Seminar in Piobbico, Italy 1998
Notes
The goal of this seminar is to focus on the work of the interpreter.
How could we define interpretation? I like to use the word encounter, that I find otherwise used to describe the phenomenon of knowledge: the interpreter is the subject, an “I”, that encounters an object – in this case the piece of music – tries to understand a unitary meaning to render it and transmit it to whoever is listening. In so far as the object encountered possesses an artistic value and the subject has a vibrant desire for beauty and the capacity to recognize and render the beauty expressed in the work, understanding and expressing this beauty isn’t a cold or aseptic operation, or purely intellectual (it’s particularly true here that “only amazement knows”, as Gregorio di Nissa said), but provokes a liking that one wants to share with others, and this sharing (Stravinsky expressly uses the word communion) is also a source of fulfillment, like the satisfaction of a desire. It’s an experience of freedom, then, like when something bigger is opened to us.
As a matter of fact, Segovia said,“interpretation, like life, is an explosion of freedom”.
Certainly, it’s necessary that the gesture of playing is lived in its truth, that is, not reduced or contradicted in its profound nature – but we’ll get back to this danger right away.
Let’s listen now to an example, typical of Segovia, of this freedom in action.
(listening example)
I believe that the piece confirms everything that we’ve said until now.
Today it seems that there’s a difficulty proper to cultural order and to mentality, to understand and identify oneself in this type of approach to the problem, a difficulty therefore to define and most importantly to live the interpretation as an explosion of freedom, and the result is that the freedom in playing becomes a rarer and rarer good, to which one doesn’t even care too much about, either by who is playing or who is listening; so often, playing gets reduced to following the rules, a mass of rules in which disentangling oneself – let’s also refer to teaching music – in search of a perfection seen as the absence of breaking the rules (and this in the more serious cases), or a mediocre, obtuse automatic managing that contradicts the desire for beauty with which one had began to play – and maybe one stops because he doesn’t have fun anymore - ; or, even if in our field it doesn’t seem to me to be a dominant tendency anymore, a surely search for freedom, but intended as a purely instinctive outlet that imposes itself crushing and mortifying the possibilities of artistic expression contained in the piece and reducing everything to ephemeral sensation, or dream…
Here, I wouldn’t want to get into the motives, on why this situation that is certainly one aspect, or fruit, of this attack on the I, on the heart of everyone, an attack that characterizes our times so much.
Of course, the situation in which we live explains why, in my opinion, now there is still a need to recover some definitions and genius indications on interpretation, like the phrases of Segovia that we’ll cite today, clarifying more and more the reasons for those affirmations without taking for granted the fact of agreeing with them or having understood them. Actually, someone said that one rarely learns what he already thinks he knows.
Since this is a seminar with fairly practical intentions, I’ll confide that an immersion in the work experience of the interpreter would be the most useful thing, in this place, to recuperate a true position, supposing, though, at least the desire that interpretation is or goes back to being that explosion of freedom that Segovia talked about. As a matter of fact, as Lewis said, “what I like about experience is that one deals with something so honest. You can do a bunch of things wrong, but keep your eyes open and you won’t be permitted to stray too far before the right sign appears”.
We’ll look at the problem of method, aware, though, that there’s no method that holds up if most importantly one doesn’t desire that freedom that Segovia spoke of.
Speaking of work method, another one of Segovia’s phrases seems illuminating to me, which I put in the title:
“Interpretation is a synthesis in continuous expansion”.
First of all, why does Segovia speak of “synthesis”?
The piece of music is a unity made up of multiple factors (for example, many single sounds, in complex relationships among them: melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal, formal relationships… these sounds form musical ideas, developed and connected in various ways by the composer to construct the piece; so, this expresses the personality of the composer, in turn influenced by psychological, cultural and historical factors).
But then I am there, too: a man that encounters and re-creates – if nothing else because I play it back, starting from the signs on the page – the piece, and that I encounter at 17 years, at 30 years, or at 50 years, in historical, cultural, and temperamental conditions of taste, sensibility and also extremely different physiques. If the interpretation is an encounter between subject and object, my way of understanding the value and therefore organizing what I encounter in a meaningful unity changes – but even this desire changes in time, maybe it deepens and becomes more aware.
And then there’s the instrument: a complete musical interpretation is a sonorous gesture, so the characteristics of the instrument and the environmental acoustics influence them in some way – if I play in a small room or at the Rimini Fair with 20,000 people, it’s different -; and in the end, even the audience that becomes part of the event participates in determining the interpretive choices to a certain extent – if I play for someone, this “for” determines my choices.
So, interpretation is a synthesis of many elements that I complete, and since these elements are continually changing one understands how this is and can only be in continuous expansion: every thing I notice, that happens, that enters in my horizon, contributes to reformulating the synthesis… It’s as if, instead of blocking oneself on any one of the aspects mentioned above, they are all worked through to reaffirm, in any condition and through everything, the value, what it’s worth the trouble to say; like this, the interpretation becomes an event.
There’s a famous phrase, I think by Rossini, on Mozart: “Mozart was the hope of my youth, the desperation of my maturity and the consolation of my old age”.
It’s a good example of synthesis in continuous expansion.
As a side note, in passing, all this implicates that the musical sense of a piece is not something to be defined and measurable once and for all, not even by the same composer: a sincere composer will say that ultimately the beginning of a musical idea is a fairly mysterious fact that the composer most of all recognizes and then develops while trying to respect it. And once the piece is finished, it’s life isn’t: Segovia said that the interpreter is like Jesus that resurrects Lazarus, calling him to a new life… There’s a paradox in this example, but also some truth.
Romano Guardini in “La fine dell’epoca moderna” [The End of the Modern World]: “Every great work passes through a similar crisis. The first contacts with this are immediate; they rest on the community of the historical situations. When these disappear, the primitive relationship dissolves and a period of separation follows. Actually aversion follows, as heated as much as the first agreements were dogmatic, until at a later age, beginning with the new situations, one discovers a new contact with man and his work. For this to happen, for such a rebirth to take place and in what measure it remains living in history, all this decisively determines the human value of the work”.
And now I come to the last observation, the most practical one that I wanted to make: how does this “making a synthesis” happen? How does one make it, or how can one be helped to make it?
Let’s go back to the listening example we heard earlier: one thing that strikes you while listening to Segovia’s performance is the extreme control over every detail, as if the interpreter decided how to play every single note. On the contrary, often in the way people usually study a certain automatism occurs, as if the single gesture were dragged on by the preceding or influenced by the following one – so that, for something that can be decided, maybe 10 notes come later that aren’t decided, not made deliberately. And still, Segovia’s extreme emotional involvement as interpreter in all he plays: for some aspects this will be linked to a particular temperament, but the indication of method remains. Segovia himself said that during a performance you need to “intervene in the piece, but without stopping it”, as I said, every particular idea determined by the synthetic idea that one is following. But how is it done?
There is an indication that Segovia gives regarding the performance of scales that seems almost banal in its concreteness: perform them first slowly, playing forte, then quickly, playing piano (he also said to play scales for two hours a day, to correct errors of the hand position, gradually increase finger strength, and prepare the articulations, to study more in a hurry afterwards! As if to say that it’s not wasted time concentrating on the physical aspect of playing; this doesn’t exhaust the artistic aspect, but permits the performer to express it. As a matter of fact, Segovia also said that scales improve the “physical beauty of the sound”, while “the sonority and its infinite shades come from the innate excellence of the spirit”). So, in the slow execution, you need the maximum cure of every detail, as if every movement could have been decided like starting over from zero; and then an overview in the fast execution (for example, taking care of the rhythmic and dynamic regularity, as the piano method by Leimer – Gieseking suggested). Naturally, this should be done with a critical ear to evaluate the progress made every time.
Let’s try to apply this to the study of the pieces; also here, these two phases need to continually interact: the slow execution, to the limits of isolating every sound, giving yourself time to listen to it in relationship to all the others and learning to “re-decide” it on the basis of the value that we can attribute to it at the time, that grasps, if we are attentive to the reading, an aspect of “total truth” of the piece (an interval of a fifth has a different sound and “meaning” than a second, a dotted rhythm is different from a non-doted one), even if we still don’t know well how this factor will “play” within the total unity of the piece. Therefore, don’t be afraid to use the 1000x magnifying lens to isolate – for the time being – every detail while trying to understand its relations, possibly with the details nearby the point being examined.
This is a preliminary aspect of the work on synthesis.
But then, or before, or during – every moment is good - , there is the most difficult part: understanding the idea, possibly still only partially. Understanding the idea is like a light bulb that lights up and illuminates even only one phrase, a point, and because of this is still only a temporary fact, but it’s already a beginning of the meaning of the piece, of that piece – the musical idea, even if it’s not in its final synthesis yet, is already a little synthesis of the many elements that make it up. They already influence the how we see and play the interval of a fifth, the dotted rhythm, all the elements that make it up. You don’t censure any single detail, but everything tends to find its place, to be determined by its place in an organic whole. I insist on this point, because the comprehension of a piece starts when this light bulb turns on. Here our capacities to identify with the piece and our fantasy are in play.
And in the end (what would correspond to the fast execution of the scales) we attempt to see the synthetically global whole, even if it’s full of lights and shadows. In this phase it’s important to be extremely open to new ideas that often come to us only when we see the piece like this, like “from afar”, and see how in this synthesis, even if incomplete – because in continuous expansion – the particular details reformulate themselves and the “right” weight is given back to what was perceived in the preceding phases. In addition, this opening leaves more space to the influence of the other factors I mentioned before: the sound of the instrument, the acoustics of the environment – changing environment can lead to new ideas because ideas come to us from the circumstances, as someone reminds us – until our temperament of the moment, and to the type of audience that we have in front of us at the moment of the performance. I’ll say that the more we have clear ideas about every particular and the possibility to intervene in every movement – and develop these things in our study – the more we can “re-decide” everything in this phase, if we are continually open to the inspiration of the moment, to the continuous re-creation of the interpretation as event, as something meaningful that happens.
And so it happens like this, through this work an explosion of freedom can take place.
This is why Segovia said that interpretation is made up of 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration!
Maybe we can make some examples and move on to eventual questions.
Notes
The goal of this seminar is to focus on the work of the interpreter.
How could we define interpretation? I like to use the word encounter, that I find otherwise used to describe the phenomenon of knowledge: the interpreter is the subject, an “I”, that encounters an object – in this case the piece of music – tries to understand a unitary meaning to render it and transmit it to whoever is listening. In so far as the object encountered possesses an artistic value and the subject has a vibrant desire for beauty and the capacity to recognize and render the beauty expressed in the work, understanding and expressing this beauty isn’t a cold or aseptic operation, or purely intellectual (it’s particularly true here that “only amazement knows”, as Gregorio di Nissa said), but provokes a liking that one wants to share with others, and this sharing (Stravinsky expressly uses the word communion) is also a source of fulfillment, like the satisfaction of a desire. It’s an experience of freedom, then, like when something bigger is opened to us.
As a matter of fact, Segovia said,“interpretation, like life, is an explosion of freedom”.
Certainly, it’s necessary that the gesture of playing is lived in its truth, that is, not reduced or contradicted in its profound nature – but we’ll get back to this danger right away.
Let’s listen now to an example, typical of Segovia, of this freedom in action.
(listening example)
I believe that the piece confirms everything that we’ve said until now.
Today it seems that there’s a difficulty proper to cultural order and to mentality, to understand and identify oneself in this type of approach to the problem, a difficulty therefore to define and most importantly to live the interpretation as an explosion of freedom, and the result is that the freedom in playing becomes a rarer and rarer good, to which one doesn’t even care too much about, either by who is playing or who is listening; so often, playing gets reduced to following the rules, a mass of rules in which disentangling oneself – let’s also refer to teaching music – in search of a perfection seen as the absence of breaking the rules (and this in the more serious cases), or a mediocre, obtuse automatic managing that contradicts the desire for beauty with which one had began to play – and maybe one stops because he doesn’t have fun anymore - ; or, even if in our field it doesn’t seem to me to be a dominant tendency anymore, a surely search for freedom, but intended as a purely instinctive outlet that imposes itself crushing and mortifying the possibilities of artistic expression contained in the piece and reducing everything to ephemeral sensation, or dream…
Here, I wouldn’t want to get into the motives, on why this situation that is certainly one aspect, or fruit, of this attack on the I, on the heart of everyone, an attack that characterizes our times so much.
Of course, the situation in which we live explains why, in my opinion, now there is still a need to recover some definitions and genius indications on interpretation, like the phrases of Segovia that we’ll cite today, clarifying more and more the reasons for those affirmations without taking for granted the fact of agreeing with them or having understood them. Actually, someone said that one rarely learns what he already thinks he knows.
Since this is a seminar with fairly practical intentions, I’ll confide that an immersion in the work experience of the interpreter would be the most useful thing, in this place, to recuperate a true position, supposing, though, at least the desire that interpretation is or goes back to being that explosion of freedom that Segovia talked about. As a matter of fact, as Lewis said, “what I like about experience is that one deals with something so honest. You can do a bunch of things wrong, but keep your eyes open and you won’t be permitted to stray too far before the right sign appears”.
We’ll look at the problem of method, aware, though, that there’s no method that holds up if most importantly one doesn’t desire that freedom that Segovia spoke of.
Speaking of work method, another one of Segovia’s phrases seems illuminating to me, which I put in the title:
“Interpretation is a synthesis in continuous expansion”.
First of all, why does Segovia speak of “synthesis”?
The piece of music is a unity made up of multiple factors (for example, many single sounds, in complex relationships among them: melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, contrapuntal, formal relationships… these sounds form musical ideas, developed and connected in various ways by the composer to construct the piece; so, this expresses the personality of the composer, in turn influenced by psychological, cultural and historical factors).
But then I am there, too: a man that encounters and re-creates – if nothing else because I play it back, starting from the signs on the page – the piece, and that I encounter at 17 years, at 30 years, or at 50 years, in historical, cultural, and temperamental conditions of taste, sensibility and also extremely different physiques. If the interpretation is an encounter between subject and object, my way of understanding the value and therefore organizing what I encounter in a meaningful unity changes – but even this desire changes in time, maybe it deepens and becomes more aware.
And then there’s the instrument: a complete musical interpretation is a sonorous gesture, so the characteristics of the instrument and the environmental acoustics influence them in some way – if I play in a small room or at the Rimini Fair with 20,000 people, it’s different -; and in the end, even the audience that becomes part of the event participates in determining the interpretive choices to a certain extent – if I play for someone, this “for” determines my choices.
So, interpretation is a synthesis of many elements that I complete, and since these elements are continually changing one understands how this is and can only be in continuous expansion: every thing I notice, that happens, that enters in my horizon, contributes to reformulating the synthesis… It’s as if, instead of blocking oneself on any one of the aspects mentioned above, they are all worked through to reaffirm, in any condition and through everything, the value, what it’s worth the trouble to say; like this, the interpretation becomes an event.
There’s a famous phrase, I think by Rossini, on Mozart: “Mozart was the hope of my youth, the desperation of my maturity and the consolation of my old age”.
It’s a good example of synthesis in continuous expansion.
As a side note, in passing, all this implicates that the musical sense of a piece is not something to be defined and measurable once and for all, not even by the same composer: a sincere composer will say that ultimately the beginning of a musical idea is a fairly mysterious fact that the composer most of all recognizes and then develops while trying to respect it. And once the piece is finished, it’s life isn’t: Segovia said that the interpreter is like Jesus that resurrects Lazarus, calling him to a new life… There’s a paradox in this example, but also some truth.
Romano Guardini in “La fine dell’epoca moderna” [The End of the Modern World]: “Every great work passes through a similar crisis. The first contacts with this are immediate; they rest on the community of the historical situations. When these disappear, the primitive relationship dissolves and a period of separation follows. Actually aversion follows, as heated as much as the first agreements were dogmatic, until at a later age, beginning with the new situations, one discovers a new contact with man and his work. For this to happen, for such a rebirth to take place and in what measure it remains living in history, all this decisively determines the human value of the work”.
And now I come to the last observation, the most practical one that I wanted to make: how does this “making a synthesis” happen? How does one make it, or how can one be helped to make it?
Let’s go back to the listening example we heard earlier: one thing that strikes you while listening to Segovia’s performance is the extreme control over every detail, as if the interpreter decided how to play every single note. On the contrary, often in the way people usually study a certain automatism occurs, as if the single gesture were dragged on by the preceding or influenced by the following one – so that, for something that can be decided, maybe 10 notes come later that aren’t decided, not made deliberately. And still, Segovia’s extreme emotional involvement as interpreter in all he plays: for some aspects this will be linked to a particular temperament, but the indication of method remains. Segovia himself said that during a performance you need to “intervene in the piece, but without stopping it”, as I said, every particular idea determined by the synthetic idea that one is following. But how is it done?
There is an indication that Segovia gives regarding the performance of scales that seems almost banal in its concreteness: perform them first slowly, playing forte, then quickly, playing piano (he also said to play scales for two hours a day, to correct errors of the hand position, gradually increase finger strength, and prepare the articulations, to study more in a hurry afterwards! As if to say that it’s not wasted time concentrating on the physical aspect of playing; this doesn’t exhaust the artistic aspect, but permits the performer to express it. As a matter of fact, Segovia also said that scales improve the “physical beauty of the sound”, while “the sonority and its infinite shades come from the innate excellence of the spirit”). So, in the slow execution, you need the maximum cure of every detail, as if every movement could have been decided like starting over from zero; and then an overview in the fast execution (for example, taking care of the rhythmic and dynamic regularity, as the piano method by Leimer – Gieseking suggested). Naturally, this should be done with a critical ear to evaluate the progress made every time.
Let’s try to apply this to the study of the pieces; also here, these two phases need to continually interact: the slow execution, to the limits of isolating every sound, giving yourself time to listen to it in relationship to all the others and learning to “re-decide” it on the basis of the value that we can attribute to it at the time, that grasps, if we are attentive to the reading, an aspect of “total truth” of the piece (an interval of a fifth has a different sound and “meaning” than a second, a dotted rhythm is different from a non-doted one), even if we still don’t know well how this factor will “play” within the total unity of the piece. Therefore, don’t be afraid to use the 1000x magnifying lens to isolate – for the time being – every detail while trying to understand its relations, possibly with the details nearby the point being examined.
This is a preliminary aspect of the work on synthesis.
But then, or before, or during – every moment is good - , there is the most difficult part: understanding the idea, possibly still only partially. Understanding the idea is like a light bulb that lights up and illuminates even only one phrase, a point, and because of this is still only a temporary fact, but it’s already a beginning of the meaning of the piece, of that piece – the musical idea, even if it’s not in its final synthesis yet, is already a little synthesis of the many elements that make it up. They already influence the how we see and play the interval of a fifth, the dotted rhythm, all the elements that make it up. You don’t censure any single detail, but everything tends to find its place, to be determined by its place in an organic whole. I insist on this point, because the comprehension of a piece starts when this light bulb turns on. Here our capacities to identify with the piece and our fantasy are in play.
And in the end (what would correspond to the fast execution of the scales) we attempt to see the synthetically global whole, even if it’s full of lights and shadows. In this phase it’s important to be extremely open to new ideas that often come to us only when we see the piece like this, like “from afar”, and see how in this synthesis, even if incomplete – because in continuous expansion – the particular details reformulate themselves and the “right” weight is given back to what was perceived in the preceding phases. In addition, this opening leaves more space to the influence of the other factors I mentioned before: the sound of the instrument, the acoustics of the environment – changing environment can lead to new ideas because ideas come to us from the circumstances, as someone reminds us – until our temperament of the moment, and to the type of audience that we have in front of us at the moment of the performance. I’ll say that the more we have clear ideas about every particular and the possibility to intervene in every movement – and develop these things in our study – the more we can “re-decide” everything in this phase, if we are continually open to the inspiration of the moment, to the continuous re-creation of the interpretation as event, as something meaningful that happens.
And so it happens like this, through this work an explosion of freedom can take place.
This is why Segovia said that interpretation is made up of 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration!
Maybe we can make some examples and move on to eventual questions.