August 6, 2015: practice Thursday

Yesterday I had a rehearsal with some colleagues on a Beethoven piece we'll be performing next month. The piece was the op. 11 trio for clarinet, cello, and piano; we are substituting a bassoon for the cello, and it works quite nicely. Our rehearsal focused on the third and final movement of the trio; we worked through fined details of tempo, dynamics, and articulation. One of the resources that we relied on was a set of first editions and sketches of the piece from the digital archives at the Beethoven Haus in Bonn. Whenever we had a question about any kind of marking in our scores, we consulted the first editions and the sketches before making a decision regarding interpretation.

I once had a discussion with a friend who is a history professor at a liberal arts college; we were talking about how musicians' performances sometimes aren't regarded as highly in academic communities as scholars' books and articles. She thought for a while and said, "Historians make and present deductions based on evidence they've studied. Is that what musicians do?" I explained to her that of course, that's exactly what musicians do. The evidence we study includes sketches, historical editions, recordings, and our own and our colleagues' practicing and performances. We present our research in the form of performances. Other musicians can tell if a pianist's performance is influenced by Art Tatum, Alicia de Larrocha, or Emmanuel Ax.