Let me hone down what I mean to the specifics. I don't mean that we play Bach slow movements too fast. What I want to focus on is those movements that either are traditionally fairly quick, like gigues, or have tempo indications like allegro or presto. We are coming at the end of nearly two hundred years of performers pursuing virtuosity and the cult of higher, faster, louder. This started with Paganini and Liszt in the first half of the19th century, so, long after Bach's death.
It is therefore notionally quite reasonable to make the claim that we might have a tendency to play Bach fast movements too fast simply because we can. Time for a couple of examples. I am a guitarist, so let me choose some guitar examples. Here is a performance just premiered a few days ago of David Russell playing the 1st Lute Suite. Lovely production. The performance starts just after the 2 minute mark. What I want to focus on is the gigue which is just before the fourteen minute mark. This is a fiendishly difficult piece and Russell has done a fantastic job of mastering the challenges.
But it's too fast, in my view. There are not a lot of guitarists who can bring this off at this tempo, and Russell is certainly one of them. Technically, it is a tour de force. But it is not musically comfortable for either the performer or the audience. There are tiny details that tend to go by in a flash that should be noticed more by both performer and listener. Now a lot of the time Bach fast movements are simply rushed, resulting in sloppiness and a lack of clarity. That is not the case here. We can hear the notes and it is rhythmically stable. But the information flows over us too fast. It is hard to luxuriate in the layered counterpoint when it is moving so quickly. Again, this is just my opinion. But I hear a lot of performances, particularly on guitar, that are inappropriately virtuosic.
Here is another example, from Ana Vidovic. Go to the 24:25 mark and listen to the Presto.
Again, this is not fast and sloppy or rushed, it is very virtuoso and very controlled, but still, I think, too fast. This is an exuberant movement, which does not mean that it needs to strain the bounds of virtuosity. But that is what people are paying for these days I guess.
I think I could find examples on other instruments, but I am less comfortable making judgements about performances on instruments I know less well.
Your thoughts?
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I think a lot about how music school culture shapes performance practices, how the peer pressures and competition drive musicians to weird stylistic excesses. I hear most classical music as being played too fast and with way, way too much rubato. Especially Bach! I refuse to believe that he would have played his own music so far out of metronomic time. I support this belief by comparing jazz recorded and after its widespread institutionalization. The Berklee grads consistently play everything 20% faster than the midcentury masters did.
That's a fascinating piece of information about jazz performance!
I can only offer my thoughts as a non guitarist but someone who studied music history. My own feeling is that music slowed down a lot in the 19th C relative to prior centuries because the larger orchestras and instruments were capable of providing a bed of sustaining sound. The larger and brighter 19C instruments also provided more volume and richness to chamber music, also permitting slower tempos.
When deeper bass is added, the tempo slows down partly for technical reasons as the larger instruments have a more sluggish response. It also slows down for harmonic reasons as active bass creates lots of dissonance and masking above it. So this forced more sporadic bass parts at times to keep the harmony under control. For example Baroque music was likely played slower in the 19th C with the larger orchestras and returned to more normal tempos with the HIP movement which used fewer doubled parts. Did they overshoot on the fast side? I don't doubt that but to some extent the difference seems greater due to the intervening Romantic era.
Pop music has also slowed down quite a bit and seems slower than ever apart from a few styles with lighter clipped bass. But also the increasing use of distortion made fast tempos more difficult. Synth textures rather simulate the old 19thC orchestra with a bed of sustaining sound. Also the New Depression genre slows down tempos for reasons of mood.
However there are instruments such as classical guitar or xylophone with very short sustain. Most treble and alto voiced instruments can also play fast. As mentioned, pop music that aims at faster speeds usually has a more clipped treble tilted sound. People are so used to the bed of sustaining sound that they have trouble listening at regular tempos to brittle sounds that leave more space between notes. So tempo creep is quite natural to counteract that.
In addition concert audiences have a notorious penchant for virtuoso display. In opera the high C conquers all as well as fast melismas. So that encourages guitar performers at concerts to virtuosic extremes too. In the current era with widespread video creation and sharing performers are always aware that they could be heard by a large audience outside the hall.
To Ethan's point better technical instruction has made amazing differences in technical execution compared to the older masters. So I would agree that the greater ease of playing difficult parts as well as school peer pressure also encourages faster tempos.
But there seem to be two opposing forces that on one hand is slowing down music and on the other permits its speedup. My own feeling is that music is more bipolar than it used to be.
Re Bach in particular, one of the most interesting performers with respect to tempo is Glenn Gould. He has pursued some very fast tempos and some very slow tempos. One thing I notice is that it often seems as if he is slowing down, just a tiny bit. He really isn't, but giving certain notes just a bit of room to breath. This is actually a great way to play Bach as it allows more expression. Ethan, I'm not talking about rubato, but something more microscopic.
There is a Russian pianist named Anton Batagov who has made a specialty of playing Bach slowly. He's made several recordings where the speed of the playing is roughly half of what we expect. This is an extremal point of Bach interpretation, obviously, but I confess I really like it. There are so many beauties in the music that lingering on them is, at least from time to time, a wonderful experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbdgfAor88
Maybe Bach and Scott Joplin have in common that the brilliant nuances of their music get butchered by insensitive musicians who play their music too fast. :)
I probably can't remember where the essay is if it is even still online, but Matanya Ophee wrote about how absurdly prevalent Romantic era approaches from Spanish guitar music saturated even Bach interpretation, one of those elements about Segovia's influence we can collectively rue, despite Segovia's indisputable influence.
Craig, thank you for the introduction to the Batagov "Slow Bach". As a novice in the area, I can approach these performances without hearing the sins of off-tempo playing. Taken this way, the music takes on something of a New Age character and slows the pace of life.
A review in Forbes [https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenslaurson/2018/03/21/classical-cd-of-the-week-anton-batagovs-bach-is-for-tripping/?sh=25d001942767]
goes so far as to compute Batagov's time stretching. Up to 147% slower than the average in some movements. His presentation/interpretation is so slow that two CDs contain just the Fourth and Sixth Partitas.
For me there is a place for this contemplative consumption of Bach.
Bryan, great topic. Time and the timeless. How to play Bach. Evidence of the deep well that is "classical" music.
Over the past 20-30 years, the tempo of pop music has completely detached from live performance considerations, since everything is programmed now. The base tempo has slowed down enormously since the 1980s, because drum machines and DAWs make it possible to have very fine subdivisions and microrhythms that would be impossible to play live. So mainstream rap songs are usually at about 65-70 bpm with a 32nd note pulse and all kinds of 64th notes, triplets and so on for embellishments. And at the more artsy/underground level you have the J Dilla drunken drummer aesthetic where things are very far off the beat on purpose, or using quintuplet or septuplet swing, and these things are only really audible/meaningful at very slow tempos.
Yesterday during my lunch break at a residential solar install, I was playing my violin at my car. The customer happened to walk by with her son and said "just yesterday he recorded his violin playing for college applications, he's been playing since he was three years old." "Not me," I replied, only six years and still no good." I turned to her son and asked "what did you record?" "Just Mozart, his concerto in D." "I would never say 'just Mozart!' his violin music can be deceptively simple on paper but far beyond me to attempt yet from a musicality point of view. What do you LIKE to play?" I asked. His reply: "I like to play fast music."
Yes, makes me wonder, when the young people are going to get tired of slow, depressive pop music?
Great topic Bryan and thanks to all for interesting comments ... Bach under pressure can be interesting ... Glenn Gould's hypersonic Goldbergs fascinated the world ... but mostly I agree with Bryan; Bach can take any degree of virtuosity but guitarists could stand to slow down a bit. The question of speed on guitar detours when considering transcriptions for guitar. Debussy's Arabesque #1 seems to be the latest transcription to conquer and I want to yell, "Stop! There is a reason composers choose instruments to go along with their compositions." A really good guitarist can reproduce the Arabesque #1 to about the level of a talented 2nd year piano student, but the unfulfilled, blurred or thumped notes, the skipped bass lines, the diminished sonics and the general stretch strain make for uncomfortable listening. The guitar demands that one hand do with difficulty what two hands on the piano can execute with ... ease? ... No, that's not the word ... how about 'practice'. But the classical guitar audience is trained to overlook these unmusicalities as foibles, as 'The Price of the Ticket' for loving the guitar ...
p.s. Question to all you expert music lovers (i.e., Bryan's commentators); anyone know of a piano performance of Ravel's 'Le Tombeau de Couperin' whose zippy first movement is not full of mistakes?
Try this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eb5OHsOYG5c
Thanks Bryan lovely rendition o the 'Prelude'...but... ahem ... something about those trills ... the piece might be impossible ...
Yes, it is one of those borderline impossible pieces. I figure if Sokolov can't play it cleanly, it can't be done. I was looking for a version by Sviatoslav Richter, but couldn't find one on YouTube.
I agree! We do play Bach much too fast. I am guilty of this as well. It changes the emotional quality of the music, making it feel, well..Unlike Bach!
Do you ever accept guest posts from fellow classical musicians?
I have in the past. Not for a while. We had a couple of guest posts on Messiaen.
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