I confess, I didn’t learn what this was until freshman year of
college. I remember a friend saying to me “oh you know when you play a certain
piece a lot, and all the decisions you’ve made seem really final, then you play
with someone else and you have to make new decisions?”. I was a bit confused because I had innocently
thought “you just play a piece like it’s supposed to go.”
In my mind, the great performances I had heard were just
artists who “REALLY played it how it’s supposed to go.”
Obviously I had a lot to learn about communicating in a
chamber ensemble! In truth, I had been
making musical decisions my whole life.
Anytime you play music, whether it’s intentional or not, you are making
thousands of little decisions about how to play it. Anyone, musician or not who happens to hum a
tune they know is making musical decisions.
These decisions about how you hear something, and eventually what makes
your “voice” unique come from thousands of factors, all affecting your
judgement of what seems right for that bit of music.
Some examples of musical aspects we make decisions about are:
Where do notes lead? Over a phrase, where do groups of notes lead (that is grow
or move into each other), what is their overall shape? How connected are notes?
Do they have stronger or more gentle articulation? Timing: do you stay steady? Linger on an
important moment, do you have a sense of rushing or moving forward? What kind of sound quality are you trying to
produce? A dark tone? Rich and warm tone?
Silky or feathery tone? The
questions are infinite, but most musicians have strong opinions about all these
factors because they hear the piece as a “whole.”
Your decisions might be affected by what you’ve listened to,
what you think the spirit of the music is, or what it means to you. It’s truly amazing how differently people can
hear things. I’ll never forget a
hilarious instance when I borrowed a colleagues part for the Bartok concerto
and in a section where I had pencilled in “warm”, she had pencilled in “tortured”. We joke that both markings really meant “use
more vibrato.”
If composers tried to mark all these details into the score,
the music would be covered in ink and practically illegible. It would also take a lot of the creativity
and fun out of interpretation.
I took a wonderful class at the University of Montreal one
year called “interpretation” where we listened to various recordings of great
artists and literally tried to notate all their musical decisions. We had to blow up the scores to be able to
fit all the subtle details in. It was
also remarkable to see from this perspective how “plain” the music really is.
Sometimes, the music is downright illogical, or
confusing. At the end of the famous 3rd
movement “Heiliger Dankgesang” of Beethoven’s Op. 132 quartet that we will play
this coming season, Beethoven writes a series of repeated notes, but ties them
together with slur markings. Usually,
when you see this marking connecting two notes that are the same, it means
there is no separation, that is play it like one long note. However, Beethoven could easily have just
written one long note instead of tying together smaller note divisions. Does this mean you are supposed to make tiny
separations? Pulse each note
division? Perhaps Beethoven wanted the
subdivisions of the beat felt more strongly but not emphasized under a long
held note? Larry decided to research what other quartets had chosen to do and
listened to a myriad of recordings from all different time periods. He notated their solutions on a separate piece
of paper and brought them to rehearsal.
There were almost as many interpretations as there were quartet
recordings! We still have not come to a
final decision about how we will play that one important bar, but look forward
to lively discussion and experimentation to test ideas and come to a unified
musical decision.
Until next time,
Esme