Great online resource for classical music (all types of music as well)

[mound]

(note, I just edited this with a more appropriate title)

I always like to listen to as many recordings of a piece I intend to learn for some period of time before I start learning it.. I have always done so with score in hand. I've found that Bernhard is a big proponent of this, and has said things like "listen to 10 versions of a Bach Invention" etc..  How is one to do this w/o spending thousands on CD's?

I subscribe to a service called Rhapsody, from www.listen.com

It's $9.95 a month (you need a fast internet connection) and it gives you unlimited access to something like 100,000 albums and recordings. Thus far, every piece I've learned, I've found several recordings in this service. You can burn tracks for $.79 each, or just stream them and listen in CD quality. From this service I was able to burn a CD with 7 versions of Bach's Invention #1, which my teacher and I then listened to and discussed.   I'm just starting the Sinfonia #9, again, there are several versions to choose from. Chopin? Beethoven? It's all there, it's a massive collection.  The Malaguena by Ernesto Lecuena that I'm working on now? Yup, there is at least one version I've found.

Definitely, if you have a fast internet connection and 10 bux to spare a month, this service is well worth it.



-Paul

[BoliverAllmon]

sounds better than napster

[jbmajor]

(note, I just edited this with a more appropriate title)

I always like to listen to as many recordings of a piece I intend to learn for some period of time before I start learning it.. I have always done so with score in hand. I've found that Bernhard is a big proponent of this, and has said things like "listen to 10 versions of a Bach Invention" etc..  How is one to do this w/o spending thousands on CD's?

I subscribe to a service called Rhapsody, from www.listen.com

It's $9.95 a month (you need a fast internet connection) and it gives you unlimited access to something like 100,000 albums and recordings. Thus far, every piece I've learned, I've found several recordings in this service. You can burn tracks for $.79 each, or just stream them and listen in CD quality. From this service I was able to burn a CD with 7 versions of Bach's Invention #1, which my teacher and I then listened to and discussed.   I'm just starting the Sinfonia #9, again, there are several versions to choose from. Chopin? Beethoven? It's all there, it's a massive collection.  The Malaguena by Ernesto Lecuena that I'm working on now? Yup, there is at least one version I've found.

Definitely, if you have a fast internet connection and 10 bux to spare a month, this service is well worth it.



-Paul

I'll have to check it out.  www.naxos.com is also good.

[cziffra777]

I always like to listen to as many recordings of a piece I intend to learn for some period of time before I start learning it.. I have always done so with score in hand. I've found that Bernhard is a big proponent of this, and has said things like "listen to 10 versions of a Bach Invention" etc..

This isn't always a good idea. If you listen to recordings before learning a piece, you are less likely to come up with your own interpretation.   

How is one to do this w/o spending thousands on CD's?

It's possible to find classical cds very cheaply if you know where to look. I have around two thousand cds and I only paid $2-5 for most of them.

[Tash]

well i'm lucky and my uni library web database thingy has an online classical music library that i can explore for free!!! i got so excited the first time i went there, it was like heaven and i could listen to whatever i liked! so ner ner sorry i'm being mean now. thus my conclusion is you should all come to my uni and get free music hehe

[mound]

This isn't always a good idea. If you listen to recordings before learning a piece, you are less likely to come up with your own interpretation.

I don't buy that.. I've thought about this, I've had discussions about it with my teacher, and folks on this board, especially Bernhard, have agreed that this is total nonsense. To listen to 10 completely different interpretations of a Bach invention is not going to prevent me from coming up with my own interpretation.  I think that's a pretty logical argument though, but I don't accept it as truth.

-Paul

[bernhard]

I always like to listen to as many recordings of a piece I intend to learn for some period of time before I start learning it.. I have always done so with score in hand. I've found that Bernhard is a big proponent of this, and has said things like "listen to 10 versions of a Bach Invention" etc..

This isn't always a good idea. If you listen to recordings before learning a piece, you are less likely to come up with your own interpretation.   

I have discussed this at some length in this thread:

https://pianoforum.net/smf/index.php/msg19129
(See the discussion that starts on reply #9)

But recently I have been reflecting on the subject of interpretation. And here is a new angle (at least I think it is new).

Many years ago, I met a number of Japanese guys who had come to the UK to do some graduate courses. In those days this was not as common as it is today, and many of them could not speak English at all. They could read and write, but their spoken English was so atrocious that it was simply impossible to understand what they were trying to say. Eventually I learned that they all had extensive courses in English while in Japan. However, since English teachers who were native speakers were pretty rare in Japan then, their teachers were themselves Japanese who could not speak the language either. As a consequence they were completely literate, had excellent grammar, but could not have a conversation. Their knowledge of the language was limited to the written medium.

Now, I would like to submit that “interpreting” a piece of music from a score is analogous to saying aloud what you read in a text. You may understand the score, its structure, its harmonic relationships, where the melody is going and so on. And yet, it is through interpretation that you bring the music in the score “to life”. It is perfectly possible to “interpret” the music and yet not to bring it to life, not to give it any meaning, or to give it a completely mistaken meaning, pretty much like my Japanese friends, who, having no idea about the correct pronunciation of the written words, could not give them meaning, or gave them erroneous meanings. And yet, until the moment they arrived in the UK they were convinced that their pronunciation was – if not perfect – workable.

Now do you think the argument below holds water?

“You should not listen to any recording of this text in English, just in case it interferes with your pronunciation.”

This strikes anyone as complete nonsense. And it is. Because listening to a native speaker pronounce the words is the only way to get to pronounce the words right.

But when it comes to music, you see a lot of people – who should know better (and this includes all of my teachers without exception) - voicing the same absurdity.

Likewise, the only way to figure out how to interpret music is to listen to people who know what they are doing (the equivalent of a native speaker).

And just like no one speaks exactly like anyone else, no one can interpret music exactly like someone else.

And if you are not going to listen to a CD – just in case it interferes with your interpretation, you better never go to any concert ever, since you may want to play that piece and it will interfere with your interpretation.

I think the above solves a lot of the problems from Beethoven onwards. We have a live tradition of interpretation for all this music (the equivalent of a “native speaker”).

However, pre-Beethoven music poses a different problem altogether. And I thinkl I should touch on it, since Paul gave the example of Bach’s inventions.

What is it that we have to guide us in Bach’s interpretation? We have (sometimes) the original scores. We have the writings of his son (C.P.E.) and the writings of some of his pupils/contemporaries (Forkel, Kirnberger). And we have a whole bunch of musicologist’s opinions, mostly starting in the 50s. We also have the hearsay of music teachers/pianists (Beethoven played like that – so said my teacher who was a pupil of Fisher, who was a pupil of Krause, who was a pupil of Liszt, who was a pupil of Czerny, who was a pupil of Beethoven).

And that is pretty much it.

Unfortunately, the score does not tell you that much. And the books of the time will not tell you what was common knowledge; the things that were taken for granted, the things that every musician knew. And this knowledge has been completely lost.

Let us consider an analogy. We have been able to decipher the old Egyptian hyerogliphs. We now can read pretty much any literature that the ancient Egyptians may have produced. We know quite a lot from reading it about their life style, their religious beliefs, their philosophies and their social customs.

However there is something that has been irrevocably lost: Their manner of speaking: their accent. We cannot fathom what these hieroglyphs would actually sound like if spoken aloud. In fact, if we had a time machine, went back in time and met some ancient Egyptians, even if we had completely mastered the written language, we probably would not understand them, nor would they understand us. In fact it would take a while of writing down what we wanted to say and being corrected in our pronunciation to come up with a workable version of the spoken language.

Now, I submit that saying aloud (and correctly) what I read in Ancient hieroglyphs is equivalent to playing from a score some Baroque piece.

Interpretation, then means to bring the music alive, to give it meaning so that the listener can understand what is it that we are saying. But we are now in the uncomfortable position that as players we may have quite a lot of knowledge about the written language, but no way of knowing what the spoken language sounded like. Meanwhile our listeners have no idea whatsoever about either the written language or the spoken language. They look at hieroglyphs and think “How pretty, what quaint little pictures”, and they go for this superficial aesthetics, totally unaware that a world of meaning lies therein. Meanwhile there are no shortage of players who are prepared to cater for this Aesthetic market and play Baroque music as a “pretty little tune”.

If I am in Ancient Egypt, the correct pronounciation is all around me. It is taken for granted. I will get it because I am living in a society that uses the language, and uses the language to convey meaning that can only be conveyed by pronouncing it correctly. In short, the language is alive. There is some leeway in the way speakers will pronounce words, but this leeway is contained within some pretty limited boundaries (think of the several accents displayed by native speakers of English – they are all acceptable – however, Japanese students of English usually cannot make themselves understood because they learn their English from other Japanese)

The problem we face with Baroque music is the same problem we face with Ancient Egyptian: it is a dead language. We do not know how to pronounce it anymore. The most important expressive device of Baroque music – not dynamics, and not agogics; both so important for the expression of post-Baroque music – is articulation. Unfortunately, most Baroque scores have no signs indicating how to articulate the notes/phrases, not because they should not be articulated, but because articulation was taken for granted. There was no need to notate something with which every musician was fully conversant.

This means that it is even more important to listen to a variety of CDs from different pianists, so that we can have an idea of the range available. In the case of Bach and other baroque composers, the worse one can do is to listen to “intuitive” performers: The ones who did not bother to do any research and just play it “as they feel like it” (e.g. Richter). Personally I feel quite discouraged of ever really finding out how to play Baroque music properly, but I will always go for the “scholars” (Rosalyn Tureck, Angela Hewitt, Andras Schiff) over the “aesthetic guys” – the guys who go after the “if it sounds nice it is right”.

As I said elsewhere, Baroque music is a chess game, full of rules which we do not know anymore. To look at a chess board and wax lyrical at how pretty it looks (and if we move that piece to the corner it will be even more aesthetically pleasing) is to miss the point completely.

Best wishes,
Bernhard.

[mound]

Great post Bernhard, Thank you.. It's interesting, out of the 8 or so versions of the Bach Invention #1 I listened to with my teacher, for all but one of them he said "yes, this is very pretty, but if I played it like this for my teacher, he would have scowled and walked out of the room" - they were mostly "aesthetic" versions (Gould, Rubsam.. the others escape me at the moment) - only one, I think it was Friskin came close to what he deemed "appropriate" in that it seemed to most closely follow the rules.  And his teaching and expectation from me is that I most closely follow the rules (to the best of my ability at this point, which goes to why we've spent so much time on it following my having memorized it.)

It's interesting, the more I learn from you, the more I realize how much my teacher knows, and he's just about the same age as me, but classically trained from childhood.  (an aside, I think he'd be baffled by many of the practice/learning techniques you talk about. I showed him the repeated note group exercise I did on that group of 3 quintuplets, and he looked at me like I was crazy.. I think though that once I've successfully applied these techniques to a few pieces I'll start to tell him about some of these techniques.)

It's also interesting to point out that in the beginning of my relationship with my teacher,  he'd give me a new piece and I'd ask him to play it, I remember distinctly the first time I asked him that, he said after some hesitation, "ummmm.. no, I'd rather not.. I want to see how you hear it."  - but that's just it, how the hell was I going to "hear it" when the score was just a bunch of black dots I had to tediously pick out on the keyboard?  So I started finding and listening to recordings anyway and told him as much.. Since that time he has definitely changed, he'll play pieces for me first if I ask, and encourage further listening/discussion of others recordings, perhaps because he has seen the positive impact that has.

So anyway I believe your argument still implies that listening to others is still important for post-Baroque music as well, where "We have a live tradition of interpretation for all this music". Is this correct?

Thanks!

-Paul