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Monique Deschaussée Daily news - Goudon Fonds

How to get to the heart of a musical score

: Category: post of the day; 10 May 2024; Hits: 166

It is necessary to learn how to read a score in order to penetrate its secrets. When a composer writes down in black and white what he feels, what he experiences, what is in his heart, he knows full well that in materialising through signs the Unutterable, the secret language of the soul, he is losing his way in this Imponderable, this mystery that cannot be written down. This is the metaphysical plane of music.

Faced with a score, the performer must therefore go back to the source of inspiration, rediscovering what has been lost along the way.

Notes are like letters in an alphabet. On their own, they don't mean much. Put together, they can mean a lot. Just as letters are combined into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, and chapters into a whole, so it is exactly the same with musical language. It is an organised language that leads to a wide variety of forms: forms with precise structures that allow the expression of all states of mind. Music combines all dimensions.

So before we start work, we need to situate ourselves in front of the universe that awaits us, at every level; we need to ask ourselves about its form and its musical content. Obviously, if you don't know how a sonata or a fugue is constructed, there's no point in having worked on the text. It's an aberration, an ignorance that amounts to more or less improvised amateurism.

As well as working on the piano, it is therefore essential for those who aspire to be professionals to work on all aspects of music: analysis of musical forms and structures, harmonic analysis, the evolution of musical language, the elements that inspired this language, etc. And these must be used to help us discover a work rather than remaining at an intellectual stage unrelated to a score.

In music, as in language, words and phrases are supplemented by punctuation that sometimes transforms their meaning. Full stops, commas, semicolons, exclamation marks, question marks - all punctuation is present in a score. It is reflected in cadences, silences, phrasing, in all the signs other than notes. It is precisely through these signs that we can penetrate to the heart of the mystery.

How can we construct a musical work if we don't base it on cadences from the outset? We need to know that each cadence has an expressive meaning. A perfect cadence concludes, a broken cadence creates surprise, a half-cadence creates expectation or questioning: a dominant can take us anywhere, even to distant horizons.

Harmony takes us to the very heart of the work, in terms of its construction and architecture, but also in terms of pure expression. A major key with six or seven sharps will engender light, joy and hope; a minor key with flats, drama, sadness and anguish. And these are extreme cases. But there are so many subtleties to capture in the modulations! How can we fail to perceive them if our sensitivity is alert? They translate the movements of the soul. They are life itself, with its contingent of different feelings.

As for the silences in music, let's discover them and listen to them. They are sometimes more expressive than the notes they interrupt. Breathing? A question? Expectation? Silence often adds emotion rather than simply stopping. Silences on the beat become active.

It is essential to give silences their full expressive value.

Let's also learn to live the nuances; not to play a "piano" or a "forte" because they are written, but to understand that they are there precisely because a state of mind has inspired them. Nuances are astonishing clues to the evolution of a thought or a feeling.

What about the pulse of music? What about its breathing? For music to live, it must have a heart and lungs: two organs essential to life.

The heart of music is its rhythm: a deep rhythm that generates a pulse. You need to hear the pulse of the music. In life, even when we're dreaming, even when we're asleep, our heart continues to beat; stopping the heart represents death, in life as in music.

When we start to play, this inner pulse must settle within us and never stop, even during long notes or silences. This rhythm is experienced inside the body, in the nerve centres.

The lungs of the music are, of course, its breath. How long does the rhythm breathe?

.....

We need to know how many beats there are in a bar and remember what the words "strong" or "weak" mean in terms of beats, because it is from this alternation that breathing is born....

"L'homme et le piano" by Monique Déchaussées

A letter from Dinu Lipatti

: Category: post of the day; 27 September 2023; Hits: 492

One day, Lipatti received a letter from South Africa. A young pianist, a student at a Conservatoire, humbly asked for advice: how to reconcile the rights and duties of the performer in relation to a work?
Anxious to fan the flames of music wherever they might be found - he had accepted his gifts as a responsibility, as a wealth that it was his duty to spread - Lipatti replied with the gravity that marked all his actions.
Here is his reply, an admirable profession of faith that gives us a portrait of his soul.

"Our true and only religion, our only infallible point of support, is the written text. We must never be caught at fault with this text, as if we had to answer for our actions on this chapter every day, before implacable judges.
"Given this supreme tribunal that we institute of our own accord in order to protect what we consider to be 'our faith', 'our gospel', the written text, we must study it, assimilate it, confront it in several editions and finally extract the image that corresponds most faithfully to the original thought.
"Once this has been established, we must not forget that this text, in order to live by its own life, must receive our life, and like a building, we will have to add to the concrete carcass of our scrupulosity towards the text everything that a house needs to be finished, that is to say: the impulse of our heart, spontaneity, freedom, diversity of feelings, etc....
"Casella says somewhere that masterpieces should not be respected, but loved, because we only respect dead things and a masterpiece is a thing that is eternally alive.
"Most virtuosos fail to merge the two fundamental attitudes mentioned above in their interpretations; they play exactly what is written, but without any personal contribution (and in this case one leaves the concert sometimes dazzled, but never happy), or they take the work as a pretext for expressing their own fantasy and, making good use of the composer's indications, totally neglect the true meaning that he gave to his music, employing in their performance, wrongly and mistakenly, the impulse of their heart, spontaneity, diversity of feeling, etc., which in this case, far from being a source of inspiration for the performer, is a source of frustration. which in this case, far from furnishing the house advantageously, only disfigure the work irremediably, since the interpretation thus conceived has no sound basis from which to start.
"What is this starting point? It consists of a few fundamental laws of music, the most important of which are, alas, the most neglected by most performers:

olfeggio, especially rhythmic solfeggio;
Support on the downbeats (dwelling on and emphasising the upbeat is one of the most serious mistakes in music, since the upbeat is merely a rebound to the downbeats, which have the real support).
Ignorance on the part of some pianists of the immense resources that can be provided by independence in the same hand between different attacks and touches, and therefore between different timbres. By achieving this independence, the interpretation suddenly takes on an unexpected dimension and the pianist's playing reflects the plasticity and diversity of an orchestral performance.

A pianist who has absolutely nothing to reproach himself for in terms of the author's ideas can take every liberty in his playing, just as a well-bred person can indulge in every kind of social comment and attitude.

"But if, unfortunately for him, the performer ignores or deliberately distorts the fundamental laws of a work, then he will not be allowed any personal contribution or any freedom, just as an uneducated person will always remain vulgar, even if he is careful not to take the slightest liberty of language or attitude.

"Music must live under our fingers, before our eyes, in our hearts and brains, with all that we, the living, can bring to it as an offering".

Dinu Lipatti