Bach: To Vibrate Or NOT To Vibrate?

[Stephen Fine]

1 hour ago, violinnewb said:

Stephen, is this the lady who plays bare footed?  I think I like her style...so...different.

She's the one.

I heard a couple days ago from a friend who went on her Death and the Maiden tour and said it was the "greatest two weeks" of her life. I've been stewing in jealousy ever since.

[violinnewb]

53 minutes ago, Stephen Fine said:

She's the one.

I heard a couple days ago from a friend who went on her Death and the Maiden tour and said it was the "greatest two weeks" of her life. I've been stewing in jealousy ever since.

I have watched her Tzigane and rather liked it.  It was over the top but I liked it.  I wouldn't play it like she did, nor the Beethoven (if I could ever finish learning it), but I can see what she is trying to accomplish in terms of relaying her emotions.  Imagine Janis Joplin doing covers of Christian hymns...that is my take.  

[Bill Merkel]

On 8/25/2020 at 1:19 PM, Stephen Fine said:

I'm not sure what you mean when you say he wants his orchestra to sound like an orchestra from 50 years ago.  Which orchestras?  His recording with Viktoria Mullova of the Beethoven Violin Concerto is a prime example of how HIPP has "improved" performance.  That recording is mind-blowing.  (Hard to believe that Patricia Kopatchinskaja's Beethoven can be so completely different and yet I would argue it is also HIPP.)

what i mean is he is a lot more indistinguishable from pre-hipp orchestras than his predecessors and some of his colleagues.  but anyway i have this sickening feeling gardiner/mullova is little like a performance from beethoven's time.  as we deal with composers closer to the 20th century we have actual old recordings as clues.  i think this is to make some money, which is ok. 

i enjoy pat kop a lot too, but i think all characters depicted in this work are purely fictional and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental

 

[Stephen Fine]

On 8/26/2020 at 6:23 PM, Bill Merkel said:

i have this sickening feeling gardiner/mullova is little like a performance from beethoven's time. 

I just don't understand this mindset.  It's overly skeptical.

Any performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto is ALREADY extremely similar to a performance from Beethoven's time.  No matter the performer.  We are using the same score, the same instruments, the same human limitations... sometimes in the same rooms.

Add to that performers using historically accurate equipment and it sounds more similar.

 

 

[Bill Merkel]

3 hours ago, Stephen Fine said:

Add to that performers using historically accurate equipment and it sounds more similar.

The hole in that logic is there are many things you can do with the historically accurate equipment.   Projecting back using the earliest recordings, it wouldn't floor me if Beethoven expected every note to be connected with portamento... 

[matesic]

5 hours ago, Bill Merkel said:

The hole in that logic is there are many things you can do with the historically accurate equipment.   Projecting back using the earliest recordings, it wouldn't floor me if Beethoven expected every note to be connected with portamento... 

And the hole in that logic would be that you can't play portamenti on a piano.

[Stephen Fine]

8 hours ago, Bill Merkel said:

The hole in that logic is there are many things you can do with the historically accurate equipment.   Projecting back using the earliest recordings, it wouldn't floor me if Beethoven expected every note to be connected with portamento... 

We have quite a bit of written materials from students, teachers, and audience members about how different people played, what their style sounded like, how it differed from other musicians, how the fashion of technique evolved.  We know about when continuous vibrato was developed, when various ornaments went in and out of style, improvisatory habits, how different musicians used their bows, shifting technique, etc. . .

Quite frankly, your example is absurd.  If you knew much about the subject, you would indeed be floored if research turned up that Joachim slurped between every note.  We know a good bit about how Joachim sounded (even if we didn't have recordings of him from 1903).

There are some performers and composers that we know very little about their style, Beethoven and Joachim aren't them.

One more point.  Historical equipment is the best teacher for how to play historically accurate.  The gut strings and the Baroque bows force you to adapt your modern style over time.  The Baroque bow stroke, the tendency away from sostenuto, that's not "made up", that's just physics.

[gowan]

WIth all the musicological research into HIPP and instruments why haven't any composers developed who write good, inspiring music in the style of Mozart or Beethoven?  Certainly enough is known about the music these kinds of composers wrote but no one seems to be able to write that kind of music.  Any attempts I've heard fall short. 

Baroque and classical music are a kind of language, dare I say a dead language.  Think of Latin or ancient Greek.  Great literature was written in dead languages, empires were created and ruled using dead languages.  In the present time we read and appreciate translations and if we want to we can learn the language enough to read or translate it.  But no one uses these languages to create.  What does this have to do with HIPP as it pertains to music?  If we want to appreciate literary works such as Homer's  Iliad or Odysseus we can just read a translation without thinking at all about the history or culture of ancient Greece and we might enjoy it very much and get a lot of meaning for our own lives.  Knowing about the history and culture might well deepen our appreciation and understanding.  But, with all that study, language learning, etc. we cannot know what the ancients knew, all we can do is seek the meaning of the work in our own terms.  That applies to Baroque and Classical music or any other music, too.  We have the composer's score, possibly with a lot of ancillary material from that time, but all we can do is interpret it in our own terms, in our own cultures.  We cannot know or recreate what players from two or three hundred years ago could do.  Interpreting music, after all, uses the players' emotional world, something we can't know. 

HIPP research and realization can give us something, just as contemporary instruments can give us something.  Each method evokes a response from us that has meaning relative to the piece.  No one can say one response is invalid.  I am grateful for every performance of the Beethoven Concerto and I feel I learn from each one I hear.

[Stephen Fine]

5 minutes ago, gowan said:

WIth all the musicological research into HIPP and instruments why haven't any composers developed who write good, inspiring music in the style of Mozart or Beethoven?  Certainly enough is known about the music these kinds of composers wrote but no one seems to be able to write that kind of music.  Any attempts I've heard fall short. 

Baroque and classical music are a kind of language, dare I say a dead language.  Think of Latin or ancient Greek.  Great literature was written in dead languages, empires were created and ruled using dead languages.  In the present time we read and appreciate translations and if we want to we can learn the language enough to read or translate it.  But no one uses these languages to create.  What does this have to do with HIPP as it pertains to music?  If we want to appreciate literary works such as Homer's  Iliad or Odysseus we can just read a translation without thinking at all about the history or culture of ancient Greece and we might enjoy it very much and get a lot of meaning for our own lives.  Knowing about the history and culture might well deepen our appreciation and understanding.  But, with all that study, language learning, etc. we cannot know what the ancients knew, all we can do is seek the meaning of the work in our own terms.  That applies to Baroque and Classical music or any other music, too.  We have the composer's score, possibly with a lot of ancillary material from that time, but all we can do is interpret it in our own terms, in our own cultures.  We cannot know or recreate what players from two or three hundred years ago could do.  Interpreting music, after all, uses the players' emotional world, something we can't know. 

HIPP research and realization can give us something, just as contemporary instruments can give us something.  Each method evokes a response from us that has meaning relative to the piece.  No one can say one response is invalid.  I am grateful for every performance of the Beethoven Concerto and I feel I learn from each one I hear.

Gowan, have you considered that modern pop/rock is pretty closely related to music in the style of Beethoven or Mozart (which is to say tonal and formal and progressive?).  Mozart and Beethoven were musicians from professional musical families with immense musical talent.  They became masters of the styles of the big cities that they had access to.

The other genre that is probably easier to identify with the scores of Mozart and Beethoven is music for film and television.  Is John Williams not in the style of Beethoven in the way that you mean?  

PDQ Bach has had some success.

And there must be countless others that we just aren't aware of.

 

Your Ancient Greek example I like but don't quite understand your take.  Translation is incredibly difficult work, part science and part art.  I think it is very similar to HIPP.  Of course, the more removed in time you are, the more difficult it becomes, so translating and understanding the full nuance of Ancient Greek is more difficult than understanding and translating the full nuance of modern Greek.  (Although, as you point out, we can only approach things with our own personal, cultural, temporal perspective.)

If I had more time to think, I'd like to incorporate into this conversation the idea of an oral (or in this case aural) tradition.  It's a bit of a fallacy these days to mistrust tradition in favor of documentary evidence. But I personally am only 2 generations from de Bériot, 3 generations from Viotti from my first teacher.  And from my college teacher I'm only 3 generations from Joachim.  These performances were not so long ago.

[Bill Merkel]

4 hours ago, Stephen Fine said:

Quite frankly, your example is absurd.  If you knew much about the subject, you would indeed be floored if research turned up that Joachim slurped between every note.  We know a good bit about how Joachim sounded (even if we didn't have recordings of him from 1903).

actually the problem is i do know the subject, including how much guessing or disingenuousness is involved.

12 minutes ago, Stephen Fine said:

Gowan, have you considered that modern pop/rock is pretty closely related to music in the style of Beethoven or Mozart (which is to say tonal and formal and progressive?). 

ack

 

[Stephen Fine]

14 minutes ago, Bill Merkel said:

actually the problem is i do know the subject, including how much guessing is involved.

So then why couldn't you provide a real example?  We know for a fact that Beethoven would not have expected to hear portamento between every note.  Can you provide an example of something that is being guessed at?

PS- I don't see the difference in genre between a Schubert song and Phoenix's Lisztomania from their album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. 

 

[Bill Merkel]

an example of what?  i'm not suggesting beethoven wants portamento beetween every note, just saying it wouldn't floor me.  do you think you'd know what a concert sounded like from reading reviews?  especially if that concert was 200 yrs ago?

[Stephen Fine]

1 minute ago, Bill Merkel said:

an example of what?  i'm not suggesting beethoven wants portamento beetween every note, just saying it wouldn't floor me.  do you think you'd know what a concert sounded like from reading reviews?  especially if that concert was 200 yrs ago?

I don't understand what wiggle room you think there is.

A concert 200 years ago, given the same score and musicians of a similar caliber, will sound roughly the same today even on modern instruments.

The biggest disparities might come from tempo selection.  This is an area where HIPP research has been "valuable".  For example, Mozart's operas are replete with unlabeled dance movements that, in the time of Mozart, would have been instantly recognized.  Everyone knew what a minuet sounded like. Everyone knew the steps and the vibe of it.  Nowadays, we don't have that context any more.  Play a minuet waltz tempo, play a minuet sarabande tempo, it doesn't matter... the modern audience doesn't have that cultural context.

So we might ask, what value even is there in insisting that an aria accompanied by a minuet be played at a minuet tempo if the cultural context is absent...  the answer is that the value is limited.  As has been said countless times in this thread now, HIPP is just a template, just like the score itself.  It helps us tap into the aural tradition that has been subverted by our own modern aural tradition.

But there isn't wiggle room for portamento between every note (which was your example, not mine).  Could there have been even more portamento than we thought?  Absolutely.  But not to a point where we wouldn't know about it.

There's just not enough difference between modern performance practice and HIPP and the possibility of what historical performances actually sounded like for me to get the skepticism.

[Bill Merkel]

"A concert 200 years ago, given the same score and musicians of a similar caliber, will sound roughly the same today even on modern instruments."

My whole point is we can't really know that from only descriptions of performances.  We can just pretend we know it.

"Could there have been even more portamento than we thought?  Absolutely.  But not to a point where we wouldn't know about it."

~~~

Side question -- if you imagine a performance from two hundred years ago, does a lower level of light go along with the mental picture?  Not a discussion of lighting...but in your imagination is it darker?

[uncle duke]

For present day playing of the old music it seems that a thin vibrato can help with articulation -  or in other words by another,  clarity to help move on to the next notes all the while not taking what should be ideal intonation.  Some play flat and others sound clearly higher.

So I read up on HIP some.  If one studies a little bit about bow hair placement on strings it could or can make one a better player.  Problem after learning about bow placement comes the nebulous discussions of left hand placement after HIP bow positions from bridge to fingerboard edge are learned.  

As for myself - I haven't played much if any violin since the holiday season.  Say I was to start tonight I'd have to familiarize myself with positioning and muscle tone, not worrying about vibrato at all because I know I wouldn't have it for any usefulness.  Now after three or four months of practicing everyday I'd be applying some sort of vibrato wherever I'd see a chance too.  Vibrato seems a way to keep the motor of the violin running optimal clarity wise for faster or cleaner playing. 

[Stephen Fine]

On 8/29/2020 at 1:10 PM, Bill Merkel said:

"A concert 200 years ago, given the same score and musicians of a similar caliber, will sound roughly the same today even on modern instruments."

My whole point is we can't really know that from only descriptions of performances.  We can just pretend we know it.

Using your definition, we can only pretend we know anything at all.

Studies of eyewitness and earwitness identification have proven how unreliable our own memories are for events we have seen and heard ourselves, especially over time, especially when other peoples' memories are discussed along with our own.

I saw Rostropovich play Dvorak in 2000 and my memory is that he didn't use portamento between every note, and I have a recording of him and a few YouTube recordings of him playing without portamento between every note, but does that mean that I know that he didn't usually play Dvorak Concerto with portamento between every note?  No, I can't know that.  I didn't attend every single performance, and even if I did, who's to say my memory is accurate?  And even if there was a recording of every single performance, who's to say that they haven't been digitally altered in the years since then?

 

We don't only have descriptions of performances, by the way.  We have much more.  For one thing, we have early and later editions with fingerings and bowing's by various performers.  These technical details reveal quite a bit about shifting.  We also have the descriptions of how the students and colleagues of various performers played.  We know how people sounded compared to what was considered normal.

And it's good to remember that the descriptions of performances aren't from single sources, for major artists like Joachim we have reams of letters and reviews describing his playing.

 

But if I'm arguing with you about whether it's possible to really know anything at all... well, that's a topic for a philosophy forum, not here.

 

As far as I can tell, you listen to HIPP and enjoy it, so I'm not sure what we are arguing about here.  Until you can provide me with a real example of anything at all instead of all this hypothetical criticism it's hard for me to respond.

 

PS- finally saw your edit on the earlier post.  I'm wondering if you have inside information about ensembles where the emphasis is "mostly musicological".  Honestly, I only have a few friends in the scene, and while I know that's not how their ensembles rehearse, I can't say that I've done a survey.

[Herman West]

On 8/24/2020 at 9:48 PM, Bill Merkel said:

^sorry, don't respond to eye rolling.  only winks or bug eyed-ness

ok, this once.  the situation is like a political one.  conservatism vs. hipp wokeness.  my position would be wokeness is more about being woke than the actual matter at hand -- the deepest understanding of the music and music in general. 

Are you aware that HIP, and musicians like Harnoncourt, Brüggen and Leonhardt have been around (they're all dead now) for more than fifty years? This is not some new-fangled thing...

[Bill Merkel]

^oh.  my mistake.  in that case fuggetaboutit