I was a professional flutist. Just looking at this from that particular and narrow viewpoint, I agree with this video. You suggest we "won't". Is it reasonable to suggest that a 25 year old flutist today, acquire a 1950 Powell or Haynes flute to play this piece, and also copy the way flutists played back then? I think not. Those flutes (the flutes of my youth) were out of tune, much more difficult to play in general, and not capable of the range of dynamics and color of a modern flute. As an old man I appreciate many of the flutists of that era and previous ones, but I don't think we can expect modern players to play like that. Like every generation of musicians they chart new paths and reject the way of their teachers and predecessors.
Maybe we can for Copland. But for anything in the pre-recording era, we simply don't know what quirks of instrument-playing were fashionable and/or admired at the time. Like the string crescendo he talked about -- maybe in 1850 it was fashionable for orchestras to show their skill by suppressing that kind of crescendo; maybe it was fashionable to emphasize it. Unless somebody happened to comment on it, we just can't know.
Was lucky to hear Aaron Copland conduct the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performing Appalachian Spring at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis as a high schooler in the late 70s. Wish I remembered more of the nuances of the performance. My favorite recording of AS is AC conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Used to play this every night in HS going to sleep on my stereo.
GREAT story. On another note, I lived in Cathedral Hill in St. Paul in the mid-90s where one of my already favorite conductors, Christopher Hogwood, was Director of the SP Chamber Orchestra. Heard some great soloists as well, including Isaac Stern one memorable night. You live in a wonderfully musical area.
Yes, I noticed this when a few years ago I bought a CD of the original chamber version, and found the slow, wide vibrato in sustained passages to be really obtrusive. That made me wonder how different the vibrato practice was at the time it was written. I have noticed, too, how much basic understanding of mid-20th century style has been lost since then. The first LP recording of Penderecki's _Dies Iræ_ made a tremendous impression on me in my youth, listening with score in hand countless times. When I heard a recent new CD recording, I was aghast at how clueless the whole affair was, the work's intense drama almost entirely lost, as if the conductor and performers just assumed that all was needed was to operate the notes and never have any sense of dramatic gesture. The same is true of a recent CD of organ works by US composer William Albright. I knew Bill, heard him perform these works many times, even being his page-turner for one of his concerts, and so was well acquainted with his dramatic sense. But the recent European recording is bereft of any real expression, let alone drama, revealing no understanding of the music or where it comes from. And these are not isolated examples... It just goes to show that we cannot afford to lose awareness of our history. That you have done all the research you have on the composer's interpretation of Appalachian Spring is wonderful, and thoroughly commendable. I did the same when I performed his Organ Symphony, corresponding with an organist who had performed it with the composer conducting, and him even lending me a video of one of those performances. But, as you say, even these can lead to unanswered questions in matters of interpretation, and in the end we all have to exercise our best musical judgment, all while informed by, rather than merely imitating, the original examples.
There is this same problem--that of forgetting the animating spirit or reason--in vocal performances, too. The most disappointing live performance of Messiah that I heard had people singing notes without the drama and goal that underlay the texts. And in the other direction, some performances of the Easter Hymn from Cavalleria Rusticana are so filled with the excitement of the risen Jesus that it will take one's breath away.
I wasn't much interested in what this person had to say, but it did remind me of one of the most memorable nights of my life when Aaron Copland conducted Appalachian Spring in San Jose in 1976. Martha Graham spoke for ½ hour before the performance of her choreography. I still remember her spiritual talk that has continued to inspire me these nearly 50 years.🧡
I would have preferred an elaboration of, for example, WHY and how the flute passage was not played as we would play it, or WHY and how specific instruments in that piece from back then are considered out of fashion today. Only this musical director could do that for us.
MusicaNova Orchestra : I was going to my morning news and listen to the same dramas again. But was really glad I watched your video. I’m going to some more of your videos,you might have a new subscriber .
Topic suggestion - a full lecture/demonstration on the differences between performance styles of fifty years ago and now, with audio or visual examples, especially in romantic and 20th century music. Thanks.
OK, even if we perform pieces using "period instruments" we don't really know what the performances of 200 years ago were like - but it's an attempt at approximation of the experience. I've heard Vivaldi performed on period instruments and found the results to have an energy and urgency greater than performances using modern instruments. But it doesn't mean that I heard Vivaldi the way his contemporaries did.
It was just 55 years ago that a young genius named David Monrow brought the authenticity movement to popular culture with his soundtracks to the wildly popular BBC series broadcast to America on PBS for years on end: The Six Wives of King Henry VIII starring Keith Michell and Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson. It's only been since then that original instrumentation was even considered for broad consumption.
Yes, a performance today could be performed like it was in the past, but we don't do it because our tastes have changed, and we'd have to practice in a style we don't like. This is true for many pieces of music. I listened to Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" between the 1983 recording and Annie Lennox's current performances, and of course even with the same performer the renditions are quite different. The past informs the present. On the other hand, I remember an anecdote from a conductor or pianist who visited Japan, and was asked to help judge a recital competition. He was unable to judge the performances, because each performance was exactly the same. Upon further inquiry, it turned out that the recitals were based on the only recording of the piece that was available in the country at the time. From the performer's perspective, they were being judged on how closely they could match the recording.
4 หลายเดือนก่อน
So Mahler, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Ives, Stockhausen, Cage, Glass, ffs Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman are not performable?
These days one cannot cover Sweet Dreams without also interspersing parts of the White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”, but that’s a topic for another day.
The first LP I ever bought was Copland Conducts Copland Appalachian Spring. I was sitting in lectures given by Lawrence Moe at UC Berkeley in 1973 and he was discussing this work. I went out and bought it, even though I didn’t own a record player at the time. I’ve still got it somewhere, although I now no longer can play it, as I no longer own a record player. But what a great recording! Professor Moe also recommended Stravinsky’s “Svadebka”conducted by the composer, but I couldn’t find that at the record store, so I bought a more recent recording with Robert Craft conducting. I wonder is anyone would, or even could, perform it the way Stravinsky conducted it. Also, each soprano sounds quite different. There is a TH-cam video out there of Stravinsky conducting and another of Craft, and both are a treat.
If you listen to the original Star Wars soundtracks and compare to more recent films, you can HEAR so clearly how brass instruments have changed so rapidly
The original brass on the star wars recordings sounded a little rougher around the edges, slightly less "perfectly" in tune and such, but it had character. Bold, meaty, triumphant. Not saying it's better or worse, but just different. Throughout the 20th century orchestras around the world began to lose their distinct regional sounds and sort of meld together into one symphonic sound concept.
@@ericpalacios920 The newer recordings are also a different orchestra. The first 6 movies were all recorded with the LSO at Abbey Road. If anything one has to compare the 1977 to 1983 recordings to the 1999 to 2003 recordings to find out whether the brass sound changed within the LSO. But like I already said: The recording equipment changed as well. The original ones were all analogue and from 1999 on they are digital recordings.
@@vtnatureboy I'll certainly grant that that's probably not what's going on with Star Wars, that's a weak example. But if you compare how Eastman sounded under Fennel to how they sound now I'd say it's pretty noticeable difference in brass sound. I'm really interested in your experience as a more senior player, because my experience has been that older trombones are far more likely to have smaller bore sizes compared to ones from say 2000 on. And the tenors from pre 1950 are so different to me? On the euphonium side (where I have my training), in the USA it's much more common to play on a 12" bell than it was even when I started and that's only 20 years or so. And the rose brass bells, and the steel mouthpieces, etc. all seem pretty new. Gold plating being the latest fashion. Steve Mead plays on a big Prestige now, but his recordings from the 80s are on euro-shank instruments; and if we go back further Leonard Falcone was a professional soloist on a small-shank euph (though that was also unusual).
i came to like Copelands music through the various 'rock' musicians interpretations and your insight is priceless. i'm not much of a musician (analogue synthesisers are my thing so it was Keith Emerson, amongst others who opened my ears) but i love to listen and learn (listening is a really important part of playing a synthesiser of the 'vintage' kind). I would love to be in Phoenix to hear the performance but i am in the UK. I do hope you can post it on TH-cam? P.S. was the way it was played 80 years ago a kind of 'hangover' from the classical music style of an earlier era? P.P.S. one of my favourite shows is BBC radio 3, 'Building a Library' where several versions of a tune are assessed and reviewed in terms of their various musical qualities, it's fascinating.
I heard the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with the original instrumentation for the library of Congress auditorium of 13 instruments in 1977-1978 with Dennis Russell Davies as the conductor and it is hands down the best version of Appalachian Spring ever. Perfect Temps. I hate the full orchestra version, there is no soul or grit. They did cut a direct to disc album along with Ives Three Places in New England also top notch.
Yes, Davies and St.Paul is a terrific recording, and I agree with you about both that performance and the superiority of the 13 instrument version. It suits the music so much better.
Speaking as a composer and conductor, there are innumerable example throughout music history where a composer's own conducting of their own music is far from the best performance. Some composers were notoriously horrible at conducting their own music, and some which were very fine conductors still preferred other conductors interpretations. So the rule of thumb seems to be in a way that everything is sacred and nothing is sacred, music is an instruction book and a living tradition, there's limitations to ability and there's no accounting for taste.
And Copland was a decidedly better composer than conductor! I saw him conduct some of his own stuff with the NYP in 1973, and then compared it to Bernstein conducting the same works with the same orchestra. Maybe he taught Bernstein composition, but LB learned conducting somewhere else!
"music is [...] a living tradition" And that's why these "historically accurate" performances tend to leave me cold. Sure, it's intellectually interesting to hear what the music would have sounded like to the composer's own ears, people seem to very often take the short step from "That's how it _did_ sound" to "that's how it _should_ sound".
We are fortunate enough to know how Copland intended his piece to be and we should respect that. Whether or not you "like it" should not be part of the equation.
Bravo. This is a subject that came up for me about thirty years ago also, as a music critic for a Sacramento newspaper. We need to appreciate how much work has gone into refining performances of the great classics. We might very probably not care for Mozart's conducting, or Beethoven's, for that matter. Bernstein, Norrington, and Hogwood have wonderful versions of our favorites. I also recall reading critical comments by Mozart on the orchestras he had to put up with.
I wouldn't put much stock in Mozart's criticisms of orchestra performers. He was kind of a perfectionist, and despite his skill playing the violin he was often sloppy performing at the keyboard.
@@rgnyc Who said he was sloppy on the keyboard? Numerous honest biographers fail to report that. He was playing at age five, like Lang Lang, so it’s highly probable it was jealousy and envy that motivated his critics. He had many enemies due to his unwillingness to bow and scrape to aristocracy. Don Giovanni was seen as a middle finger to the “nobility”. There was no press back then, so all we have to go on in our search for the truth are letters.
@@riverwildcat1 I'll try to find the reference for you. I recall reading something along those lines in an interview associated with the release of Amadeus - basically, that he was sublime on violin, but more enthusiastic than precise when playing a keyboard.
@@rgnyc It could be that Mozart was playing on a very early piano. They’d just been invented, and the hammer actions had not been perfected. They also didn’t have bronze frames. Beethoven often broke pianos until they were improved, around 1800.
Try listening to the Koussevitzky RCA recording or his radio broadcast from the mid 40’s. It would be instructive. Copeland was close to Koussevitzky and must have had some influence on the conductor. BUT the BSO sounded totally different from the BSO of today. Koussevitzky imprinted his own sound never to be duplicated. Are we talking about interpretive qualities and/or the sonic profiles?
I think the issue is specifically _because_ it's only 60 years old. It's old-fashioned, but not quite historical. So it sounds wrong. I think, if we leapt forward a few more decades, maybe a century, it may come back into fashion among "historically informed" crowds, because it's different from the way the music of that time is performed, and so more "authentic" - as opposed to now, where it just sounds like the way the "old" orchestras played, and therefore something we've "moved past"
Yes, the issue here isn’t that we can’t replicate the mid-century sound, it’s mostly just that we don’t consider it worth doing. If we somehow magically got our hands on audio recordings of J.S. Bach himself conducting or performing his own music then ensembles would be much more inclined to imitate them very closely-at least until we eventually got to the point where that too felt passé.
All performance is a conversation with the past. It doesn't mean you ape the past or take dictation from the past. It's a conversation. This is true not only for recreative work, but for actual creative work as well, ie. composition. It's true in visual art as well.
This is a really interesting subject with so many implications I have been studying/ playing 25 years now and some of the recordings I used to take as reference now I don't think I like. For instance cannot listen a recording of Helmut Rilling the same after years of exposure to what's called historic informed practice. At the same time I came to dislike baroque instruments more and more. I love modern instruments and historical interpretation. Take the gewandhausorchester playing Bach's B minor mass in a 1970,80, and post 2010 records
Very bad title -- so many videos on TH-cam have inappropriate or even falsified titles! As for your invitation, I enjoyed my visit to the Museum, but I have no plans ever to return to Phoenix.
One of my college ensemble conductors opined that recordings conducted by a work's composer tend to be the least interesting. They are rarely fine conductors in their own right and they are rarely asked to conduct anything other than their own work. The name on the LP dust cover probably didn't hurt sales, however.
I think it depends on the composer. Bernstein and Boulez, for example, were an excellent conductor; Shostakovich was an excellent pianist, so I'm more interested to hear him play his piano works than conduct his orchestral works. (Of course, you said _tend to,_ so me posting a couple of exceptions hardly disproves the rule.)
Thank you -- that's really informative. I must say the ballet looks terribly dated, but that's probably because people hadn't worked out how to transition dance from a theatre stage to the close-up world of the TV studio. There's a HIP performance of some Gershwin pieces --- Gershwin by Grofe. On one track, there's even one performer who played when the stuff was new. You know it's right, because we have recordings, but it sounds like a period piece. But that doesn't mean HIP is bogus: precisely because "authenticity" is impossible and probably undesirable, they changed the slogan to "informed". And HIP has changed ordinary modern performance. I follow a couple of HIP bands here in Auckland -- Baroque and earlier -- and I like them because they have fun. And after being used to that, I picked up an old CD of the Brandenburgs -- von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. It sounds like an old steam engine winding itself up compared with the nimbleness of modern playing. I really don't care whether they use gut strings and Baroque bows or not, but some things that come from studying earlier performance practice really make a difference.
A pet peeve is intelligent people not knowing how to properly pronounce "Appalachian". It's NOT pronounced "appellation". The "ch" is pronounced as one might expect it to be pronounced.
"hard not to crescendo on an upbow" BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE I was a string player. you LIGHTEN THE PRESSURE on the upbow stroke problem solved it helps not to shoot of vast amounts of bow on the down bow part of the note if that is how the bowing divides for the is one long note both of these are matters of bow technique. are you a string player?
It's not my primary instrument, but I do play violin. And yes, as you heard, they played it without a crescendo. Avoiding the crescendo is made trickier by the context, (the forte, the indication "vigoroso", and the movement to the high E on the next note) and by the fact that musically a crescendo is both easier-and most important-makes musical sense. Something slightly hard becomes much harder when you have to fight your instincts to do it!
Why are you making the leap from historically informed performance, applying whatever you can learn from the performance environment of a period, to "authentic performance?" The latter term was almost exclusively used by people who set up straw men to dismiss any effort to understand how the music of a particular period was understood, appreciated, and performed in its time. Virtually no performers of the HIP movement use the term "authentic", although the misguided promoters of some record labels did. Please stop using this canard against people who are just trying to make the music sound as good as possible. Historically informed performance is not an attempt to recreate a time-travelled performance.
I am not making that leap. I agree with you. There is a longer version of this video that we should probably post where I go into detail about precisely that straw man. In the case of Copland, however, we could talk about playing it pretty close to exactly the way he did.
What I'm really hearing here is not why we "can't" play the music in some fashion, but why we "won't" play it that way.
I was a professional flutist. Just looking at this from that particular and narrow viewpoint, I agree with this video. You suggest we "won't". Is it reasonable to suggest that a 25 year old flutist today, acquire a 1950 Powell or Haynes flute to play this piece, and also copy the way flutists played back then? I think not. Those flutes (the flutes of my youth) were out of tune, much more difficult to play in general, and not capable of the range of dynamics and color of a modern flute. As an old man I appreciate many of the flutists of that era and previous ones, but I don't think we can expect modern players to play like that. Like every generation of musicians they chart new paths and reject the way of their teachers and predecessors.
We can… but we choose not to..
And authentic performance is neither pretentious nor impossible, but again, we don’t choose to
Have you ever heard a recording of Bach?
Maybe we can for Copland. But for anything in the pre-recording era, we simply don't know what quirks of instrument-playing were fashionable and/or admired at the time. Like the string crescendo he talked about -- maybe in 1850 it was fashionable for orchestras to show their skill by suppressing that kind of crescendo; maybe it was fashionable to emphasize it. Unless somebody happened to comment on it, we just can't know.
Was lucky to hear Aaron Copland conduct the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra performing Appalachian Spring at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis as a high schooler in the late 70s. Wish I remembered more of the nuances of the performance.
My favorite recording of AS is AC conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Used to play this every night in HS going to sleep on my stereo.
GREAT story. On another note, I lived in Cathedral Hill in St. Paul in the mid-90s where one of my already favorite conductors, Christopher Hogwood, was Director of the SP Chamber Orchestra. Heard some great soloists as well, including Isaac Stern one memorable night. You live in a wonderfully musical area.
Yes, I noticed this when a few years ago I bought a CD of the original chamber version, and found the slow, wide vibrato in sustained passages to be really obtrusive. That made me wonder how different the vibrato practice was at the time it was written.
I have noticed, too, how much basic understanding of mid-20th century style has been lost since then. The first LP recording of Penderecki's _Dies Iræ_ made a tremendous impression on me in my youth, listening with score in hand countless times. When I heard a recent new CD recording, I was aghast at how clueless the whole affair was, the work's intense drama almost entirely lost, as if the conductor and performers just assumed that all was needed was to operate the notes and never have any sense of dramatic gesture. The same is true of a recent CD of organ works by US composer William Albright. I knew Bill, heard him perform these works many times, even being his page-turner for one of his concerts, and so was well acquainted with his dramatic sense. But the recent European recording is bereft of any real expression, let alone drama, revealing no understanding of the music or where it comes from. And these are not isolated examples...
It just goes to show that we cannot afford to lose awareness of our history. That you have done all the research you have on the composer's interpretation of Appalachian Spring is wonderful, and thoroughly commendable. I did the same when I performed his Organ Symphony, corresponding with an organist who had performed it with the composer conducting, and him even lending me a video of one of those performances. But, as you say, even these can lead to unanswered questions in matters of interpretation, and in the end we all have to exercise our best musical judgment, all while informed by, rather than merely imitating, the original examples.
There is this same problem--that of forgetting the animating spirit or reason--in vocal performances, too. The most disappointing live performance of Messiah that I heard had people singing notes without the drama and goal that underlay the texts. And in the other direction, some performances of the Easter Hymn from Cavalleria Rusticana are so filled with the excitement of the risen Jesus that it will take one's breath away.
I wasn't much interested in what this person had to say, but it did remind me of one of the most memorable nights of my life when Aaron Copland conducted Appalachian Spring in San Jose in 1976. Martha Graham spoke for ½ hour before the performance of her choreography. I still remember her spiritual talk that has continued to inspire me these nearly 50 years.🧡
Authenticity is not the silver bullet that some make it out to be.
I would have preferred an elaboration of, for example, WHY and how the flute passage was not played as we would play it, or WHY and how specific instruments in that piece from back then are considered out of fashion today. Only this musical director could do that for us.
Thank you for this totally enjoyable and helpful presentation.
MusicaNova Orchestra : I was going to my morning news and listen to the same dramas again. But was really glad I watched your video. I’m going to some more of your videos,you might have a new subscriber .
Topic suggestion - a full lecture/demonstration on the differences between performance styles of fifty years ago and now, with audio or visual examples, especially in romantic and 20th century music. Thanks.
OK, even if we perform pieces using "period instruments" we don't really know what the performances of 200 years ago were like - but it's an attempt at approximation of the experience. I've heard Vivaldi performed on period instruments and found the results to have an energy and urgency greater than performances using modern instruments. But it doesn't mean that I heard Vivaldi the way his contemporaries did.
It was just 55 years ago that a young genius named David Monrow brought the authenticity movement to popular culture with his soundtracks to the wildly popular BBC series broadcast to America on PBS for years on end: The Six Wives of King Henry VIII starring Keith Michell and Elizabeth R with Glenda Jackson. It's only been since then that original instrumentation was even considered for broad consumption.
Yes, a performance today could be performed like it was in the past, but we don't do it because our tastes have changed, and we'd have to practice in a style we don't like. This is true for many pieces of music. I listened to Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" between the 1983 recording and Annie Lennox's current performances, and of course even with the same performer the renditions are quite different. The past informs the present.
On the other hand, I remember an anecdote from a conductor or pianist who visited Japan, and was asked to help judge a recital competition. He was unable to judge the performances, because each performance was exactly the same. Upon further inquiry, it turned out that the recitals were based on the only recording of the piece that was available in the country at the time. From the performer's perspective, they were being judged on how closely they could match the recording.
So Mahler, Stravinsky, Berg, Webern, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Ives, Stockhausen, Cage, Glass, ffs Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman are not performable?
That’s not at all what the OP was arguing.
I imagine Annie Lennox HAS to change it up to keep her sanity. She IS the music in a way that Aaron Copland can not be for Appalachian Spring.
These days one cannot cover Sweet Dreams without also interspersing parts of the White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”, but that’s a topic for another day.
@@gabbleratchet1890 comment wasnt meant literally.
The first LP I ever bought was Copland Conducts Copland Appalachian Spring. I was sitting in lectures given by Lawrence Moe at UC Berkeley in 1973 and he was discussing this work. I went out and bought it, even though I didn’t own a record player at the time. I’ve still got it somewhere, although I now no longer can play it, as I no longer own a record player.
But what a great recording!
Professor Moe also recommended Stravinsky’s “Svadebka”conducted by the composer, but I couldn’t find that at the record store, so I bought a more recent recording with Robert Craft conducting. I wonder is anyone would, or even could, perform it the way Stravinsky conducted it. Also, each soprano sounds quite different. There is a TH-cam video out there of Stravinsky conducting and another of Craft, and both are a treat.
If we could exactly reproduce what was played 60 years ago… what’s the point? Change good.
If you listen to the original Star Wars soundtracks and compare to more recent films, you can HEAR so clearly how brass instruments have changed so rapidly
I'm not sure it is the instruments. It's rather the recording equipment that has evolved and the studios those were recorded at.
The original brass on the star wars recordings sounded a little rougher around the edges, slightly less "perfectly" in tune and such, but it had character. Bold, meaty, triumphant. Not saying it's better or worse, but just different.
Throughout the 20th century orchestras around the world began to lose their distinct regional sounds and sort of meld together into one symphonic sound concept.
@@ericpalacios920 The newer recordings are also a different orchestra. The first 6 movies were all recorded with the LSO at Abbey Road. If anything one has to compare the 1977 to 1983 recordings to the 1999 to 2003 recordings to find out whether the brass sound changed within the LSO.
But like I already said: The recording equipment changed as well. The original ones were all analogue and from 1999 on they are digital recordings.
As a brass player (MM in trombone performance) this comment is complete BS.
@@vtnatureboy I'll certainly grant that that's probably not what's going on with Star Wars, that's a weak example. But if you compare how Eastman sounded under Fennel to how they sound now I'd say it's pretty noticeable difference in brass sound.
I'm really interested in your experience as a more senior player, because my experience has been that older trombones are far more likely to have smaller bore sizes compared to ones from say 2000 on. And the tenors from pre 1950 are so different to me?
On the euphonium side (where I have my training), in the USA it's much more common to play on a 12" bell than it was even when I started and that's only 20 years or so. And the rose brass bells, and the steel mouthpieces, etc. all seem pretty new. Gold plating being the latest fashion.
Steve Mead plays on a big Prestige now, but his recordings from the 80s are on euro-shank instruments; and if we go back further Leonard Falcone was a professional soloist on a small-shank euph (though that was also unusual).
i came to like Copelands music through the various 'rock' musicians interpretations and your insight is priceless. i'm not much of a musician (analogue synthesisers are my thing so it was Keith Emerson, amongst others who opened my ears) but i love to listen and learn (listening is a really important part of playing a synthesiser of the 'vintage' kind). I would love to be in Phoenix to hear the performance but i am in the UK. I do hope you can post it on TH-cam? P.S. was the way it was played 80 years ago a kind of 'hangover' from the classical music style of an earlier era? P.P.S. one of my favourite shows is BBC radio 3, 'Building a Library' where several versions of a tune are assessed and reviewed in terms of their various musical qualities, it's fascinating.
I heard the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra with the original instrumentation for the library of Congress auditorium of 13 instruments in 1977-1978 with Dennis Russell Davies as the conductor and it is hands down the best version of Appalachian Spring ever. Perfect Temps. I hate the full orchestra version, there is no soul or grit. They did cut a direct to disc album along with Ives Three Places in New England also top notch.
Yes, Davies and St.Paul is a terrific recording, and I agree with you about both that performance and the superiority of the 13 instrument version. It suits the music so much better.
Speaking as a composer and conductor, there are innumerable example throughout music history where a composer's own conducting of their own music is far from the best performance. Some composers were notoriously horrible at conducting their own music, and some which were very fine conductors still preferred other conductors interpretations. So the rule of thumb seems to be in a way that everything is sacred and nothing is sacred, music is an instruction book and a living tradition, there's limitations to ability and there's no accounting for taste.
And Copland was a decidedly better composer than conductor! I saw him conduct some of his own stuff with the NYP in 1973, and then compared it to Bernstein conducting the same works with the same orchestra. Maybe he taught Bernstein composition, but LB learned conducting somewhere else!
"music is [...] a living tradition"
And that's why these "historically accurate" performances tend to leave me cold. Sure, it's intellectually interesting to hear what the music would have sounded like to the composer's own ears, people seem to very often take the short step from "That's how it _did_ sound" to "that's how it _should_ sound".
Thank you
We are fortunate enough to know how Copland intended his piece to be and we should respect that. Whether or not you "like it" should not be part of the equation.
Fascinating!
Nice
Bravo. This is a subject that came up for me about thirty years ago also, as a music critic for a Sacramento newspaper. We need to appreciate how much work has gone into refining performances of the great classics. We might very probably not care for Mozart's conducting, or Beethoven's, for that matter. Bernstein, Norrington, and Hogwood have wonderful versions of our favorites. I also recall reading critical comments by Mozart on the orchestras he had to put up with.
I wouldn't put much stock in Mozart's criticisms of orchestra performers. He was kind of a perfectionist, and despite his skill playing the violin he was often sloppy performing at the keyboard.
@@rgnyc Who said he was sloppy on the keyboard? Numerous honest biographers fail to report that. He was playing at age five, like Lang Lang, so it’s highly probable it was jealousy and envy that motivated his critics. He had many enemies due to his unwillingness to bow and scrape to aristocracy. Don Giovanni was seen as a middle finger to the “nobility”. There was no press back then, so all we have to go on in our search for the truth are letters.
@@riverwildcat1 I'll try to find the reference for you. I recall reading something along those lines in an interview associated with the release of Amadeus - basically, that he was sublime on violin, but more enthusiastic than precise when playing a keyboard.
@@rgnyc It could be that Mozart was playing on a very early piano. They’d just been invented, and the hammer actions had not been perfected. They also didn’t have bronze frames. Beethoven often broke pianos until they were improved, around 1800.
Try listening to the Koussevitzky RCA recording or his radio broadcast from the mid 40’s. It would be instructive. Copeland was close to Koussevitzky and must have had some influence on the conductor. BUT the BSO sounded totally different from the BSO of today. Koussevitzky imprinted his own sound never to be duplicated. Are we talking about interpretive qualities and/or the sonic profiles?
I think the issue is specifically _because_ it's only 60 years old. It's old-fashioned, but not quite historical. So it sounds wrong.
I think, if we leapt forward a few more decades, maybe a century, it may come back into fashion among "historically informed" crowds, because it's different from the way the music of that time is performed, and so more "authentic" - as opposed to now, where it just sounds like the way the "old" orchestras played, and therefore something we've "moved past"
Yes, the issue here isn’t that we can’t replicate the mid-century sound, it’s mostly just that we don’t consider it worth doing. If we somehow magically got our hands on audio recordings of J.S. Bach himself conducting or performing his own music then ensembles would be much more inclined to imitate them very closely-at least until we eventually got to the point where that too felt passé.
All performance is a conversation with the past. It doesn't mean you ape the past or take dictation from the past. It's a conversation. This is true not only for recreative work, but for actual creative work as well, ie. composition. It's true in visual art as well.
This is a really interesting subject with so many implications I have been studying/ playing 25 years now and some of the recordings I used to take as reference now I don't think I like. For instance cannot listen a recording of Helmut Rilling the same after years of exposure to what's called historic informed practice. At the same time I came to dislike baroque instruments more and more. I love modern instruments and historical interpretation. Take the gewandhausorchester playing Bach's B minor mass in a 1970,80, and post 2010 records
My Brother studied with Aaron Copland
Small world
Can't go back in time. And no one wants us to anyway. I say, be as true to the intentions of the composer as is possible, but no further.
Very bad title -- so many videos on TH-cam have inappropriate or even falsified titles! As for your invitation, I enjoyed my visit to the Museum, but I have no plans ever to return to Phoenix.
One of my college ensemble conductors opined that recordings conducted by a work's composer tend to be the least interesting. They are rarely fine conductors in their own right and they are rarely asked to conduct anything other than their own work.
The name on the LP dust cover probably didn't hurt sales, however.
I think it depends on the composer. Bernstein and Boulez, for example, were an excellent conductor; Shostakovich was an excellent pianist, so I'm more interested to hear him play his piano works than conduct his orchestral works. (Of course, you said _tend to,_ so me posting a couple of exceptions hardly disproves the rule.)
Thank you -- that's really informative. I must say the ballet looks terribly dated, but that's probably because people hadn't worked out how to transition dance from a theatre stage to the close-up world of the TV studio.
There's a HIP performance of some Gershwin pieces --- Gershwin by Grofe. On one track, there's even one performer who played when the stuff was new. You know it's right, because we have recordings, but it sounds like a period piece. But that doesn't mean HIP is bogus: precisely because "authenticity" is impossible and probably undesirable, they changed the slogan to "informed". And HIP has changed ordinary modern performance. I follow a couple of HIP bands here in Auckland -- Baroque and earlier -- and I like them because they have fun. And after being used to that, I picked up an old CD of the Brandenburgs -- von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. It sounds like an old steam engine winding itself up compared with the nimbleness of modern playing. I really don't care whether they use gut strings and Baroque bows or not, but some things that come from studying earlier performance practice really make a difference.
dont you know it.
A pet peeve is intelligent people not knowing how to properly pronounce "Appalachian". It's NOT pronounced "appellation". The "ch" is pronounced as one might expect it to be pronounced.
If you say “Appalaysha,” I’ll throw an apple atcha!
@@eosborne6495 haha... I see what you did there ;-)
Ah, but how to pronounce that third a?
@@billcook4768 Lived here a few years - It's pronounced the same as the first
Caribbean Caribbean.
Potato potato.
Give it a rest - and put a fermata on top!
?
"hard not to crescendo on an upbow"
BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE
I was a string player.
you LIGHTEN THE PRESSURE on the upbow stroke
problem solved
it helps not to shoot of vast amounts of bow on the down bow part of the note if that is how the bowing divides for the is one long note
both of these are matters of bow technique.
are you a string player?
It's not my primary instrument, but I do play violin. And yes, as you heard, they played it without a crescendo. Avoiding the crescendo is made trickier by the context, (the forte, the indication "vigoroso", and the movement to the high E on the next note) and by the fact that musically a crescendo is both easier-and most important-makes musical sense. Something slightly hard becomes much harder when you have to fight your instincts to do it!
This is such great insight and a really an interesting way to think about music performance. Always so much to learn
Why are you making the leap from historically informed performance, applying whatever you can learn from the performance environment of a period, to "authentic performance?" The latter term was almost exclusively used by people who set up straw men to dismiss any effort to understand how the music of a particular period was understood, appreciated, and performed in its time. Virtually no performers of the HIP movement use the term "authentic", although the misguided promoters of some record labels did. Please stop using this canard against people who are just trying to make the music sound as good as possible. Historically informed performance is not an attempt to recreate a time-travelled performance.
I am not making that leap. I agree with you. There is a longer version of this video that we should probably post where I go into detail about precisely that straw man. In the case of Copland, however, we could talk about playing it pretty close to exactly the way he did.
Then stop doing imitations and do it your way. BTW, you can do anything you want, if you so desire. Fashion is for the fashion industry.