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Overview
An accomplished composer, pianist, writer, and teacher presents an easy and entertaining guide for players at all levels of expertise. Ernst Bacon offers valuable tips on working, listening, and playing habits in five sections that cover "The Performer," "The Learner," "The Player and Writer," "The Observer," and "Technically Speaking." This edition features an informative Introduction by virtuoso pianist and professor Sara Davis Buechner.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486310855 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2013 |
| Series: | Dover Books On Music: Piano |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
NOTES ON THE PIANO
By Ernst Bacon
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-31085-5
CHAPTER 1
Of Interpretation
An artist should never lose sight of the thing as a whole. He who puts too much into details will find that the thread which holds the whole, thing together will break.
F. CHOPIN
Like the actor and the stage director, the interpreter stands as middleman between the writer and his public. All depends on him. The more unique is the work, the more convincing must be its reading. There are canons of originality no less than of conformance, to unsettle which requires the most skillful advocacy. When Chopin sounds badly, the pianist is at fault. But when John Smith's music sounds badly, Smith alone is blamed.
The performing art may represent today a level superior to that of the writing art. As against the anarchic confusion existing in the composing field, the standards in performance are technically higher and more fixed than ever before. Whoever chooses novelty in writing is allowed to be innocent until proven guilty. But in performance, a deviator is adjudged guilty until he proves his innocence. Never before was performance as disciplined as today: never was writing less so.
It was no accident that Chopin included two of his finest nocturnes in his book of etudes. It is interesting that the piano, an instrument of percussion, should have gained so large a share of the literature of melodic music. Quite probably this is because it is capable like no other instrument of combining harmony with melody, is complete in itself, and does not suffer the organ's limitation of tone. The artful grading of the piano's percussive tones, as to length, loudness, timing, delay and haste, and all the relations of melody to accompaniment or countermelody ; these together with pedalling, make possible the piano's illusion of continuous and expressive melody.
The piano's resonance does not stop with the piano itself, as anyone knows who has played out of doors. The entire hall is involved in its vibrations. Since the player cannot remove himself from the origin of his sound, he can hope to hear himself as others hear him only through electrical devices, or by exercise of his imagination. There is every reason to think that the greatest artists have given thought and ear to producing sounds that fill and carry the best in whatever hall is at hand. I have heard Kreisler, alone with his little Guarnerius, fill a colosseum in which a large orchestra tried vainly to conquer its vacuous immensity. One must know the point beyond which the enlargement of tone is not only useless but harmful. The ear of the listener adjusts easily to all levels, and is ready to accept lesser sounds as climactic, so long as they are proportioned to other sounds. Segovia's unamplified guitar will prove this. It is quality that carries where quantity fails; the imagination defeating decibels.
Any extreme; of slow or fast, rough or smooth, soft or loud, goes with a heightened tension. Middle ground is middle effort. The lazy player can no more achieve a pianissimo than a fortissimo, a largo than a presto. There is nothing more demanding than a sustained slow tempo unless it be an expressive dolcissimo. Alexander Raab remarked that Toscanini showed his age, in his vigorous middle eighties, only in that the tempos of his slow movements were not quite so slow as before. If there is one trait common to all great interpreters, it is their capacity for intensification. There are many ways to achieve intensity, dictated by the music; but whether explosive, impassioned, eloquent or restrained, intensity will always be felt as a mark of inner energy.
Without this intensity, the listener never more than half listens. But when it is there, his attention is drawn in ratio to the player's concentration ; he feels what the player communicates, on whatever level it may be.
We are content if the singer is master of but one category of singing. Thus we designate the voice as lyric, dramatic, coloratura and the like. But the pianist is expected to be all of these, and his preparation embraces all styles. In point of fact, his best gifts are as circumscribed as those of the singer; and by confining himself to his own special sphere of playing he may surpass those who essay to do all. A full mastery of but one idiom may represent more breadth than a versatile, and necessarily shallower, proficiency in all idioms. There is breadth in depth, no less than depth in breadth. Some travel most profitably at home.
Nevertheless, the discovery of what is one's own special sphere of music should not be hastened; rather it should grow out of a wide range of trial and effort, particularly among those of student age. It is best to settle down after one has seen something of the world.
Great virtuosity should not be made an absolute condition of a pianist's acceptance as artist, any more than mere power, range, or skill in fioritura, on the part of the singer. He may have exceptional tonal, melodic, coloristic, or imaginative qualities which deserve acclaim, the more so in an age in which facility has become common currency.
The whole rule of rubato is grace. Every increase and decrease of tempo has to do with the demands of declamation: phrasing, words (if any), accents, rests, harmony, and all the idiosyncrasies of instruments (such as the crossing of strings in the violin, breathing in the winds, securing the pedal base in the piano, allowing for extended leaps, and other undue manual difficulties). The rubato has also to do with the dimension of a work, a large work normally concluding with a longer allargando, for example, than a small one, just as a freight train takes longer to come to a stop than a motor car. An abruptness is allowable only when it is meaningful. A jerky or irregular increase or decrease in tempo is a misdemeanor, and reveals an insecurity of control, as with an adult who cannot walk steadily. Some music is all rubato, as is much of Puccini. Other music comes as close as is humanly possible to metronomic regularity, as does nearly all dance music, which expresses the body's pleasure in a regular, measured movement.
The declamation of music seldom permits the hastening of a beat, but is continually calling for delay. A delay calls attention to itself and is, in some degree, emphatic. On the piano this delay is mostly effected with both hands together, but sometimes it takes the form of the melody note following its chord, or accompaniment. This latter has the effect of warming the tone, as with an imaginary vibrato, or else it suggests the singer's portamento. But a continuous delaying of melody notes can easily become a sentimentality or mannerism.
Embellishments stemming from a time before they were written out are a large subject, best studied in C. P. E. Bach, Quantz and Leopold Mozart. The pianist of today is not obliged to abide literally by the instructions of these masters, conceived as they were for other times, tastes and instruments; but he should learn them before permitting himself liberties. The modern piano, differing from its predecessors in power, sustainment of tone and pedal, poses new approaches. In general, it invites less decoration, and tends toward simplification, just as the more powerful orchestra and the organ of earlier times were treated more simply than the fragile and voluble clavichord or harpsichord.
To preserve the spirit of embellishment may require a deviation from the letter.
The quality of a turn tells me a great deal about an interpreter. A first-class carpenter should also be a first-class cabinet-maker, and shows his craft in the delicacy no less than the doughtiness of his structures. Elizabeth Schumann could make the littlest turn in, say, Schubert's "Litanei" a moment of sheerest poetry. Some pianists of otherwise large abilities can make a turn seem like a footnote.
Dullness, remarked Liszt, is the cardinal sin of performance. Nothing contributes to this more than the ostentation of learning, whereby a player will emphasize and sometimes exaggerate structural details, phrasings and dynamics, in a spirit of zealous didacticism or reform. He imagines that the listener is more interested in a work's wiring and plumbing than in its purpose and poetry. The homiletic virtuoso has been made very fashionable of late. It becomes more important that the public distinguish between the Baroque and the Biedermeier than that it should be awed by what Schopenhauer described as Beethoven's power to "thunder on the flute," or be allowed to overhear, in Laotzu's words, "stone growing on a cliff."
As in all else, accents are purely relative, and proportioned to that which surrounds them. Almost anything very sudden is an accent, even a sudden drop in tone. There are accents by expectation (mostly as a result of sequential patterns), and there are accents by surprise. An accent is like a cliff in the landscape.
Not many know how to play a true piano bass. It is not enough to pedal it clean; it must be savored. Paderewski gave us to hear the noble snarl of a Steinway bass. Koussevitzky had a special ear for deep sounds in the orchestra. Rachmaninoff understood basses. The piano bass has a masculine ring, and is the nearest thing we have to the ancient gongs of China. Its dignity will not be hastened. Given the pedal, it picks up a family of overtones and, grandfather-like, it resolves all the high-pitched contending sounds into harmoniousness, through its common ancestral bond.
The experienced pianist will mostly underplay, however slightly, his biggest moments. Giving all, has the effect of over-playing, and gives away the secret of power, whose limit is never fully known to the listener, when it is not fully revealed. Monadnock, wrapped in a cap of clouds, could be the Grand Teton.
While an older author occasionally would write beyond his instruments, in range, power, sustainment, or character, anticipating developments beyond his time, the nature of music was, of course, largely determined by the instruments of the day. This knowledge should affect our present interpretation of older works. A Mozart or a Scarlatti forte is not a Brahms forte, and deserves to be played crisply rather than weightily. Similarly, in pedalling, the earlier music should eschew too large sonorities, particularly on accented chords, when followed by their own arpeggiations, in which the rapid separate pulsations deserve more definition than the chords and basses from which they are generated. The lack of sustainment of the early instruments automatically took care of this.
Beethoven introduced orchestral quality, as well as new power, into the piano. In performing his music, the player, unlike the conductor who drives his orchestra to achieve its utmost in sound and fury, must learn to temper his exertions within the limits of physical elasticity. It requires but a few moments of playing to the full, to tire the hand or the wrist beyond the point where its sensitivity may be recovered. When music invites the extremes of power, the player must let elan take the place of brute force.
Much music after Beethoven poses similar problems of a power-level which, if literally sustained, would exhaust the player. It is as with the distance runner who may, through tempering his speed by only the littlest fraction, sustain his pace over a long period—while if he drives himself to the limit for only a moment, he cannot hope to survive the race.
The tendency to hasten a crescendo and retard a diminuendo is universal. If all other disciplines fail in overcoming this fault, one may consciously practice to exaggeration the contrary; that is, deliberately retard the rising, and accelerate the falling sound. The discipline of ensemble is another corrective.
The player should consider that in all speech, an increasing emphasis calls for added deliberation, and that a relaxation of mood brings an easing of pace, which is, after such deliberation, a tempo increase.
"A really good playwright," says Frank O'Connor, "will give you a part that you can do with what you like." Now, as a reaction to the license of the past, we hog-tie the interpreter with the fetish of "fidelity to the score," and as a result, we have an art as static as was the former extravagant. This new idolomania of the composer is the more fatuous since he is in effect today on the bottom rung of the importances. Music is not served by enslaving one of its parties to another. Of course the performer serves the author; but whom does the author serve, if not the performer?
Tension, so easily achieved by the voice or the strings, is created on the piano mainly through certain discreet exaggerations, as between melody and accompaniment, or between louder and softer, or with rubati, or with the holding or delaying of tones, as often called for in pedalling. Tension is often achieved by a high degree of precision.
Not to invest music with a sentiment which is not there is as important as to give music the sentiment it already has. Sounds have their bleak and barren moments, their treeless, shrubless, waterless areas, that call for the chilly, or the dry, or the expressionless. In these is often a gray comfort, deeper than can be supplied by the warmest opulence. An arctic solitude offers sometimes the best solace. Must we blow over such a scene the sensuous vibrato of the strings, or try to relieve its coldness with a rich, warm piano tone, or invade its frozen-ness with shimmering flute sounds, by which the player thinks to bring the feathered creatures of the air? Why not let cold music sing its coldness?
The rubato is not only inseparably tied together with music's declamation, but is a part of all instrumental athleticism. Extreme rapidity calls sometimes for a running start, which is to say, a rubato of acceleration. This is where the orchestra differs from the solo instrument; for the art of orchestration will always provide the most dexterous instruments for rapid passages, and not burden these with obstacles before they enter on their assignment of brilliance. A taxing orchestral work, well scored, is full of brief recesses for every group. The pianist, being an entire orchestra himself, enjoys no such respites, and must compensate for their lack with occasional freedoms of tempo. Like the hurdler or obstacle racer, he cannot maintain the sprinter's unvaried pace.
I observe the nature of a crescendo: whether it is continuous or interrupted; whether it is controlled or casual; whether it climbs at a steady pitch, or follows a steepening curve, or else a lessening one; whether its climax is gentle or precipitate. All these curves have their counterparts in the profiles of hills and mountains. The diminuendo has these same variants in reverse, and it by no means follows that the fall must have the same curve as the rise. It is only the volcano that is symmetrical in cross section.
Toscanini had the faculty of controlling rising and falling lines of sound. Therein lay much of his power. His was a gift of simplification, of almost abstracting music to its topographic and climatic essentials. His powers showed the greatest on the highest ranges of music. Thus he was supreme in Beethoven, in Verdi, in Brahms and in Wagner, all masters of grand tonal topography. It takes a man to stand up to such men.
The nature of a staccato remains an ever unsettled question. Doubtless, had Thomas Edison had his way, musical notation in this, as in other respects, would have achieved more exactitude. But Edison was a man of genius with machines, and not the arts, and could not possibly understand the advantage an art enjoys in being put not too literally on record. Music will have to meet the changing needs of instruments, tastes, capacities and uses, in the future. The guesswork of each generation as regards the intentions of previous generations makes the study of older works more interesting than were they corralled in sterner rules of action. One of the good things in Shakespeare is that he left us no rules whatever.
All we can say about dotted notes is that they are meant to be detached, but as to how much, there is no clue. String players and conductors are little agreed as between the short staccato on the string and that with the bouncing bow. Staccatos on the piano may be plucked off the key, in the manner of a pizzicato; they may be rapped, either from the wrist or the finger, or they may be played in any degree of detaché, with a rebounding wrist, pointedly or yieldingly, or anything in between. Some music uses dots over notes which are also connected by slurs or with the pedal, indicating a connected sound with unconnected motions.
Between all these possibilities, the player must decide, whether guided by editings, traditions, the example of others, or his own preferences. Let him take consolation in his uncertainty, in the thought that any choice is better than none, and will justify itself by virtue of consistency.
Sporadic pedallings during staccatos need discretion, inasmuch as they produce a resonance sharply in contrast with the unpedalled staccatos.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from NOTES ON THE PIANO by Ernst Bacon. Copyright © 2011 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Dedication,
Copyright Page,
Introduction to the Dover Edition,
Introductory,
THE PERFORMER,
i - Of Interpretation,
ii - Of Melody,
iii - Of Form and Style,
TECHNICALLY SPEAKING,
iv - Of the Hands,
v - Of the Fingers,
vi - Of the Pedals,
THE LEARNER,
vii - Of Study,
viii - Of Teaching,
ix - Of Schools,
THE PLAYER AND WRITER,
x - Of Performance and the Public,
xi - Of Ensemble and Accompaniment,
xii - Of Authorship,
THE OBSERVER,
xiii - Of the Environment,
xiv - Commonplaces,