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II: Technique as Touch
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
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o 00 Technique as Touch Among the misguided reasons for playing an early instrument is the intent to do a demonstration, as though dressing in its clothes will bring the past to life. Music making is not historical reenactment. An early piano should be used only as a medium to conjure up the spirit within the music. The Spirit of Sf. Louis, like the Concorde, enabled a person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Lindbergh, however, flew without the aid of sophisticated instrument systems, depending upon his skill and endurance. He came to know, as we cannot, the awesomeness of transatlantic distance and the elements, as well as the possibility for disaster. Playing an early piano, though not life-threatening, also requires an exercise of judgment and skill. Lacking the resources of the modern piano, the player is responsible for believable dynamic levels and sensuous tone quality. When listeners remark that the period piano enabled them to hear the music for the first time, what they heard was the stimulus of the instrument to the player's imagination and ingenuity. In Beethoven, the player's involvement extends to the expressiveness of physical effort as well. As the historic piano is forced beyond the limits of its sonority , the music itself sounds more imposing. Because of the lesser sonority and the change in character from one register to another (as opposed to the homogenizing of sound on the modern piano); expressive details become as personal as words whispered directly in the ear of a single listener. In program notes for a New York recital on which he used a clavichord, a harpsichord , an early piano, and a modern piano, Ralph Kirkpatrick compared playing The Sounds of Involvement 10 Mozart on the modern piano to walking "lace-beruffled" on eggs; it is, he wrote, as though one were to look thn;mgh the wrong end of opera glasses and see the singers as pygmies on the stage. An early piano, he continued, its intimacy and nuance inherited from the clavichord and clarity and declamatory quality from the harpsichord , reveals "life-size" Mozart, there being no need to restrain the normal sound of the instrument, as one might playing a modern piano. Just as opera glasses reveal lines in the individual actor's face, the sound of the early piano makes it seem that we are walking shoulder to shoulder with Mozart, and that we can speak to him and he to us. Playing Beethoven (or Mozart of Haydn) on a piano of the period teaches that the technique required is primarily a control of touch, revealing infinite variety within the basic elements of piano sound, which is to say, intensity and duration. The notation of Classic keyboard scores may be compared to the dots and lines and spaces in the engraving on paper currency, representing a precise calculation of pressure and duration in the fingertips that communicates musical ideas equally precisely. The fingertip must know the sensuousness of sound before the ear hears it. Ultimately, playing is an integration of mind and muscles in which hear tone and feel touch becomes hear touch and feel tone. The content of the present chapter and the four that follow is not intended as a discussion of performance practice. For that, the reader is referred to Sandra Rosenblum 's monumental Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music.' The examples have two purposes, to illustrate the subtlety of Classic scores and to speculate on the role of that subtlety in interpretation. Exx. 2.1 through 2.27 illustrate this notational precision in single notes; of these, Exx. 2.1 through 2.14 relate to intensity and the remainder to duration. The fp over the opening chord of the Pathetique (Ex. 2.1), separating a single sound into two dynamic levels, is an orchestral effect, as befits a piano sonata with symphonic pretensions. (The subtitle is, after all, Grande Sonate Pathetique.) Since piano sound, once produced, cannot be altered, the effect is comparable to splitting a musical atom to release its emotional force. No other sonata of the thirty-two begins in just this manner, the fp chord like the reeling of consciousness before a tragic situation. Although possible with an immediate release of the chord synchronized with a quick pedal change, the effect is also risky. Instead of a diminished C-minor chord, the player may be left with no sound at all. We cannot be certain that the composer himself would have tried to produce this...