Style; Origins of Music (21)

Style

Just as any language has its own grammar

Classical music has its own guidelines for making

It is a bit similar to grammar

But it is completely different from grammar

Language requires more precise regulationso that people with different ways of thinking can communicate smoothly

We all live our lives in our own context

Some people call it “formal music”

Classical music

Like language,

there is guidance for how it is made

This is something that has slowly changed over time

It continues to evolve over time

It is based on harmonic relationships

and has been shaped so that it can be used more easily

within what people of each era could “know”

How one takes in a sound itself

and how one senses the relationships between sounds

The sense of harmony differs from person to person

this becomes very clear when teaching children.

Before that,

it is something that must be learned and embodied.

In this way, knowledge accumulates

and gradually takes form as a system that can be learned and used by anyone

In the past, musicians were

like many other trades

fairly common to see

and often in service to courts or churches

So the point at which true freedom

began to shape classical music

is actually quite recent

Because what was required

was technical expertise

to respond to professional demands,

the knowledge of how to construct music to meet those demands

was, in a sense, indispensable

So it developed in great detail

And there is still a pitfall there

Of course, each work has its own beauty

or perhaps it is clearer to call it its “character”

and because of that,

I think one has to truly enter into dialogue with the work

and find it for oneself

But how that finds its way into sound

depends on the person who plays

If we choose to ignore this

and one pursues an imposed sense of “rightness”

based only on historical form,

the music does not come alive

Especially if one becomes too caught up

in small, peripheral details,

it becomes difficult

it really does

I have played differently for exams and for performance

so I know

When you keep doing that,

not only does the music die,

but your own heart gradually thins out

At a basic level,

what a person does not allow in themselves

they do not allow in others either

So in order to free oneself from this kind of constraint,

one has to first free oneself

When you feel that someone’s music is “good” or “bad,”

if you notice

why it has become a binary judgment,

that is where the first step begins

About interpretation,

I once read a passage in a book

where Cortot wrote about Chopin

I was still in my twenties

I thought it was an important sentence,

but it took me all this time

for it to truly become my own

And then, the same words return again

as if to reaffirm something in myself

Words of Lili Kraus,

who studied with Bartók

I did not know

she had also studied with Schnabel

I remember bringing

Schnabel’s edition of the Beethoven sonatas

to a lesson

and being told off for it

🤭

I learned that it is a total misconception to speak about ‘style’ of playing.

If you understand the fabulous message of Mozart’s dynamic signs, you will have no doubts

—— Lili Kraus

Spread your wings,

and free yourself from the constraints.