musical cul-de-sac

[calimac]

This article will explain the brief and cryptic concert reviews I've been dropping into LJ lately. I spent most of my time for four days immersed in a Stanford musicological symposium, largely so that I could write the article. (I'm a reporter, a journalist! Yikes!) irontongue was there too, and I hope she resumes writing about it.

Here's a comment from one of the participants, who expresses doubt about the validity of the interpretive tradition, what I mentioned in my article by noting that the word "grandpupil" turned up a lot. I had a lot to cover in the article and needed to keep it short, so I left my own reaction out, but I can add here that I felt a little skeptical when presenters argued that X's teacher was said to have played just like Chopin by people who remembered Chopin from fifty years earlier, so therefore X had also inherited the true and authentic way to play Chopin, or "My piano teacher was the daughter of the student of the grandpupil of a guy who also taught Liszt, and here's a boring inaudible tape recording of my childhood lesson to prove how much I learned from her vague comments about how the piano must sing." Sheesh.

There are several versions of this, some of them distinctively racist, and with punchlines on varying subjects, but the one I know is the one Henry Cabot Lodge read into the Congressional Record during the investigation of the great 1920s political scandal:

Absolute knowledge have I none,
But my aunt's washerwoman's sister's son
Heard a policeman on his beat
Say to a laborer on the street
That he had a letter just last week -
A letter which he did not seek -
From a Chinese merchant in Timbuctoo,
Who said that his brother in Cuba knew
Of an Indian chief in a Texas town,
Who got the dope from a circus clown,
That a man in the Klondike had it straight
From a guy in a South American state,
That a wild man over in Borneo
Was told by a woman who claimed to know,
Of a well-known society rake,
Whose mother-in-law will undertake
To prove that her husband's sister's niece
Has stated plain in a printed piece
That she has a son who never comes home
Who knows all about the Teapot Dome.

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I myself am the grandpupil of the great French composer Darius Milhaud. My harmony instructor, who taught me most of what I know about the technical nuts and bolts of music, had been a composition student of Milhaud's and talked about him all the time. But I don't think I know any more about Milhaud than anybody else who's heard his music.

What was really interesting to me was a student presentation - which I didn't mention but Irontongue did - documenting Sergei Rachmaninoff's admiration for Vladimir Horowitz's style in Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. Yet we have recordings of both of them playing the same concerto (the "Rach Three" of Shine fame), both from about this time, and they play it very differently. So what did Rach want? Maybe he simply thought, "That's not how I'd do it, but it's very good nonetheless, and just as legitimate."

Furthermore Horowitz's own style changed markedly through the subsequent decades. The student presenter implied that Horowitz was following the fashion and style of his time, but cheerfully acceded to my suggestion that Horowitz was pretty iconic in his day and that maybe fashion and style were following him.

On top of which is something I did emphasize in the article, which is, that even if a modern performer studies old recordings intently and marks up the score and tries this and that rehearsal technique in an attempt to reproduce the style of the original performer, often enough they can't do it.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I'm curious why you are attributing to Jonathan Bellman only his doubts about how interpretive traditions are passed on, when his blog posting and presentation were both clear about his belief that Raoul Koczalski's playing probably does owe a great deal to Chopin, and that that would have been acquired through Koczalski's teacher Karl Mikuli. Also, Jonathan's reference to the case being made with great shrillness was surely to Rosen and some of his passing comments about his teacher Rosenthal. (When I get to it, I plan to dissect his offhand claim that Rosenthal said "Brahms always rolled chords.") No one, for the record, claimed that Koczalski had the "true and authentic" way to play Chopin. I'm sure the participants would say there is a wide variety of ways to play Chopin, including multiple 19th century styles of playing his music.

If that long made-up quotation starting "My teacher..." is a reference to Jonathan Summers and what he played of that lesson, I believe he was an adult when he studied with Michal Hambourg. If it's a reference to the generally-muddled Rosen, then right on. :)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Koczalski presumably owed something to Chopin, but what and how much is impossible to say. Some of the quotes Rosenblum read about Mikuli did make it sound as if she was arguing that some perfectly-preserved fire was being handed down for three generations. Even leaving that aside as hyperbole, the whole thrust of her presentation was that Koczalski's recordings are the closest we can get to what Chopin's playing sounded like. Color me doubtful that there's any way to measure this closeness or judge its reliability.

Yes, I was parodying Summers, who seemed to be falling into the same trap. Rosen was saying the opposite.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

But Rosen's willing to fall back on what Rosenthal told him as evidence. See the comment I quote above. I'm sure you can construct the arguments for doubting him as well as I can.

I think the body of evidence for Koczalski's playing reflecting mid-19th c. playing is fairly strong. It includes Mikuli's playing and reactions to that, reports on Chopin's playing, many editions of Chopin, Koczalski's playing and writings, and reactions to Koczalski's playing. Jonathan Bellman, who has read and heard all the evidence, buys it.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I studied theory and composition with William Bergsma. Me and Philip Glass, baby. I'm sure you can see the influence in my oeuvre. Oh, that's right. None of them were ever performed. :)

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Composers are creating new works, and their training is expected to lead them to developing an individual style, these days not within any standard compositional language. Performers are largely recreative artists who are trying to develop the ability to be convincing within particular performance styles. I absolutely believe it's possible to transmit many aspects of performance style from teacher to student.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"many aspects" = a pan of warm fudge. There was plenty of hard evidence at the symposium that performance style can change dramatically, even over the course of one career (remember Horowitz), so that even what is transmitted offers no real guidance to what the unpreserved ancestral actually sounded like.