On instinct, and the importance of theory for us mere mortals.

I will state my argument from the start: ‘instinct’ / ‘talent’ / ‘musicality’ is not enough to reach one’s full interpretative potential in a musical artwork.

A well established ability of ‘talent’ is having an innate sense to shape musical phrases expressively and / or ‘correctly’.

Let’s consider phrases and motifs as micro elements of form.

As ‘musicality’ increases, a performer will start to instinctively understand (and interpret ‘correctly’ / expressively) larger (macro) elements of form, such as culmination points in a work, contrasts between segments (such as applying different colours or tempi between the two main themes - if they are contrasting, for example, in their articulation- of a Sonata Exposition) and finally contrasts between sections (Expositions, Codas, Variations, etc.). The highest amount of talent / instinct / etc. will also be able to ‘feel’ the relations between movements of an entire work. This means that the musician in question will find the culminating point of the whole work (as well as other macro and micro elements) and shape the expressive intensity of all other movements accordingly, so as not to obscure the one and only culmination (some works don’t have a single culmination but several, but most works have only one, in my humble opinion ((and also Rachmaninov’s)).

Before proceeding, here is my view of tonal harmony and form in general:

Harmony has rules that come from nature’s ‘golden ratio’ (feel free to google this if you are not familiar with it). This ratio then translates into the harmonic series, which makes tonal music have a strict set of rules that determine what we find ‘pleasing’ and ‘unpleasing’ (in the same way that ‘nice’ smells and ‘bad’ smells are not ‘nice’ or ‘bad’ per se; this is just an extrapolation of the concepts of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ of human beings, ‘good’ being what helps us survive, ‘evil’ being what does not - the foul smelling flower does not know it is foul smelling -). Back in our specific context, ‘pleasing’ could mean, for example, an augmented fourth interval resolving into a perfect fifth (the basis of every dominant seventh resolving into a tonic chord and arguably the basis of most of harmony). ‘Unpleasing’ would be, for example, resolving a dominant into a tonic without a decrease of tension, or losing tension in a subdominant passage before reaching the dominant in a micro (or even macro) element of a work.

To sum it up, this basically means, I think, that all laws of harmony are laws of tension and release. Abiding by these rules creates the expressive / ‘correct’ interpretation of micro elements such as phrases, motifs, etc.

Form is basically harmony in a larger scale. This also implies that abiding by the rules will create expressive / ‘correct’ interpretations of macro elements such as segments, sections, etc.

So then, to make a long story short: can we say that interpretation is merely an act of spotting rises and descents in a topography and balancing them out ? If a musical work was a sculpture of a human being, wouldn’t it be wrong to recreate a sculpture by Michelangelo (in musical context, he would be the composer, obviously) with a nose as long as Pinocchio’s ? Or to recreate a drawing of a human being by Picasso with correct bodily shapes and sizes ?

This may sound too simple, but there are nuances to it. For example, many tools exist to make a ‘pleasing’ element stand out. Post - baroque composers will use articulation for this, writing accents on appogiaturas and so on. Sometimes, performers may even stray from these directives and, after having spotted a contrast that needs to stand out, choose to change the original articulation (or dynamic). An example for this are Vladimir Horowitz’s subito pianos (if you examine their location you will see they only come when contrasts call for it, such as between contrasting micro elements or segments ((when a false recapitulation starts, for example)) or his adding of a bass octave into a culminatory part of a piece. Rubato is also a great tool to emphasize contrasts and dents in topography.

So let’s enrich the definition. Can we say that in the end, interpretation is merely an act of balancing out micro and macro culminations with different tools (articulations written by the composer, subito pianos / fortes, rubati…) ?

This thought process means that in the end, all is in the score, and that if one knows proper theory, one can be a good interpret that presents musical works in their ‘ideal’ representations.

But is that all there is to Music and to an interpret ? Mathematical certainty ? Isn’t art, specifically Music, much more ineffable than numerical values and relations ?

I suppose that’s where talent ends and genius starts.

To illustrate this, let’s hear Martha play an encore she’s been playing recently: these are the two Gavottes from Bach’s 3rd English Suite. The passage in question (the 2nd Gavotte) starts at 1:30.

Now, here is the score:

Sure, Bach almost never wrote any markings, since anyone that played this was quite the music theorist back then. But do you think he would have notated the wonderful, bell like first beats created by the interpreter ? Or the intense usage of left and right pedals, creating a blurry, pianissimo, introverted atmosphere ? Would he have written ‘dolcissimo’ here, which is the way she plays it ? Would Bach have notated these tiny ceasuras that we hear between the phrases ?

Suddenly, in this Gavotte, the interpret plunges us into a world of serenity. Who knows what she feels in this piece that made her play it so beautifully and creatively ? The closest image to the way she plays this that I can think of is this: she is thinking of the feeling of the first time she cradled one of her children to sleep. Feel free to find any other images and / or feelings. But one can be sure that no amount of virtuosity in balancing out tensions and releases or topological characteristics will ever make one play like this. Bach had many children. This ‘cradling’ image is not so far fetched. Has she found the emotional essence of the Gavotte ? Yes ! It is a certainty, as I think you will also feel after having listened to the recording. The image may be different, perhaps this is actually about a beautiful morning mist. But the essence of the emotion, of the work, is always unmistakable…

And that is genius…

To look behind and feel beyond the score.

For interprets of this stature (other ones are Richter, Kleiber, Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, etc. Wouldn’t you agree ?) this Dyonisian look is omnipresent, and the whole Appolonian theoretical apparatus I just described is second nature by instinct. They do not need to learn theory (actually, most of them did. One of my biggest regrets is not having asked Martha about this ((whether she thinks of form and harmony when playing or practicing, etc.)) in a long car journey in Switzerland where she talked about the Chopin Competition, the pandemic and the recently departed Nelson Freire). But I think that perhaps only about a few thousand people have been born as such geniuses (I do not use that word lightly) in the last thousand years, and only 100 became musicians and only 10 became famous enough for us to hear them.

For us mere talented mortals, theoretical knowledge is a MUST. We may be able to feel beyond the score now and then, even if in a bit more shallower way, revealing half truths. But without looking at a score theoretically, we take a big risk in hoping that our talent will make all the ‘correct’ decisions in all elements of a work. Can instinct or talent foresee that the themes in the secondary theme group of a classical sonata should always be ‘left in the air’ since the convention is to evade a perfect cadence until the essential expositional closure preceded by a medial ceasura arrives ? I truly doubt so. I’m pretty sure that most of us as painters would be out of work from creating Mona Lisa reproductions with sunglasses.

In a finishing note, I must say that it was only when I started to conduct that I truly started to analyze pieces. Until then, as a pianist, I was a crap musician who listened to youtube recordings (without using my own aural imagination beforehand) and took what I wanted from passages of interpretations I liked, making a pastiche of ideas that weren’t mine at all. I thought theory was boring and unneeded. I was so talented anyway ! I didn’t need this !

I only realized I was wrong after a few years of studying theory more deeply (and writing a little sonata myself, as an exercise), noticing that my interpretations were now much more coherent, ‘correct’ and ‘truth revealing’.

To the young musician reading these words ! Take what I said seriously, and don’t lose precious time doing this mistake that I did.

To the more experienced musician reading these words ! I must sound like an all-knowing pedantic narcissist. Close this page immediately. I do hope that you will agree with me though, that in this world of dualities, an artwork must be balanced in both Appolonian AND Dyonisian aspects, and that a strong Appolonian aspect is required because of its link to the physical conventions of the earth in which these organized sounds which we call Music exists.

DOE