Any classical music adherent would love to go back in time and listen to performances by the great composers themselves. A lot has changed over the years, including musical instruments and piano technique, leaving one to wonder whether this has affected the overall sound and effect of the music.
Modern classical music performance
The last 10 years have seen a growing number of music scientists investigating how the instrumentalist’s technique affects the sound of the music as well as the emotional response it triggers from the audience. For instance, the way the instrumentalist’s body moves while playing affects his or her performance.
“Music has one foot in physics and one foot in aesthetics,” said Rolf Inge Godoy, a professor of musicology at the University of Oslo. “Body motion is essential for shaping the outcome of the sound, both in terms of what you actually hear and in terms of the visual impact on an audience.” Via NY Times
One of the technologies Dr. Godoy uses to study the physics of movement while playing a musical piece is optical motion capture. This is the same technology used in the animation industry that employs the use of infrared cameras. Reflective markers are placed on the player’s hands or body, and the cameras capture the light from them to allow for recording of the performers motion with great precision.
In order to draw the line between technique and the resulting sound and audience reaction, however, Dr. Godoy needed to involve an instrumentalist with the same technique used by the legends of classical music. He found such a musician in Christina.
Christina Kobb learned a 19th-century piano technique that forced her to hold her body differently, producing a more fluid and subtle sound. Credit Fredrik Solstad for The New York Times
To find out, Dr. Godoy struck up a collaboration with Christina Kobb, a doctoral candidate at the Norwegian Academy of Music and head of theory at Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo. Ms. Kobb has developed an unusual expertise: She has learned how to play the piano according to techniques described nearly 200 years ago.
As a visiting student at Cornell University in 2010, she researched 19th-century pedagogical piano treatises — essentially, instruction manuals for piano playing. The techniques that they described, she realized, differed drastically from those she had been taught.
“I was not following even the most basic instructions given to beginners at the time,” Ms. Kobb said. “I wondered, ‘Would this make a difference in my playing?’ ” Via NY Times
Christina taught herself how to play in 19th-century technique, using as a guide the seminal treatise “A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instructions on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte”, written by Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s, who was Mozart’s student. She also drew additional information from treatises written in Vienna in the 1820s, and others published in England and France.
“It’s hard enough learning how to play once,” she said. “I had to become conscious of every motion in my hands and fingers, things that normally I would do automatically, by habit.”
While modern players tend to hunch over the keys and hold their forearms nearly perpendicular to the keyboard, 19th-century style dictated that pianists sit bolt upright. The posture prevented players from bringing their weight to bear on the keyboard, instead forcing them to rely on smaller finger movements. The elbows were held firmly against the body, with forearms sloping down and hands askew. Via NY Times
As expected, Christina discovered significant differences in her performance. For instance, she noticed that she could jump more swiftly between disparate chords, play faster and decrease the dramatic pauses between notes.
The old style also allows the performer to be more discriminatory and subtle in choosing which notes to stress, Ms. Kobb learned, producing a performance that is subdued by today’s standards.
“There’s a different physical feeling to playing, as well as a different outcome,” she said. Via NY Times
Dr. Godoy’s research is meant to draw out the link between the musician’s bodily effort and sound output, a highly extensive and engaging process.
Ms. Kobb played with reflective dots on her hands to allow optical motion capture for a study of the physics of musical movement. Credit Alexander Refsum Jensenius
“The correlation between bodily effort and sound output is really what we’re aiming to find out, but in order to do that we need to perform extensive statistical analysis, which is tremendously time-consuming,” Dr. Godoy said. Via NY Times
Even so, what’s already evident is that a lot has been lost as a result of the shifts in technique. It is, therefore, important that musicians restore and learn the early techniques if we are to experience classical music in the way its composers intended.
To play Mozart on a modern grand piano with the appropriate style and taste will always be a challenge for today’s performers. One of the main reasons is that Mozart was thinking of a different instrument at the moment he composed his music, constructed with other materials, played with another technical approach, and activated with a different mechanism that provided a very characteristic tone. This essay analyses two recordings made on historical instruments of the Mozart Sonata in B flat K.570. It will first explain the aims of selecting these specific two recordings. It will then go on to examine the context of the instruments used in these recordings and how this relates to their reliability as a reference for the original sound of the fortepiano in Mozart’s time. Via The Tutor Pages
Pianist Christina Kobb: Playing it 19th century style
Virtually all classical pianists play 19th-century music, but because live recordings of early romantic music don’t exist, no one alive today really knows what 19th-century piano repertoire sounded like in 19th-century performances.
Christina Kobb might have a better idea than most. While studying at Cornell University in 2010, she came across 19th century piano pedagogy books that at first made her giggle because of how much their instructions differed from what Kobb, now Head of Theory at Barratt Due Institute of Music and a Ph.D candidate at the Norwegian Academy of Music, had been taught while growing up in Norway in the 1980s. Via Oregon ArtsWatch
Putting piano music from Schubert’s time under the microscope
Nowadays, Schubert’s music sounds differently compared to 200 years ago. To find out why, the body language of pianists is now being analysed.
“Pianists’ playing technique has changed considerably over the last 200 years,” says Christina Kobb, PhD scholar at the Norwegian Academy of Music. For the last five years she has studied piano treatises of the early nineeenth century in order to reconstruct the physical approach to piano playing at that time and to determine whether the music of such great composers as Beethoven and Schubert would sound differently with the reconstructed playing technique. Via Apollon
To play Mozart on a modern grand piano with the appropriate style and taste will always be a challenge for today’s performers. One of the main reasons is that Mozart was thinking of a different instrument at the moment he composed his music, constructed with other materials, played with another technical approach, and activated with a different mechanism that provided a very characteristic tone. This essay analyses two recordings made on historical instruments of the Mozart Sonata in B flat K.570. It will first explain the aims of selecting these specific two recordings. It will then go on to examine the context of the instruments used in these recordings and how this relates to their reliability as a reference for the original sound of the fortepiano in Mozart’s time. Via The Tutor Pages
Virtually all classical pianists play 19th-century music, but because live recordings of early romantic music don’t exist, no one alive today really knows what 19th-century piano repertoire sounded like in 19th-century performances.
Nowadays, Schubert’s music sounds differently compared to 200 years ago. To find out why, the body language of pianists is now being analysed.