Sunday, June 17, 2018

Espressivo, Cantabile, with Feeling

Four of my relatives got together and gave me a tape recorder for my Bar-Mitzvah. I used to attach wires with clips to the input of the loudspeaker on my parents' high fidelity system (I don't remember whether it was even stereo back then) and record broadcasts from WQXR. Once I happened to record Stravinsky's ballet, The Soldier's Tale, which I am listening to now, as I write, a version without the narrative. I was enthralled and listened to it again and again, while my contemporaries were listening to Elvis Presley. (I was proudly out of it as a teenager.)
I remember reading that Stravinksy didn't mark his scores with emotional directives like "espressivo." Actually, what I remember is that he argued against using them, but, in fact, he did put them in his scores. But I agree with his argument, whether or not he practiced what he preached. Why would anyone play any way except expressively? Why would anyone play in a non-singing way? Why would anyone want to play any other way except with feeling?
I recently joined a wind orchestra with a dynamic, young conductor, and the rehearsals are fun and challenging. Last week he had us rehearse a piece with complicated rhythms (less complicated than Stravinsky's) and told us not to try to play it musically. "Just play the notes."
He's definitely right, because if we can't play the notes right, in the right rhythms, we'll never be able to play it musically. I wonder whether, once we do get the notes right, we'll play it musically in spite of ourselves. I expect so.
Now and then I have written music on notation programs. Unless you write in crescendos and diminuendos, ritardandos and fermatas, the computer plays the music back entirely without expression at the same dynamic level, with absolute rhythmical regularity and perfect pitch, without responding emotionally to the notes it's sounding. Nevertheless, it's often hard to hear the music that way. Our ears - my ears, at any rate - supply a lot of the emotion that's lacking in the electronic monotony.
I couldn't play like a computer if I tried (which isn't to say that my playing is as musical as it should be), and when I'm learning a piece, and a third of the way in, the composer writes, "espressivo," I think to myself: Was I supposed to be playing without expression up to now?

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