reactions to the record
Apr. 4th, 2014 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt's time for another one of the irregular musicology conferences scheduled by the Stanford Music Department to discuss the study of early recordings. This one is being held in the cubical pit of the small hall in the back basement of the new Bing Concert Hall, whose staff are having trouble grasping the concept of an event in their hall that they don't have to take tickets for.
The keynote speaker, Richard Taruskin, had to cancel for health reasons - the same reason he had to cancel at the last minute from the previous conference, worse luck - and so to fill the time we got a double dose of Kenneth Hamilton, a Scotsman from out of Oxford who teaches at the University of Cardiff and who looks like Bill Gates, including the ungainly part until he sits down at the keyboard. He was endlessly amusing as he described the vanished practice of "preluding" (yes, that's a verb), which was a now-forgotten habit of pianists from the 19th and well into the 20th century of beginning their recitals and sometimes linking individual works with short passages of their own composition or improvisation. Some of these were written down or recorded, and Hamilton played them on the handy piano and described how they were used to pivot harmonically between keys. Sometimes, especially in concertos (where it was difficult for the pianist to improvise), the composer would write it into the score. The opening of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto (declamatory chords for the orchestra and a series of flourishes for the piano) is an example.
Preluding developed as a way to test out unreliable 19th-century pianos to see if any keys stuck (which is why many such preludes range all over the keyboard), and also to tell the audience to shush because the concert is starting (which is why they're often loud and declamatory). It would be hard to reintroduce the process today, Hamilton said, because "We try very hard to perform historically, but we get very annoyed when the audience behaves historically." He incidentally mentioned how terrified his own students are of improvising, and how this comes from pressure to master all styles. He said that isn't fair: he doesn't know of any pianists who are equally skilled at all periods of keyboard music (and I bit my tongue to prevent myself from interjecting, "How about Joyce Hatto?")
The single funniest prelude - well, I thought it was funny - was the one played by Hans von Bülow when he was touring with a singer whose work was less than edifying. She'd perform first, and then Bülow would come out, sit at the piano, and play the melody from Beethoven's Ninth which goes with the words, "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" I can't believe nobody else in that roomful of erudition got the joke from the music alone, though I didn't notice anybody else laughing before Hamilton explained it.
Hamilton's other session was on the mutability of Liszt's piano compositions, how he'd play them differently out of simple boredom with the original score or from forgetting how they went, but not always write down his new version, which in later years would cause his pupils to be disbelieved when they'd claim they were playing his works in his own performing style, especially as his own style might change next year, or even next week.
The other big news of the day was the announcement of Stanford's impending acquisition of a huge trove of 7500 early-20C piano rolls, and ten instruments to play them on (like computer software, piano rolls were often incompatible with other companies' players), collecting which was the lifelong passion of a deceased music teacher from Sydney, which is coming here because, alas, his heirs couldn't find any institutions in Australia which could undertake to study and play the rolls and maintain the instruments, instead of just sticking them in a museum cupboard.
The keynote speaker, Richard Taruskin, had to cancel for health reasons - the same reason he had to cancel at the last minute from the previous conference, worse luck - and so to fill the time we got a double dose of Kenneth Hamilton, a Scotsman from out of Oxford who teaches at the University of Cardiff and who looks like Bill Gates, including the ungainly part until he sits down at the keyboard. He was endlessly amusing as he described the vanished practice of "preluding" (yes, that's a verb), which was a now-forgotten habit of pianists from the 19th and well into the 20th century of beginning their recitals and sometimes linking individual works with short passages of their own composition or improvisation. Some of these were written down or recorded, and Hamilton played them on the handy piano and described how they were used to pivot harmonically between keys. Sometimes, especially in concertos (where it was difficult for the pianist to improvise), the composer would write it into the score. The opening of Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto (declamatory chords for the orchestra and a series of flourishes for the piano) is an example.
Preluding developed as a way to test out unreliable 19th-century pianos to see if any keys stuck (which is why many such preludes range all over the keyboard), and also to tell the audience to shush because the concert is starting (which is why they're often loud and declamatory). It would be hard to reintroduce the process today, Hamilton said, because "We try very hard to perform historically, but we get very annoyed when the audience behaves historically." He incidentally mentioned how terrified his own students are of improvising, and how this comes from pressure to master all styles. He said that isn't fair: he doesn't know of any pianists who are equally skilled at all periods of keyboard music (and I bit my tongue to prevent myself from interjecting, "How about Joyce Hatto?")
The single funniest prelude - well, I thought it was funny - was the one played by Hans von Bülow when he was touring with a singer whose work was less than edifying. She'd perform first, and then Bülow would come out, sit at the piano, and play the melody from Beethoven's Ninth which goes with the words, "O Freunde, nicht diese Töne!" I can't believe nobody else in that roomful of erudition got the joke from the music alone, though I didn't notice anybody else laughing before Hamilton explained it.
Hamilton's other session was on the mutability of Liszt's piano compositions, how he'd play them differently out of simple boredom with the original score or from forgetting how they went, but not always write down his new version, which in later years would cause his pupils to be disbelieved when they'd claim they were playing his works in his own performing style, especially as his own style might change next year, or even next week.
The other big news of the day was the announcement of Stanford's impending acquisition of a huge trove of 7500 early-20C piano rolls, and ten instruments to play them on (like computer software, piano rolls were often incompatible with other companies' players), collecting which was the lifelong passion of a deceased music teacher from Sydney, which is coming here because, alas, his heirs couldn't find any institutions in Australia which could undertake to study and play the rolls and maintain the instruments, instead of just sticking them in a museum cupboard.
