Pitch Continuity and Rests

Whether playing Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert on the piano apparent phrase endings indicated by slurs and by rests are often not really endings but rather deceptive suspensions of continuing resonance.  How often do these composers use exactly the same sonority on both sides of a rest or a phrasing indication?  Surely it is a matter of an interruption rather than an end and a fresh beginning.  This could only have occurred to them because of the relative ringing of the instrument when compared to the harpsichord or clavichord. 

Modern readers see a rest and they stop their ears.

Haydn Sonatas - a New Series Begins in February

This morning I was reminded of why I used to hate Haydn so much that I threw out every bit of his music that I owned at the time.  It was a matter of the beginning a sonata in D in which the composer leaves everything up to the imagination of the listener.  Nothing rhythmic is clearly spelled out for the first fifteen bars or so.   It is hilarious.

Not so when required beginning freshman repertoire at the conservatory where I was a student 50+ years ago and  "Pound out the down beats" was the order of the day.  One thing was clear: no one would voluntarily play that repertoire.

But that is not the repertoire.

Moderato, this time in Beethoven after all

Playing through Beethoven's Sonata for Piano and Horn, Op. 17 (with natural horn, of course)  my attention was drawn to the designation "moderato" for the first and last movements.  But I reported last week that Alfred Einstein found that Beethoven did not use the term.  A bit of research into the Beethovenhaus archives showed that he did, indeed, use the term!

Fascinating that it is in a piece for the highly vocal natural (i.e., valveless) horn.

Allowing the word to enable stretchings of the beat from time to time utterly transformed the sonata, not only making it easier to play, but making it deeper on every level and in every respect.

Support the Blog!

From time to time I remind you, dear readers, that free is not.  I invite you to support this endeavor: see www.tonalrefraction.net to learn how.  And thanks.

Listeners' Wisdom

Performing in an intimate space allows room for listeners to come into dialogue with me, with each other, with the music  Several candid listener insights after the first Schubert performance have had great effect on the ensuing work.  So my thanks to listeners.

As an activity listening is too under-appreciated.

Last night I dreamed of listening so intensely personal and yet so shared that it sparked reactions like those of a stadium crowd reacting to a thrilling touchdown.  (I haven't watched a football game for decades but somehow the memory remains of that roar in response to a manoeuvre I did not in the slightest grasp.)

Can You Tap This?

Sorry for the pun: It just slipped out.

Thinking about upbeats and downbeats, as I do a great deal of the time, brings to mind the many instances in which a composer combines rhythmically ambiguous material with fermatas (as does Schubert in the B-flat Sonata, so much on my mind of late).   Having the same sonority on both sides of a bar line is one way to obscure the down-beat.  Ending a phrase with rests and a fermata further obscures matters, especially if you take the fermata to mean that a period of time must elapse such that the listener has no idea whether the next sound is a down- or an up-beat (cf. my definition of fermata in What Might it Mean? An Uncommon Glossary of Musical Terms and Concepts for the Stuck, Bored, and Curious).

There are two schools of thought on the subject one maintaining that the downbeat as notated must be audible at all costs and in all cases, the other, finding this predictability to be conducive to physical and mental torpor, avoiding it like the plague.

"Just Because You Can Doesn't Mean You Should"

The title is borrowed from one of Rachelle Garniez's new songs (written for Catherine Russell) and might well be applied to the great compositions for solo piano or any other type of music routinely assigned to music students before they can tell that there is a difference between a floor and a ceiling.

This really happened:  A honking car horn clearly meant that someone was trying to attract my attention as I walked along Broadway on the West Side.  When I went to see what he wanted the beckoning driver asked, "Which way is up?"