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Music: listening and performing
In music right now, we're studying Beethoven. This is part of my job I love. Getting paid to listen to Beethoven (among others). One thing I like to play of Beethoven's is the piano sonata known as the Pathetique (in C minor, Op. 13). Awesome, beautiful piece. However, although it's discussed in my textbook, it's not on the CD set, so I have to bring in my own copy. Ever since I've been teaching here, I've used a Vladamir Horowitz recording, but yesterday morning, as I was looking for this CD, I came up empty handed. Still don't know where the CD is, though I trust it's somewhere. In a pinch, I had to substitute a recording by Alfred Brendal. I realized that I'd never listened to his performance of this sonata (I got it as part of a complete sonatas set not too long ago).
Listening to this reminded me of one of the cool things about classical music, the way that there are so many subtle variations in performance. To many people, one recording of Beethoven may seem like any other, but really it's amazing how many little choices a performer has to make and how they impact the performance. It's fascinating. As an undergraduate, one of my classes required me to listen to recordings of choirs and orchestras performing the same music with different conductors and on our tests we would have to listen to pieces we'd never heard and figure out based on the interpretation the conductor had taken which conductor it was. It made me more sensitive to such things, and I really do find it fascinating listening to different interpretations.
Why is this so? The music written before the 20th century couldn't be recorded, so there's no such thing as a definitive version. Maybe that's part of it--whereas in modern popular music we get recordings of the songwriter performing it and we take it for granted that this is how it goes. Since in "classical" music we've gotten used to multiple interpretations, modern recordings haven't had that same effect on modern classical music. Maybe it's because this music has so many subtle nuances that it's easy to do it many different ways; it's complicated enough that lots of different interpretations "work." In popular music, covers tend either to be too similar to the original or very different--which is often very cool. But it's more amazing, I think, when you don't have to change the instruments or the notes and yet you can still have a pretty different take on the piece.
The Alfred Brendal version, I found, has a much slower introduction. Definitely too slow to hold the interest of high school students, and I didn't like it as well as Horowitz's take on it, which feels more directly passionate, whereas Brendal's feels overexaggerated. And yet, either because the intro is so slow or because it really is faster, the fast section seems really fast. I also had confirmed something I'd suspected: that Horowitz seems almost to put some Gershwin into Beethoven (it isn't there in Brendal's version). Anyway, I found it fascinating.
I got an e-mail that my former college choir director sent around to alumni. The current incarnation of the choir I was in is performing a Bach motet that I performed as a sophomore. It was 14 minutes long and we memorized it, and the current choir members are a bit daunted. He solicited our thoughts on it. I wrote:
It's such a big piece to wrap the mind and voice around. I have it playing as I type this, and I'm amazed by the memories. In the first place, it's amazing the extent to which, even 7 years later the song is imprinted in me so that I remember far more of the notes than I had any right to expect and the ones that I don't remember come instantly back with the force of inevitability. It's a nice thing to have a couple Bach motets (among so many other things!) imprinted so firmly in your mind that they're still largely there and, I hope, always will be. In the second place, I hear the voices of the people I sang with. They jump out at my--hey, I know that soprano/alto/tenor/bass. Especially the tenors, of course! What a great bunch of guys! I envy your singers every moment of the year, even down to the late-night pre-tour music cram sessions that await them in late February. Tell them not to worry, they'll get it by the sixth tour stop or so! No really, it's tough but it really is rewarding. In the long history of music, there are a good number of composers I prefer, but there's no better way to get into Bach than from the "inside," from performing it. And it really is good stuff.
Really, I think there's no better way to get into any music than by performing it. You get to know it better than just by listening to it, I think. And it really does end up more deeply in your psyche. A lot of my love for a lot of the "classical" music that I love, I got from performing it, be that in a choir, on the piano, or in a band. Certainly not all of it, there's music that I've come to only by listening. Still, it's such a great way of getting into music. I'll suggest it to anyone, for any kind of music. Go do it, why don't you?