Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Details, details. As important as it is to get the general idea of a piece of music it is the details that stick in one's craw. They certainly bothered me as a youngster, particularly those pesky chromatic alterations Mozart inserted in all the wrong places. I disliked them to the point of "correcting" them. No one stopped me, so what difference could it possibly make?

I notice when a student trips over details because it shows that the student is reacting to their specificity. This often means that I have to make the effort to go into the probable cause for these improbable musical events. I have benefited greatly from this effort and so has Rachmaninoff, the composer du jour.