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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: 07/23/15Follow Ups:
Maybe a large part of what you don't like is the early 18th century fortepiano itself, which has a sound that can be very hard to accept if you are used to the modern piano.
As for your comment about musicologists, unfortunately it is a common problem throughout academia that researchers make what can be perfectly valid discoveries or findings but then tack on conclusions that exaggerate their significance and general applicability rather than acknowledge their limitations and narrow applicability. Often these conclusions are speculative on their face, and not dishonest per se, but still potentially misleading.
I don't know if that's happening here, but it seems to me studying historic treatises is one, though certainly not the only, legitimate avenue of study. Among other things, the writers of these treatises sometimes strongly and explicitly disagreed with each other, which itself can be revealing. There were two famous instances of this in the flute literature alone, one in the late 18th century and one in the late 19th century.
Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding! We have a winner!! Rbolaw has hit the nail on the head here. Sorry Chris. :)
And. . . yes. . . as I've written previously, fortepianos tend to sound variously (to me at least) like toy pianos and/or strung-and-tuned rubber-bands.
Regarding flute treatises, I still have the one by Quantz, which I used to enjoy reading, especially when he delves into topics which tend not to be covered in other treatises - such as how to dress for a concert, what clothes to wear, etc. And, as you so rightly observe, the disagreements among treatise writers are revealing in themselves and are indicative of the dangers of relying on any single one of them to dictate what is "correct" or "best" in approaching music from a given period.
Yes, Johann Joachim Quantz wrote the first important one (1750), imho still a very important book about playing baroque music. Then came an important treatise by Johann George Tromlitz (1791) which touched on his famous and nasty battle with Ribock, his former student, which I believe went back and forth in published writings a couple of times. Tromlitz took a couple of shots at Quantz, too. Apparently Tromlitz was a brilliant player, teacher and scholar, but also a mean, short-tempered guy whom everyone disliked.
In the late 19th century came the treatise battle between Englishmen R.S. Rockstro and Christopher Welch. Part of the nastiness was due to the fact that all of these guys, except for Welch, in addition to being major players, designed, made and sold flutes, and each wanted his own model to be the industry standard. It's all about the money. Of course, similar rivalries existed with other instrument makers.
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