The problem lies chiefly in the misunderstanding of technique as purely a mechanical artiface as opposed to its application in support and realization of musical effect at much higher level of performance than most people ever can aspire to. We are not to to speak the language of music as it ought to be being to easily satisfied by accuracy as the basis of an excellent performance. Leads to blandness.
“My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” -Stravinsky The claim near the end of the video: “simplicity enables infinite options” may be true but I would argue that the infinitude of options can be quite debilitating for a composer to deal with. To me, it is quite “beautiful” to behold a composer’s solutions to limitations.
In the example with Corelli's Concerto Grosso in G MINOR in bar 2 what you highlighted in red as Parallel 5th is actually Dim 5th (F# C) not so? Moving from a Dim 5th to A P5th is not considered consecutive/parallel 5ths not so?
Your videos have given me the best overview of musical composition that l have ever come across, anywhere on the internet or in books , and has allowed me to put the detail into better context. Brilliant. Thank you.
Indeed, had Hauer written his ideas in the book, he would have been knwon now instead of totally un-known. However, there were surely many personal little elements in their senstivie relationshi that could have made Hauer super reluctant to be associated or demenaed by the other guy... The fact however remains that no one as far as I have seen, has touched the Transcendental Philosophical foundation of Hauer's thinking.... his music is touching on the 4th Dimension, and is rooted in Pythagorean appreicaition of mathematics and geotmetry as the foundations of our existence and our minds .... no one so far das even whispered about this ! Lubomyr Melnyk's Continuous Music was originated in its written form atter meetins in New Yrok with the H,M HAuer Society in the late 1870´s. and what drew Lubomyr Melnyk to Hauer was precisely the Trnascendental element that lay hidden behind the musical sound. Maybe if soeone will explore this MOST important side of Hauer's work and thought, then Hauer will be able to rise again in the world and his music will be heard again for what it is .... a door into the Sublime .... you can not listen to Hauer with the same years you listen to Beethoven ... while we accept Beethoen as "the greatest" .. Hauer offers us something Beethoen could not ... we must always accpet composers for what they give .. not reject them because they are not so great as someone else !"
Also, his wife, Lottie, caught Joplin burning armloads of his manuscripts and had to physically restrain him. He was sent to an asylum shortly after and he died there in 1917. Who knows what he burned that is now lost forever? Plus, he even composed while in the asylum but he would always tear it up and throw it away. The opera score also appears to be missing large swaths of storyline. He only paid for an abbreviated score. Reginald Robinson and Chris Ware located a photo at Fisk University that Lottie had had taken in the 40s. It showed Joplin's piano with some of his surviving manuscripts displayed on it. One of the pages was an unknown piece with lyrics. Reginald plays this fragment on his album "Euphonic Sounds"--the only rendition of this fragment (which lasts 31 seconds, I believe). It sounds like it came from the opera--Joplin never wrote lyrics to his rags--but that Joplin must have decided to exclude it from his published score. Whether that was just a surviving page or if Lottie had more pages from this piece, we will never know.
Scott Joplin is a great composer. I discovered Treemonisha 50 years ago with the recording made in Houston. This opera must be compared to Mozart's "Magic Flute". In both cases, it is the struggle of knowledge against obscurantism. However, there is a big difference, in Joplin, it is a woman who brings knowledge! And what's more, she is black! It is doubly revolutionary for the time in a segregationist country. Treemonisha is the first and greatest American opera.
I wrestled with doing so in the video, but decided against it, as Kapustin in my opinion is an exception and not part of an overall trend. The same goes for third stream jazz. These are interesting personalities and projects of jazz and classical but are not part of the linear narrative of musical development that classical music academia has developed. This video is more of a comment on the damage that narrative has caused.
@@MusicaUniversalis I just thought it would’ve been worthwhile to mention him as an example of what a blend of jazz and classical could be. But fair enough.
Classical music has a great and long heritage, but refusing to adopt Jazz into classical music is a shame. If it's a question of atonality, then Jazz does have its players like Cecil Taylor and the Free Jazz movement. But classical music can never shrug off its elitist and overly intellectual proclivity. It can never shrug off the antagonism between “art music” and “popular music.” It can never remove the sublime pretensions between “serious music” and “folk music.” Today, classical music is a form of heightened, intellectual mysticism. It is too clever by half and competes with the theoretical mathematics that informs the physics departments on the true nature of reality. Classical music presents a form of religiosity that substitutes man as the next Creator after the death of God, Classical musicians are like secular priests that still point to the spirit when, and if, possible. That is in their DNA, despite Nietzsche lamenting the Death of God in the 19th century. Yes, man now represents God as a masterful creator. That is the ROMANTIC period, of worshiping the musician as creator, and we are still in that period. However, classical music, with its rich background, is born from FREEDOM. That is “Freedom to.” Jazz is born from the blues, which is also born from FREEDOM. However, that is “Freedom from.” Classical music is always about their aristocratic freedom to do this and that... write a symphony, go on a fox hunt, seduce that young peasant girl. Blues is always about their being slaves and freedom from this and that... paying the rent, not going to jail, feeling sad your girl ran off, etc. So the two can't really meet each other... unless they become something totally different.
Brilliant stuff! Have you seen the RU-vid channel Phantoms of the Opera? Similar subject matter from a soprano singing in bel canto tradition and exploring early recordings
Here is more ammo for your bashing. I'll paraphrase from Robert Hill's performance practice of early music seminar in Boulder last year: When a performer asks a modern composer of noise music "How can this be playable or how can I play this accurately?" the reply is virtually always something similar to "Oh the notes don't matter in that passage, just change it to make it playable. Try to keep the same shape." You could say this is a large factor distinguishing ancient composition from modern. The pitches in ancient compositions refer directly to an underlying Partimento or chord structure that cannot be easily altered. Further, some universities have stopped teaching fugue to composition students all together. I undertsand if faculty feel teaching it to pianists or other musicians is not important, but composition students must learn fugue! We can't let that tradition dissapear.
Great conversation! I was sad to hear the even Gieseking had lost bel canto playing by his time. Who were the first to lose it? Who was the last to have it?
I'm sorry but, according to what I have learned, the video and some commentators here show that they don't have a complete overview of the voice leading rules. It's not just about voice independence. For the sake of brevity, I just mention this without going into detail. In music, nothing is forbidden, but you have to know the aesthetic effect of the techniques you are going to use in order to express what you have in your head.
Thank you for this discussion. It is most informative, illuminating, and it does make me question many things in my own playing, so it is doing something useful in challenging the status quo. I would like to bring a few points forward however. Firstly I feel, although it has been mentioned, that not enough attention has been drawn on the fact that pianos themselves have changed enormously, becoming heavier, more powerful, more solid, but less subtle, less characterised in tone colour, and less able to do a singing line. That fact really shouldn't be overlooked. Secondly although your guest is extremely interesting, well learned and clearly knows what he is talking about, he also makes very bold claims ("I have Rubinstein's technique"), which, in choosing to remain anonymous, he also conveniently doesn't have to back up his claims with a demonstration (unless he has and I am not aware of it. I have never been on twitter). We would want to see what his playing is like, and whether or not he lives up to his claims. In some ways this is a similar problem to the one of the channel This is opera, which is also fascinating and provocative, but hides behind a rather convenient veil of anonymity, although I do know that they have been exposed. The other thing is that I find there is also in this discussion a little bit of undue idealisation of a supposedly golden past. Although much of what is being said is undeniably true and backed by recording, there is also probably a fair bit of playing from that era that was unduly prone to showmanship, excessive freedom, questionable taste, and sloppiness. This is also reflected in some recording, and it should be acknowledged. As Lamond said to Karajan when they played together, it wasn't all wonderful. Our times are also in some ways a reaction against some of the excesses of the 19th century, and though we have lost much in the process, this is how history works. However, I don't want to sound unduly critical or ungrateful. I mostly absolutely agree with what I learned here, and am very pleased to have seen this video which will make me think for a long time.
I absolutely agree with what you say. There are a lot of very interesting and well thought-out points talked about in this video that I think need to be adressed and will be very inspiring to all types of musicians. However, I find the format of this video to be somewhat problematic as well. The whole debate is very much centered around this dichotomy of past and present that seems unnuanced and gets lost a bit too often in polemic bashing for me (funny how I found that some of their critique on the other side, the mysterious "they", could very well be applied to their side.) I get my lessons from a pianist who studied under the modern conditions of the 'Musikhochschule' and we talk about singing on the piano, breath control and the influence of opera on melodic lines all the time. I agree that a lot of things regrettably got lost in the art of piano playing but it isn't that black and white like it's portrayed here. Also, this video is hardly a discussion and rather feels like a circejerk over a fetishized past at some points. I really really appreciate the scientific effort and work that went into this video and I am glad that this topic is adressed by such smart and informed people but some parts were pretty hard to digest. When they talked about how some people should "stay out of music" I wanted to turn it off all together. A pity!
@@dexiomine1232 And there is another point that seems to have been pushed under the carpet. The change in piano playing that occurs is described as being due to bad musicians becoming teachers, but this is certainly far from always being the case. Cortot was a fantastic pianist and musician from the old school, and he trained an immense number of pianists who pretty much all played in a modern way, Lipatti, Haskil, De Brunhoff, Heidsieck, and so many others. None of his student ever desynchronise their attacks, or practice the kind of rubato he did, though they were great pianists. So clearly the change that happened goes much deeper than a case of bad transmission, if pretty much all over the western world people changed the way they played and thought about music in such a short period. Many great pianists were teaching, and somehow, the style changed nonetheless.
Classical was first. Jazz embraced classical. How do you think bebop came about? Jazz players copping Stravinsky and Bartok. Modal jazz? They looked to Debussy for their harmony. Classical embraced jazz: it was called West Side Story. William Bolcom was another classical composer who embraced jazz. Nothing new here.
So happy to see more people talking about the old school and how bad musician's have gotten since the latter half of the 20th century. Long live the old school!
Fantastic interview, thank you so much. I've dig deep into this topic, but from the classical singing perspective, and there are many people completely disillusioned by modern performance and classical education practices, especially regarding bel canto, which today doesn't mean a thing anymore. It is at least comforting to know that there are people aware and able to hear this. And I found some in the craziest of places doing jobs having nothing to do with music. Keep up the good work. As the concert and opera houses continue to get more and more empty, maybe the voice of "others" will become more prominent. Sadly, you are most probably right, and the lost art will never be found again in this form. But might slowly get rediscovered in private alternative circles of talented amatures and old record collectors and enthusiasts, far away from the snobbish academics. In the end, the true art is based on nature and might rise from it again if allowed to grow in a safe space isolated from the mainstream classical music scene.
Then you disagree with Walther’s Musicalisches Lexikon published in 1732 that describes the dance as “grave and serious.” No mention of it being bouncy and energetic, and this is from a source who would have actually seen the historical dance. Don’t take modern interpretations of things at face value.
A wonderful, wide-ranging discussion. Almost nothing I can disagree with, some of which I cover in my book Vital Performance: Historically Informed Romantic Performance in Cultural Context. Best wishes to you both.
I wanted to ask (a little off-topic to the discussion at hand), what are your thoughts on musical schema theory from Robert Gjerdingen & the push of studying Partimento as a tool for composition? Do you think it might be a positive way forward for music education or will it just be a niche fad?
I guess it’s fine but fairly limited. Probably like 1% of what a composer needs to know. You can only do so much with it, and his book is too long for what amounts to 7 or 8 “patterns.” His book on child composers is more interesting imo.
I haven't listened to the full conversation yet, and i intent to. But i find it very curious that RU-vid recommended this just after i finished reading Kenneth Hamilton's book "After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance" Like I've said, i have yet to listen to the full conversation, but just by hearing some of the points randomly, I'm guessing the arguments in this discussion are fundamentally contrary to the arguments made by Hamilton in his book. And i don't mean this as a discredit of this conversation or anything, it's just that at least on the surface, there seems to be arguments for both sides regarding points like this one: “There has never been a point in history where we had musicians as good as they are now” I love these kinds of conversations so, thank you for making this kind of content.
I'm glad there's a continuing revival effort for the bel canto performance style. I always try to remind people of it when they complain about early recordings, piano rolls, and the few especially historically-informed pianists today. I practice almost exclusively in the bel canto style, but I'm a pretty poor pianist and I don't have enough time to refine it. I wish I'd had the ability to take it more seriously 8 years ago when I was a 12-year-old with all the time in the world.
Regarding improvisation: What is your opinion of the French organ school and improvisation during the context of the Liturgy: do you view this as an authentic continuation of the old tradition of improvisation?
This is definitely, without a doubt, the best thing I have come across on RU-vid, or even Twitter. As a young guy, for a few years I genuinely thought I was one of the only young people in the world who was into this era of pianists. Coming across you guys and Karl Bohm Respector was really nice. Making this kind of material tho, this long form chat with music examples etc, completely next level. Very good to hear Koczalski's Ghost talk, really wish you both the best with the things you are working on.
