April 19-21, 2007
REACTIONS TO THE RECORD: Perspectives on Historic Performance
George Barth, Professor of Performance and Billie Bennett Achilles Director of Keyboard Programs at Stanford, discussed the twentieth-century transition from an aural tradition with faith in embodied knowledge to a tradition that placed greater emphasis on written evidence alone.
Jonathan Bellman, author of The Style Hongrois in the Music of Western Europe and editor of The Exotic in Western Music (a collection of essays by himself and others), talked about the popular/cultivated divide, including the "stylized rudeness" of folkloric traditions, and vernacular versus pan-cultural styles in the music of Brahms, Gershwin and Joplin.
Jonathan Berger, Associate Professor of Music at Stanford, presented his analysis, transcription and recreation of the 1889 cylinder recording of Johannes Brahms's performance of a segment of his First Hungarian Dance.
Malcolm Bilson, internationally-renowned pianist at the forefront of the period-instrument movement for over thirty years and creator of the recently-released DVD Knowing the Score, discussed what early recordings reveal about how we read music notation today. In conjunction with his talk, Mr. Bilson coached Stanford pianists.
José Bowen, Dean of the Meadows School of the Arts and Professor of Music at Southern Methodist University, considered questions of style and the circumscription of structure in an aural tradition through the lens of "cutting contests" from Liszt and Thalberg to the early days of recording, with takes on "Carolina Shout" by James P. Johnson, Fats Waller and others.
Nicholas Cook, Professorial Research Fellow in Music at Royal Holloway and Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), explored early and more recent recordings of Frederic Chopin's Mazurkas, asking how we might use empirical techniques (data capture, visualization) to complement or strengthen rather than bypass our interpretational insights.
Will Crutchfield, Director of Opera at Caramoor, talked about how one arrives (if it's possible at all) at a feeling of "naturalness" and "musicality" while trying to integrate stylistic information that is not from one's own time and milieu. In conjunction with his presentation he'll coach Stanford singers and pianists in performances of Italian opera, Chopin and Brahms.
Anatole Leikin, Professor of Music at U.C. Santa Cruz, discussed and demonstrated Scriabin's performing style based on the composer's piano roll recordings (a glimpse into his forthcoming book for Ashcroft).
Donald Manildi, curator of the International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland, discussed the pupils of Liszt interpreting his works, focusing on their similarities and differences as derived from their recordings and from Liszt's own teaching as we know it. His talk featured some of the extremely rare recordings recently obtained by IPAM.
Beginning with the invention of Edison's phonograph in 1875, Jerry McBride's "A Brief History of Recorded Sound" covered the main landmarks in the technology of sound recording up to about 1980. These include the first tin foil recording, wax cylinders, the first Berliner discs, the evolution of the 78 rpm recording, the introduction of electrical recording and playback, the transition to 33 1/3 and 45 rpm speed recordings, the introduction of the RIAA equalization curve, early magnetic tape recording, audio cassettes, and the advent of the compact disc. Photographs of historic phonographs were shown, and cylinder and 78 rpm recordings were demonstrated on historic Edison, Brunswick, and Victrola machines from the Stanford University Archive of Recorded Sound. Jerry McBride is Head Librarian of the Stanford Music Library and Archive of Recorded Sound.
Robert Philip, author of Early Recordings and Musical Style and Performing Music in the Age of Recording, talked about the ways in which early recordings have become assimilated into modern consciousness: as sources for historical style, as correctives against the smooth perfection of modern CDs, and as symbols of some sort of lost innocence, raising the questions: "What are we really assimilating, and what will always remain out of our reach?"
Pianist Andrew Rangell has been widely acclaimed for his powerful, individual interpretations of a wide- ranging repertoire. He discussed the role of recordings in an artist's development and the complexities of forming a personal artistic identity within myriad spheres of influence. His talk, entitled "Learning, Listening and License: Historic Recordings in One Pianist's Education" explored these issues from the standpoint of his personal journey through a career as a pianist. Rangell's distinguished performing career has included multiple performances of the complete Beethoven sonata cycle and his numerous recordings are available on the Dorian and Bridge labels. His latest recording of the complete Bach Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 will be released soon.
The St. Lawrence String Quartet gave a multi-faceted reaction to historic recordings of string quartets. In addition to dealing with the fascinating changes in string performance practices including vibrato and portamento, they explored the complexities of determining authenticity in performance through an examination of "composer authorized" recordings of Ravel and Shostakovitch. They guided us through historic recordings, and share personal experiences from their studies with some of the great quartets. They also demonstrated and explored earlier styles and consider the complex issues around imitation and revival.
Jeffrey Treviño's "Eliminating Performance Practice" described from a primarily notational point of view some aspects of the changing relationship between notation and performance practice into the twentieth century, first addressing the common assertion that the musical score becomes a more and more notationally specific text into the twentieth century, and then considering some of this situations' possible effects on performance practices. Treviño then discussed a less commonly discussed change in notation, that of notational parameterization, the notion that one kind of symbol should correspond to one aspect of music and that no two kinds of symbol should describe the same aspect of music. He contextualized this change through analogy to recorded media. Lastly, he demonstrated persisting dissonances between twentieth century and earlier ideas about the notation/practice relationship through examples from a recent recording session with the Arditti String Quartet.
