Mark Swed wrote an engaging, thought-provoking piece last week in the LA Times about the future of classical music. The subtitle says it all: “Memo to doomsayers: Not only is classical thriving, but the debuts of Disney Hall and Golijov’s ‘San Marco’ also helped give it a new energy,” and the concluding paragraph makes a powerful statement:

Not I, nor anyone else, can tell you where we are headed, and don’t believe anyone who flaunts surveys. Audiences may be diminishing in rural America, but in the last 10 years, there was more music made by more people and delivered in more accessible ways to more places and at higher quality than ever before. We should only be so resourceful when it comes to feeding the world’s population or saving the planet.

Here, Mark Swed is directly speaking to the fears that research like the National Endowment for the Arts’ audience engagement survey raises.

What Mark is talking about, and what the survey demonstrates, is that the traditional model for arts engagement is no longer working – we’ve known this for a while. There is only a limited sub-set of the population that will subscribe to an orchestral season each year, there is an increasing emphasis on making short-term decisions, and an atmosphere that focuses on reinforcing the class, status, or education of the audience no longer appeals to the modern audience. Favoring subscribers heavily over single ticket buyers is a dated business model.

My own company saw the truth of the last-minute decision making process in November, when we had audiences knocking down our doors for the concert right before Thanksgiving. Despite the fact that the Berlin Philharmonic performed at Davies Symphony Hall that weekend, we still drew large, engaged audiences. A profile of the music director two days before, combined with a positive review, generated record box office call volume, and made for a very successful weekend.

Classical music won’t die – my generation won’t let it. There are too many of us who care too much to let that happen. There will be a lot of changes – Mark Swed’s examples and the day to day business experience illustrate that quite plainly. The history of music is about taking risks that pay off, and I look forward to being a part of the process.

Messiah

The manuscript of the "Hallelujah" chorus Photo by Joan Patrick

The Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque Orchestra

at Town Hall, 8th & Seneca, Seattle

Saturday December 12 at 7:30pm and Sunday December 13 at 2pm

www.brownpapertickets.com

“Our” Messiah

Scholars are still arguing about whether the April 1742 premiere of Messiah was a hit or a flop; Dublin was a long way from London, and after 28 years in the snakepit of commercial opera there, Handel had collected a lot of enemies ready to dish him given the slightest opportunity.

What is not in any doubt is that long before Handel died in 1759, Messiah had become his best-known work. By the 19th century it had become much more: one of the central cultural artifacts of the composer’s adopted homeland, along with steak and kidney pudding, afternoon tea, and Westminster Abbey.

By 1885, when George Bernard Shaw began his career as a music critic, bloated ceremonial performances with amateur choruses numbering in the thousands had become routine and it was as compulsory for the audience to stand for the “Hallelujah” chorus as for “God Save the Queen.”

Such performances were still routine in the U.S. as well as in England in the mid-20th century and haven’t entirely vanished today. But little by little the ideals of the “early-music movement” began to penetrate even the Messiah industry. In 1985, musicologist Joshua Rifkin was booed by his colleagues when he dared suggest that Bach’s choral works should probably be performed with just one singer per part, but his ideas have percolated throughout the world of music. No one suggests that Handel’s oratorio choruses should be sung by a quartet; Shaw asked that Parliament should pass a law against using more than 80 singers, but his joking proposal is much closer to the norm today than 800.

With smaller choral forces came the possibility of using smaller orchestral forces as well, and early-music practitioners were not slow to realize that the growing popularity of the small-is-beautiful aesthetic offered them a way to open their appeal to mainstream musical audiences. The Tudor Choir and Seattle Baroque Orchestra first teamed up for an annual authentic Baroque Messiah in 1996; at present it’s the only opportunity to experience the work at full length (most performances concentrate on the first, “Christmas” section and trim more or less heavily from parts II and III.) But when it comes down to basics, authenticity and completeness are secondary. Almost from its first performances, Messiah has occupied a special place in the Western musical repertory. Whether Handel saw it so or not, it still functions as a celebration of communal spirit as well as dramatic, tuneful, moving expression of religious faith. The early-music community needs its symbolic centerpieces as much as any other community, and here’s our own chance to celebrate: the season and ourselves.  – Roger Downey

Jed Wentz performs with Musica ad Rhenum as the second concert on EMG’s famed International Series on Saturday, November 21 at 8PM at Town Hall.  A pre-concert lecture will be given by Mr. Wentz at 7PM.  Tickets ($38/$35/$20, based on location) are available at www.earlymusicguild.org, or by calling (206)325-7066.  Reserve your ticket now to hear a performance you won’t soon forget!

Click here to hear an interview with Jed Wentz and Marty Ronish!

Jed Wentz, baroque flutist

Music as Gesture

Scholar-flutist Jed Wentz of Music ad Rhenum writes about how hands-on research helps players bring the music of the past back to vivid life.

In Europe today, higher education for musicians involves scholarship as well as performance. This is due in part to the flowering of “historical performance practice,” which has caused attitudes towards music and musicians to change in many, often surprising, ways. An early-music performer is no longer just an executant; by study and research, by experimenting with one’s artistic vision and by testing one’s hypotheses on the stage, the performer only transforms his or her artistic practice, but brings scholarly research to life for a broad and appreciative audience.

My own studies are concentrated on how stage behavior at  the 18^th century Paris Opéra invluenced musical performance. For the lover of early music, this is a rich and varied field, a meadow ablaze with fragrant blossoms: costumes, settings, and gestures; dance, poetry and singing; theories about passion, aesthetics, and politics: The challenge  is to stay focused amid such an abundance of tempting topics.

Here is a small example that has proved unexpectedly fruitful to my research. A set of satirical prints, published in Holland during the 18^thcentury, shows a series of dancing dwarfs.  They reflect the cruel humor of the time, but also  social and aesthetical attitudes. One of the figures, for instance, is identified as “Mademoiselle Horibilicribrifaxin”–“Miss Terrible-Scream-Noise-Whore”– a not very subtle way of expressing a preference for Italian-style singing seems to be intended as a comment on the “le cri François’, the famous and controversial style of singing associated with the Parisian  tragédie en musique.

More fundamental is how the 18th century theory of emotion affected stage gesture and musical performance, with the goal of discovering how the movements and gestures prescribed for the proper portrayal of emotion influenced  influence the look and sound of the performance.

For the 18th century, “passions” were not vague abstractions but concrete, physical manifestations in the body, (e)motions in fact: the motion of the animal spirits through the body, the flow of the blood, gall, and phlegm, the involuntary reaction of the muscles to these coursing liquids; the resulting gestures, postures, and facial expressions were not seen as stylized but as direct resources for performers to reach the hearts and even the very guts of their audience.

The succession of emotions has a profound effect on music. Composers made the most of the variation in tempo they caused. An aggressive passion–sudden, hot anger–involved lots of motion; the heart would beat fast, the animal spirits coursed through the body; the gestures and voice of the actor in such a passion would be correspondingly abrupt, hot and uncontrolled, and required music with quick tempi and loud instruments. A moderate emotion like love produced a gentle and smooth flow of spirits in the body, warming it: gentle flowing music best described it, in a moderate tempo and a full warm instrumentation, and gestures, facial expression and voice to match.

So too, sadness or depression were signified by a slow movement in the body; its lethargic physical manifestation corresponded to slow tempi, small intervals and with gestures in proportion.

It is easy to see then, how gesture on stage could change the musical performance, for each passion must have its own tempo and its own proper gestures within that tempo: in the 18^th century, to change the affect was to change the tempo. Put in a nutshell, both music and gesture were driven by the same inner imperative, both sprang from the same fecund source: the passions expressed in that “more gorgeous excesse of wordes”, the text itself.

[Elisabeth]

“Wynton’s desire to perfect and bottle New Orleans jazz is just another ‘Early Music’ conservatory project with ‘period instruments.’”    [from the Jazz is Dead??? comment board]

Them’s fighting words! Or really, a very good point of departure for another debate.
Since last week Alex mentioned the possibility of debating the period-instrument/historical-performance movement, I’d like to invite her to enter the fray at this juncture. What about the assumptions behind Marissa’s “just another…” ? Is she right?

Kris Kwapis, EMG's marketing and development coordinator

Roger Downey, contributing writer for Early Edition, recently spoke with Kris Kwapis about some of her performing experiences and her interest in early music.  Kris moved to Seattle in the summer of 2008 from New York and is becoming a familiar face at EMG events.

* * * 

1. How does a nice girl like you get into a business like this?

I grew up in the tiny town of Ortonville, Michigan.  I loved music and couldn’t wait to join the band.  I originally wanted to play drums, but ended up playing the trumpet because my cousin had one that I could borrow at no cost.  I hoped to have a career as an orchestral trumpeter and chamber musician, but a wonderful course in period performance practice at the University of Michigan inspired an increased interest in period instruments.  That same year I heard live performances of Les Arts Florissants and Concerto Palatino and knew that playing baroque trumpet and cornetto was what I was compelled to do. Pretty soon I began performing exclusively on period instruments. 

2. I hear the cornett is the instrument from hell.  True?  

The cornett is beastly!  It’s a hybrid instrument, using a lip-buzzed mouthpiece like a brass instrument and finger holes like a recorder thus bringing certain specific challenges to the player – basically the most difficult aspects of both instrument families.  The combination of a tiny mouthpiece and the awkward hand position required to even hold the darn thing is daunting enough to send most wannabe cornetto players running toward another instrument that is less stress-inducing.  The sound can be so glorious though, so I’d like to think that the effort is worth it. Baroque trumpet (the valveless predecessor to the modern trumpet) is still my main instrument professionally, but I look forward to mastering the cornett.

3. In the 17^th century, the cornetto was the virtuoso solo instrument bar none. Why do you think it disappeared so completely for so long?

One theory is that the plague of 1631 wiped out so much of the population of Venice, where Europe’s best cornetto players were, that it became increasingly difficult to find cornetto players and teachers to keep it alive as a viable instrument capable of extreme virtuosity. Plus the violin was the hot new instrument (kind of like electric guitar in our age) so it could be that changing tastes helped violinists to overtake the virtuoso role that cornettists once held. Also, maybe people were just interested in hearing something new and different.  

3. Tell us about the early brass group you’ve founded in Seattle.

This summer, I began coaching the newest of EMG’s community collegium ensembles – a cornett and sackbut ensemble.  There are a few early brass players in the community who have been interested in playing together but there hasn’t been someone with early brass experience to make it happen.  So far we have two sackbut players and three cornetto players involved. Unlike the Loud Band, the EMG community ensemble devoted to Renaissance wind music, we’re focusing more on vocal music than instrumental music. One of the wonderful things about the old brass instruments is their ability to sound like a voice.  Cornetts and sackbuts were designed to compliment voices, so the listener can almost hear the words of the text when they play. One of the goals I have for this ensemble is collaborating with other EMG community ensembles – Sine Nomine, a vocal ensemble, and the New Baroque Orchestra.  Along with Giovanni Gabrieli, Heinrich Schütz was one of the most interesting composers to write for brass instruments.  It would be lovely to have a joint project of his Psalms of David or History of the Birth and Resurrection of Jesus Christ once the brass group gets more established.

- Roger Downey

Many today spend their careers trying to figure out, with the help of what documents survive, how music of the past was performed. When this is done for musical reasons and produces artistic results, it is an unmixed blessing. I’ve just come upon an interesting interview with Gustav Leonhardt in which he sounds a striking warning:

And we have to remember that so many of the treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were evidently written because the author was angry with what he saw going on around him; he saw people doing things he thought were incorrect and wanted to correct them. With Bach we have a tendency to accept that whatever we know of the circumstances of the acoustics or the number of his performers was his ideal. So therefore the acoustics of St. Thomas’ represented what Bach wanted. We don’t know anything about such matters. He might have hated the acoustics of St. Thomas’, or the fact that the gallery was too high, and so on, just accepting what he had and getting on with the job. We give far to much credibility to the idea that everything a composer met with in his working conditions was what he wanted.

The interview goes on to make provocative points about the rehearsal of chamber music (your ensemble is no good if it requires a lot of talk and rehearsal) and conducting (it’s the easiest thing in music performance, if the highest-paid).

The idea of production effecting the opera at its core–a combination of words and music–came up in last week’s Monteverdi and Sant’Alessio viewing/listenings.  Which, natuerlich, got me thinking about opera in performance today, especially in light of Anne Midgette’s recent post in the WashPost’s Classical Beat.  Though talking about symphonies, a truly different beast, her central idea is a clear crossover:

“Of course, today’s symphony orchestra is essentially a 19th-century phenomenon; as Fischer said, it hasn’t fundamentally changed for 100 years. But what does it mean, in concrete terms, to change an orchestra? No one wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater and eliminate artistic standards, quality, the ability to play Mahler symphonies.”

This is light-years beyond where I’m at in the Opster Project, but I was in a Massenet mood this weekend and, while listening to the San’Sulpice scene from Manon, was struck at how many different ways this piece could be performed.  And, thanks to YouTube, I was able to sate my curiosity very easily.

There is the purely institutionalized version which, unfortunately, has to come out of the Met–the most famous opera company of the US, if not the world.  It lacks a modern edge and the performances of Vargas and Phlegming Fleming remind me more of two fat people wrestling over the last Milk Dud than it does of two people full of conflict, passion, and hormones a-go-go.  It was embarassing to watch this as they fought towards grandeur with every note, each in their own world and leaving the audience wondering where the fire was, where the passion was.

Not eager to further subject myself to Renaaaaay but interested in seeing as many points of view possible, this was a slightly more on-target production with a more minimal set and the added fire of Marcelo Alvarez, though again they lacked a certain connection that, while imperative in any opera, is uber-important when you’re doing a scene as former lovers, one attempting to reconcile, the other attempting to repent, fighting it out to see which one will win (spoiler alert: the soprano wins).

In one of my freshman theatre seminars, we read Grotowski’s “Towards a Poor Theatre,” which argued that theatre would never be able to compete with television and film in terms of grandeur, so the best theatre should go in the opposite direction entirely.  I sometimes think about what Grotowski would say to the Met, or at least the old, Joe Volpe/Rudolph Bing Met which was full of camels and chandeliers.  It’s upsetting to see our country, a country that was not a part of the creation of opera, still married to the “tradition” of grand theatre, a tradition that they more or less adopted from the European houses and a tradition that is, for the most part, all but dead in Europe.  There are some notable exceptions, and ironically not all of them have to do with age–this Sills/Price San’Sulpice is almost as old as Fleming (or at least Fleming’s birth certificate), yet it is focused entirely on the singers.  There is barely a set, but their energy fills the room.  Sills is sensual in a way that would still make some people call “scandale!” today.   It’s clear here that a production is a living, breathing thing and even the best set can be useless without the right singers/performers.

The two that really got me going, however, were both–ironically–with Anna Netrebko sliding into Manon in Vienna (with Roberto Alagna) and Berlin (with Rolando Villazon).  The Villazon shows restraint, particularly physically with the gates of San’Sulpice separating the lovers.  It’s cruel, acerbic, and spiteful, and ultimately worn down by Netrebs.  But she seems a tad out of place at times, for split seconds it’s as though she’s morphing out of Manon and back into Anna.  Not so with Alagna.  The violent passion mirrors, serves, and enhances Massenet’s score–what every opera production ought to do.  What’s more, it’s as hot as any Brangelina clip.  Show this scene to a bunch of 20 and 30 somethings and there won’t be a dry seat in the house.

And then there’s the one where they almost go too far to the other side, thanks to Natalie Dessay who, while bringing the crazy beautifully in the Met’s Lucia, seems to lack a purpose to her marble-tossing here.

Production study such as this is also innumerably helpful to singers, particularly in researching new (or at least new-to-them) roles.  Ultimately you want to create a character that’s true to your own self as much as it’s true to the composer and librettist.  There’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one way to sing Manon.  With only one exception, each of these Manons truly works in its own unique way.  The marketers and administrators for opera houses–and in most industries these days–talk about authentically connecting with new audience members/customers through copy, advertising, and the internet, but we also must remember that one of the other vital forms of authentic connection is through the performers themselves.

Beberapa waktu lalu saya pernah mengeluhkan tentang sedikitnya begitu terbatasnya rentang pertunjukan musik di Indonesia, khususnya di Jakarta. Rentang ini terutama menyangkut periode era musik yang ditampilkan yang terutama hanya berhenti di era klasik saja.

Kurang dieksplorasinya musik barok dan pendahulunya juga membuat keterbatasan lain, yaitu kita hampir sama sekali tidak pernah mengenal instrumen kuno atau period instruments.

Di dunia musik Indonesia yang terkadang terlalu mengagungkan musik klasik dan terkadang malah membuat musik itu sendiri tidak dapat diakses oleh kebanyakan orang, ternyata seringkali melupakan suatu elemen lain dari eksplorasi musik yaitu otentisitas.

Semangat untuk mengejar otentisitas lah yang sebenarnya membangunkan kembali dunia Barat di pertengahan abad 20 akan pentingnya melihat kembali sejarah pertunjukan dan kebiasaan yang dilakukan pada zaman komposer tersebut, termasuk di antaranya instrumen kuno.

Instrumen kuno sendiri sebenarnya bukan serta merta harus merupakan instrumen yang berusia tua dan lahir pada zaman tertentu, tetapi lebih kepada teknik pembuatan dan spesifikasinya. Sejalan dengan waktu, instrumen musik pun berevolusi baik bentuk, ukuran, bahan, teknik pembuatan, bahkan teknologi pembuatannya sehingga pastinya juga mempengaruhi suara yang dihasilkannya. Misal, dahulu flute dibuat dari kayu dan bukan logam seperti sekarang.

Semangat membangkitkan instrumen kuno sebenarnya tidak lepas dari keingintahuan dan juga kerinduan pecinta musik akan bunyi-bunyian asli yang ditelurkan oleh sang komposer di zamannya, dengan gaya bermusik saat itu dan juga instrumennya. Dan tampaknya di Indonesia jarang sekali muncul pertunjukan seperti ini.

Namun perlu diingat bahwa dengan munculnya gerakan instrumen kuno, bukan berarti eksplorasi karya musik dengan instrumen yang mungkin berbeda zaman dengan era penggubahan karya menjadi suatu yang salah. Jelas tidak. Memainkan karya keyboard Bach di atas piano tidak menjadi salah walaupun sebenarnya Bach menulis karya itu untuk clavihord.

Eksplorasi bunyi dan nada adalah sesuatu yang harus terus dibina, sehingga sebenarnya bukan masalah praktek yang benar ataupun salah yang dipikirkan, tetapi lebih kepada pengayaan khasanah suara dan bunyi kita yang akhirnya memang membuat kita semakin mengerti musik itu sendiri.

Karenanya akan sangat baik apabila musik di Indonesia bisa juga mengeksplorasi hal yang sedikit berbeda. Sudah terlalu sering kita dibombardir musik-musik yang megah dan besar padahal sebenarnya diperuntukkan bagi ensemble kecil saja.

Tapi yang jelas, apapun yang kita lakukan, kebenaran dan eksplorasi yang bertanggungjawablah yang harus diperjuangkan. Entah eksplorasi instumen kuno ataupun modern, semuanya harus dilakukan dengan penuh tanggungjawab, terutama terhadap masyarakat yang akan menerimanya.

Picture:

• http://www.du.edu/newmancenter/img/webAcademyAncientMusic-DavidRowe2.jpg
• http://www.geocities.com/synta7/photos/synta_JXXIII.jpg
• http://www.unt.edu/untresearch/2006-2007/images/features_10.jpg

Over at Daily Observations, fellow Portland blogger Charles Noble has made a couple of musical predictions and started a wish list for 2009. Be sure to stop by and take part in the discussion.

I gave up trying to tell the future after someone filched my Magic 8 Ball in high school, but wish lists I can do. So here are a few opera-related things I’d like to see in the new year:

1. That live Met simulcasts continue to increase in popularity and frequency, and that movie theaters and booking agencies are able to overcome the commercial, contractual, financial, or technical obstacles that currently prevent us from also seeing performances from San Francisco, La Scala, Salzburg, and Glyndebourne.
2. A renewed commitment from regional and national opera companies to present a wide variety of works from outside of the standard operatic canon, as well as a promise to market these productions with the same level of energy and enthusiam that are typically reserved for such shows as Traviata, Boheme, or Carmen.
3. A recording project devoted to 18th- or 19th-century vocal performance practices, one that aims to shed new light on such issues as articulation, phrasing, tempo, rhythm, vibrato, ornamentation, and embellishment.

What would be on your operatic wish list? Take a moment or two and share your own thoughts and ideas.

I am still fighting with Bruce Haynes’s The End of Early Music. For me, the book turned out to be even more depressing than its pessimistic title suggested. It is truly the end of a lot of things when the art of text editing is being addressed in such a nonchalant manner as here (would you, in a scholarly book, expect a pallet-palate blooper?), and when the author’s promise to present the reader with “merely personal reflections on the present state of the historically informed performance movement” (p. viii) clearly serves as a free ticket for abandoning great thoughts (of which there are quite a few in this book as well) whenever their proper development becomes a little tricky. This is the opposite of a page-turner: one of those books where, right from the first page onward, the reader keeps mumbling “uh huh, this makes sense, but what was the point again?” And I am not even addressing the issues where I disagree with Haynes; these do exist, too.

Specifically, I disagree with the polemic undertone of the book, which disqualifies it as a HIP textbook, which it otherwise might have been. Polemics in Early Music were an often annoying reality of the discussions of the sixties and seventies. The pointed statement of otherness was the fuel that kept HIP performers going, and the gleeful celebration of aesthetic outrage was the main theme of the HIP–mainstream confrontation – both for the performers and the public. But this is history. Even when Taruskin published his collected work on the Early Music phenomenon of the 20th century in his book  Text and Act (1995), the polemic component of his style had become outdated. Clear thought – especially analytical, retrospective thought – can, in fact, be presented without the aid of vigorously kicking boots. The historian and the politician ought to be two different persons.

Tvelve years after Taruskin, Haynes can afford to be less belligerent. He writes with a smile and a wink. He loves anecdotes. But the boots are still there, and they come into action whenever you least expect it. He is less organized than Taruskin as well, which is even more problematic. His discussion of the canonization of Early Music, for example, is too hand-hewn to be truly deep, and as such it fails to be helpful for those who play Early Music today – who actually owe their dedication to their profession to experiences such as having heard Haynes in concert when they were teenagers (like I did).

All this makes me sad. I have always had great respect for Haynes as a performer, and I regularly consult his dissertation on pitch standards for my work. I would like to love his book – but I really don’t.

As said, I am still fighting. If I am still fit to write when I’m done reading there is likely more to come.

Performance practice is a tricky issue: instead of WWJD, it’s more a questions of “what would Bach do” (or Brahms or Couperin). There are two general schools of thought about performance practice.

First, the militaristic approach to performance practice. It says: play-it-exactly-as-prescribed-or-you-will-be-shot (or at least, have points docked from your score). And no whining either. 

Second, the slightly more genial, creative approach. It says (in the words of my friend Crawford Wiley): ”Let’s assume that Bach (or whoever) played like we do – and if he didn’t, who cares?” 

That’s all you really need to know about performance practice. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the first approach, in which case, I’d suggest heading to the library right now. And plan on staying for a very long time.

Titulo de la revista: Body, Space & Technology

URL : http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=subject&cpid=157

La revista es de Inglaterra, la editorial es  Brunel University, Department of Performing Arts, y su año de inicio fue en el 2000. La revista trata sobre  la aplicación de diferentes métodos al arte para que de esto resulte un proceso creativo con mayores conocimientos sobre el arte contemporáneo. La revista me pareció muy interesante, su diseño es muy creativo y se enfoca en distintos tipos y aspectos de las artes, lo cual te da conocimientos mas profundos y completos acerca de distintos temas.

The phenomenon of the professional musician’s severe annoyance with what he perceives to be the artistic aberrations of other musicians is not new in the history of Western Music. From the beginning, the music student is driven by competition: competition for having a more informed taste, for collecting the better Cd’s and, first and foremost, for playing better than the next person. To the eyes of a growing musician whose goal is accomplishment, a more humble level of achievement will soon stand out as clumsy, a more modest talent will be seen as a weakness of character or mind, and a player who has a different taste might seem to be wilfully distorting the music. For centuries, musical observers have missed no chance for sarcasm in discussions about musical style and taste and in descriptions of musical performances.

It is very hard to free oneself from the last remnants of this kind of thinking. Even in the seasoned professional musician, the sentiment that musical taste divides the artistic world in the good guys and the bad guys lives on. In musical leadership, picking on the the ones deemed unable is a well-established culture [listen all the way to the end!] (while it, in my opinion, is frightfully time-inefficient and generally leads to inferior artistic results). In teaching music, such an impatience naturally should be banned altogether. In democratic chamber music playing, I found that my impatience with other musician’s level of commitment always led to unhappiness: my own, to be precise.

A most stimulating self-teaching technique is to make recordings while practicing. Long ago I used to have the self-protective notion that it would be impossible for me to actually hear my shortcomings that way, and that these recordings would drive me into perfecting my playing into artistic sterility. This is superstitious nonsense. In listening to myself, I understand which things I absolutely need to improve in order to meet my own standards. It is self-evident that this technique would be completely useless, if I would persist in thinking that ‘that unmusical person’ on my own recording was stupid, or maliciously lacking in discipline. Musical self-criticism is not synonymous with chastising oneself: I listen to my recordings because I want to improve matters – critically but in a friendly spirit. A similar attitude, and not a disdain for other musicians, should be the basis for a good rehearsal culture.

As an afterthought it strikes me that, on a larger scale, the ardor of ones commitment to music-making naturally influences ones intensity of opinion about the musical enterprises of others. The (now in itself largely historical) anger of some established mainstream musicians at historical instruments and their players might to a large degree have been a result of this mechanism – to a larger degree, in fact, than was their purported collective fear of being eclipsed by the new-old historically informed performance practice culture.