I was 12 years old, when on a friend's birthday party, I saw this little "organ" he just got as a present. I don't know why, but I felt so attracted to it, that his mother me kindly had to ask to leave, long after that party was over. I simply couldn't hold my hands from it. One year later, with a quick upstep to classical organ playing and teached by probably one of the best teachers of my region, I was the prize winner of an international organ competition. Playing on a big historical organ, life on national radio, headlines in many newspapers. There my journey as a musician started. Today, that journey is still ongoing, it centralizes around practical musicology research, mastering the technique, with the never fulfilled wish to come as close as possible to the composer's intention, but overall: share with you the immense beauty of clavichord and early keyboard music! To contact me, please use the contact page: www.authenticsound.org/contact/
Double beat is way too complicated a concept, why would any 1 have invented it like that. you have to tell your student to ignore an audible tick and play your note on the second tick. Hear tick play note, that is just easy. Czerny’s mm’s do seem unrealistic indeed. I think it is single beat intention though, but don’t know why so high, we would have to ask Czerny which is alas impossible.
Just transpose it. In all 12 keys. “Play the tune in every key, and it will come to you.“ (Art Tatum) :-) Transposition helps to understand Bach's mind for musical structure and composition. It also weans the performer from reading---a great skill, but insufficient to match Bach's improvisational genius. Structure, functional harmony, mean much more than tempo variety. The extreme, warp drive (!) tempi are just finger-wiggling athletics, not artistry. Another advantage of transposition is to avoid that miming that sometimes occurs when a performer can read but not transpose. Avoid being a musical mime. The test? Can you transpose? Cheers,
take your metronome, let it swing (or tick), listen to the beats, go up/down with hand, arm, foot,... copy the speed of the ticks, then stop the metronome, and take every 2d beat as down beat, and think three beats while still beating up/down. Just try it, it is very simple, and the second beat (just like a conductor can beat triple meters) will turn out to be very helpful.
If the metronome was ever intended to be used that way, you would find explanations like that in the metronome instructions by Maelzel and Czerny. But you don't. Not a word.
I've tried beating up and down with two equal movements while thinking three beats, and I can't do it. My hand automatically wants to stay down for the first two beats and go up for the third. But it is very easy to count three going down and three going up. Was the metronome really invented to make things more difficult for musicians?
I have a better idea: why triplets even became a thing? They are almost inconceivably difficult, no? Musicians are there just to make our lives difficult; that’s the solution. BTW, Kullak’s second new study from Chopin can help you with the subdivision. Or would one’s left finger be incapacitated by during its “downbeat”?
18:30 I also want to take a moment to remind ourselves that conservatoires then were different from how many a run now. Where i live, you go to conservatoire at 18 or older, minimum 17. Any younger are truly exceptional cases, anomalous. It's different from country to country but in Liszt's day, I think I'm correct in saying that the exceptional cases would be in the single-digit ages. Many if not most entered as young teens. If the above is correct, and correct me if I'm wrong, does this mean that a good first year student would be a 14 year old capable of sight-reading Liszt's Beethoven symphony transcriptions?
Beethoven was a virtuoso pianist. He could play at least as brilliantly as Glenn Gould (when Gould chooses to do so). Go listen to Gould's recording of this Sonata.
@@sebastian-benedictflore Why would you need double escapement for Beethoven Sonata 6? I found one fortepiano performance, by Eric Zivian, on a copy of a 1795 Vienna instrument. Not as fast as 96, probably about 90, and rather splashy, but no problems with the repeated notes.
even if that were to be true in our modern understanding - he, nor all of his contemporaries were out of their minds asking for speed our nerve system is not designed for.
I think the argument about Marx (17:00 on) may be mistaken. Suppose that it was excessively fast 'virtuosic' tempi such as those given by Czerny that A.B. Marx was complaining about? Suppose that Marx believed that movements of a polyphonic character should be played at about half the speed that Czerny (and Moscheles) recommended? Is this probable? Well, Marx does say earlier in the chapter that you should ignore the metronome indications given by editors, and even by Beethoven himself, and judge the correct tempo for a piece of music from the Italian words Andante, Allegro etc. and from studying it carefully to determine its true character (he goes into some detail over several pages about how to do this). And elsewhere he says that polyphonic works should not be played too fast, and criticizes the excessive tempi Czerny sets in his edition of Bach's keyboard works, suggesting that these are due to Czerny's own outstanding virtuosic playing ("eignen ausgezeichneten Virtuosenspiels"). So we have an interesting contrast between people (like Czerny and maybe even Beethoven) who believe that fugues and other polyphonic pieces can benefit from rapid speeds, and people who believe they must be played quite slowly in order to hear and appreciate the different voices. That would be worth exploring further. Czerny's own School of Fugue Playing (Op. 400) might be a good starting point.
That is a great thought, I agree that we shouldn’t just assume that Marx didn’t include Czerny’s tempi in his remarks about excessive speeds, that is a faulty argument. However, could Czerny really play the piece at an unwavering tempo of 96?! Since he himself claims in his Pianoforte Schule that you ought to be able to play all the way through a piece with a steady pulse, making an effort to conceal technical difficulties. Was he a hypocrite who didn’t follow his own advice or have we somehow completely misunderstood metronome marks altogether? It seems so simple, we have a very concrete, objective, quantified way of setting tempo - one tick of the metronome per given note value with the metronome set to tick at a given rate. And yet… so many problematic tempi exist (at least from our point of view). I am not convinced the double beat theory is the answer, but I also agree that we should be asking questions and not accepting the dogmatic (yet inconsistent) view of musical academia. Beethoven meant exactly the speed he prescribed, but he was also crazy and had unrealistic expectations, and his metronome was broken, and metronome marks are just a loose suggestion anyway? Just a ballpark figure not to be taken literally despite being literally invented to show you the EXACT speed a piece is to be played at?
My question is, does "a steady pulse" mean "metronomically" to a performing musician? I am 99% sure Czerny could have played this piece in the ballpark of half=96, just as Glenn Gould does. If a ticking metronome would show up slight divergences, are these noticeable to an audience? (Ballpark is the wrong term. I meant the perceived speed of half = 96. Set a metronome to 96, listen for a few seconds, turn off the metronome and start to play Gould's recording. What does it sound like?)
@@matttondr9282 These quotes from Czerny need to be taken in context. For instance, I can give you a quote, in a passage about how to perform a short example of an Andante, that says "the prescribed time is scarcely varied by a 1/4 or 1/6 part" and infer from that that varying the time up to 25% or 16% is acceptable. This is from Part III, chap. III 'On occasional changes in the time or degree of movement'. In Para 2 of that chapter you find this: "we must consider it as a rule, always to play each piece of music, from beginning to end, without the least deviation or uncertainty, in the time prescribed by the Author, and first fixed upon by the Player". That quotation is often cited out of context, and without continuing to the end of the paragraph. "But without injury to this maxim, there occurs almost in every line some notes or passages, where a small and often almost imperceptible relaxation or acceleration of the movement is necessary, to embellish the expression and increase the interest." Note also in the 'rule' that the author prescribes a time, but the player has to fix upon a time. This makes sense only if Czerny is thinking of Italian tempo words. [[since there is some leeway for allegro, andante, etc. But if he also meant metronome indications, he might be saying that even there the performer has discretion - even though the MMs are a more precise guide than the Italian tempo words, a performer still has to decide how closely to follow them.]] Czerny was a leading virtuoso as well as a composer and teacher. If he gives an indication of half-note = 96 MM, you can be fairly sure that he could have played at that speed (in single beat, of course).
15:23 Can I just say digital technology can be useful so we can know how ridiculous some single beat renditions sound like? It's really unfortunate both you and your wife hate driving! I'm a musician too and I love driving, even going out just for fun with no destination. Although I do hate driving at night since I'm on the autism spectrum and bright lights really bother me.
24:32 yep, still here - plus I always drive under the speed limit. My wonderfull 96 Mercedes can go much faster, but A - I never had a ticket in 15 years of driving and B - I enjoy the road and the scenery
of course, but that is not the point - our aim is to reconstruct the original meaning of the metronome marks, speeds that were very important to the composers of those days. What musicians do with that knowledge is entirely up to them!
All this effort to speed up Alberto's performance when you could have posted Gould. But of course, Gould is only interesting when he is playing much slower than we are used today :).
and so I did the factchecking for you - Gould starts in 94 and slows down in the difficult passages even below Lisitsa's tempo. But even if he didn't- you still would have to assume people in Marx' days played way faster than 96 (a speed which he doesn't hit at all) - that 's the whole point - a single beat reading falls flat from every corner. You might want to learn to listen to the message open mindedly first
nope - she starts in 92 and slows down in the difficult passages, just like Lisitsa to low 80s - but even if she didn't- you still would have to assume people in Marx' days played way faster than 96 (a speed which she doesn't hit at all) - that 's the whole point - a single beat reading falls flat from every corner
@@AuthenticSound You don't have to assume that people in Marx's day "played way faster than 96". You only have to assume that Marx thought this movement should be played more slowly. The only reference he makes to Czerny's metronome marks is in a footnote on p.68, where he says "they ought not to be accepted without a test" - and he says the same about Beethoven's own metronome markings in the passage you show at 17:40. I take that to mean that, if you test them and feel they are too fast for the true character of the movement, you should reject them.
There are people that genuinely think that Marx is referring to musicians playing _faster_ than Cyborg Alberto's single-beat rendition. It's obvious in comparison how you can infer that musicians speed up based on the original whole beat tempo. Keep up the great work, Wim.
You mentioned a composer wishlist at the beginning. Mine is very short: Domenico Scarlatti. Positively no one plays him at the correct speed, there are now competent editions of his work (Fadini is just the latest catastrophe), there have been no competent studies on him since Kirkpatrick's mostly conjectural novel. DS's sonatas, or rather compańeras, were for the most part mispaired. DS more or less stopped composing by 1738, and the official and hurried archiving begun a dozen years later initiated an incomparable allegro di confusione. One can find more correct information about lesser known composers, such as Francisque, Chambonnières, Louis Couperin, Schuyt, Sweelinck or so many others than DS. Love to have your thoughts on some of the less known pieces, not K9, 380, or that silly piece K141 which is not even by DS, but rather such authentic gems as K246 (first compańera of K247), 212 (of which Bartók made an insanely fast, but musically intuitive recording), of the harmonically stunning K260 (not a pair with 259) and the harmonically equally rich 240 or of the compańeras in g, K234 and 196. Scarlatti's music has an extremely haunted quality, alot to with the early Portugues influence. - A few dedicated words by you - such as you dedicated to Bach's fugue in f - could do minor wonders for the great Domenico. He needs a few wonders in his favour, quite a few! What is written about him and how his music is played is a true musical catastrophe. - Thank you for reading.
A.B. Marx criticised Czerny's fast tempi for Bach. Would he really have approved Czerny's tempi for Beethoven? "… wohl gar polyphoner Satz, in dem man jede Wendung, den Gang jeder Stimme fühlen möchte, wird zerrüttet durch zu schnelles, vielleicht für ein glänzendes Bravourstück eben angemessenes Tempo: und der Verf[asser]. muss bei dieser Gelegenheit ausdrücklich gegen viele Tempobezeichnungen protestiren, die in der sonst vortrefflichen und höchst rühmens- und empfehlenswerthen Ausgabe von Bach's sämmtlichen Werken (bei Peters in Leipzig) von C. Czerny -- freilich mit Berufung auf Beethoven, wahrscheinlich aber mehr unter dem Einfluss seines eignen ausgezeichneten Virtuosenspiels -- gegeben worden sind." (Marx, Allgemeine Musiklehre, sixth improved edition, Leipzig 1857, Part Six section 4, on Interpretation and Performance, footnote) And of course Marx's Appendix on The Chronometer describes Gottfried Weber's pendulum and Maelzel's metronome in undeniably 'single-beat' terms, which makes it very unlikely that he regarded Czerny's (and Moscheles') MMs as 'wholebeat'..
Employer did not want me to be Kantor in Germany because i cant drive, and dont want. I passed one of the hardest exames to lose later for a car... In a country of “eco & bio ” people
With all due respect to scientific evidence, you suggest that Lisitsa slows down during the set due to lack of skills (see your anecdote about students and teachers). Is there any evidence for this? Or is this just your interpretation of her kind to play this masterpiece of music?
I didn't suggest Lisitsa lacks skills, she simply cannot uphold the tempo she took at the beginning which, in this piece, is an interpretation mistake.
Still flabbergasted by the previous video, sent it to some friends and seen it three times! Is there already a possibility to subscribe for the Beethoven collection?
Some changes to metronome values might also be prosaic: a typo. Typographers/engravers make mistakes. :-) Bonne journée, en vous souhaitant de publier vos trouvailles géniales en des journaux musicologiques réputés.
sure, but they are easily comparable and in this case the number is absolutely normal for the movement. Before adhering the quality of an error to a data point, one must explore all possible reasons why it could be correct. Labeling it as wrong because the result doesn't match a preconditioned outcome (here: it should be playable) is not what you should do
Managed to make it to the end, even though lately videos are longer and longer every day 😆 . Yes, as you probably saw yourself, I had this very discussion on the comments of your previous videos just because some people not only don't get it but, apparently, they got pissed because some of us professional musicians had those same doubts about the subject in the past and now in the light of the evidence are supportive about your more than well documented hypothesis. Don't know why, to be honest, but they just don't try to at least listen and review all those evidences and all, and now here you are exactly with the kind of things those told me not to be truth just because, again stuffed with obvious evidences those blind ones will keep rejecting. Ok, good for them, I understood and made my mind about this many time ago for obvious reasons, not understanding or trying to be open minded is just a problem of theirs. Don't get discouraged by those Wim, you're making an outstanding job with all of this and sometime future musicians will have to face the truth that for a century and a half we've just been blind idiots with this evidences in front of us all the time... Thanks for your work and for showing it to all of us. Now, I've taken so much time to complete the video I already have another video of yours to watch... 🤣 Great video, as usual, by the way. Bye!
Bernard Matx wrote on the metronome and the pendulum. The universal school of music, tr. by A.H. Wehrhan : Adolf Bernhard Marx : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive It refers to Weber's Pendulum based on length, oscillation, vibration, and the shorter lengths.. Since some argue about single beat it is from my brief scan showing how very short lengths can be made to beat single beat but longer lengths correspond to whole beat and the metronome...on page 84 I forgot to mention I was still "here'' (or should I type there) for the entire video.
I think you should take a little longer to study the English translation, and perhaps even the German original. Marx unmistakably describes the normal 'single-beat' use of Maelzel's metronome, then gives a table comparing the pendulum lengths in Rhenish inches with the numbers on Maelzel's metronome. Nothing about this is 'wholebeat'.
I think the people who don't watch to the ends of these videos are the single beat fanatics, who could hardly bear to listen to a piece longer than 25 minutes.
Let's ride Lavender Lamborghini roll up in a blue bikini Bitches on the beaches looking super cute and freaky All my friends are princesses we keep it whipped and creamy Ice cream on our tongues because we like to keep it freezy Lavender Lamborghini get out on the right side Chauffeur stayed at home because my girl wanted to ride Looking lush and tasting plush I'm feeling so alive Wanna take it to the highway come on let's go for a drive
Amazing I love your content I am a musician who have little visual impairment and they didn’t take me in music conservatory Give me an advice This is my RU-vid channel Check my music out
The reason many people play faster than Metronome Marks in Whole Beat is that they don't like the way the music sounds at that tempo. If I go to a fancy restaurant and order a meal that needs more salt in my opinion, I don't suffer through the meal as the Chef intended it should taste. I just add some salt to my taste. The Chef had their chance, and then I have mine. That's just the way life works. From a historical standpoint, Tempo Reconstruction is very interesting. But from an enjoyment standpoint, not so much.
Fitting, since they call whole beaters a cult. If the religion isn't mine, it's illegitimate. Of course that whole reasoning is flawed from the very basis, since single beat requires more blind faith than whole beat.
