First, let me say hello to the many new readers who have found their way here from the BBC after my chat (which you can hear here) with Nicholas Kenyon on yesterday’s Today programme. In that very brief segment, we managed to touch on a few topics very dear to my heart, so let’s follow up a bit.
What then of someone like Furtwangler, who’s Beethoven tempi tend to be quite uninhibited by the metronome? Many leading modern Beethoven interpreters and commentators, including John Elliot Gardiner, Gunther Schuller and Benjamin Zander have all held up Furtwangler’s performance of the first movement of Beethoven 5 as an example of how not to do it in our times.
What they all point out is that he does a lot of things that are not in the score- most notably changing tempo often and rather drastically, especially slowing down for big statements of the main theme. He also doesn’t do things that are in the score, like taking a basic tempo which is quite a bit slower than Beethoven marks (although not always- plenty of his Beethoven tempi are actually not too far from the marking- at least plausibly in the same meter as Beethoven has marked, which is not always true for conductors like Klemperer and Celibidache).
Naughty boy, Furtwangler.
What if, just as an exercise, we assume for a moment that, as a musician, Furtwangler was not a moron and was not being intentionally self-indulgent….
Why would he have done this piece the way he did? Did he not realize how it actually sounded? No- he lived in the recording era and recorded the piece more than once and would have had ample opportunity to hear the results of his work and correct any unintended eccentricities.
Did he not respect Beethoven wrote and take seriously his instructions? Are you kidding? Why spend your life studying and performing music you don’t respect?
Maybe he was asking different questions? Different, but VALID, questions?
So, here’s one question I think he might have been asking…. “These Beethoven symphonies, especially this one, are full of things that are new to the symphony. They’re longer, more compositionally free, and use new instruments and colors like the trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon in this piece. What were his influences, or did he just pull these ideas out of the sky?”
Take instrumentation. Beethoven was not the first composer to use trombones in the orchestra, just the first to use them in a symphony. They were often used in opera, notably by Mozart. Might opera have been an influence on the Beethoven symphonies? Well, we know that the Eroica is full of touches taken from the world of Italian opera- melodic formulae, accompanimental patterns and so on. What in the 5th might be operatic? How about that very opening gesture? Get your scores out kids and look at it- doesn’t it remind you just a bit of, say, the opening of Don Giovanni or the Magic Flute? It’s similarly iconic, similarly dramatic. I would suggest that a lot of what looks most radical in Beethoven 5 has it’s origins in opera, and that it is perfectly reasonable that an operatic conductor, like Furtwangler, might find reason to treat those aspects of the music dramatically. Look at the famous oboe cadenza at the end of the first movement- in Furtwangler’s performance it plays like a real operatic recitative instead of a joke (one recent, and very famous recording, does, to my ear, treat that very moment as a joke).
Of course, in opera, especially in recits but elsewhere, performers are expected and required to go beyond the notes, tempi and dynamics. Not to ignore them, but to go beyond them, adding appogaturas, embellishments or shaping the flow of the music to suit the rhythm of the words. In this spirit, Furtwangler’s take could be closer to Beethoven’s original idea than we know, maybe just as close as the modern conductor with all his research into performance practice.
We can’t go back to that manner of performance because we’ve found lots of new and interesting questions to ask, but we shouldn’t forget the old questions either.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
The only black-and-white, nuts and bolts questions in musical performance are “what” questions- we can say with specificity what note is being played, what the dynamic is, what instrument is playing it, even what motive it is part of, but the execution of these findings is subjective, and therefore, all the “how” questions are artistic ones.
One of the interesting recent trends in the musical world has been that finding new and interesting artistic questions to ask has become a way of building a career for some- fitting since we describe ourselves as living in a “marketplace of ideas.” Find the right question(s), and you’ve found a niche market for yourself (and, more importantly, you might learn something really important and interesting about the music)!
In performance, the most interesting example of this trend has been the emergence of the Historically Informed Performance movement, also known as the Period Performance Movement, the Original Instruments Movement, the Nonnies, the Granolas or the Cosmic Birkenstock Movement for the Restoration of Historical and Knitted-Woolly Values in Musical Performance and Performance-Related Discussion, Advocacy and Argument (okay, I made that one up).
Let’s say for the moment that the basic question at the heart of the HIPster movement is something like this:
“How would this music have been performed at the time it was written?”
Pretty good, and useful, question!Maybe a better, and more specific question would be “how would the standards and practices of all musical performance of the time have affected the composer’s choices when writing the piece in question?”
After all, it would be foolish to think that all composers were always satisfied with the performing standards, working environments and instruments of their day. We’re often told these days that Mozart and Beethoven wrote for small orchestras, but this is not exactly true. They wrote in an era when orchestras were small, but both often expressed the desire to work with larger groups- Mozart was overjoyed to hear his music played in Paris by an enormous orchestra, and Beethoven spent his entire career trying to put together a “big” orchestra to premiere his symphonies, only succeeding with the 9th (although that band was not huge by modern standards).My point is not that we should play this music in huge orchestras, but that we ought to be aware that these composers were working with an inherent friction between what they wanted (big orchestra) and what they knew they were going to get (small-to-medium sized orchestra).
I think a perfectly good case can be made for playing a Mozart symphony with a full-sized band, but the conductor would have take into account aspects of the scoring that were specifically intended to make the piece work with the smaller orchestras Mozart had to make due with. A case could be made that in some works of Mozart you can get closer to what he wanted (as opposed to what he expected) by using a large string section with judicious doubling of the winds in louder places- an approach these days that would not go far with critics. Maybe the thinner sound of some “period” instruments would be better in a huge band than modern instruments? Mozart reorchestrated Handel to make the most of the performing resources of Mozart’s era, why shouldn’t modern musicians- maybe Mozart expected more of that than we know? Lots of possibilities, and lots of questions.
For me, getting away from “yes and no” questions is all-important- you can’t answer “how?” with “yes!”The whole vibrato/non-vibrato issue is a classic example of a question that is best not asked as one that can be answered “yes” or “no.” We’ve all heard the argument-
“Should we use vibrato in Beethoven- yes or no?”
The fact is, Leopold Mozart’s “Art of Violin” does contain vibrato exercises. Some vibrato was used back then, the questions are when, when not, what kind and how much, and, more to the point why (or why not)? Ask those questions and you’re onto something.
One of the issues at the core of the HIP movement is the whole question of tempi, for instance in Beethoven. So, is the question “should we follow Beethoven’s metronome markings- yes or no?” or is it “why did Beethoven give the metronome markings he did?”
Answer the first question and you are going to get a performance that sounds like an orchestra playing along with a metronome, regardless of whether you say yes or no to the question. Answer the second and you may come up with some genuine insights about the phrase structure, the form, the unit of pulse, the breathing, the bowing, what you conduct, and even about what the piece is actually about. (Remember- Beethoven the pianist was known for his sense of freedom, flexibility and spontaneity.)
Of course, there really is nothing new under the sun- HIPsters are not the only one’s to ask these questions, but maybe the were the first to combine a given set of questions as the central issues they were interested in. Toscanini, Carlos and Erich Kleiber and even Karajan all took careful note of Beethoven’s metronome markings, as did many others, and people have been arguing about and writing about them since the pieces were published. My worry about the HIP movement is that, 25 years in, it is starting to feel like a source of answers rather than questions. I feel like too many listeners now have a fixed idea of what a Historically Informed performance sounds like- take out the vibrato, shrink the band, speed up the tempo, amplify the trumpets and timps and you can’t go wrong. The very fact that I can tell almost any orchestra to play like a period orchestra and they can immediately do it is something I find worrying. When performance is something that can be described in shorthand, something has gone wrong. That’s copying, not interpreting.
What then of someone like Furtwangler, who’s Beethoven tempi tend to be quite uninhibited by the metronome?Many leading modern Beethoven interpreters and commentators, including John Elliot Gardiner, Gunther Schuller and Benjamin Zander have all held up Furtwangler’s performance of the first movement of Beethoven 5 as an example of “how not to do it” in our times.
What they all point out is that he does a lot of things that are not in the score- most notably changing tempo often and rather drastically, especially slowing down for big statements of the main theme. He also doesn’t do things that are in the score, like taking a basic tempo which is slower than Beethoven marks (although not always- plenty of his Beethoven tempi are actually not too far from the marking- at least plausibly in the same meter as Beethoven has marked, which is not always true for conductors like Klemperer and Celibidache).
Naughty boy, Furtwangler.
Next time, I’ll try to figure out what those crazy old dead guys were thinking. What questions were they asking?
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
“Conductors question scores for a living. Actual conducting is something you just have to do to share the answers you’ve found to the questions you’ve asked.”
Practical questions about music are important (and fun!) to answer.
When a real music lover tells me he or she has no interest whatsoever in the practical, technical issues of performance, I always feel I should try to change their mind. They’re probably the kind of people who always watch the “making of” feature on their dvds, so why be scared off by trying to understand how music works? It’s less scarey than trying to understand how pyrotechnics work.
So today we return to the practical issues of score questioning. You might want to make sure you’ve read episode one and David Hoose’s comment before proceeding.
I learned (through the much undervalued experience of humiliation) how important they can be when I took my first conducting final exam. We were to conduct the first or last movement of Brahms 1 and Der Freischutz Overture (the overture was to be memorized) with piano. I’d never really tried to analyze a symphony, let alone a Brahms symphony, right down to its DNA, and what I discovered completely and totally blew my mind (I can still remember the afternoon I did most of the work on my old sofa in my apartment, what the light was like, when the fire truck drove by- I’ve never looked at music the same way since that day). I got so excited I decided I would do both movements from memory as well as the Weber.
Well, that was all fine- I conducted my heart out and got through everything without falling apart.
Then the professor (Chris Zimmerman) started asking some questions to test my knowledge of the score.
I was actually looking forward to this bit!
He started by asking me to begin somewhere random, then he stopped me and asked what came next. I happily answered something along the lines of “the second theme enters on the third beat in inversion, while the bass completes the statement of the same theme in augmentation, which prepares the arrival in the new key on the downbeat, which has the third of the chord in the bassline and a suspension which is not resolved until the next bar.”
“Okay,” he said with great patience, “but who are you going to point at?”
I had no idea! I’d been so busy learning the music I completely forgot to learn the score, and I couldn’t have helped an orchestra to get through it. I had done the work needed to understand the music, but not to make it happen.
So, a good practical question might be- “who comes in next?” This might be quickly followed by “why that instrument/section at that moment?” Another practical question might be “what are they playing?” by which you could be asking “what notes are they playing?” “What rhythm are they playing” At a more enlightened level you might ask “what motive or theme are they playing?”
Where does that motive come from? Is it related to other ideas? Has this material appeared before? Is it scored differently this time? What are the dynamics? What part of that instrument’s range are they in? What else is going on at that moment? What happens next? Is there something interesting about the harmony at that moment? How loud do they play? What is the articulation? Are they doubled? Is it an imitative entrance (that is, does another instrument or voice play the same or very similar material before or after it)?
One can see that a simple, practical question quickly leads to all kinds of other, more artistic questions. Back to my early final exam- I thought
One of my first “official” conducting teachers told us all that “conductors study scores for a living. Actual conducting is just something you get to do for fun as a reward for the studying.”
It’s a point of view I took to heart and have often repeated to both students and to music lovers who are interested in understanding just what a conductor does, but I’ve recently become frustrated with the term “score study.” Maybe it’s because I never took to “studying” in school- I never had the patience for, say, repeating pages of my chemistry notes out loud until I memorized them in school. I always felt that if I understood something, then I could remember it, and if I didn’t understand it I wouldn’t remember it, no matter how often I repeated it, copied it out, re-read it or whatever.
As I thought about this linguistic problem, it also occurred to me that I actually spend very little time “studying” scores the way an American student is taught to study for tests, drilling, repeating, repeating, repeating. What was I doing with all that time?
So- on to the new model….
I would like to suggest that “conductors question scores for a living. Actual conducting is something you just have to do to share the answers you’ve found to the questions you’ve asked.”
Yes, I toyed with “analysis,” and any number of other words, but for me, the most productive work on scores comes when I ask the best questions.
Yes, you heard it here first- Score Questioning
So, what are the best questions?
Well, for some conductors, there is only one question to ask.
One conductor I learned a lot from when I was getting started was Pascal Verrot, who was a regular guest at the Round Top Festival, where I spent many happy summers. When I first worked up the courage to ask him for a conducting lesson he said that he has only one thing in mind (not that) when he “studies” a score, which is- “why?” He claimed to never work on memorizing things. For every detail in the score and not in the score, his goal was to understand why- why did the composer make the choice he or she did, why did they know to make that choice and why does it work?
I’ve got to hand it to Pascal- that was, hands down, the best piece of conducting advice (even better than “one is down”) I’ve ever had, and every friend and student I’ve passed it on to (who didn’t already know it) has come back to me and said it transformed not only their method of learning a score, but also their ways (and mine) of communicating with an orchestra in rehearsal. Players don’t like to be lectured at and tend not be interested in hearing all the little factoids one has discovered hunched over the score at home, but they don’t like to be in the dark either, and if you can show them with real experimental evidence gathered in the rehearsal laboratory why you’re doing it a certain way, it makes a big difference, both in terms of how much they get out of the work and what the audience gets out of the performance.
Nonetheless, the pragmatist in me isn’t %100 convinced that that is the only question you need to address. Maybe it’s helpful to look at all the other questions (maybe they are only subservient to “why?”) as falling in to one of two categories. On the one hand you have all the nuts and bolts, practical questions and on the other hand you have all the artistic, philosophical ones.
More of those in the next episode.
UPDATE- Be sure to read David Hoose’s comment, which is even cooler than this post before moving on to episode 2.
c. 2006 Kenneth Woods
Recent Comments