2012 Reactions to the Record Symposium
Program
Reactions to the Record III:
Early Recordings, Musical Style, and the Future of Performance
Stanford University
April 12-14, 2012
(click on a presenter's name to read an abstract of their presentation)
Wednesday, April 11
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
7:30pm
Pre-conference Presentation
Sponsored by Friends of Music at Stanford
Thursday, April 12
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
Reconciling Scholarship and Performance with Recordings
9am-12pm
George Barth (Stanford University)
Daniel Leech Wilkinson (King’s College London)
Allan Evans (Mannes College The New School for Music)
Recordings Reflecting Culture
1:30-5:30pm
Edward Herbst (Hunter College-CUNY)
Anna Schultz (Stanford University)
Charles Kronengold (Stanford University)
Concert 1: ‘Recordings-Informed Performance’: C. Schumann, Reinecke, Brahms, Rachmaninoff
Campbell Recitall Hall
7pm Pre-concert talk
Rebecca Plack (San Francisco Conservatory)
Nicholas Mathew (UC Berkeley)8pm Concert 1
Rebecca Plack, Nicholas Mathew, Anatole Leikin, Patricia Mitchell, Susan Vollmer, George Barth, Kumaran Arul
Friday, April 13
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
Interpreting Archaic Traditions on String Recordings
9am- 12pm
Melanie Goldstein (Stanford University)
David Milsom (University of Huddersfield)
Clive Brown (University of Leeds)
Performance History and Revival
1:30-5:30pm
Anatole Leikin (UC Santa Cruz)
Richard Taruskin (UC Berkeley)
Panel:
Nicholas McGegan (Philharmonia Baroque),
Sharon Choa (University of East Anglia)
Concert 2: ‘Not so HIP’: Performing Historical Baroque: Handel Concerto Grosso Op.6 Nos. 2 and 10, Bach Brandenburg Concerto No.5
Dinkelspiel Auditorium
7pm Pre-concert talk
Erika Arul (UC Santa Cruz)8pm Concert 2
Alexander Vereshagin, Russian Chamber Orchestra
Saturday, April 14
Campbell Recital Hall
Performing Analysis: Technique, Limits, Meaning
9am-12pm
Jacob Boehm (Stanford University)
Jonathan Bellman (University of N. Colorado)
José Bowen (Southern Methodist University)
Nicholas Cook (Cambridge University)
Interpreting New Discoveries
1:30-5:30pm
Jonathan Summers (British Library Sound Archive)
Kumaran Arul (Stanford University)
William Wellborn (San Francisco Conservatory)
Jerry McBride (Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound)
Quatuor Mosaiques perform Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven
(sponsored by Stanford Lively Arts - separate admission required)
8pm Dinkelspiel Auditorium
For tickets and more information, please visit the Lively Arts Website
Discount code available to registered conference participants.
Program Talks and Abstracts
"...& the Future of Performance"
George Barth (Stanford University)
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (King’s College London)
We have recently witnessed both the first encounters between Historically Informed and Historically Recorded Performance – showing mutual incomprehension, inevitably – and the first fully Recordings-Informed Performances. RIP breaks a fundamental law of performance teaching (never copy a recording) and upsets widespread assumptions about musicianship (that it is uniquely personal, tied to physical build, different every time). In fact performances are often more or less identical, even among musicians famed for their spontaneity (illustrations will be provided). As these examples suggest, performing is saturated with delusion whose function is to protect performers from the terror of facing the score alone. At the heart of our mythological musical world lies the notion of the composer as fascistic dictator, with its sub-delusions, the performer’s duty to the composer and the composer’s dominant role in the formation of musical meaning, which in turn lead on to our notions of music history, copyright, and the unique qualities of western art music. What chance, then, of deposing the composer?
Suggested listening and reading: ‘Chasing the Butterfly’, the remaking of Grieg’s playing by Sigurd Slåttebrekk and Tony Harrison on SIMAX PSC 1299 (rec. 2007), supplemented by www.chasingthebutterfly.no.
Creators and Entropy: Music’s destiny in time.
Allan Evans (Arbiter Records, Mannes College)
Music reflects time and place. Illustrations both Western and Asian, including discoveries from my work with Arbiter Records, will demonstrate how a masterwork is transformed soon after its creation. Examples of composers and their pupils/descendants will trace how interpretation develops style, aesthetics, and how one is to reckon with it today. Authenticity is often questioned in historic recordings, and this will be put through scrutiny with several examples. Folk origins behind several classical works will also be examined.
Reviving Early Twentieth-Century Balinese Vocal Styles
through the Music Recordings of 1928
Edward Herbst (Hunter College‐CUNY)
In 1928 the German companies Odeon and Beka made the only recordings in Bali
published prior to World War II. This diverse collection of avant‐garde and older
instrumental and vocal styles appeared on 78 r.p.m. discs, but quickly went out of
print. My acquisition of 108 of these recordings (in cooperation with Arbiter Records) from diverse archives including UCLA and Indonesia’s Museum Nasional comes at a time when the last artists of that generation are available as links to the creative and cultural currents of the 1920s. Field research amongst both near‐centenarians and much younger singers has exposed challenging ambiguities of music cognition, implicit and explicit knowledge.
The most complex issue involves tonality and modal practice. The microtonal
singing of 1928 clearly reflects archaic seven‐tone gamelan, but exhibits an even
wider palette of pitches to the octave. The challenge becomes one of musical
perception in which new ways of hearing and visualizing intervals seem necessary
for most Balinese singers to penetrate through their own culturally and historically specific processes of music cognition.
An interesting consequence of the fact that these recordings have been unavailable
in Bali, or anywhere, until now, is that my Balinese colleagues and I are similarly
dealing with varying degrees of unknowns, necessitating a dialogic process of
research and understanding of the materials. It is what I often refer to as our
kebingunan enak, delightful confusion that has stimulated a considerable amount of
re‐thinking about both aesthetic issues and those of cultural history.
The Liveness-es of Pandit Bhimsen Joshi’s Popular Abhangas
Anna Schultz (Stanford University)
The late Pandit Bhimsen Joshi was loved throughout India as a singer of Hindustani khayal, but his renderings of abhanga and bhajan occupy a special place in the hearts of Marathi and Kannada-speaking people. Born in northern Karnataka near the border with what is now Maharashtra, Joshi was accustomed to political boundaries that shifted, and to moving beyond those boundaries. As a young man seeking a guru, he traveled throughout North India, and as a senior musician performing to packed concert halls, he traveled the world. With solid roots in Maharashtra, Karnataka, and North India, Pandit Joshi became skilled in song genres of all three Indian regions. Perhaps this geographic restlessness contributed to his taste for transgressing generic boundaries of “classical” (khayal), “devotional” (abhanga and bhajan), and “popular” (songs for film and theater).
I suggest a stirring of these categories through a consideration of his Marathi devotional songs (abhangas) as alternately popular and classical. Multiple approaches to mediated “liveness” are at work in Bhimsen Joshi’s abhanga recordings—particular audiences are addressed as potential listeners or evoked for the pleasure of other audiences, which in turn has implications for temple and pilgrimage performance. I compare his 3-6 minute recorded versions with his 10-13 minute versions of the same abhangas, and trace these versions into the repertoires of temple-based kirtankars and bhajan singers. I argue that Joshi’s shorter versions are orchestrated and arranged to evoke varkari collective performance in stylized form for the pleasure of urban audiences who have little exposure to pilgrimage culture, while also serving as a condensed classicism for kirtankars seeking models from a master of Hindustani music. Indeed, his 3-6 minute versions of certain abhangas have become so popular with kirtankars that they’ve almost eclipsed other possibilities. On the other hand, his longer versions of these same abhangas evoke a different liveness of a Hindustani classical performance that also mediates varkari life but with fewer indices of collective performance.
Bossa Nova in the History of Not Rock & Roll
Charles Kronengold (Stanford University)
Bossa Nova moved into North American markets as much through records as through live performances and freely-circulating songs in lead-sheet form. These recordings transmitted beat patterns and modes of vocal delivery that had an immediate and lasting impact on musicians in the U.S. All this is well known. But the records also demonstrate arrangement and production techniques that advance a practice crucial to postwar popular music. Simply put, they bring elements in and out flexibly and unpredictably. Antonio Jobim’s late-fifties arrangements for João Gilberto, especially, present a surprising range of highly differentiated textures in which instruments come and go—individually and in groups, within songs and from song to song. Despite or because of their short lengths, these records create manifold soundscapes that refuse to cohere around a single instrumental ensemble or physical space. These Gilberto/Jobim records influence arrangers like Burt Bacharach, whose approach is borrowed and revised in Philadelphia soul and in the black action film scores. These early-seventies approaches help shape the practices of arranging, mixing and remixing in disco that are transformed and brought into the digital domain by hip hop djs and producers; hip hop production in turn becomes the filter through which disco’s influence moves into electronic dance music. This line of borrowing and transformation can interest us not only because it bypasses rock & roll, but also because it adapts to changing technological means and helps to determine the musical uses of these technologies.
My talk will focus on the ways Jobim’s approach gets picked up in North American pop and soul records of the mid sixties through the early seventies. This influence is traceable not only through versions of Brazilian songs, but through original songs whose most obvious connection to bossa nova lies only in a vaguely samba-inflected beat. Changing production practices of this moment worked toward clearer differentiation of elements in a stereo mix and thus supported a more heterogeneous collection of materials. The beat-driven approach to arrangement, and the stratified textures it encouraged, rhymed with developments in soul but also affected contemporary pop to an unacknowledged degree. This added up to a new kind of musical discourse, in which smaller musical objects started to resemble objets trouvés—a development Jobim’s arrangements prefigure. A sense of particles constituting the musical discourse, and of objects in the stereo field, can make a recorded song feel like an assemblage. As such these records embodied multiple sets of values: different genres, different modes of continuity, different sorts of comportment. And without the strong throughlines of Gilberto’s guitar and voice, the North American bossa-pop records especially began to undermine their own sense of coherence by accumulating more material than they could safely contain.
Rebecca Plack and Nicholas Mathew
Few musicians would dispute that "being together" is a virtue when performing chamber music - one that is supposedly instilled in collaborative piano classes and ensemble coaching in conservatories across the world. But what is it? Judging by many recent recordings, one might assume that it means the same thing as rhythmic simultaneity - and perhaps the smooth blending of sound and phrasing. By contrast, early recordings amply show that, at the start of the twentieth century, chamber musicians were rarely as exact in their temporal alignment, as balanced in their timbre, or as well-matched in their phrasing as performers have been since the Second World War. That is, these musicians frequently weren't... together. In many early recordings of Romantic Lieder, one can hear that the performers aimed for something else: an expressive asynchronicity between melody and accompaniment, a closer attention to text declamation than to rhythmic precision, and a sensitivity to the way in which musical gestures overlap but do not unfold in lockstep. This approach to Lieder performance thus both problematizes and enriches our sense of what musical togetherness really is.
Bach Cello Suites with Piano? Recordings and Performances Before the Era of Casals
Melanie Goldstein (Stanford University)
The Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach (BWV 1007-1012) have been the subject of considerable research in performance practice – specifically with regard to the nuances and stylistic intricacies of musical renderings of these pieces as they were conceived during the Baroque period. However, there exists little substantive literature regarding the performance history of these works in the centuries since they were composed. The legendary ‘discovery’ of the Suites by the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals in the early 20th century helps account for this dearth of scholarship. This presentation will focus on historical performances of the Suites, especially those in arrangements with piano, and will explore recordings, programs, critical responses, and scores. Recent research in Germany at the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, Stadtarchiv in Goettingen, and Staatsbibliothek in Berlin suggests that cellists and other instrumentalists championed the Suites before Casals – their largely forgotten concerts, editions, and records will form the basis of the study.
The Legacy of a ‘classical’ German School of Violin Playing?
Protégés of Joseph Joachim on Record - An Illustrated Discussion
David Milsom (University of Huddersfield, UK)
One of the enduring frustrations of early recordings from the perspective of the performance historian is that their invention appears to coincide with a time of rapid stylistic change. This is evident as regards string performing practice. Whilst the recordings of the earliest-born players (such as Joseph Joachim or Leopold Auer) may or may not be able to evoke the practices of the nineteenth century credibly, players who were significantly younger are not only more likely to have been stylistically impressionable in the shifting sands of the early twentieth century (with the pioneering of various manifestations of ‘modernism’ in thought and practice) but, indeed, appear to have been so, from the evidence of recordings that suggest powerfully that newer styles of playing soon took over.
Nonetheless, if selected carefully, there are younger players whose recordings might be said to corroborate some aspects of earlier practices. In the case of the ‘classical’ school of violin playing (associated with the Leipzig and Berlin tradition of Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim) recordings by Joachim himself can be contextualised by performances by musicians such as Karl Klingler (and the Klingler Quartet), Marie Soldat, and the d’Aranyi sisters (Jelly and Adela) – all of whom had close pedagogic connections with Joachim and who were, more or less, faithful exponents of his aesthetic for at least a time after his death in 1907.
Two main issues will be examined, both of which are linked to the concept of trying to find ways of understanding such carefully selected recordings in the context of earlier performing practices. First, the paper will seek to show how recordings by the musicians above can be seen to corroborate Joachim’s own style and aesthetic, often in repertoire rather more revealing than the frustratingly curtailed scope of Joachim’s own performances on record of 1903. Second, it will examine the extent to which these later recordings can be considered a ‘stable’ embodiment of such stylistic characteristics. One of the areas of fascination is the apparently rapid stylistic change observable in the 1920s – one that (perhaps suspiciously) coincides with the invention and rapid adoption of electrical recording processes after 1925. In this regard, comparisons will be made between acoustic and electric recordings of the Klingler and Rosé quartets as well as a variety of performances by Soldat and the d’Aranyi sisters. In most cases, the electrical recordings are not only more revealing sonically but also seem to suggest a much more ‘modern’ style. Is this simply due to the fact that these younger figures changed their style in the light of prevailing fashion, or should the alignment of style and technology encourage us to seek other explanations?
This paper, aspects of which are examined further in Clive Brown’s discussion, seeks to bring these threads together by posing some key research questions which comprise the beginnings of a new research project by the speaker to investigate string playing style on record in the early twentieth century (and the decade of the 1920s in particular). It will be followed by a workshop performance of Louis Spohr’s op. 67/2 violin duet and Mozart’s G major violin and viola duo, with the intention of evoking a ‘classical’ German approach to playing the works recognizable to Joachim and his protégés examined in this talk, and reflected in editions of the works by Ferdinand David.
Changing Sounds and Techniques in Early Twentieth-Century Violin Playing
Clive Brown (University of Leeds)
This paper is intended to complement David Milsom’s by examining the potential relationships between some of the practices we can observe in early recordings and those that are described in treatises, implied in annotated editions, or illustrated by drawings and photographs. Recordings up to the 1920s reveal a range of string playing styles and practices that suggest contrasting, or even conflicting aesthetics and techniques. Some of these appear to conform to well-established teaching, while others suggest an change of approach that precedes documentation in the vast majority of sources.
Some features of violin playing are amenable to investigation by the ear. Among the most obvious are vibrato and portamento. In the earliest days of recording, vibrato ranged from the sparing and ornamental (Joachim) to the intense and continuous (Kreisler), with most recorded players using it more or less constantly; portamento, universal in violin playing at that time, varied considerably in application from player to player. Other features of violin playing in early recordings, such as styles and patterns of bowing, are more difficult to identify with certainty by means of the ear, but it seems clear that many players approached bowing rather differently from their modern counterparts; applying particular bowstrokes in other contexts than is conventional today.
All these aspects of string playing result from physical and technical procedures that cannot be determined aurally. It is, however, clear from visual and documentary evidence that the handling of the instrument was changing just as radically as the aesthetics of performance at that time, although, as yet, little attention has been paid to this either by scholars or professional ‘period’ performers. There can, nevertheless, be no question that the adoption of a different posture and of new approaches to right and left arm techniques during the early twentieth century was intimately connected with, and had a profound effect on the changing sound and style of twentieth-century violin playing.
Alongside these developments, attitudes towards the interpretation of the text were changing. During the early 20th century, notions of fidelity to the composer’s written text began to alter and the idea that the notation should be realized much more literally rapidly gained ground. Early recordings provide revealing examples of similarities to and differences from 19th-century annotated editions. This changing attitude towards the text will be examined in relation to particular editions by Ferdinand David, including his heavily annotated personal copy of his own edition of Mozart’s Duos for Violin and Viola.
The paper will utilise early recordings and visual images together with live demonstration to investigate a number of key early twentieth-century string playing practices. The focus of our papers will be more broadly illustrated by a performance of Spohr’s Duo for 2 violins op. 67 no. 2 and Mozart’s Duo for violin and viola in B flat major (played from the material belonging to and annotated by Ferdinand David), in which we will seek to emulate the style of the classic German school of violin playing that is reflected in the editions of Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim, and, to varying degrees, in recordings by Joachim, Marie Soldat, Karl Klingler and the d’Aranyi sisters.
Can We Make Classical Music Exciting Again?
Anatole Leikin (University of California, Santa Cruz)
It is not uncommon nowadays to see news articles entitled “The Death of Classical Music in America,” “Is Classical Music Dying?”, or “Relevance Lost: Can Classical Music Adapt?”. Audiences are aging and dwindling, symphony orchestras are shutting down, and classical records companies are in pain. Classical music is dropping out of the cultural mainstream. This situation reflects a radical departure from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, when classical music enjoyed immense popularity.
There are several factors at work here: socio-economic, technological, and cultural. Many of them are beyond our (that is to say, musicians’) control. But we certainly can change at least some of the adverse conditions. One factor, which in the past greatly contributed to the wide popularity of music in society, was bustling concerts, which differed drastically from “the ritualism of our smug, dull concert life” (as Taruskin put it).
To begin with, the atmosphere in concert halls used to be much livelier, involving diverse concert programs that mixed solo, ensemble, orchestral, vocal, and instrumental forces, thereby appealing to a wider range of musical tastes. Interactions between the performers and the audience were quite spirited, including enthusiastic rounds of applause between movements and ardent requests to immediately repeat them if the listeners liked particular movements well enough. As such, the concerts of yesteryear in no way resembled the staid, standoffish affairs that are typical of classical music concerts today.
More importantly, the vast majority of modern performances themselves differ strikingly from those of the old days. Many performers now proudly declare their artistic “self-elimination” (using Taruskin’s term) for the sake of being faithful to the composer. In actuality, however, this trendy credo turns out to be faithful to the score (at least, ostensibly so), which is an altogether different concept. As a result, modern performances sound impersonal, formal, overly predictable, and essentially boring. Conversely, performers of the past treated the score only as a point of departure. The license they took with the score allowed them to craft distinctly personal, expressive, and highly engaging interpretations, marked by spontaneity and creativity. Such performances enthralled audiences, drawing them to concerts in droves.
Perhaps, we can bring back these vastly entertaining qualities of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century concerts, with all their thrills and unpredictability. Then we may stop losing audiences (especially younger listeners) and make classical music exciting again.
Stravinsky meets Bartok on the Field of Mozart
Richard Taruskin (University of California Berkeley)
“Not so HIP: Performing Historical Baroque”
Erika Arul (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Listening to orchestral recordings across the span of the twentieth century, it could be argued that the most vivid stylistic changes have occurred in our approach to the performance of baroque repertoire. Concomitant with these shifts is the notion that today’s widely praised period performances are the product of an evolved musicological scholarship that touches and informs virtually every aspect of these interpretations; instrumentation, ornamentation, ensemble size, and bowing techniques are but a few aspects of today’s performances sculpted by the chisel of modern scholarly knowledge.
Be that as it may, there is the all-too-easily adopted conclusion that baroque performances from the early-twentieth century generated from a less-than-informed vantage point, and that it is a lack of scholarly knowledge that accounts for the radically different styles. Additionally, the more crippling Achilles Heel of many of these performances is the perceived conflation of Romantic expressive sensibilities with baroque repertoire.
But a closer examination of the historical context reveals a more nuanced picture. In this discussion, we will take a look at two historical recordings of Handel's Concerti Grossi (Ernest Ansermet’s 1929 recording of Opus 6, No. 2 and Wilhelm Furtwängler's 1944 live performance of Opus 6, No. 10) in an attempt to reflect a sharper image of early approaches to historically informed performance. Ernest Ansermet’s correspondence with pioneering early music advocate Arnold Dolmetsch and Furtwängler's Notebooks provide material for reflecting on historical conceptions of authenticity.
In the concert that follows, the ensemble will perform these works, along with Bach’s 5th Brandenburg Concerto, inspired by these recordings, challenging both musicians and audience to reconsider the qualities of these distinctive performances – to hear them anew.
Methodology of Revealing Temporal Nuance: A New Way to Look at Scriabin Performance
Jacob Boehm (Stanford University)
To play Alexander Scriabin’s music in the way it is written, is to not play it at all. His scores are substantially different from the music we know he performed. Consequently, any study of his music or its interpretation, should be held accountable not to the score itself, but to what we know of Scriabin’s performance of that music. In addition to testimonials with varying degrees of vagueness, piano roll recordings that Scriabin made provide insight into his musical interpretation. Unfortunately, current visualization techniques do not provide the tools to adequately explore the rich nuance of these rolls or his performance style. In this talk, I will propose a new approach, which solves many of the difficulties encountered with prior methodologies. I will demonstrate the technique on recordings of Scriabin and Sofronitsky of Op. 11, No. 13, revealing potentially overlooked nuance in the prelude.
Chopin and the Mazurka Problem
Jonathan D. Bellman (University of Northern Colorado)
To judge from his students’ descriptions, Chopin’s playing of his own mazurkas constitutes one of the biggest conundrums in nineteenth-century performance. Under his hands, this triple-meter dance apparently became a de facto duple. “I once ventured to observe to him,” wrote the future conductor Charles Hallé, “that most of his mazurkas… when played by himself, appeared to be written, not in 34, but in 44 time, the result of his dwelling so much longer on the first note in the bar.” After initially denying it, “he laughed and explained that it was the national character of the dance which created the oddity.”
Fortunately, a variety of historical recordings—including those by such Polish pianists as Ignaz Friedman, Raoul Koczalski, Andrzej Wasowski, and Artur Rubinstein—demonstrate how such a rhythmic paradox might have worked. First, in practice, any of the three beats might be lengthened, not just the first. Second, it is not clear how such a characteristic inflection might have related to the way the mazurka was actually danced, but this certainly has light to shed, even though Chopin was not known as much of a dancer himself. Finally, it may be that deciding which beat to lengthen is a misguided approach anyway; the metric inflection seems, at least in some cases, to be a result or the after-effect of something that is done with the melody, which means that initially focusing on the left hand may distort both the melody and the practice itself from the very beginning.
Because this rhythmic tradition seems to have been exclusively associated with Chopin, his students, and pianistic followers, external corroboration may be unavailable. Moreover, very persuasive interpretations differ widely from each other in fundamental ways, which suggests that, no matter how persuasive, the idea of a single correct way will remain elusive. Nonetheless, the historical recordings, treated collectively as a certain kind of evidence rather than personal expressions, enable us to at least reframe the essential questions, better equipping pianists to seek their own answers.
Rosina Revisited: Performers Interpreting History
José Antonio Bowen (Sothern Methodist University)
This study draws upon over 280 recordings (from 1899 to 2010), manuscripts (including two by Rossini), annotated scores and published editions of Rossini’s “Una voce poco fa” (from Il Barbiere di Siviglia). Using transcriptions of the notes performed, this paper demonstrates that pitch choices in these performances are largely governed not by the written score, but by oral traditions specific to individual measures. Generations of singers have inherited different melodies, as well as articulations, dynamics, phrasing, and tempo changes from their teachers and coaches. It is, therefore, possible to construct an evolutionary tree of “Una voce poco fa” that traces its fluid history in performance.
These variations are not the result of improvisation; whether in manuscript or in performance, performers offer a consistent version. Performances are also largely consistent within geographical areas and historical periods; singers from Spain, France, Germany, and Italy are easily identifiable from the notes they sing. Singing notes from the score is largely an aberration before 1950.
This article demonstrates a methodology for separating the regional, institutional, period and other “styles” (which performers apply to all works) from the work-specific “traditions” (which are attached to specific pieces or measures). As the unique interpretation is then created out of an interaction with these components (and not generally from a dialogue with the score), “performance analysis” demands a unique integration of traditional source study (albeit of new sources) with an awareness of the real conditions of the sounding work.
Changing the topic: contested classicism in K. 332
Nicholas Cook (University of Cambridge)
My purpose in this paper is to develop an essentially semiotic approach to what I call the ‘rhetorical’ performance style of early pianists from Reinecke and d’Albert to Friedman, to situate it in relation to contemporary theory (particularly Schenker’s), and to draw comparisons with the style of today’s fortepianists. I unfold my narrative around recordings of Mozart’s Sonata K.332, using the topical references, of which it is a locus classicus, to introduce more general approaches based on referentiality and discursive register. Underlying the paper is the aim to define ‘rhetorical’ performance in relation to the ‘structuralist’ performance of post-war modernism. I attempt to do this in terms of opposed approaches to time, but acknowledge that such categorizations are inherently unstable. I illustrate this through the example of Schenker, who on the one hand was a principal architect of structuralist thought in music, but on the other hand regarded the ultra-rhetorical Reinecke as the foremost Mozart performer of his day, and whose attacks on the phrasing slur are essentially identical to those launched by fortepianists eighty years later. All this complicates the reductive histories of performance style that have grown out of the historically informed performance movement.
Frederic Lamond and the
Shifting Styles of Beethoven Performance at the Dawn of the Recorded Era
Jonathan Summers (British Library Sound Archive)
Kumaran Arul (Stanford University)
Frederic Lamond’s stature as a preeminent interpreter of Beethoven in the first decades of the twentieth century has been largely forgotten today. His performances garnered praise from the likes of Hans von Bülow, Franz Liszt, Arthur Schnabel, Ernest Newman and Hugo Riemann. But Lamond’s recorded performances generally leave modern listeners mystified – and at the heart of the confusion lies the stylistic ‘appropriateness’ of his interpretive choices. How could Lamond’s Beethoven have received admiration while manifesting such a radical departure from present-day tastes?
Answering this question leads us to consider not only the dynamic strands of nineteenth-century tradition, but also the ideological currency afforded to stylistics at the fin de siècle. Indeed, then, as now, style represented a conception of the work, and mattered enough to provoke heated debates. Ultimately, competing visions of Beethoven – as he is affixed atop the canonical pantheon – capture the struggle over the development of modernism.
These two talks will consider rare and unpublished recordings including the upcoming first release by Marston Records of a live performance of Lamond with the Concertgebouw in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Minor.
Jonathan Summers will provide an overview of Beethoven piano sonata performance history, placing Lamond’s career within the context of a timeline of developing interest in the sonatas, beginning with Liszt, Bülow and the first complete cycles in the late nineteenth century, and proceeding towards later advocates such as D’Albert, Backhaus, and Schnabel. Recordings from the collection of the British Library Sound Archive, including unpublished and unreleased selections, will be used to suggest the range of approaches in the era. Summers will also present recently discovered examples from Lamond’s personal scores with markings that provide insights into his conception and style.
Kumaran Arul will contextualize the reception and interpretation of Lamond’s performances from the time of his debut in London in 1886, through his growth into a leading Beethoven player in the second decade of the twentieth century, to his dwindling appeal in the thirties and forties. The arch of Lamond’s career encompasses the rise and fall of an approach to Beethoven formed by the teachings of Hans von Bülow and Liszt; its diminishing appeal is a bellwether, signaling the loss of an authentic nineteenth-century tradition. As such, Lamond’s decline, viewed in conjunction with the ascendance of Schnabel, reveals a compelling narrative of shifting values at the dawn of the recorded era.
Rhythm and Rubato: Nineteenth-Century Excess or the Key to Interpretation?
William Wellborn (San Francisco Conservatory)
While the musical truths of great masterpieces remain constant over time, the manner in which they are interpreted from generation to generation can vary considerably. The current availability of historic recordings affords us the opportunity to hear one of the more tangible differences between approaches taken by a nineteenth-century trained musician and a more modern one- namely, in the artist’s handling of rhythm and rubato. This presentation will focus on the singer Eugenia Burzio (music from Un Ballo in Maschera), the conductor Willem Mengelberg (excerpts from Schubert’s 8th Symphony), and the pianist Artur Schnabel (Beethoven’s op. 53 Sonata). In hearing these remarkable performances, we pose the questions- do the rhythmic freedoms exhibited in these performances detract from or illuminate the musical meaning? Can hearing the stylistic traits of nineteenth-century trained artists aid a “modern” musician in uncovering a deeper musical understanding of the composer’s intent?
Jerry McBride (Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound)
Public performances of rare and newly discovered recordings. Excerpts from Edison Cylinder discoveries, Alfred Cortot, Griller Quartet, Frederic Lamond, Carl Reinecke (piano rolls), recent performer film discoveries, historic phonographs from the Stanford Archive collection.