Digging In: Part I - The Classical Drawl

In this first post, we'll explore what makes our modern performance approach as classical musicians fundamentally distinct, not just from other musical genres, but from "classical" musicians of the past. But are we conscious of those distinctions? Are good differences, or not? Does it even matter??

Yes sir, it does matter. Your general mindset about classical music shapes everything from your most abstract theories about music to the daily grind of how you practice. Don't believe me? Read on. 
 

As classical musicians, our training must look strange compared to other musical genres. Typically, we have a very structured musical education. We are told exactly what notes to play, how to play them, and when. Instilled in us in from the very beginning is the sense that there is a right and a wrong way to do everything. It is rare that classical musicians begin their training like a rock guitar player begins, for example. When a ten-year old boy starts to learn the guitar, he will often begin learning by ear. He pulls the guitar out of the case, starts fiddling around on it, learning riffs to rock songs from magazines in a generally unstructured manner. Eventually there are basic directives given – technique, reading chord changes, style, and rhythm. However, the details of exactly which notes to play are not set in stone. He has to have a flexible approach to written music since improvisation is integral to genres like rock or jazz and chord changes supply only a basic outline of the music.

Modern Baroque performers call this kind of musical writing “thin-writing”, written music that is just the essentials of the music with the expectation that the performer will add shadings, dynamics, articulations, tone color, rhythmic nuances, and melodic embellishments. To put it another way, music for the Baroque or Classical musician was more descriptive, rather than prescriptive. To make a culinary analogy, descriptive writing is like saying to chef, “I’d like a dish with some kind of fish, a starch and a vegetable. Now, use your skill as a chef to make it.” Contrast that with a prescriptive approach, “Here is the recipe. Just prepare it exactly as written.” In fact, musicians in the Baroque and Classical era would have had much more in common with the folk, jazz, or rock musicians of today than with an orchestral musician. The late Bruce Haynes, scholar and early music specialist, writes in The End of Early Music:

Jazz doesn’t worry about the “intentions” of a composer, rock doesn’t give much weight to who “composed” a piece, pop doesn’t get hung up on a prescribed and immovable repertoire. Nor were they an issue for our ancestors before 1800 either.

For many classical musicians, this might come as a shock. After all, our training has imbedded certain presumptions inside of us that we assume are shared by our musical ancestors. Similar to an accent in speech, when one is surrounded by people of the same accent, it is difficult to recognize. The classical “accent” involves ideas and practices such as:

•         Playing music saturated with performance directives (dynamics, articulations, tempos, etc.)
•         Performing a certain select group of works repeatedly (the Canon)
•         There is a right and wrong way to play each of these works
•         Musical works are fixed and shouldn’t sound very different from performance to performance
•         Composers have specific intentions in music to which performers are supposed to be faithful
•         These intentions are completely expressed the written score
•         A piece is finished prior to performance rather than through performance
•        The performer and composer are separate people
•        It is not necessary for performers to compose or improvise

However, before the Romantic era, virtually none of these assumptions were generally shared by the musicians of that time. New music was constantly in demand, much like it is in the pop world of today. Musicians in the 17^th and 18^th centuries often complained that music 30-40 years old was out of date, like a band today playing in exactly the same style as the Beatles. Johann Matheson writes in 1739 in Der volkommene Capellmeister that he couldn’t understand how Corelli’s music published in the 1680s and 90s could still be admired in his time due to how old it was. And since improvisation was a fundamental part of the music of that time, the written score was never viewed as a fixed object, completed prior to performance. A piece could be so radically different from one performance to the next, even composers didn’t recognize their own works at times. A piece was only completed through performance. Another bi-product of improvisation was the fluid relationship between performer and composer. Since composition is a kind of written improvisation, nearly all performers composed and vice versa. “[The performer should play] so that one believes that the music was composed by the person who is playing it,” writes W.A. Mozart in a letter in 1778. Contrast that with the Romantic era thinking of A.L. Crelle in Einiges uber musicalischen Ausdruck und Vortrag in 1823: “It is in fact wickedly presumptuous for a player to alter a work of art according to his mood, since in doing that he suggests that he understands the work better than the composer who invented it.”

Does this resonate with you? It did for me. When I realized how radically different the my approach was from musicians of the 18th and 17th centuries, it was like realizing I had a thick accent I never heard before. 

So, we've realized that we have an "accent" and it's quite distinct from our musical ancestors and cousins. But how can we summarize and examine this approach we've been taught? Is a good one? Tune in for Part II.