2012: A MUSICAL SPACE ODYSSEY
Part 4: Interpretation
JEREMY SIEPMANN, Speaker
& Presenter
Hong Kong City Hall
Concert Hall
Thursday (11 October 2012 )
It all started with those Breakfast Meetings of
The Chopin Society of Hong Kong, held in the mornings of each festival at a
meeting room of the YMCA Salisbury. For the editions in 2008 and 2011, the veteran
British writer-broadcaster and musical historian Jeremy Siepmann, also a member
in the jury of the Hong Kong International Piano Competition, was invited to
give talks on various aspects of music. Subjects included a secret history of
the piano and that enigma called “From Sigh To Scream”. These proved so popular
that Siepmann was invited back this year (a non-competition year) to helm a
series of lectures on the elements of music, interpretation and criticism over the
course of five days. Those people who attended all five sessions would be
awarded with a certificate personally signed by the master himself.
Having arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, I could
only attend the last two lectures. The first was on Interpretation, and why
performances of a same piece of music by different performers could sound so
different. He suggested that all musical phrases were rhythmic phenomena
comprised three rhythmic states: the upbeat, the beat and the afterbeat. It is
the mastery of the afterbeat that defines interpretation. This is a very
interesting concept indeed, which he referred to as the Holy Trinity of musical
expression. He also regularly referred to the way one pronounces the word tortilla: tor-TEE-yah, with the emphasis on the middle syllable. And also its
variation with a cadence, tortilla now:
tor-TEE-yah NOW!
He declaimed the disadvantages of being a
trained and professional musician, where formal education often stultifies the
way one naturally perceives of music. One becomes more conscious of the notion
of music rather than experiencing it organically, a case of being more
concerned with the context rather than the content. Music is infinitely greater
than being it being a symptom of its time. Therefore musicologists and
authenticists are guilty of mummifying the spirit of music in certain ways.
He showed some musical examples, like the first
phrase of Schubert’s Sixth Moment Musical, which is often better sung than
played on the keyboard. He elaborated at length the first four measures of Bach’s
Prelude in C minor (from WTC Book 1) and demonstrated how the Fugue in D major (WTC Book 1 again) could be interpreted in different ways based on
variations of tempi – like a sewing machine, a Busonian chorale or musical box.
A score is merely a blueprint, for which a performer begins to build his
interpretation and gives life to a work. It is otherwise as boring as an
architect’s blueprint when compared with the final product, a building.
He asserts that all performance is a merely a
cross-section of the myriad possibilities that exist of any given piece. So why
do artists persist is playing in the same way? Is there not the possibility of
variation, such as playing the exposition repeat of a sonata movement
differently the second time around? Nothing should be considered definitive,
otherwise it would just be boring and extremely wasteful.
Even Van Gogh’s art gets a look-in, his thick
gobs of paint making a piece look 3-dimensional when light is being reflected
from its surface. He also quoted from some Russian, “We learn in order to
forget”, to which he adds a corollary, “Until we forget, we have not
learnt”. By now, Siepmann no longer
comes across like some instructor or teacher, but a fount of erudition who
opens our eyes and ears, and illuminates a path through the morass of musicalese,
technical jargon and information overload.
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