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...

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...