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It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes.

RE: Technique - don't knock it!

I notice these delightful words were written before 1905, probably well before. Victorian and Edwardian English literature is another of my interests, and this wonderful short paragraph, though nonfiction and no doubt cropped from an ancient newspaper (I see Johnstone wrote music criticism for the Manchester Guardian) is a gem of that age. Thank you for it!

It was also the age before the dawn of commercial recording. I've argued that recording has changed our tastes in and expectations from music. This would apply to all sorts of music, but it's especially interesting to see it in classical music, where the identical pieces performed in the 19th century are performed today. I think we have very different ideas of what constitutes virtuoso technique than did the audience for this music in the 19th century.

The experiences of Arthur Rubinstein, a famous musician who straddled these eras, has long fascinated me. He dismissed acoustic recording as a novelty item, but when confronted with electrical recording at the age of 40, had to overhaul his technique.

Edwin Fischer was considered one of the young Rubinstein's greatest rivals, but can you listen to Fischer's Well Tempered Clavier today without at least occasionally wincing? Even harder to listen to is Shostakovich, a capable pianist who reportedly refused to allow his mistakes to be edited out of recordings, playing his own preludes and fugues.

The 19th century virtuosos created the illusion of superhuman technique while remaining profoundly human and fallible. Great technique means something different today, and in my opinion, something less magical -- and less human.



Edits: 08/21/14 08/21/14

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