BY BENJAMIN MARTIN
Blobs, and the death of classical music.
Minus ‘blobs’, it’s a phrase often repeated nowadays. However, determining why exactly it might be dying, or why many think this is happening, is a tough one to clarify. Yet, as it appears a widespread, relatively sustained belief, it ought to be considered seriously rather than dismissed as some form of mass hysteria.
Let’s focus on one of the main reasons given for classical music’s demise: that the improvisatory aspect of classical performance has all but dried up, giving way to a rigid adherence to the score, supposedly in an effort to realize the composer’s intentions with infallible accuracy. Advocates of this rationale often suggest that the reintroduction of an improvisatory aspect into performance – once considered par for the course – may re-invigorate the classical arts. They may well be right. Yet how, in practice, might this be achieved? A few extra well-researched twiddles here and there? A couple of doubled bass notes dramatized by some prolonged pauses? In actual fact, no small number of performers contrive such musical adjustments, but it’s somehow too safe – the joints just don’t seem to be loosening.
To my way of thinking, such a re-introduction, if it is to endure, would need to strike at the very core of the problem; specifically, our current artistic values, which over decades have reasoned themselves towards a dead end. What we have struck is not so much the death of classical music, but rather the limits of an ideology too narrow to do it justice. Somehow, we need to re-identify with artistic expression and what this may entail.
Perhaps the best starting-point I can offer is from my own experience. Years ago, I played Chopin’s fourth Ballade for the great pianist Eugene Istomin. Afterward, he demonstrated one of the passages with a captivating, balletic gesture, and remarked that he would play it the exact same way regardless of who wrote it. To many nowadays, this may sound like musical heresy, for surely if such a passage formed part of, say, a Mozart sonata, it ought to be performed differently, given the contrasting musical periods? Yet, it is a profound statement, and ought to be examined more closely and without prejudice. It lies at the very core of the problem.
The point is that a group of notes may be brought to life through a gesture appropriate to them (here, the term gesture may entail rubato, or rhetoric, etc. Specifically, that a phrase is so proportioned through tension and release that it behaves as if a physical entity). One could say that such a gesture contains certain inviolable properties, without which the notes themselves may never achieve sufficient shape. It is true, of course, that a group of notes may lend itself to a variety of different gestures. But very often, notwithstanding periodic and stylistic considerations, the notes respond to one particular gesture, not several.
This aspect of inviolable properties strongly parallels mathematics, whereby one may draw a distinction between a shape that is measurable, and one that is not, the latter amounting to an undefinable blob. One could argue that a certain blob is interesting, true to its creator and so on, yet devoid of any tenable physical properties it remains impossible to convey the object in any meaningful terms beyond terming it what it is: a blob.
As interpreters, we have to be wary of committing too many blobs in our own performances. If you get hold of any recent edition of Bach’s 48′ you’ll discover that there are barely any dynamic or tempo indications. Such editions are definitely true to Bach in the sense that he offered very little in this way. However, if you consult a much older edition – say, Augener or Busoni – you’ll find many expressive suggestions on offer. Now, it’s very easy to ridicule such efforts today and say that they are not being true to Bach. But that misses the point. The fact is that these expressive markings tend to outline the rise and fall of the music, points of culmination, and so on. These markings are obeying laws of the music’s internal gesture, without which the music has no life. One may choose to underplay such gestures, or lend them implication through varied articulation, and certainly with Bach one could discover alternative solutions in dynamic shadings. But regardless, the expressive markings are most definitely being true to what is there on the page. One may discover much more about the structure of such pieces in such editions than via the clinically typed ones of today, informed though they may, or claim, to be.
We should remember that great music transcends all epochs and their concurrent practices, which is why the easiest prediction to make is that 100 years from now, people will look back on our current standards and think them hopelessly inadequate. In the meantime, we could do a lot worse than attempt to rediscover this aspect of true gesture in all music, regardless of period. This, in turn, would allow for our deeper creative instincts to kick in, and have us re-identify with classical music once more so that a sense of improvisation – which is the natural extension of appropriate gesture – can resurface, and lead us along.
To learn more about Benjamin Martin, visit his website and read our interview here.
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