Composing Performances

All too often, critics, historians, and music analysts draw upon the aesthetic and analytic language of composition to describe and account for performed interpretations. This article explores the inequities and challenges that derive from this borrowing of language. Yet a study of Ernst Levy and his recorded performance of Brahms, however, reveals how compositional aesthetics can also be appropriated and repurposed to new creative ends.

Glenn Gould in six scenes

Glenn Gould’s legacy revolves around his retirement from the concert hall in 1964. Studies of his artistry often reflect on that by following a particular impulse: to seek out the rational underpinnings of this decision and to explain them in terms of a larger technological or aesthetic vision. Drawing in particular on the work of Virginia Held and Sara Ahmed, this article conceptualises Gould’s abandonment of the concert hall as an act of self-care, a mechanism for coping with the increasingly intrusive and exploitative celebrity musical culture into which he was catapulted as a young musician. Thus, this article frames Gould’s self-care in terms of six overlapping scenes, as he performed in the concert hall and recording studio, in interviews and essays, and in front of the camera as photographic subject and television actor, culminating with a case study based on an excerpt from Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary Glenn Gould: The Alchemist. The study concludes by suggesting that Gould’s artistic choices (and achievements) had much more to do with cultivating caring relations that allowed him to thrive than they did with an individual pursuit of a grand musical philosophy.

Onset asynchrony in Western art music

Melodic onset asynchrony, whereby the upper or some component of a musical simultaneity may strike the ear ahead of other sounds, is a common feature in the performance of Western art music. It seems to be of high aesthetic value in the history of pianism, often harnessed to the seemingly contradictory “bass lead” that prevailed in the early 20th century, though in fact the two are far from exclusive. Departing from an application of Brent Yorgason’s taxonomy of “hand-breaking” (2009) to canonical, composed examples of onset asynchrony from Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt, we examine timbral, organological, and aesthetic continuities that underly distinct practices of asynchrony. We consider the physical nature of such normally non-notated “microtiming”, ranging in performance from a few ms of melodic onset asynchrony to about 100ms, above which it is generally agreed that even the casual listener may perceive it. A piano-roll recording by Claude Debussy, of “The Little Shepherd”, illustrates the mix of melodic onset asynchrony, bass lead, and apparent simultaneity that may be applied in a single interpretation. We then discuss the concept of “audibility” and the question of to what extent, and in what ways, the combined transients of piano attacks may interact. We consider with reference to 20th century Russian piano pedagogy why onset asynchrony seems to have been a little documented, rather than an explicit playing technique, even though certain sources, such as a 1973 treatise by Nadezhda Golubovskaya, show it to be ubiquitous and well theorised. Finally, regarding the thinking that has predominated in musical performance studies in recent decades, with its emphasis on average practices and “ordinary” listeners, we suggest that a new emphasis will be fruitful, that is, research on what is particular about the embodied creativity of expert musicians.

Understanding expressive intonation

Research on intonation has mainly sought for classifying and/or expressive explanations for performers’ strategies. In the field of music psychology and music perception, such explanations have been explored in terms of interval direction, size, or type; in the field of performance analysis, to which this article belongs, investigation on intonation has been not only scarce but also limited to short excerpts. In this context, this article explores Pau Casals’ intonational practice specific to his recording of Bach’s E flat major prelude for solo cello. To do so, on the basis of exact empirical measurements, it places such practice alongside the cellist’s conscious, theoretical recommendations apropos what he called “expressive” string intonation, showing that the interpretation of the latter should is not straightforward. It also proposes several reference points and tuning systems which could serve as models for Casals’ practice and looks for explanations beyond simple interval classification. In this manner, it ultimately proposes a structural function for intonation, in partnership with tempo and dynamics. Similarly, it understands Casals’ intonational practice not as a choice between but as a compromise for multiple options in tuning systems (mostly equal temperament and Pythagorean tuning), reference points (the fundamental note of the chord and the immediately preceding tone), the nature of the compositional materials (harmonic and melodic), and, most importantly, structure and expression.

Pedal del piano

En muchas ocasiones, a causa de su dificultad en la interpretación pianística, se ha subestimado la importancia de la evolución histórica del pedal y, por tanto, su enorme influencia tras su popularización en el instrumento durante la transición del estilo clásico al romántico, esto es, en la transición de la música de las últimas décadas del siglo XVIII a la del siglo XIX. El mantenimiento de la sonoridad por efecto del pedal de resonancia influyó en el tempo de la música romántica, que se hizo más fluida, incluso, mucho más flexible, principalmente, a causa de un nuevo modelo de articulación, a saber, el legato cantabile, semejante a otro de los fenómenos musicales del momento, la ópera belcantista. Sobre este nuevo paradigma de articulación surgieron, a su vez, nuevos modelos dinámicos y texturales, que desterraban la simplicidad de la melodía acompañada del Clasicismo a favor de esquemas más densos y complicados, que hubieran sido difíciles de imaginar sin la participación de los pedales del piano.