• Home
  • About
    • What’s going on here
    • Kyle Gann
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

PostClassic

Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Up to the Performer

Pianist extraordinaire Sarah Cahill, whose browser somehow won’t let her interact with Arts Journal comments pages, nevertheless chimes in on the dynamics issue:

Leo Ornstein… was an excellent pianist himself, and wrote fabulously for the piano.  But most of his piano scores have absolutely no dynamic markings whatsoever.  He believed that it was the pianist’s responsibility to come up with dynamics in the process of interpretation.  It’s so interesting, because there will be a passage which to one person is a climax, to be played forte, and to another person it will be an opportunity to back off and have it be more powerful as a pianissimo passage.  So his scores can be played in a variety of ways, and it’s fascinating to hear different performances.

…[W]hen a piece leaves dynamics out, it makes us as performers explore it in an entirely different way.  We can’t rely on superficial expression (playing dynamic markings as notated), we have to dig deeper and get to the heart of the piece to figure out what’s going on, how to best interpret it, and how dynamics figure into that interpretation.  It can be a more satisfying experience.

Not that everyone should compose the way Ornstein did – but if someone’s imagination works that way, why shouldn’t he be allowed to do it? How did conformity become such a cherished attribute among composers? And I can’t resist re-quoting the following note that Ellen Zwilich appended to her Lament for piano of 1999, a warning that Chopin would have found ludicrously obvious, but that today’s notation neuroses have made necessary:

Throughout, whether the passage is marked liberamente or not, the performer should feel free to ‘sculpt’ the rhythm and dynamics for expressive purposes in order to give a spontaneous, improvisatory quality to the piece. It would be ideal if no two performances were exactly alike.

What’s going on here

So classical music is dead, they say. Well, well. This blog will set out to consider that dubious factoid with equanimity, if not downright enthusiasm [More]

Kyle Gann's Home Page More than you ever wanted to know about me at www.kylegann.com

PostClassic Radio The radio station that goes with the blog, all postclassical music, all the time; see the playlist at kylegann.com.

Recent archives for this blog

Archives

Sites to See

American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)

Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects

Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station

New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking

The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross

William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer

Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation

Eve Beglarian's Home Page- great Downtown composer

David Doty's Just Intonation site

Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site

The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer

Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues

Return to top of page

an ArtsJournal blog

This blog published under a Creative Commons license