Performance practice: the Book

                        Performance practice:  the Book

In this post I’d like to recommend a book – the book, in fact – on historical performance practice: Clive Brown’s Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900 (1999).

It’s what the title suggests: a comprehensive survey of all the main and many of the minor aspects of the subject, with substantial chapters on (among others) articulation, accentuation, phrasing, tempo, tempo modification, ornamentation, vibrato, and portamento. The book deals with vocal as well as instrumental music, and solo and orchestral as well as chamber performance. But fortunately for us, it’s chamber music that tends to dominate the discussion. Of the many musical examples from the works of Beethoven, for example, the great majority are from the quartets and other chamber works. The only important topic that Brown does not discuss is the instruments themselves. Of course he’s well aware that they underwent major changes (not always improvements) in this period, and that these influenced performance practice, and vice versa. But to have discussed this vast subject in any detail would have made the book impossibly long; readers seeking information on instruments these will have to go elsewhere (such as the relevant chapters in H.M. Brown and S. Sadie, eds, Performance Practice: Music after 1600 (1989)). About the only performance issue that Brown neglects – surprisingly - is repeats: where the rule is in fact very simple: play them!

The author draws on a remarkably wide range of sources. The most important are the surprisingly numerous instrumental (and vocal) treatises and instruction books, many of which were written by leading performers (such as those for the violin by Pierre Baillot, Charles de Bériot, and Joseph Joachim – not to mention the one by Leopold Mozart). The author has also examined older editions of the musical works themselves - Ferdinand David’s editions of the Beethoven quartets, for example - complete with tell-tale fingerings and bowings (and sometimes inappropriate slurs and dynamics). In addition there are many comments by musicians of the period in letters and other printed texts. And from the years after 1900 there are the early recordings, giving us the actual sounds musicians made and first-hand evidence of contemporary performance practice. All in all, there turns out to be more material, even for the pre-recording era, than might have been expected. 

The great strength of the book is simply that it tells us most of the things we need to know – including some we didn’t know we needed to know! – about the nuts and bolts of musical performance during what for most of us is the golden age of chamber music. The author is thorough in his approach and doesn’t neglect the basics. Notation, for example, may seem too obvious to be worth mentioning. But the author devotes considerable space to it, and rightly so. I suspect that few amateur players (or professionals, for that matter) are aware of how even the most familiar signs – including f, fp, sf, and sfz – changed their meaning over time and were used in different ways by different composers. On questions of tempo, Brown gives us a detailed discussion, extending over a hundred pages, of all of the major tempo terms, what they meant and the changes in their use and meaning during the period. (Andante – with that baffling variant, andantino - alone receives ten illuminating pages; no more excuses for getting it wrong!) It also includes a section on the metronome, explaining its contemporary uses and its effect on older approaches to the setting of tempo. The chapter on tempo modification is one of the most instructive of all. Nowadays, anyone ‘indulging’ in rubato is liable to have some Beckmesser rapping them on the knuckles: but before 1900 rubato was used imaginatively and expressively (and sometimes excessively, no doubt) and was one of the most distinctive features of musical performance. A chapter on string bowing has much to teach us about the vexed question of dots and strokes and about the surprising preference in the early nineteenth century for on-the-string bowing in passages where we would automatically play off-the-string (not least in Beethoven’s quartets). String players (and some of their woodwind colleagues) will also find food for thought in the detailed chapters on vibrato and portamento. Perhaps the most striking characteristics of musical performance between 1750 and 1900 was that players used very little vibrato and a great deal of portamento: the very opposite of the normal practice today. More generally, the book is valuable because it shows us the many things musicians did that were not written down. (Such as the late eighteenth century practice, discussed in a previous post, of playing notes shorter than they were written.) These were the things that a composer did not bother to spell out in his score because they were the current practice and could be taken for granted. Though composers became more precise in their instructions to performers in the nineteenth century, even then the written score was never the whole story. In giving us the unwritten as well as the written rules, Brown opens up an entire lost world of performance practice.

His book is long (over 600 pages), serious, and scholarly. Yet it’s well-written and easy to follow: the material is clearly laid out and there are many musical examples. Brown is careful in his approach, reaching conclusions where the evidence is clear but never over-simplifying things; he’s always aware of the exceptions, the complexities, the cross-currents. He is one of the leading authorities on the subject and his book inspires confidence. Another of his virtues is that he has no obvious axe to grind. He’s a historian seeking the truth, not an evangelist seeking converts, or a preacher denouncing the evils of rigid tempos or excessive vibrato. Coolly and calmly he describes how music was performed in the past and leaves it to us to decide what (if anything) we want to do about it in our own playing.

Yet even in a long book Brown can’t tell us everything, and readers seeking more detail on a particular subject will have to consult other works. Fortunately, the prime sources, the treatises and handbooks, 

can often be found in larger libraries; and since the history of performance practice has become a hot topic in recent years there is also a good deal of modern research on particular topics. On violin playing, for example, there are specialist studies by Robin Stowell, David Milsom, and Brown himself; and there are similar works for the cello (by Valerie Walden) and the piano (by Sandra Rosenblum, among others). Composers not only wrote music but also had strong views on how it should be played; there is much to be learned from books like Performing Beethoven and Performing Brahms and from comparable works for Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn. On early recordings, the essential titles are Robert Philip’s pioneering study,Early Recordings and Musical Style (1992), and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s online work ‘The Changing Sound of Music...’ www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html). But Brown remains the best starting point. 

What general conclusions can we draw from the book? Perhaps the most obvious is simply that between 1750 and 1900 music was played very differently from the way it’s played today. Not that performance practice stood still in that period. Musicians in the late nineteenth century played Mozart’s music differently from the way it was played in his own time (and not only differently but worse). It’s clear, nevertheless, that the really big change - the advent of continuous vibrato, the decline in portamento and rubato, the ban on ornamentation, etc - took place just after 1900, in the first few decades of the new century. There were more and deeper changes in the 40 years after 1900 than in the previous 150, and pre-1900 styles of performance rapidly went out of fashion and were forgotten. (Later in the twentieth century, when they eventually were rediscovered and to some extent revived, they caused a real shock: a shock of the old, in the realm of performance practice, that was as great in its way as the shock of the new – such as modernist twelve-tone music - had been in the realm of composition.) A further conclusion – though Brown tactfully does not spell it out - is that most of the post-1900 changes were for the worse. Tbe great virtue (and sometimes vice) of pre-1900 performance practice – the freedom of expression in tempo, rhythm, ornamentation, and quality of sound – has largely been lost. (Anyone nowadays who tried to play with that older freedom of expression would be condemned for ‘taking liberties’ and banished to musical Siberia.) What that means in practical terms is simply that the music of the late eighteenth century is likely to sound best when played more or less in the way it was performed when it was written – and likewise for music written in the nineteenth century. Whether pre-1900 music is better than what came later is a matter of personal taste: but there’s little doubt that it sounds better when played in a pre-1900 style. A final observation is that performance practice has to do not just with practical or technical details but also with wider changes in style, expression, and musical culture; the history of performance, as Brown presents it, is an integral part of the history of music itself.

Roger Norrington, himself one of the leading lights in the revival of period performance, says in the Preface that ‘This is the book we have been waiting for.’ He’s right. It’s the book that anyone who’s serious about the subject should ‘read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest’. And – I would add - apply its lessons to their own playing.

How to play Mozart: Slurs

My apologies for being so late with this. My only excuse is that the music notation program I'm using is tricky, confusing, endlessly user-unfriendly. To compensate, this post is an unusually long one. 

Music really was different in the Classical period – even the way slurs were played. Fortunately for us, the 18^th century way isn’t hard to pick up and put into practice: and it can make a big difference to the musical result.

      A.  There were two (or sometimes three)
golden rules:


   1.)  The first note under a slur should always be played with 
          a slight emphasis or accent. This obviously implies that
          subsequent notes should be de-emphasized.  
                    (Leopold Mozart also recommended lengthening 
                     the first note and shortening the notes
                     that came after it.)   
     2.)  The last note should be played lightly, and in most 
           cases should also be shortened.
     3.)  The result was a diminuendo across the slurred
           phrase as a whole.


B.   These rules apply especially to the two-note slur, the 'sighing' motif so common in music of the period, whether both notes are the same length (typically two eighth notes or quavers, as in the following example), or the first note is longer than the second, as in example 3.


      The expressive effect of these slurs is due as much to the 
           rests as to the notes. No rests - no emotion!  

              Ex. 1

                        Incidentally, this way of playing two-note slurs remained standard practice well into the nineteenth century. Brahms, for example, insisted on it as late as 1870. Nineteenth-century slurring practices - a complicated business - will be discussed in a later post. 


Slurred notes, in late 18th century music, were the only notes that were played legato - all others (as the previous post indicated) were detached. A slur was thus a special effect, an island of smoothness in a choppy sea of non-legato. Which means that if the slurs are to stand out, the non-slurred ones have to be played in the right way - detached, with gaps between them - without any half-suppressed desire for legato!


C.  Long slurs

                       These are unusual in music of the Classical period. The vast majority of Mozart’s slurs are less than a bar (measure) in length; most of them start and finish within the same bar.

                       When a longer slur does appear, it should be played (on stringed instruments) with a single bow stroke and in the standard way, with a slight emphasis on the first note and an easing off or shortening on the last note. 


Ex. 2      Mozart, Divertimento for string trio, K. 563/i

                                           

                       But very long slurs, especially in rapid passages, should be treated with suspicion. In nearly all cases they were added by nineteenth century editors of Mozart's music who didn’t think twice about imposing their own un-Classical stylistic preferences on the works of the Master. The same warning applies to the term ‘legato’, which was much bandied about by later editors but which may never have been used by Mozart himself. If you’re playing from an older edition, it’s a good idea to check it against the standard critical texts in the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, which fortunately is freely accessible online:                 

      http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/nma/start.php?l=2.

          

                       The chamber works are in Series VIII.

D.  Consecutive short slurs         

            In chamber music, at least, these were not very frequent; nor were they often discussed in eighteenth century treatises and teaching manuals. Mozart does use them occasionally in his piano works, where they've set off a lively and most revealing debate as to how they should be played.

                      The ‘traditional’ (in fact, twentieth century) approach was to treat a series of short slurs as a single long slur. Composers, according to this view, actually intended long continuous slurs, but printers for some reason found these technically difficult to produce and used short ones instead.

                       More recently, however, historically informed performers and musicologists have challenged that view, arguing that short slurs should be played as short slurs and not combined or accumulated. The debate over the following example, from one of Mozart’s piano sonatas (K. 332, now dated to the early 1780s), gives an idea of what’s at stake.  (The bass clef is omitted.)        

            Ex. 3      Mozart, Piano sonata in F, K. 332/i  

                            

            Artur Schnabel, by general consent one of the greatest pianists of the first half of the last century, was a leading advocate of the traditional approach. In this passage his advice to his students (as one of them later recalled) was that the right hand should emphasize the third beat of each bar, ‘to keep the long line going and to deliver it gently into the following downbeat with no audible bump’ (quoted by Malcolm Bilson in ‘Execution and expression in the Sonata in E flat, K 282’, Early Music (May 1992), p. 243).

           What’s wrong with that? The answer comes from Bilson himself. (Who has played and recorded Mozart’s piano music on period instruments and is a major figure in the period performance movement.) The Schnabel approach, he points out, is anachronistic and totally at odds with proper Mozartian style. What Mozart would have intended was that the stress in each bar should fall on the first note, and that the second note should be ‘shorter and weaker’, thus giving the passage, and much of the movement as a whole, a ‘strong sense of lilt’. Schnabel's line - or Mozart's lilt? (I know which I prefer.) 

                   Incidentally, Bilson also remarks that that shortest note in bar 4 is the quarter note.   

                    Critics of the traditional approach also point out that there is no support for it in eighteenth century sources – the countless treatises, musical dictionaries and teaching manuals of the time. The reason why composers didn’t write long slurs was simply that they didn’t want them. Classical style was based on small units, detached articulation, and crisp phrasing: if long slurs are inflicted on music of this kind, they flatten it, homogenize it, and spoil its character.              

                     The main conclusion for performers is to play each slur in the proper way, with a slight accent at the beginning and a lightening and shortening at the end - not because this is historically ‘correct’ but because it really does sound better!

How to play Mozart: articulation

How to play Mozart

We know how hard it is to play Mozart. That’s not usually because of technical difficulties, though certain passages can be testing for amateurs, but because the music is so exposed, and seems to demand nothing less than perfection: one false accent and an entire phrase is spoiled. The good news is that there are practical things we can do to improve our Mozart playing in spite of our technical limitations. The secret lies in period (or ‘historically informed’) performance: playing his music in something of the style he had in mind when he wrote it. And there is in fact a lot of evidence on this. The book on violin playing by Mozart’s father was only one of many such treatises and teaching manuals; musicologists who have studied these (and other contemporary sources) give us a remarkably detailed picture of late eighteenth century performance practice.

What emerges is a way of playing that in some respects is very different from the way most of us were taught (and from the performance practice of most current professional players). Fortunately, it isn't too hard to pick up some of the standard 18th century practices - and not nearly as hard as acquiring a perfect spiccato or fingered octaves. And they can make a big difference. Playing the music of Mozart (and of Haydn and early Beethoven) in the style of the late 18^th century - rather than in the style of the late 19^th or late 20^th - can be a revelation. The basic elements of that style are well known to period performance specialists: in this blog I would like to introduce them to everyone who plays Mozart’s music and would like to play it more idiomatically and expressively.

Articulation

In late 18^th century music the norm was non-legato.That means that notes should be played
shorter thanwritten,with ‘separation between them’.

The rule also applies to any note before a rest. (And to slurs as well which will be discussed in the next post.)

(Apologies for this abnormally long measure: I'm still on the learning curve with the music notation program.)

Legato, by contrast, was a special ‘expressive effect’. Notes should be played legato only when they’re slurred.

Legato became more common at the end of the 18th century and wasstandard – though not universal – in the 19th century. When the word ‘legato’ appears in Mozart’s music it was almost certainly put there by some later editor, not by Mozart himself. It reflects musical taste as it developed in the Romantic period and is alien to the music of Mozart’s own time.

Joining non-slurred notes or phrases to form a seamless ‘long line’ is a 19th century mannerism that is completely out of place in themusic of the late 18th century.

About the Chamber Music Coach

        (This is a re-run of the blog's first post  - the mission 

        statement - which somehow fell by the wayside and

        drifted away into the blogosphere. So here it is again.)                    

This is a blog for amateur musicians who play chamber music and would like to play it better. I don’t mean technically: I leave the technical nitty-gritty to teachers. What I have in mind is playing the pieces we play more musically – with more expression, deeper understanding, a better sense of style. The good news is that this need not involve huge effort: those of us who have had good coaching know that small adjustments and refinements can make a big musical difference. I hasten to say that I’m not a coach: I’m an amateur player myself. But for quite a few years now I've been collecting tips, advice, and information from coaches, professional players and other experts on playing string quartets, piano trios and other works in the mainstream chamber music repertoire between 1750 and 1900. And so the purpose of this blog is simply to pass on that material to amateur players who play these great works.

The contents of the blog are drawn from quite a wide variety of sources: master classes, coaching sessions in chamber music courses, recordings and live performances, program notes, books by and about leading professional chamber ensembles, scores and teaching manuals from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and modern musicological research – not to mention the ever-intriguing YouTube. There will also be the occasional suggestion – clearly labelled! – based on my own experience as an amateur player.

The blog has four main strands. The first is detailed practical advice – bowings, fingerings, phrasing, etc - on how to play particular passages in particular pieces. The second strand involves period performance. Quite a lot is now known about how Mozart’s music (for example) was played in his own time – how the composer himself would have expected to hear it played. One of the aims of the blog is to introduce some of the specific performance practices from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and suggest how we can make use of them in our own playing. This ‘historically informed’ approach has revolutionized the performance of earlier music: it also has a great deal to offer, as those who have tried it have found, to the performance of music of the post-1750 period. In the third strand my aim is to make available useful material from academic musicologists. Though their work isn’t very well known, even to professional musicians, it can be extremely helpful. Structural analyses of particular pieces, though sometimes over-elaborate, can be eye- and ear-openers; we can also benefit from up-to-date biographical and other background material. The last strand consists simply of occasional nuggets of musical wisdom that have come my way and seem worth passing on. Such as this piece of advice (relayed by Arnold Steinhardt in his own blog) from Jascha Heifetz: ‘Practice like it means everything in the world to you. Perform like you don’t give a damn.’