What recording has cost in interpretation

[Chaszz]

This is a long review of a book on how recording has influenced playing styles and what may have been lost in interpretation along the way, compared with the days before recording was invented. It is very detailed and thorough, and perhaps only pianists will have the patience to read thru it all. But the elegant, expert writing of the reviewer, the music writer and pianist Charles Rosen, makes it worth at least sampling. I found particularly intersting the last footnote: "We know that Beethoven played Mozart's D minor Concerto, K. 466, and that he disliked Mozart's playing, finding it 'too choppy' and preferring a longer line. Perhaps his interpretation of this most dramatic and original of Mozart's concertos was more satisfying than the composer's, but much of the lightness must have been lost."


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18400#fnr7

[This message has been edited by Chaszz (edited 10-27-2005).]

[Droell]

Originally posted by Chaszz:
This is a long review of a book on how recording has influenced playing styles and what may have been lost in interpretation along the way....

The opening of the article:

<em>Before 1900 in Europe and America, it was at home that music was most often experienced, by family members who played some instrument or sang, and by, willingly or unwillingly, the rest of the family and friends.</em>

By 1800 (a century earlier), chamber music was changing in fundamental ways. The change was already underway when Beethoven started his career.

Chamber music had been written primarily for the enjoyment of the players themselves. Such music is otherwise boring to listen to, which is why it has rarely been performed in public.

Almost all of Beethoven's chamber music is meant to be heard. Music to be heard requires two fundamental changes in composition:

1. It makes more technical demands on the players, and, as a result,

2. It isn't as much fun to play.

This in turn lead to a schism among composers. There were "serious" composers - whose names we all know & love, who wrote music to be heard, and there were not-so-serious composers, who wrote for the masses. With few exceptions, we have forgotten all about the later. I can only think of the American, Stephen Foster.

<em>By the twenty-first century, all this has changed. Both private and public music are being displaced by recordings. </em>

In the 20th century, simple-to-play sheet music was abandoned in favor of recordings of more thrilling - or popular - material (think of vaudeville & early films). If such simple music still exists today, it is primarily in the form of children's music - simple ditties - and children's instrumental exercises, all completely (and unjustly) ignored by adults. Go to your local sheet music store & you may still find some, by composers & arrangers of whom you have never heard.

Only the Great Works are remembered, only the great works are recorded. For the most part, these have never been all that popular with amateur musicians - moms & pops gathered round the piano - because they are just not that easy to play. When you make music in the afternoon, you want to have fun. You don't want a contest to see who can play it the best.

The rest of the article is a nice discussion of how playing has changed over time. The way music has been played has always been changing. I would guess that recordings impacted performance the same way that early radio broadcasts impacted the use of English in the rest of the country, for better & for worse.

[Droell]

On further examination, the premise itself, that recordings have somehow changed performances, has additional problems.

If we start with the premise that music-making in the home is where it all started, then we immediately realize that it's still being made there, much as it always has been.

For the past several decades, the instrument of choice has been the guitar. Go to your local music shop, you will find lots of sheet music - all the pop standards of the last 40-odd years. And lots of guitars. Like many others, I myself have scores of the collected works of the Beatles.

As we all know, this music is a staple at bars, coffee shops & restaurants. The performers break down along two lines: The poorer ones slavishly immiate the original recordings, as best as they can. The better performers rework the material to their own tastes. Either way, to the performers, the original, definitive, recorded performaces are a positive nuisance.

The original premise of the article in question, that people stopped performing the Hammerklavier in their homes once recordings were invented, was a situation that never actually existed. Music written for professionals has only ever been played by professionals, or, at the very least, by the very well-trained. If this is the case, I would guess they have been influenced by peer pressure more than by recordings. (Recordings being the means by which peer pressure is exerted.)

Meanwhile, we have forgotten that casual music making still exists, as it always has.

And yes, much of it is just plain awful. As it always has been.

[Rutradelusasa]

Originally posted by Droell:
Meanwhile, we have forgotten that casual music making still exists, as it always has.

And yes, much of it is just plain awful. As it always has been.

I spend a good deal of my free time playing the piano anything from the books I have, I don't care if I can or not, I do it. Of course it sounds as great as Stockenhausen's quartet of helicopters but I won't stop until my back hurts. It's just too much fun.



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