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Richard A Williamson(Choral Journal Writing Fellow)
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Editor's note: Richard Williamson first appeared as a Writing Fellow in the Choral Journal in April 2001 with a study of Ginastera's Lamentaciones de Jeremias Propheta . He returns with a compelling and enlightening challenge. When we perform music from before 1750, we can find treatises on interpretation and performance practice to guide our reading of the notation. Williamson applies the same strategy to the nineteenth century. He presents treatises that can refresh our understanding of the later Common Practice period. Our goal as Writing Fellows was to share the drama and surprise of relatively recent sources, extract their lessons, and apply their instructions to standard works by Brahms and Fauré with the same intelligence and care we give to more remote composers.
Nina Gilbert
For information about Choral Journal Writing Fellows, see [lang ]ww2.lafayette.edu/[sim ]gilbertn/WritingFellows.html[rang ].
Is it possible that our readings of Romantic music have become under-Romantic? Starting with works of Leopold Mozart and C. P. E. Bach in the late 1940s, scholars have published modern English versions of several important eighteenth-century performance-practice sources. 1 These served as an antidote to overly Romantic renderings of Baroque and Classical works. Today, we are as far removed in time from Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms as musicians of the mid-twentieth century were from Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Yet major nineteenth-century performance-practice documents remain unavailable in modern editions. Studying such sources may help us reawaken the Romantic spirit in our performances of nineteenth-century music.
Expressive markings alone do not convey all nuances. Performers must determine for themselves when to add emphasis, articulation, and tempo and dynamic inflections. Authentic interpretation aspires to reproduce the expressive gestures performers of a particular period might have employed. Specific performance applications recommended by authors of the nineteenth century -- when applied to music of their time -- represent a historically relevant performance practice for Romantic music.
This article presents ideas from Hugo Riemann's Katechismus der Phrasierung [Practical Guide to the Art of Phrasing, 1890] and his Katechismus des Klavierspiels [Catechism of Pianoforte Playing, 1888], Mathis Lussy's Traité de l'expression musicale [Musical Expression, 1874], and Alfred John Good-rich's Theory of Interpretation Applied to Artistic Musical Performance (1899). 2 ...