4:00 - 6:30 PM Stanford Research Projects:

Stanford students will present their research projects from the "Reactions to the Record" seminar, fall 2008.

Justin Solomon will consider aspects of "legacy" in Elgar Cello Concerto recordings after Jacqueline du Pré.

Andrew Zhou will speak on "Brechtian" performance in interpreters of the songs of Hans Eisler.

Kevin Koai will consider assessments of 'intention' in performance using the recordings of pianist Josef Hofmann.

Cynthia He will examine questions of authority in recordings of Rachmaninoff's 3rd Piano Concerto by Vladimir Horowitz and the composer.

8:00 PM Evening Concert 1 (Memorial Church, Stanford):

Robert Huw Morgan, organ. Improvisations by Charles Tournemire, Symphonie-Passion and Four Versets by Marcel Dupré.

8:30 AM Opening Address: George Barth, Stephen Sano

9:00 AM Jonathan Bellman

Two Roads Diverged: Historically Informed Ornamentation and its Contradictions

Early recordings testify to the practice of ornamentation and improvisation that was an essential component of nineteenth-century performance values. However, these practices were hardly uniform, and virtuoso performers borrowed idiomatic styles from a variety of musical contexts and traditions. The cantabile style found in Chopin's Nocturnes, for example, is of an idealized bel canto sort, which situates pianists' elaborations - both early and modern - as being close to operatic practice. The popular Hungarian-Gypsy idiom, featured in Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies among other works, offers a different kind of opportunity rooted in charactistic soloistic and ensemble improvisations, and within the framework of a particular musical dialect. However, both of these referents prove inadequate descriptors of the particular results that composers and performers achieved in their works as evidenced in historical recordings. In truth, the elaborations dating back to the roots of these styles (including those by the composers themselves) do not always reflect the stylistic rigor that the original idioms would seem to require, at least in our retrospective understanding of them.

10:00 AM David Milsom

Attempting to Recapture Brahms in the 'Joachim Manner': Brahms's A major Violin Sonata and Evidence for Joachim's Performing Practices in Early Recordings and Annotated Editions

In this lecture-recital, David Milsom (AHRC Research Fellow, University of Leeds, UK) will discuss the nature and quantity of evidence of Joseph Joachim's performing practices, with particular focus upon relevant early recordings. Milsom will highlight the principal issues inherent in "historically reconstructive" performance, as he attempts to convey Brahms's A major violin sonata in the manner of a performance by Brahms and Joachim of the 1890s. In so doing, he will demonstrate the need to counterpoise scholarship with practical musicianship, arguing that, whilst the exact nature of Joachim's playing is ultimately unknowable and unhearable, there is sufficient evidence to undertake in the modern age a performance that is likely to have been recognizably that of the Joachim "school."

11:00 AM BREAK

11:15 AM Robert Philip

Back to the Future with Brahms

Over recent years, there has been renewed interest in the time that Brahms spent with Hans von Bulow and his chamber-size Meiningen Orchestra, as a pointer towards some sort of 'authentic' performing style for Brahms. Several recordings have been made of the symphonies by chamber orchestras, and one (conducted by Mackerras) draws on the notes left by conductor Fritz Steinbach, which indicate changes of tempo not marked in the published scores. But meanwhile, some more direct historical evidence is available in recordings themselves. Recordings show that there has been a widespread trend over the last eighty years to take slower tempi in Brahms, and to give his music a grandiose quality. It does not take much leap of imagination to suppose that this has been a trend away from what Brahms probably envisaged. Of particular interest are two recordings of his third symphony made in the 1930s by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra led by Arnold Rose, who led the premiere of this symphony under Hans Richter in 1883, and who often performed Brahms's chamber music with the composer. How might we use these recordings to inform our own approach to Brahms?

12:15 PM LUNCH BREAK

1:30 PM Midday Concert 1

Student Performances

Brahms Piano Trio in B Major, Op.8 (1st mvt.), Brahms Clarinet Trio in A Minor, Op.114 (1st mvt.), Tchaikovsky/Pletnev "Nutcracker" Suite, Copland "Variations."

2:30 PM David Breckbill

Diction as Expression in German Singing Around 1900

At the turn of the twentieth century, one of the prominent styles of vocal performance in Germany was that advocated by Julius Hey (1832-1909), who was called upon by Richard Wagner to help establish a specifically German style of singing that would be appropriate for Wagner's own works. Hey's insistence on clear diction of the text as a springboard for expressive singing yielded some unsuccessful results - for example, the drastic enunciation and less-than-mellifluous singing promoted by Cosima Wagner and Julius Kniese at Bayreuth, which was an incomplete and partially uncomprehending adaptation of Hey's precepts, has become notorious. Nevertheless, numerous singers (among them Felix von Kraus, Friedrich Brodersen, Julius von Raatz-Brockmann, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink) left recordings showing the enormous range of expressive possibilities and apparent spontaneity Hey's approach can attain. An examination of these recordings reveals many virtues worth preserving or reviving, and my presentation will consider the degree to which the style they display can either be reclaimed or serve as inspiration for modern performance. Specifically, comparing practices found in those recordings to the styles of modern singers with fine diction shows ways in which the Hey style is possibly inextricably embedded in other practices we are less likely to wish to revive. Perhaps exposure to early recordings is particularly valuable as a means of identifying areas in which modern performance seems relatively ineffective or undeveloped, and thus as a spur for further artistic development, rather than as a source or oracle from which specific practices can be directly transplanted.

3:15 PM BREAK

3:30 PM Will Crutchfield & Rebecca Plack

Historical Styles in Practice and Considerations of "Revival"

The revival of historical styles creates many challenges for the musician today. Will Crutchfield and Rebecca Plack will provide a working discussion of the complexities that musicians must manage today when faced with the challenge of emulating historical styles.

5:15 PM Panel Discussion

Pedagogical Problems in Historical Performance: Imitation, Emulation and Inspiration

6:00 PM DINNER BREAK

8:00 PM Evening Concert 2

David Milsom, violin, Kumaran Arul , piano (Brahms Violin Sonata in A Major, Op.100), Jonathan Summers, piano (Liszt Vallee d'Obermann, Summers/Bizet Carmen "Flower Song"), Kumaran Arul, piano (Chopin Sonata No.3 in B minor, Op.58).

9:00 AM Kumaran Arul

Heinrich Schenker as Romantic: An Examination of his Writings on Performance

In his Pianoforte-Schule Carl Czerny describes no fewer than six 'styles of execution as so many principal schools', and at the end of the nineteenth century the evidence still points to a great variety of performance approaches. Heinrich Schenker's writings on performance including his early critical writings provide us with some sense of his preferences amongst these styles. Research on the numerous and often competing performance traditions of the day gleaned from early recordings, rolls, and writings allow us to situate Schenker's values with styles of performance largely falling out of favor at the beginning of the twentieth century. We will examine a variety of artists reviewed by Schenker including Reinecke, D'Albert, Rontgen, and Messchaert and younger artists Schnabel, Serkin, Huberman, and Casals with a focus on those who left recordings. Schenker's writings yield not only a greater understanding of his aesthetic principles, but they also comment on the trends in performance style during this time, as observed by one of the most acute musical minds of the day.

10:00 AM Sandra Rosenblum

"He led me into the wondrous world of his master": Koczalski, Mikuli, Chopin

Some musicians have asserted that among his contemporaries and even later, Raoul Koczalski (1885-1948) was one of the best, or even the best representative of Chopin's desired style of playing His most important teacher, the one with whom he spent the greatest amount of time in intensive study and whom he revered, was Karol Mikuli, himself a student of Chopin from 1844-1848 and for part of that time his teaching assistant. This paper will attempt to explore the results of Mikuli's teaching: How did Koczalski play Chopin?

There are several avenues by which we can assess Koczalski's playing in relation to what has become known about Chopin's performing style. From 1923-1948 Koczalski recorded a large number of Chopin's works in many genres, from the quiet Berceuse (recorded four times!) to the great Polonaise in A-flat, Op.53 (recorded twice). How did he regard the scores, particularly the German editions which I suspect he used? What characteristics marked his playing as particularly Chopinesque, and how did it differ from the playing of other noted pianists who recorded Chopin's repertoire? How did Koczalski's interpretations change when he recorded a work more than once? His published writings about the performance of Chopin's works may also offer some relevant information.

11:00 AM BREAK

11:15 AM Allan Evans

Dispatches from the Field of Timeless Sound

Music research can resemble archaeology, as ongoing discoveries and improved restoration technology add to one's perception of history and interpretation. Approaching music in this manner results in a methodology often venturing beyond the boundaries of library-based investigation. Dispatches of recordings from ongoing fieldwork will be shared, primarily of unknown performances or familiar ones that impress anew through restoration. including documents by Friedman, Tiegerman, Horszowski, Joachim, Sofronitsky, Fried, T. S. Eliot, and Balinese gamelan.

12:15 PM LUNCH BREAK

1:30 PM Midday Concert 2

Improvisations

Improvisations by pianists Genadi Zagor and William Cheng on themes submitted by the audience

2:30 PM Panel Discussion

Improvisation in the Past, Present and Future

3:15 PM BREAK

3:30 PM Joseph Horowitz

Bidding Farewell to the Performance Specialist - New Horizons for Interpretation

In recent decades, the notion of "textual fidelity" has been undermined by a new sense of freedom from prescribed musical texts. The resulting interface of creativity and re-creativity dooms the "performance specialist" - a 20th century phenomenon that will come to seem an anomaly. As in centuries past, performers and composers will be one and the same.

Working from a historical perspective (including Liszt), my talk will juxtapose performance specialists like Rudolf Serkin with frustrated composers like Leopold Stokowski. Using Stokowski recordings of Beethoven and Dvorak, I will illustrate how he "pedals" his orchestra by distending the bass line, and by elongating notes at phrase-ends to cancel or compress rests. His example can help us to loosen up.

As a model for the future, I propose the unclassifiable bass-trombonist David Taylor, whose improvised version of Schubert's "Doppelganger" (with trombone ensemble) will be contrasted with Schubert's original.

4:30 PM Panel Discussion

The Future of Performance

Charles Rosen, Joseph Horowitz, Will Crutchfield, Robert Philip

6:00 PM BANQUET: Schwab Executive Center

8:00 PM Evening Concert 3

Charles Rosen, piano (Schumann Davidsbundlertanze, Op.6). Rebecca Plack, soprano, Will Crutchfield piano (songs by Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Liszt).

8:45 AM Jeffrey Treviño

Lecture/Recital: Scaffolds for Anton: Political Coherence and Puzzling Nuance in the Analysis and Performance of Webern's Op.27 Variationen

After the Second World War, the Darmstadt School promptly crowned Anton Webern the forefather of integral serialism; Pierre Boulez and apostles showered his work with lovingly crafted analysis that conferred integrity and coherence worthy of the most rigorous post-war serialism. It is correspondingly unsurprising that 60 years of the work's recorded history delineate a modernist style described as both (1) characterized by attacks on naturalistic modes of expression (Calinescu); and (2) opposed to a popular "communication model" of music through a "research model" that embraces anti-emotionalism, dehumanization, and pure rationality as transcendence in its maximal phase (Taruskin). A 1954 recording of Leonard Stein's playing exemplifies this approach. In the minority, Peter Stadlen, the pianist who premiered Webern's Op.27 in 1937 with extensive personal coaching from the composer, argued doggedly throughout his career as a performer and musicologist that Webern insisted upon a fundamentally romantic performance practice for his music. In 1979, Stadlen published a newly annotated edition of Op.27 with Webern's expressive additions and advice from the work's premiere. A recording of Stadlen performing in 1948 affords comparison and multiplicity. As Darmstadt responded to Stadlen's writings, Op.27 played host to perennial aesthetic debates regarding the link between compositional and performative roles, especially the central aesthetic question of whether or not compositional construction and expression should be congruently or dialectically related. (Quick, 2007) Although Stadlen emphasizes Webern's "enigmatic dialectic of emotive and constructive intent," hindsight shows that Op.27 has more often than not been made sense of in service of a thinly veiled aesthetic cause, a trend that has ironically failed to address the fundamental ambiguities and contradictions in Webern's compositional, notational, and aesthetic practice that have enabled such opposite appropriations in the first place. For performers and listeners, it is finally these irreducibly puzzling nuances that serve as a restorative force and a creative opportunity in the constantly reevaluated practice of performing from notation.

9:45 AM George Barth

Old Morality vs. New Purity? Early Recordings of Beethoven

In the last decade, the increasing dissemination of historic recordings has created exciting new avenues of research for scholars and performers working in the field of performance practice. Previously, questions about practice were generally addressed through appeals to writings about performance, even when historically significant recorded performances were available. Yet the more recently admitted evidence from historic recordings is calling into question the meaning of both the musical texts and the documents that have for so long been used to interpret them. It can no longer be presumed that there is an unproblematic relationship between what musicians say and what they do.

This paper will provide a case in point through a glance at the long history of performance practice surrounding Beethoven's thirty-two piano sonatas. This Ôbible' of the pianist's repertoire has been scrutinized by generations of performers and scholars who have provided a rich legacy of commentary and interpretation. But an examination of performance style in historic recordings shows that striking changes have occurred in the recorded era, from early artists renowned for their Beethoven playing like Frederic Lamond and Eugen D'Albert, to players like Artur Schnabel, Myra Hess and Wilhelm Kempff, to modern day advocates like Alfred Brendel and Richard Goode. Canonic texts on Beethoven performance style will be reevaluated in light of these differing approaches, illustrating the complexities presented by a fair reckoning with the recorded past. As such, recordings reveal that text-based interpretation, far from providing definitive evidence and clarity, often leaves untapped the full range of historically documented possibilities.

10:45 AM BREAK

11:00 AM Charles Rosen

Fetishes and Performance Practice

12:15 PM LUNCH BREAK

1:30 PM Rex Lawson

Lecture/Recital: The Player-Piano and Its Music

The situation in which the player piano finds itself with regard to the world of academic music study is most unusual. Since the Second World War it has largely been the preserve of collectors, who mostly have no musical or academic training, and attitudes towards its music have frequently been moulded by instruments of poor tonal quality, by the musical tastes of a generation that grew up loving Elvis Presley, and by writings which have almost never been subjected to any process of peer review.

Faced with this elusive world of a lost technology, musicologists have all too readily accepted second-rate writings and recordings as though they represent the ultimate truth about the instrument. Poor quality CDs and unproven theories have been quoted to portray the reproducing piano as a lost cause, incapable of any faithful reproduction of performances, and the gigantic repertoire of non-recorded rolls has been almost universally misunderstood, along with the place of the pianolist in the world of music. Rex Lawson will attempt to peddle the truth.

2:30 PM Denis Hall

Those Pianists You Have Only Read About Ð Or Maybe Have Not Even Heard Of!

Many specialists will know the names of Carl Reinecke, the Mozart specialist, Alfred Reisenauer and Bernard Stavenhagen, the Liszt pupils, Annette Essipoff, pupil and wife of Theodor Leschetizky, and Teresa Carreño, the 'Walküre of the Piano', who, at ten years of age, complained to President Lincoln about the condition of the piano in the White House. But who exactly were these remote figures who never made records for the phonograph, and how did they play? Could they ever have made a career in the twenty- first century if pitched against the note-perfect, textually-immaculate performers of 2009? Denis Hall will introduce a selection of remarkably vivid portraits of some of these ghostly apparitions from a world vastly different from our own, using Welte-Mignon piano roll recordings dating from 1905 to the outbreak of the First World War, and discuss how these amazing documents came about.

3:15 PM Jonathan Summers

"Custodians of the Legacy": Are Traditions Passed from Teacher to Pupil?

Jonathan Summers will discuss the passing of performing tradition and style through the generations with particular emphasis on the Leschetizky and Hambourg legacy. Summers will refer to his particular legacy as a pupil of Mark Hambourg's daughter, Michal Hambourg. Rare unpublished recordings will furnish examples of the difficulties in the assessment of legacies.

3:45 PM BREAK

4:00 PM Panel Discussion

Preservation of and Access to Recordings and Piano Rolls: Denis Hall, Rex Lawson, Jonathan Summers, Jerry McBride

4:30 PM Jerry McBride, Jonathan Summers, with special guest Nicholas Isaacs

Rare Recordings Session

Premier public performances of newly discovered recordings, excerpts from the newly discovered Russian Cylinder collection (Marston release), films of performers, phonographs from the Stanford Archive collection.

5:45 PM DINNER BREAK

8:00 PM Evening Concert 4

"Russian Piano"

Genadi Zagor (Improvisations on Russian Themes), George Barth/Kumaran Arul (Rachmaninoff Suite No.2 for Two Pianos, Op.17), Rex Lawson, pianola (Scriabin Piano Sonata No.3, Op.23, Rachmaninoff W.R. Polka, Stravinsky Rite of Spring, part 1).

8:00 PM Evening Concert 5

Rex Lawson, pianola.

Works by Bach, Mozart/Busoni, Chopin, Rachmaninov, Grainger, Bax, Grieg, Stravinsky, Nancarrow, Debussy, Antheil, and Stanhope. With David Milsom, violin.