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RE: Here's the problem

Posted by Chris from Lafayette (A) on July 23, 2015 at 11:19:10

In Reply to: RE: Here's the problem posted by jazz1 on July 22, 2015 at 22:36:55:

I just deleted my previous post - sorry if it sounded harsh or arrogant. ;-)

So to answer your comments in more detail, the point of my "thought experiment" is NOT that Lang Lang is actually going to write a treatise and that that's the only evidence we'll have of his playing in the future (i.e., his recordings and videos will somehow be lost). The significance of the comparison is that IF Lang Lang's presumed "treatise" were the only source we bothered to use to get an idea of twenty-first century pianism (i.e., the same methodology that the Norwegian musicologist is using with respect to Hummel's treatise vis-a-vis eighteenth - and early nineteenth-century pianism), then that methodology wouldn't deserve much notice or respect - for the reason I mentioned (i.e., that there's WAY more diversity of playing at any given time than any one treatise can account for).

IMHO, Christine is involved in some very feeble methodology - which is too bad, since, as has already been pointed out, she IS a babe. It's flimsy because claims are being made for it that go beyond all bounds of what one might realistically be able to conclude from its intrinsic worth. Sure, the practice of going back and trying to play Hummel's music on the basis of remarks in his own treatise could be interesting as a kind of experiment (and indeed, one could learn something from it!), but don't go swaggering around making sweeping claims that "that's the way it was" universally in Hummel's time, or that it should be followed in our own performances all the piano music written around then - or even that it's the best way of playing the compositions of Hummel himself! When are we going to learn that composers are not necessarily the best exponents of their own music? And, BTW, did you listen to that sound clip that accompanied the story? It was pretty bad - much like that other triumph of musicology, the quasi banishment of vibrato from performance of eighteenth- (or even nineteenth- and early twentieth- !) century music!

Finally, I agree that to dismiss all musicologists out of hand is a bit pretentious. I'm sure there MUST be some who are not susceptible to group think, exaggerated claims, and their own brand of general pretentiousness. And by "exagerrated claims" and "pretentiousness" I mean that too many musicologists consider themselves to be the final arbiters of "what the composer wanted", and that any approach to the music other than theirs is "not being faithful to the composer". You can't get much more pretentious than that - if only they had a bit more sense of humility and modesty! But no - that's not the way things work in the academe, where instructors like to prance around extolling their latest flimsy "findings"!

Edits: 07/23/15

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