Recently I heard a brilliant lecture on the subject of Rhetoric as the basis for the education of everyone who received any kind of formal schooling until, well, probably until the Industrial Revolution. The basic principle behind Rhetoric could be summed up in two words, delivered this morning by my extraordinary young adult student working on reading: Avoid monotony!
Monotony seems to have become the very thing pedagogues relied upon to get material across, otherwise how to explain what has been made of the Clementi Sonatina in C, especially the Vivace movement!
Today we worked on that one: Every sight-reading "error" made by my student signaled some truly exceptional compositional device that can only have been planted there to elicit a response just like his:
The two opening sixteenths are NOT slurred to the notes following.
The two repeated eighths are definitely a conundrum: which is the more important?
The boring left hand part is a call to action if ever there was one.
The dissonances in bar 3 likewise.
And so on it went. Paid strict attention to, the movement becomes a source of hilarity in the power of details such as precise releases, and the mandate that what looks like a repeat has to be a variation.
