Music Video Lesson: How Much Freedom Is There in Musical Performance?

I'm Robert Estrin, this is LivingPianos.com asking the question, how much freedom is there in musical performance? If you listen to the same piece by different performers on the piano or any other instrument, you'll find dramatically different ideas of interpretation.

And you wonder then, how much do you have to be faithful to the score, and how much can you just take off and do what you want to do? And the answer may surprise you.

In fact, it's important that if somebody was listening to a piece of music written by a great composer, and they had great ears, and were transcribing it note for note, they should have the same score that the composer wrote with every last detail.

Does that mean that every performance would be the same? No, surprisingly, because you can execute every detail of the score in different ways to indicate what is written.

And different people have different ideas how to achieve that. I'm going to give you a great example today, which is Debussy. Now Debussy being an impressionist composer, French composer from early 20th century, and his music was very wash of colors and sounds, and yet it's important to have the clarity of what is intended in the score come out in your performance. And yet there is more than one way to do that. So I'm going to let you hear and see how to approach such a thing. Now for example, sometimes there are double stem notes. You've seen that in your music? You have a note and the stem going down, the stem going up, you wonder what's going on? Why is that two stems? Well that note is part of two different lines of music.

It may be a sixteenth note and an eighth note at the same time. Or it could be a quarter note and an eighth note. And one voice is going one way, one voice is going the other way, because of course on the piano you can play more than one note at a time, which of course you know. So sometimes voices overlap and they both hit the same note at the same time. And the composer wants you to understand that and project that in the performance. And it can create different sounds. So in Debussy's Children's Corner Suite, in Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, the first movement, there are double stem notes. Interestingly, it starts off in the third measure with double stemmed eighth notes with staccatos, which are also sixteenth notes on the bottom.

And you might wonder what the heck is going on here? And what makes it even stranger is that starting in the fifth measure, then you've got quarter notes with four quarter notes plus there are four groups of sixteenth notes. So I'm going to play from the beginning and you can hear one way to execute this to be able to bring out this idea.

Interesting, isn't it? So first you have the double stemmed staccato eighth notes. So you want to have this, then the quarter notes.

Now I'm going to do it without the pedal to show you that I'm delineating with my fingers, although the pedal can be of great help here as well.

Ideally you do as much as you possibly can with your fingers and then use the pedal to make it even more, even smoother.

And that's just one example where the composer wants to have different lines of music and it's up to you as a performer to find a way to execute it to create the effect.

Notice on the seventh measure you have the same pattern twice, but the first time with the crescendo de crescendo, then without it.

And again, and there's all kinds of subtle phrasing, double stems, inner lines, expression, crescendos, and you know what I have found over the years is that if you really learn the precision of where the crescendos start and end, exactly how many notes are slurred, the double stem note values and you delineate all the minutia of the score, it brings it to life.

Now having said that, be sure that you're not working with a heavily edited edition where you're not following the markings of the composer but the editor, because the editor may or may not have great ideas, but you should always know what the composer had in mind with an urtext edition, one that is not edited or one that has editing marks clearly indicated coming from the editor rather than the composer.

That way you'll understand, you'll get in the head of the composer and get an idea of the concept of what they really are after and those small details all come together to really mold a great performance. So that's the answer. You can indeed follow the inclinations of the composer and do so by the conviction of how you believe that music can best be expressed with the ideas of the composer.

I hope this is helpful for you. Any contrasting or supporting ideas, leave them in the comments here at LivingPianos.com. We've got over 1500 articles here at LivingPianos.com and you can add to the voice because there are comments on these articles and accompanying videos. You'll love it. Check it out. We'll see you next time again. Robert Estrin, thanks again so much for your support.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/how-much-freedom-is-there-in-musical-performance/

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