What if our classical music is really much more varied, confusing, and more disorderly than we make it sound in playing today? What if the wordless instrumental music of Mozart and Beethoven encodes and encloses so many references to the specifics and generalities of living Italian comic opera that we're in the dark without it? What if in the great regularizing of the bow, the beat, subdivisions, fingerings, registers high and low, we … [Read more...]
Off the grid
By the later 20th Century, the performance of classical music -- for orchestra, also chamber music, and solos -- was dominated by pervasive strong regular beat. Emphasis on beat-regularity is the outcome or reflection of several musical and societal changes, among these mass production, the standardization of time keeping (time zones), the metronome, sound recording, the ascent of conducting, more emphasis on "full" scores, the practice of … [Read more...]
Beat It
Walking across the campus of a big Midwestern university, I hear drumming. The drumline from the school's marching band is practicing outdoors, with a very loud metronome. Big speakers blast out the regular electric beats -- quite a lot louder than twenty drummers drumming. These beats sound like gunshots. The music is intricate with a lot of syncopation, and these kids fit it all in, around the clicks. This kind of practicing is not so … [Read more...]