As I started working on Morton Feldman's For Christian Wolff, I aimed to learn the notated rhythms accurately. The published score is a reproduction of Feldman's handwriting. Some things puzzled me. There are a few measures that don't add up to the expected number of beats (mistakes?). (The top staff is the flute part. The lower staff is the keyboard part: notes with stems up, played by the keyboardist's right hand on the piano, notes with … [Read more...]
Circuitry
We truly learn so much by reading music performance treatises; yet we make a mistake if we read them too simply. Many useful keyboard how-to-books grow from Enlightenment sensibilities: treatises penned by the keyboardists C. P. E. Bach, Daniel Gottlob Türk, Carl Czerny, Ignaz Moscheles. I'm not suggesting that these authors were practicing "esoteric writing" -- the deliberate making of paradoxes and puzzles of meaning. I'm suggesting that … [Read more...]