken on what was wrong with George Gershwin playing his own music, and listened respectfully to my theory on what's wrong with most people playing Chopin.
If the conference had lasted longer I might have gotten more in the conversational groove, and people might have begun to notice me. I regret that I never got to speak to Taruskin at all, despite my great respect for his work. I told you: he terrifies me. It was interesting to find that he speaks and carries himself remarkably, and even looks a bit, likeasimovberlioz. Still, I found enough themes in the conference, both openly stated and beneath the surface, more than sufficient to fill up the allotted space in my article. Had it lasted longer, something might have burst.
*Some of you may get some of the jokes too:
1) Presenter (describing a piece of 18th century music inspired by the song of the nightingale): "How many of you have ever actually heard a nightingale?"
Richard Taruskin (in audience): "Does The Pines of Rome count?"
2) asirontongue reported it on her blog: "When George Barth, one of the organizers, was loading a piano roll onto a reproducing piano, the hydraulics, er, air compressor was operating, and some random pitches got played in random durations. There was some snickering from the assembled multitudes, to which I responded 'What, you haven't heard the Webern piano rolls?'"
3) I think Jonathan Bellman told this one. "There's an old joke they used to tell in Vienna. How many symphonies did Beethoven write? Three: the Third, the Fifth, and the Ninth."
Not that I wasn't planning to go anyway. It sounded fascinating, and I now have twelve big pages of handwritten notes to decipher. And five CDs of one sort or another that I picked up.
The topic was the history of classical performance practice, the history of recordings, and their effect on each other and the way we perceive music. The focus was mainly on piano music, with small excursions into string quartets, and mention of orchestras and singing.
Listen to a "historical performance" recording from before about 1925, and you can hear works that are still played today, but played in a startlingly different manner than anybody today would do it. Mind you, the kind of differences we're talking about are minute next to the differences in the average pop cover arrangement from its original. But to classical ears they loom large. Major and apparently erratic tempo variations, notes played off the beat, piano chords rolled instead of played together, strings played with swooping portamento but without vibrato, ensemble that's not together, and so on.
Why did they play this way? Why did they stop? Why does hardly anyone play like that today, even if they profess "historically informed" performance of late 19th century music? Did they play differently when being recorded than they did in concert? (Recording music was a rather difficult, against-the-grain process in those days.) How did they play before there were recordings? Can today's performers learn anything from these predecessors? If a composer wrote a work one way, but there's a piano roll of him playing it totally differently, which should you believe? And, above all, did the growing ubiquity of recordings during the 20th century have anything to do with any of this?
These were among the questions posed during the conference, and many were the suggested answers: some tending in one direction, some in another, but not necessarily contradicting each other, for this is all multi-faceted and what's true of one era, or of one composer or performer, might not be true of another. And I may pass along some of these answers later, or you can read my article when it's published next week.
Instead, here's what it was like to attend. Intense. Brain-expanding. The speakers and most of the audience are professionals at this, while I was skating the edge of my musical knowledge, and my ability to discern effects, for the whole conference. But it was satisfying, because the intellectual exchange was so solid. The conversations were at the deepest level of thought, without any of the noise and misalignment and simple lack of perceptiveness that characterize most conversations. I could follow everything they said, and I got most of the jokes.*
In many of these respects it was like a Mythcon. It was very small, considerably less than a hundred people, and all the sessions were in the Music Department's tiny raked-classroom-cum-smallest-concert-hall. Half of the attendees were presenters. Far more than half of the audience comments came from that half. Most of them knew each other.
I'd heard of many of them - people like Malcolm Bilson and Robert Philip are mighty names in this field - and a few I was even slightly awed to be in the same room with. (Most awesome - even terrifying - of all (to me) was the biggest name who was not presenting, Richard Taruskin, who is something of the Harlan Ellison of musicology, or at least the Harlan before Harlan started groping people: loud, opinionated, combative, insanely prolific, and often annoyingly right.)
But the only person I knew there was
irontongue. We sat together most of the time, two small figures afloat in a sea of erudition, sustaining ourselves by scribbling occasional notebook comments to each other. At a Mythcon I get to be one of the experts. But here not only was I unknown, my introversion and lack of social ease were a handicap. I did get to make a couple comments in class, when something I had to say really seemed to me to measure up to the prevailing standards. But outside during breaks in the hallways, anyone I wanted to talk to was usually talking to someone else, listening to someone else, or hurrying off somewhere. Often I just tagged along behind Irontongue. She's better at this, and is more learned in musicology too. That way I got to meet a couple of people, including Jonathan Bellman of the University of Northern Colorado, contributor to Dial M for Musicology. He'd spoken on what was wrong with George Gershwin playing his own music, and listened respectfully to my theory on what's wrong with most people playing Chopin.If the conference had lasted longer I might have gotten more in the conversational groove, and people might have begun to notice me. I regret that I never got to speak to Taruskin at all, despite my great respect for his work. I told you: he terrifies me. It was interesting to find that he speaks and carries himself remarkably, and even looks a bit, like
asimovberlioz. Still, I found enough themes in the conference, both openly stated and beneath the surface, more than sufficient to fill up the allotted space in my article. Had it lasted longer, something might have burst.*Some of you may get some of the jokes too:
1) Presenter (describing a piece of 18th century music inspired by the song of the nightingale): "How many of you have ever actually heard a nightingale?"
Richard Taruskin (in audience): "Does The Pines of Rome count?"
2) as
irontongue reported it on her blog: "When George Barth, one of the organizers, was loading a piano roll onto a reproducing piano, the hydraulics, er, air compressor was operating, and some random pitches got played in random durations. There was some snickering from the assembled multitudes, to which I responded 'What, you haven't heard the Webern piano rolls?'"3) I think Jonathan Bellman told this one. "There's an old joke they used to tell in Vienna. How many symphonies did Beethoven write? Three: the Third, the Fifth, and the Ninth."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 03:10 pm (UTC)So what was wrong with Gershwin playing his own music? I think his tempi should be honored in the Rhapsody in Blue, even if Bernstein knew more big words.
Seriously envious. I'm looking forward to your article.
Dial M kicks arse.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-23 07:47 pm (UTC)As for Prof. Taruskin: That poor, poor man. Of course, you're thinking back to the '70s and '80s, when I wore a full beard some of the time. Is he anywhere nearly as snotty and obstreperous as I?
Naturally, I enjoyed all three jokes. There is a modern variant of the third one which states that Roy Harris wrote only one symphony, his third. This one is leavened with a bit of irony for a few reasons -- he withdrew his first two essays in that form, there is a marked drop-off of quality in the later works, and there have been persistent rumors that his wife Johanna did more than merely make fair copies of the scores.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 06:29 pm (UTC)Where other composers cited, like Scriabin and Brahms (yes, Brahms made a record), played piano in the "old" style, with breaking of the hands, wild tempo variation, and even manipulation of note value, Gershwin played in a plain, affectless manner with no "swing" at all, seemingly robbing the music of the very characteristics that his pen put in it. There are various theories as to why he did this.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 06:32 pm (UTC)#3 alludes to limitations in the scope of the actual practical performing repertoire.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 06:36 pm (UTC)I have all the numbered symphonies through the Ninth except for the Fourth. The rest aren't at all bad; if they suffer it's from being run-of-the-mill work by a composer capable of more than that.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 06:51 pm (UTC)As to why he did it, what records are they talking about? Piano rolls, where he got his major experience? Regularity is prized there. Dance records? They were made to be danced to; regularity is a plus.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 07:08 pm (UTC)That's the modernist view: that it's all junk. The pre-1925 view is very different.
what records are they talking about?
I specifically remember that we heard him playing one of his Preludes on a radio show, Rudy Vallee's I think.
Piano rolls? Regularity is prized there.
In modernist aesthetics, yes. But older piano rolls are one of our major sources for highly individualistic, interpretational playing.
Dance records? They were made to be danced to; regularity is a plus.
That is one of the theories.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 07:22 pm (UTC)Yeah, the Vallee performance of the second prelude was a little hurried. I don't know why. Maybe they told him he had to finish it in a certain time. The Vallee show also had him do the last movement of his concerto, and that had all sorts of cuts in it to bring it in in a short time.
I know a little about older piano rolls. I have about 5,000 of them in MIDI format, and I listen to them. Some performers went in for individualistic playing, especially on the expression rolls. As with dance records, many were made for dancing, and erratic rhythm isn't looked for in that.
The records Gershwin cut in England, with eight of his show tunes, were written specifically for dancing.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-24 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-04-25 05:35 pm (UTC)None of what I was describing goes remotely as far as jazz improvisations. That's not what Bellman was talking about here, not at all.
When Gershwin wrote his music down, he was setting the notes on paper that he wanted played
Do you have any documentary evidence that he was absolutely strict about matters of interpretation? His own recordings are not evidence, as pianist-composers are notoriously flexible about not demanding that other performers follow their own style. The whole point is to put your personal stamp on the music, and if you follow someone else it's not yours.
Even in the case of a Scriabin piano roll of one of his own Preludes, which I found the single most revelatory performance on the program, Scriabin played all the notes that he'd written down, and nothing else. The interpretational differences were a matter of a certain flexibility in tempo (obviously this was not dance music, and neither is a concert performance of a Gershwin Prelude) and in phrasing and the exact duration of note values: all of which are matters within the discretion of performers even in today's more literal-minded times.
Maybe they told him he had to finish it in a certain time.
That was another theory as to why he performed as he did.
no subject
Date: 2007-04-25 05:50 pm (UTC)Do you have any documentary evidence that he was absolutely strict about matters of interpretation? Right at hand? Not a lot. In the introduction to his Song-Book, he says, "The more sharply the music is played, the more effective it sounds." (He is speaking of American popular music, and calling for less pedal.) "The romantic touch is very good in a sentimental ballad, but in a tune of strict rhythm it is somewhat out of place." His comments on how much more elaborate arrangements have become would seem to indicate that they are written that way for the purpose of being played that way, but maybe that's just my interpretation.
Of course, perhaps the existence of his elaborate improvisations is an argument that he felt that anything goes. He is known to have enjoyed Tatum.
A note on piano rolls: Not only were they even easier to edit than sound recordings are today, they aren't even always who they say they are. Robert Casadesus apparently cut the "Maurice Ravel" Duo-Art rolls. Ravel didn't feel up to the task, but that's not the only reason someone might not make their own rolls.
It's not flexibility that I object to, I should stress. It's the degree to which performers feel free to ignore the notes in what are allegedly performances of written-out music. I've mentioned the Lebeque sisters, who feel that anything by an American composer is an excuse for them to go nuts. For some reason, Gershwin gets this treatment from a lot of people, who take excessive cuts in the Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin authorized the cuts in order to get the piece its first recording on two sides of a 78. That excuse is no longer valid), or subject the music to hammy excesses in tempo (I'm looking at Leonard Bernstein when I say that).