Room for Interpretation?

Simple Howard. Instead of a score, read your question out loud. Change the emphasised words, pause and linger and stress different words and you'll see the meaning change. Result, everything written down is open to interpretation.
Alternatively, get five different recordings of a short piece out of your local library and listen. All will be revealed.

Cheers

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Originally posted by BigH47:
the question of how a piece of classical music, which has the timing(signsture/key), notes and even the speed(tempo) can have different "interpretations"?

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Speed isn't given in bpm, and it's one of the most frequently fiddled with aspects. Compare a Klemperer take on Betthoven 6 to, well, just about anybody else and this is quite clear as he's positively pedestrian compared to many. I guess he found it suited the music, and it certainly suits me!

But best advice is just listen to a pile of different recordings of the same piece and note the differences. If you listen to R3's "Building a Library" on Saturday then they go through a set of recordings of something you might want to get with samples from each different recording at various points in the piece, saying what's going on and why they feel it's good or not. It's quite a good illustration.

Pete.

Thanks guys for the replies.
I thought I was being ignored!

If I understand then ,the "instructions" ie the score is not absolute. Tempo is not a fixed rate then (bpm) but surely the other aspects are fixed, after all its a mathmatical thing.
It appears some interpretations change more than just the speed of playing.
The analogy of reading with varing pace etc does not work because there are no "parameters" stated.
Music is ratios or fractions and therefore should always be the same note and always be the same length and pitch?

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And then there are organists who improvise every Sunday in church.

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When I "improvise" on the guitar most people say its a mistake.

Surely if a piece is "improvised" it is not what is being advertised and not what the composer intended?

I'll end there and I will try the different pieces by diferent conductors comparison and see what I can deduce.

Regards

Howard (the heathen)

Just orderd a couple of discs from the library LvB Nos1-6 and a No6. I have a couple of other copies of 5 and 6 on vinyl as well.
Will report back sometime.

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Incidently Beethoven was one of the first to use metronome marks and was very strict about them yet quite often they are ignored.

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Isn't that what I was saying the composers right and the recordists wrong?

Howard

Before the nineteenth century, there was much less separation between the jobs of composer and interpreter in the ‘classical’ world: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were all noted virtuosi and improvisers as well as composers. The role of the musician-composer then was much more akin to Jazz or Indian classical worlds today. A degree of ornamentation, playing extra notes to those on the written score, was expected of musicians well into the nineteenth century. Pre-nineteenth century scores often have little in the way of tempo, dynamics or other indication of how the piece should go. No-one expected the notes to be played without a considerable degree of help or interpretation by the performer. Since then, composers and performers have evolved into separate species (with a few exceptions) and composers have given increasingly detailed instructions about how to play their pieces. The likes of Conlon Nancarrow did their best to do without performers altogether. (It still hasn't stopped some of them trying.) Even when instructions are left, it is not always transparently clear what is meant. Are Beethoven's metronome markings to be followed as gospel (which hardly anyone does) or did he have a dodgy early model which gave inaccurate readings? People write PhD theses about what is meant by his Sfortzando marking. The upshot of this is there is plenty of room for artistic manoeuvre, especially in early music. This occupies bandwidth, keeps CD sales crawling along, makes concerts something more than going to a museum and gives you something to argue about in the bar afterwards.

duncan

Email: djcritchley at hotmail.com

Thanks again guys I'll do some research and come back to this later.

I assume then it is explicit that it's almost Composer X's 5th symphony on a theme by Beethoven?

Howard (still confused but open to help)

Fredrik

have you thought of taking up conducting?

duncan

Email: djcritchley at hotmail.com

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Originally posted by BigH47:
Isn't that what I was saying the composers right and the recordists wrong?

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Well, if you're playing Bruckner, which of his many revisions of pretty much any of his works really represents what he thought (and with Bruckner we can't just assume the most recent as he was notoriously self-doubting and took on board suggestions from just about anyone he knew about "improving" his work).

Also you have to accept that music will mean different things to different people. The composition as writen down is the basic starting point, but if a conductor and their musicians identify better with a piece played in a slightly different way from the "proper one", and connect to people better as a result, who's to say who's "right"?

This is especially something to think about when you have more options than the composer did. For example, baroque music would have generally been composed for smaller orchestras using less powerful instruments than now available to conducters. Should they use their greater range of available textures or not? The market tells us there's room for both approaches.

Pete.

Fredrik wrote:

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I guess there may some modern music - help me here folks; it's off my listening range really - which does require absolute adherence to every detail of the score, but no music of the classical, or romantic periods, benefits from the approach. It simply becomes tedious and dry.

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I would think that music that has to adhere very strictly would be Film scores where the music is used to support the visual drama and for example has to explode whne something explodes on the screen. Typically of course the performance is overseen by the composer rather than "interpreted" as such.

regards
GEOFF

The boring old fart

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Originally posted by Fredrik Fiske:

I not only have thought about it, I have actually done it...

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I thought you probably had. I'm sure this is stating the bleedin' obvious, but starting something new like this doesn't get any easier as one grows older and I'd think there is only so much one can learn from studying scores. I would encourage you to get on and do it. It seems the logical move and it sounds like you're in a good position to make it happen if you want to.

duncan

Email: djcritchley at hotmail.com