About Music
Music has an intelligible nature, there is no doubt about it; it is the result of the relationship between sounds and intellect. Sound is not music. The meaning that the intellect acquires in the perception of a sound event is musical. There is no discussion of the beauty or ugliness of a sound, more generally I affirm a quality of music, expressed in the faculty of the intellect to establish significant relationships. On Music is a theory of musical intelligibility with which I hypothesize that musical thought processes are activated by a path different from rational procedures directly connected to a structured mode of speech. Musical thought processes are forms of non-sequential thought whose thought is relative to the ability to understand according to an activity autonomous from logical-formal rules.
The thumb pass
The thumb pass is one of the most important technical elements for the study of the piano; it accompanies the pianist throughout the entire course of studies from the beginning to professional performances. In this paper, the study of the thumb pass is examined in its historical evolution to understand the relationship between the development of the piano gesture and the execution of the thumb pass. Thus, in this paper, the study and practice of this particular technique propose a reflection on the piano gesture and the use of the thumb which, in the modern piano, can no longer benefit from the movement of the finger alone, at least for most of the passages in the repertoire literature.
Beating time or directing?
"Tradition is the sum of errors" claimed Artur Schnabel. A critical statement aimed at a possible negative inference that tradition - made of memory, testimonies and news - has on the text, connoting it with errors. Reading the work in this way is contaminated and a problem of interpretation follows. Luciano Berio wrote in the presentation of Cronache del Luogo, one of his works. "I can analyze music but I cannot describe it." But if music cannot be described, how is it possible to evaluate a performance process? How is it possible to weigh a negative inference of testimony? Is there a problem of decoding the text, of inadequacy of transcription of the musical idea? The performance has no objective value and has an inscrutable value, all in all there are differences that have to do with the process implemented by the interpreter. The answer may be in the term intelligibility.
Performance Analysis
The essays collected in this volume draw the jagged perimeter of a problem that can be approached from various angles and perspectives, with methods that pertain to a wide range of epistemological approaches and analytical findings that thematize different aspects of performance from time to time. Musicologists (historians, philologists, analysts), composers, performers, directors, music critics, historians of interpretation, philosophers have contributed.
Contents in:
Sonata 1924 and modernistic pianism by Igor Stravinsky
The 1924 Sonata presents itself as a formally open macrostructure in continuous material evolution. In it, the thematic and accompanimental elements tend to lose their original role to acquire a functional dimension of antagonistic figure, integrating with a hatching that simultaneously shows aspects made functionally ductile during their elaboration: implanted precisely in the Stravinsky manner. A manner that de-historicizes the compositional object, initially dated in its initial configuration “à la maniere de”. Then relocating it in a sort of restructuring that re-interprets, so to speak, its ideal position in the evolution of musical thought. Ultimately, Stravinsky's art of deformations is freed in all its creativity in the neo-baroque development of the continuous plot, which here reveals its potential not only as polyphonic but above all as a fabric that is capable of the most diverse possibilities in every, even unpredictable, creative inspiration. Continue reading