I'm including three examples of robotic playing below, though two of them would also qualify as "playing Bach as if you really hated his music." The first performance is of a young player and shows the technical perfection that young guitarists strive for these days. More power to them for that. But the robotic clunking through the notes is not to be praised. Not by me anyway. The first player actually took a tiny bit of time on one note in the first section and it was so unusual as to cause surprise in the listener.
The second and third performances are by seasoned players from an earlier generation and they are considerably less smooth technically. But just as robotic. It is as if there is some sort of stopwatch ticking away somewhere that prohibits them taking any time for phrasing or even taking a more reasonable tempo, you know, one that would allow the notes to breath and the listener, perhaps, to enjoy the performance?
Nothing against guitarists, by the way, I'm sure that there are examples on all the instruments. It is just that, being a guitarist myself, I know where to find the offending performances!
since you picked guitarists across the board, Bryan, I've wondered if there's been some generational backlash against the Segovia syndrome of earlier Bach interpretation. Matanya Ophee wrote eloquently and ardently against a Segovia syndrome of playing all music for guitar from all eras in a kind of post-Segovia Romantic style with rubato and phrase changes that wouldn't make sense for Sor or Giuliani or for Bach.
ReplyDeleteI've wondered whether or not guitarists have over-compensated in trying to not sound like everything is Romantic and post-Romantic music from Spain by erring too much on the side of playing the notes and "letting the music speak for itself". I wonder if that couldn't be a case of score-veneration where guitarists are trained to respect the score and then ADD NOTHING TO IT THAT ISN'T EXPLICITLY ON THE PAGE. Kyle Gann has lamented that more and more trained musicians in American music scenes seem to default to this approach. It isn't that way across the board.
On the other hand ... I've heard and seen complaints about Vidovic playing Bach so fast it sounds almost inhuman and yet her tempi aren't much different from some Szigeti recordings I've heard of the violin originals. Tempi themselves are not the whole of the problem. A lot of bad Bach performances don't breathe, literally or figuratively. An advantage of having training as a singer in solo and ensemble settings is that when the performance literally depends on your breath you think a LOT about phrasing and when and where you can breath and how that influences the phrases you sing and, when you compose, the phrases you write.
My not formally educated hunch (beyond minoring in music in college that is) is that specialization in classical music education has had a detrimental impact on how instrumentalists think about phrasing and interpretation, maybe.
feel obliged for some reason to point out that George Rochberg pointed out that it was too often overlooked that Webern wrote vocal music and that however atonal Webern's music was you could still SING it. Bad atonality in composition, to be polemical, is written from a purely instrumental perspective (in all possible senses of the term, pejorative ones on purpose) that has no regard for the human voice as inextricably bound up with the human body.
ReplyDeleteWhich is not a diss on anyone writing music via computer. I saw part of an Adam Neely video on how after the 1980s more and more people have heard vocal performances that have been digitally altered and that singers hear and attempt to replicate sounds that they may not realize were sonically manipulated, using examples of Sinatra, Franklin, and even Plant to highlight how before autotune all of those singers sang pitches that were often "between" notes on keys of the piano. A somewhat short way to sum things up is that we can all let the technologies that mediate our understanding and appreciation of music do the thinking for us if we're not alert.
Heh, practicing with click tracks made Phil Collins a tighter drummer but it didn't help him become a tighter songwriter. ;)
I've always quite liked some of the early guitar recordings of Bach. I can recall some Segovia Bach recordings that really are thoughtful and compelling. Among today's guitarists I also quite like the way Carles Trepat plays Bach, following Llobet's fingerings ( https://youtu.be/8h0FBvSyjr8?t=237 ) but most people I've played his recordings to seem to disagree with me...
ReplyDeleteWenatchee, what you say makes much sense. I became a noticeably better guitarist when I started singing in choirs a few years back.
When I was writing this post I recalled that the first real music lesson I had from a real classical musician was from my vocal techniques professor who was an accomplished singer. I was learning a Schubert lieder and the first thing she said after hearing me sing a couple of lines was "now do something with it." That one comment told me many things about phrasing, interpretation and so on. Sometimes you just need a tiny insight to get you started. After that the idea of singing or playing something mechanically was permanently off the table for me.
ReplyDeleteRe Segovia: yes, he was always doing something with the music.
Re Bach tempi: remember that the solo violin music sounds an octave higher on violin than it does on guitar. So it should not be at the same tempo.
Re tempo and the solo violin being an octave higher, it seems such an obvious point and yet it had never occurred to me..!
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of the (symbiotic?) relationship of singing and playing, is now the time to raise Glenn Gould's recorded performances complete with captured humming?
ReplyDeleteI find that I appreciate little idiosyncrasies like Gould's humming even more as I grow older.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, it's not coincidence that you've noticed this with bach's music. I would say that it may not be the performers. I had the same exact question when I listened to BWV 911. The music feels so structured and strict. If I had to guess why the music has a robotic affect, I would say it's probably because of the repetition of the motifs.
ReplyDeleteTake the Fugue in D major from WTC II for example. The first motif is used around 50 times, and the second motif around 100 times. This all happens in the span of around 3 minutes. "Richard Atkinson" has a good video on youtube explaining the piece.
At some level, we may associate this repetition, combined with Bach's intricate baroque style, with a robotic feel (whatever that means to you).
Some very interesting points, Ben! Yes, just looking at the notes on the page, Bach can look formidably like a picket fence or a mass-produced fabric of repetitive motifs. But then you look closer and you see that those notes all have different functions: this one is on the beat while that one leads to a downbeat; that one is an appoggiatura resolving to the next note; that is a seventh resolving down, while that bass note is the third of the triad and it too resolves down; those notes are part of a secondary dominant that prepares us for a modulation into a new key. And I haven't even mentioned the practice of inégale. As Nikolas Harnoncourt said in an essay once: "notes are not all created equal."
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