Autobiography and Performance

Little did I know when I posted about The Autobiographical Fallacy on Thursday how immediately pertinent it would be! Last night I attended a string quartet performance that illustrated the problem with identifying the composer's life with his art. The program began with the last Beethoven string quartet, op 135 in F major. It was played in a very genteel, refined manner as if someone had described Beethoven or classical style to the performers as a genteel, refined style. Then we heard Leoš Janáček: Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters” which was inspired, as the title the composer attached tells us, by his romance with a young woman. A member of the quartet gave a long introduction that went into great detail about the correspondence of the music with the composer's life. Now there is truth here in the sense that the relationship undoubtedly inspired the music, but, as Charles Rosen wisely said in a passage I quoted in the previous post, "too firm an identification of an element in a work with an aspect of the artist's life does not further understanding but blocks it." Why is this?


What happens is that, instead of taking the music as it stands, the performers are always striving to make the link with the autobiography: here is a phrase and we must play it as passionately as possible because, hey, this quartet is 'about' the passionate relationship with the young woman. The more strenuously you try to link the music with the life, the more you tend to distort, to twist the music to an extra-musical program. So they played the whole quartet with this wild abandon. The music may have been inspired by the romance, but it is not necessarily, if it is a good piece certainly not, limited, hedged in, by the events in the life. The flow of the music has its own character and stamping all of it with a conception taken from the composer's autobiography is to fail the take the music as it is, with its own logic. Here is the first movement from the quartet:

The challenge with music this disjunct, with so many contrasting sections in different tempi, is to tie it all together and to do that you have to see how the structure underlies the whole. What motifs connect the sections? How does the harmony give direction to the whole? And so on. But if you are focused on making it the soundtrack to an imaginary movie of the composer's life, well, it may be passionate, but wayward as well. And that was my impression of the performance. Too much awareness of the inspiration and not enough of how the music was actually put together.


And to go back to the Beethoven for a moment, yes, he is in the classical tradition of Haydn and Mozart, but that does not mean his music is genteel and refined.

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Glinka on Liszt

Mikhail Glinka (1804 - 1857), the first widely known Russian composer who wrote A Life for the Tsar once commented on Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886), the great piano virtuoso that

...sometimes Liszt played magnificently, like no one else in the world, but other times intolerably, in a highly affected manner, dragging tempi and adding to the works of others, even to those of Chopin, Beethoven, Weber and Bach a lot of embellishments of his own that were often tasteless, worthless and meaningless.

Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music attributes this to a change in musical taste that was taking place. He links Glinka's remarks to the fact that he spent a year in Berlin studying with Siegfried Dehn, an "apostle of the new 'classicism' ". In turn, he attributes to this new attitude the removal from the training of musicians of the ability to improvise. Liszt, for example, often ended his concerts with an extemporized fantasia, but pianists of later times no longer improvise (or only very few).

I'm sure that there is some truth to this, but doesn't Taruskin prove too much? Is it not entirely possible that sometimes Liszt did indeed add tasteless, worthless and meaningless embellishments to the music of the composers listed? Taruskin sees the 19th century as a time when the classical repertoire became fixed and 'inviolate' with a loss of spontaneity. While that is also largely true, I think we can see it from a different angle.

Personally, if I go to a concert or listen to a recording of Chopin, Beethoven or Bach, I do expect to hear a more or less true account of the score. I also expect to hear the performer making the score come alive with dynamics, phrasing, articulation--the thousand indefinable things that make for a great performance. The score is nothing but a set of instructions and a kind of graphic representation of a performance. The notes on the staff are both. Things like dynamics (ppp or fff) or articulations like accents or staccati, are instructions and exactly how and how much are indefinite. A score tells us a great deal, but also leaves a great deal up to interpretation.

What I don't expect to hear at a concert or on a recording is the performer's embellishments of Chopin, Beethoven or Bach. Each of these composers arrived at a final (or reasonably so) version of the piece which they sent to the publisher. Beethoven was known to complain that, despite all his care, the published string quartets contain hosts of misprints (which could include missing or incorrect notes, misplaced or incorrect phrasing, accents, accidentals and so on). The obvious ones have been corrected over the years, but some may still remain! Beethoven wanted performers to have a correct version of the score. This they could then bring alive for performance.

Improvisation and embellishment are of a different order, I feel certain. Chopin, Beethoven and Bach could all improvise, Bach and Beethoven with a skill that we can barely imagine. But their improvisations were of a different aesthetic quality and category to the pieces they took the trouble to write down clearly and carefully and send to a publisher. Those works, I'm also pretty certain, they did not intend to be subject to embellishments that might on occasion be "tasteless, worthless and meaningless."

Here as an example of Liszt's more extemporaneous style, is his Fantasia and Fugue on B.A.C.H. That is to say, using the notes that correspond to BACH in German nomenclature: Bb, A, C, B natural.

Now do you really want to hear him or anyone else putting some music by Bach through the same kind of treatment? Do you want to hear him Liszticizing something like this:

Where is the room for embellishment? In music this highly and beautifully organized, I doubt adding notes would improve it in the slightest. It would be like dressing up a fine roast chicken with catsup and marshmallows.

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Private vs Public, Part 2

Yesterday I put up the first post on this. The kind of music designed to be heard just by the performer or a very small group continued in the 18th and 19th centuries. J. S. Bach wrote a great deal of music designed to teach not only playing, but how to compose. The two-part inventions for keyboard are examples. This one, in F major, is a marvel of invertible counterpoint:

Bach's son, C. P. E. Bach wrote a number of keyboard fantasias that capture the sense of someone improvising just for themselves. When played on clavichord this is particularly apt because it is often called the most intimate of keyboard instruments. The key activates a small metal blade called a tangent that is held against the string. This means that the performer can feel the string tension through the key, unlike with all other keyboard instruments. Thus the performer has control of both dynamics and pitch--by pressing and releasing, vibrato is possible. Here is a piece by C. P. E. Bach on clavichord where you can hear quite clearly the vibrato:

The clavichord is so quiet that performance in a concert hall is really not possible without amplification. Pianists also wrote music largely intended for private use, such as this Fantasia by Mozart:

This feeling of the intimacy of music took on new significance in the 19th century as it was an important element in Romanticism. The most important composer of the romantic variety of private, or nearly private music was Chopin. People forget that while he made a big splash early on with brilliantly virtuosic compositions and with his concertos for piano and orchestra, for most of his career he only played in small salons. He played less than a dozen public concerts in his whole life. The nocturne, with its dreamy, floating character, is a good example of private music, whether it is just the pianist who is listening or a small salon gathering of a few others:

Individual subjectivity was a very big element of romanticism and even though it began with the piano in an intimate setting, they succeeded in transferring the feeling to the concert hall where perhaps a thousand listeners might be entranced by a solo piano piece.

The 20th century saw a new development in the story of private music. Now a performer goes into a studio and plays entirely alone, except for a microphone or two. In an adjoining room, there is a recording engineer and producer. Eventually, the music is heard by thousands or millions, but they too may be entirely alone, listening at home, or with an iPod. The intimate, private music now is becoming more important than the public music of the concert hall. I suspect that the consequences of this are still playing themselves out. One performer who responded to this early on was Glenn Gould who, at an early stage in his career, simply stopped playing concerts and performed thereafter only in the recording studio:

Thus the old tradition of the individual musician expressing something essentially private and intimate gains new life as it is shared through recording technology. Public music, though often glorious and splendid and for much of history the only kind of music most people had access to, has some potential weaknesses. Sometimes the performer concentrates on playing to the cheap seats with grandiose, excessive gestures. Subtlety can be lost entirely. The spectacle tends to overshadow the music. All these things also seem to apply to the music video, by the way.

While not always realized, the hope with private music is that it is the genuine expression of an individual, direct and intimate. This is one of those things that music has unique powers to convey.

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Private vs Public

There are a lot of different ways to categorize music. The one that seems to get the most discussion these days is classical vs popular. Other ways are 'high' vs 'low' or 'clear' vs 'obscure', both of these distinctions coming from the Middle Ages. Or even 'chamber' vs 'orchestral' or 'vocal' vs 'instrumental'.

Yet another way that is not talked about very much is private vs public. There are some kinds of music that are specifically designed to be enjoyed just by the performer or the performer and a very few others. This kind of division tends to cut across most of the others. Here, for example, is Masimba Matyatya from Zimbabwe playing the traditional instrument of the region, the mbira or 'thumb piano' and singing.

There are several rough equivalents in Western music. In non-classical genres there is the folk-singer. Though  certainly popularized and played for large audiences, the roots of it are a single performer with a guitar who needs no audience or just a very few. Here are a couple of examples. First some blues by Robert Johnson from 1937:

Then Woody Guthrie with "The House of the Rising Sun":

We can use this one to show the difference between the 'private' version and the 'public' version because later on Eric Burden and the Animals did a rock version suitable for large audiences and this is the one most people know:

First of all, more performers are involved. You can't call it 'private' music if there are five performers and a big audience. But with just one performer, he might be playing just for himself with a couple of others listening in. Lots of cultures have this kind of music. Here is an example from Japan:

The classical Western tradition is not short of examples either. They begin with the beginning of secular music and the troubadours of Acquitaine in the 12th century. A lot of modern performances are very puffed up with a whole lot of instruments and singers even though in the original manuscripts all we have is a single line of melody. Here is a simple version, played on the oud, of a song by Bernart de Ventadorn:

The lute has a host of examples where the feeling of the music is of the performer musing to himself, with perhaps a couple of others listening. Here is some John Dowland, for example:

It is entirely possible that John Dowland, one of the greatest lutenists of the Renaissance, never played for more than five or ten people together at one time in his whole career. The public recital didn't even exist yet and he would have played just for small groups of the nobility in their homes. The same situation applied to the French lutenist Denis Gaultier:

This post is just going on and on, isn't it? I think what I will do is stop here and continue the thought in another post where I will take up keyboard instruments and move toward more recent times. I'll leave you with this thought: the common quality of all this music is that it has a meditative quality, the performer is musing to himself, musically...

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Chopin's Rubato and Everyone Else's Rubato

Nathan Shirley, a pianist and composer, left a very interesting comment on my post on Tempo Rubato that I wanted to talk about. Here is the comment in toto:

The funny thing is that Chopin himself used an entirely different type of rubato, one which is virtually unknown to pianists today.
He would actually keep the left hand very steady, "like the trunk of a tree", while the right hand (melody) we would let freely drift early or late with rubato, "the branches and leaves".
It is very hard to find even old recordings where this is done. Cziffra can be heard using it with Chopin.
The type of rubato you mention is more of the Lisztian variety which ALL pianists use today. This type can be further divided into the groups of robbing the tempo but giving it back at some point (used more for older music), and robbing and not giving it back (later romantic especially).
Anyway, I composed a piece of music where I use Chopin's style of rubato for the main theme, but I actually notated the right hand rubato as rhythmically accurate as possible (without getting ridiculous). Here it is-

As a guitarist, I stand a bit apart from this issue, but from studying Chopin, I am certainly aware of the way that Chopin and his students talked about rubato. It was indeed something that was to be constrained to the right hand, or melody, while the left hand, or accompaniment, kept to a steady beat. We find this account, for example, in Carl Mikuli's introduction to the complete edition of 1879. This works well, I suspect, for a lot of the textures we find in Chopin.


I suspect that this philosophy or methodology of rubato is related to the large influence Italian opera had on Chopin, especially as concerns the melody. It is just what we would hear in the Italian opera house in the early 19th century: the singer taking liberties with the rhythm, but always settling back into synchronization with the orchestra, who have been keeping a steady beat. But this is but one source of rubato and there are others, older and no less important. These other kinds of rubato, where the beat is actually moved forward or delayed according to the musical context, was also something Chopin may have practiced as well. My evidence for this are some accounts of his playing by contemporary musicians, some of whom accused him of stretching out the 3/4 measure of a mazurka so that it almost seemed to have four beats! Berlioz went even further when he wrote in his Memoirs that "Chopin chafed under the restraints of time, and to my mind pushed rhythmic freedom much too far ... Chopin simply could not play in strict time."


Berlioz, we have to understand, is speaking as a conductor and one who was struggling to get European orchestras of the time to both play in tune and play in time! For the truth of it is that all musicians, and all soloists in particular, shape the rhythmic and metric aspect of the music they play. Often, in music that is very motoric, the shaping is very subtle and does not interfere with the 'groove'. But in fantasia-like solo music, the shaping takes over and the notation is really only a sketch. Here are some examples. First, the extreme example of an unmeasured prelude from Louis Couperin, where there are NO rhythms written down. This is from a manuscript dating from 1690, but Louis Couperin died in 1661.

The 'unmeasured' prelude originated on the lute, where, as the pitches and rhythms were notated separately in the tablature of the day, the composer could simply leave out the rhythms. The harpsichordists, tied to vocal notation, simply wrote whole notes to indicate 'free' rhythm. This tradition didn't last long, as composers later on wrote down rhythms. But in genres such as the prelude, fantasia and toccata, we have lots of reason to believe that the rhythms were to be interpreted quite freely. Here is an example

Sorry I couldn't find one with the score, but I think you can hear that there is nothing resembling a steady, reiterated pulse there? This tradition continued with Bach's son, C. P. E. Bach who wrote quite a few fantasias for clavichord. Here we do have the score. As you can see, he puts in a time signature, the 'C' sign that does not actually stand for "common" time, but is a holdover from the medieval time signature "tempus imperfectus" or duple time, indicated by a half-circle. Triple time was indicated by a circle. But as you can also see, there are no barlines! So really, there isn't any meter, at least not at the beginning.

There are also some fantasias by Mozart. Here is one in D minor. Sorry, the clip doesn't have the score, but Mozart does indeed write rhythms in a meter, but gives a different tempo indication every few bars. It starts andante, but a few bars later becomes adagio, then presto.

I have chosen extreme examples to make my point that rubato, in the broader sense of moving the beat around freely, has a long, long history. Nearly every piece of music except some very motoric dance-like pieces, has places where rubato is not only allowed, but probably needed. There is a spectrum from the very free fantasia to the very strict tarantella, for example. But there are also a host of critics calling for the suppression of rubato and they have a good point too. For the truth is, that many less-musical musicians, misuse and overuse rubato. But that's just the way things are!


UPDATE: I just recalled a great quote on the subject by Nicholas Harnancourt: "All notes are created equal--but played unequally!"

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Tempo Rubato

One of the things I do on this blog is talk about some of the fundamental concepts of music history, composition and performance. One especially tricky one is tempo rubato. Literally this means "robbed time". It can be contrasted with the other concept of 'groove' or, more traditionally, strict time. Most music has a pulse, by analogy with the pulse of the human body. Pulse is one of the most fundamental ways music affects the listener as it does so somatically, through the body. Here is a good example of pulse:

I put up a whole post on pulse here. As I talk about there, pulse is not necessarily a rigid thing. In most current pop music they use drum tracks that are rigid and I find them a bit unpleasant for that reason. There is a difference, to my ear, between a rigid drum track and a 'groove' created by a human drummer. The differences are probably in minute anticipations of certain beats and delays of others. The energy of a 'groove' comes from these slight variations. Here is a good example:

Ginger Baker, the drummer, is laying down a great groove there.

Tempo rubato is when you avoid a groove and let each beat have its own space. What the heck do I mean by that? It is hard to talk about because it is not quantifiable and because it is very specific to the individual musical moment. Here is a classic example:

The music of Chopin is most often associated with the idea of rubato. Listen to how each beat is slightly different in length from the others. The downbeat of the bar is usually delayed slightly -- 'placed' for greater emphasis. Phrases move ahead in the middle and pull back as they complete. Rich harmonies are lingered on, while plainer ones are passed over lightly. The rubato is so interwoven with the melody and harmony that it is difficult to separate them. This is as it should be as the placement of the beat responds to what is happening in the melody and harmony. I used the phrase "placement of the beat"; this is the crucial concept: in rubato, the beat does not just occur, it is placed, located just where it needs to be. Even dance music, when it is used as concert music, has rubato. Take this mazurka by Chopin, for example:

Beautiful examples there of how holding back the beat is contrasted with pushing it forward. I wish I could could contrast a performance played strictly with the one above, but I can't find one on YouTube! Alas! That would be the perfect illustration. Indeed, this is how a teacher would demonstrate the idea in a lesson: by playing a passage strictly and then with an appropriate rubato. You will just have to imagine it...

A rigid performance of Chopin, or any of the host of pieces of music that need rubato, sounds like cold oatmeal tastes compared to a performance with rubato.

It is not just solo piano music that uses it, of course. Since the innovation of the conductor in the early 19th century, even orchestral music uses rubato. Beethoven, one of the first conductors, was "much concerned to achieve a proper tempo rubato" according to his contemporary Ignaz von Seyfried. There is also the famous story that Beethoven, initially delighted with the invention of the metronome, after a while said that his metronome markings were only good for the first few bars, after that you are on your own!

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How to be HIP

I am blessed with some very wise commentors, so let me take up the conversation about my last post, which delved into the problem of authenticity, and expand a bit. Whereas with the two posts on "Depths and Dimness" I was trying to strike a cautionary note, here let me take a different tack.

The whole project of expanding our horizons outside of the music of our immediate surrounds and present time has been an incredibly fruitful one. What Mendelssohn started in 1829 by reviving Bach's St Matthew Passion, has expanded to include not only the music of Europe going back a millenium, but also to the few scraps we have of ancient music and the music of other cultures as well--not to mention music from the folk traditions of Bulgaria, Romania and so on. As long as we bear in mind that we will inevitably see things from where we are standing, we are so much richer for it.

My anonymous commentor brought up the idea of "historically informed performance" (HIP). Yes, we just might get an inkling about how differently music was performed in the past if we study the past. One of the first things that was noticed was that the instruments have changed. The revival of the harpsichord, which has been going on for nearly a century, now is an accomplished fact. There are harpsichord builders in many places and many fine professional harpsichordists and teachers and programs. We can purchase innumerable recordings of the complete works of Rameau and Couperin and many others performed by many different players. Playing on the harpsichord, it is felt, helps get "into the skin" of the musicians of the Baroque and helps us to sense how the music might have been played at the time. The same is true of the lute, the viola da gamba and a host of other instruments. Before I go any further, let's listen to a wonderful Baroque performance:

That is going to be so, so different if played on cello and piano. It is also interesting that some pianists are playing harpsichord music on piano with rather a different sensibility than they would have before our ears were filled with the sound of the harpsichord:

As my commentor said: HIP HIP hooray!

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The Depths and Dimness of Music History

I was tempted to title this "Why does all ancient music sound like Carl Orff" but while catchy, it's not quite accurate. This deserves a longer post, but I wanted to put up a few thoughts as an introduction. Here is the problem: what did the music of previous times sound like? This is partly an historical problem and partly a notational problem. Historians tend to disagree even about recent events such as the American Civil War or even the Kennedy assassination. Imagine how much disagreement there could be about ancient Babylonian music.

Music is an ephemeral art--or it was until recording technology was invented little more than 100 years ago. As soon as a piece is performed, it vanishes into the air. For much of human history music was created and played spontaneously. In a few places the need developed to put something down as an aid to memory. Perhaps the priests wanted to be sure they got the hymn correct so the god would not be displeased. This might be the reason that the Hurrian Songs were preserved in cuneiform. Thanks to Jon Silpayamanant for the suggestion. But what are the odds that anything scholars have come up with bears any resemblance to the actual music? It is even a bit of a speculation that what we have is a musical score:

It was the unsystematic succession of the interval names, their location below apparently lyric texts, and the regular interpolation of numerals that led to the conclusion that these were notated musical compositions. 

But the sound of a piece of music can vary immensely even if it is a piece from the recent past. Imagine you had a simple song chart for "My Way". You might perform it this way:

Or this way:

Both ways are "My Way".

It was only in the 19th century that musicians started thinking about the music of the past. Before then, a particularly diligent composer like J. S. Bach might collect and study scores of his predecessors going back a couple of generations, but most music heard was very recent. The exception is folk music, which can be much older. So in the 19th century scholars started digging around in old libraries and unearthed scores going back a long way indeed. The Catholic Church had been preserving chants going back a millenium, but scholars discovered much, much more.

After a while, performers wanted to explore this music as well and in the 20th century a few pioneers started trying to revive Baroque and Renaissance music. At first they played it just the way they would play any music. But then the realization dawned that this music was performed very differently than Brahms, say, or Elgar. In the 1960s and 70s the Early Music Movement was born and we started hearing a whole new spectrum of musical sounds:

I have to end here, but I will post more later...

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