01. November 2015

Once, a well known piano professor in Germany commented on his student's struggles to interpret a composition of the classical music's repertoire: "Just let the music play itself.." What a sentence. The composed music must be able to play itself. It doesn't need to much interpretation because its melodies and rhythms, its harmonies and sound textures are strong enough to sound perfectly, without some added marks of interpretation? Well, the aesthetic approach of this professor surely was, to...

10. Juni 2015

The exciting relation between chance and determination used to be an issue of discussion in the avantgarde music scene of the 60’ties. Composers were “addicted“ to complex structures. An ensured and understandable perception for listeners was not a point of much consideration for them. Complexity was estimated as an ultimate truth for itself, no matter if anyone could grasp what they had notated in their scores. The so-called serialism and aleatoric were the two opposite points of...

03. Juni 2015

Is our culture shallow? Yes, of course it is. Day by day we face pure superficialness, because it is the surface area where we learn about any cultural things. And these things have to sparkle like diamonds to be discovered by us. We want things to sparkle, because then we are more happy and satisfied. That is a crucial part of our biology. Animals have to tout for their courtship display, using only the best they could develop in their evolution - just to be more showy. So, the surface is the...

21. April 2015

You grasp notated music if you can play with it Is musical improvisation a must for any professionally skilled musician? Meaning a must for classical musicians, too? Or is it a more or less pointless effort for interpreters of classical music to laboriously play around with all these pre-built phrases they would have to learn to get into something sounding like good improvisation? Something, which is, on top of that, quite rigidly bound to genres like Baroque, Jazz or Blues? Hence, in such a...

15. April 2015

What play does a musician play as an interpreter of a musical composition of the classical music's culture? Is it about expressing his own role in a determined cultural play about obviously old-fashioned musical styles? Or is it even still possible to speak about the musical 'self' with all attached emotions, like in Pop and Jazz? And could this interpreter do so in aiming at a brilliantly witty version of the interpreted composition? Or is a non-trivial self-expression only the result of...