(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.’
