Susan Alexander-Max was born in New York City. Having graduated from the Juilliard School of Music with honours, she won a scholarship to study with Ilona Kabos in London, where she now resides. Susan was a finalist in the International Bach Competition and has performed extensively throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. She has been featured on American and European radio and television and has performed as soloist and chamber musician in festivals, concert series, museums & galleries and educational institutions throughout the world. She specialises in music of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, performing on fortepiano and clavichord. For many years, she was professor at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London, however, her special interest in the classical repertoire now takes her to Universities, Music Colleges, Galleries and the like, where she gives masterclasses on fortepiano and workshops on the introduction to early keyboards. She has made a recording of Mozart Sonatas for fortepiano. A CD of J.C. Bach Fortepiano Concerti is due to be released by Meridian Records later this year. In 1996 Susan founded The Music Collection, a chamber ensemble that performs solely on period instruments, and more recently, she established a Music in Schools project taking historic instruments into the schools to inspire and encourage today's youth.
Susan Alexander-Max
Artistic Director
The Music Collection
38 Fairhazel Gardens
London NW6 3SJ
+44.171.328.9347
Max@musicol.demon.co.uk
By chance I heard a new recording of works by J. S. Bach played on the piano by Richard Goode. Hearing Baroque music on the modern piano is not always my favourite thing, nevertheless, the performance was informed, clean, clear and articulate. This is not a plug for Richard Goode, although he is well worth hearing. While I am plugging recordings, I might just put in a good word for Murray Perahia's Mozart.
What do these two pianists have in common? Their playing is clean and clear. These are characteristics not always associated with the modern piano. By its very nature, the modern piano is not particularly a clean or clear instrument. I remember as a student at the Juilliard school, my teacher always shouting, "articulate". So it is up to us to make the instrument sound clean and clear. This is sometimes a difficult task to do, although not impossible. However, ignore these characteristics and let the piano do whatever, and there is little point in playing any music composed before 1850 on a modern piano.
That is a big statement. I know. But if we take no notice of what the music from this period is about, then I ask, "What is the point?" Mozart starts to sound like Moszkowski, and the principals of our heritage are lost.
Perhaps the key to the success of playing music from the period on a modern grand is understanding its origins. I don't think that the majority of players have much knowledge. Now that is another big statement, and a huge assumption. Think about it. Of all the performances you have heard, how many performances do you truly find aesthetically pleasing, musically correct and in harmony with the instrument being played?
Attack, articulation, decay of sound, the use of portamento: are these words understood today? Are they even considered in depth? Perhaps, now I am being too pessimistic. But the evidence indicates a dearth of knowledge about the meaning of these words, not in principal but in action. We do not understand their use or their need, and therefore, we do not understand the very foundations of the emotions of the 18th century. All of these things take on a new meaning and a new life when playing on an historic instrument. Why? And what, then, are the connotations of this comment?
Affetto. How many people use this term today? What does it mean? Where does it come from? Why do we need to know? Affetto is the term used to describe the use of emotion to move the audience. Not our emotions, not the audiences, but the emotion of the music and its ability to move the audience to tears. We have no right, as interpreters, to get in the way of the music. Whilst I refer to 18th century music, I believe the same rules, though the rhetoric is different, apply to more modern music: Shostakovich, Debussy, Bartok. Or go back a little further to Brahms. You still have to understand the rhetoric and the content in order to do justice to this music. If you use the same tactile approach to Brahms as you do for C.P.E. Bach or Mozart or even Beethoven, then you have misunderstood the language of the music.
Affetto is the term first employed by German musicologists, in Baroque music, to describe an aesthetic concept originally derived from the Greek and Latin doctrine of rhetoric and oratory. Just as, according to ancient writers such as Aristotle, orators employed rhetorical means to control and direct the emotions of their audiences. In the language of rhetoric manuals and also of Baroque Music treatises, the composer must move the affections (emotions) of the listener. During the 17th and especially the 18th century, this concept of rhetoric was borrowed and used by composers. Therefore, affections were rationalised as emotional states or passions. After 1600 composers generally sought to express in their vocal music such affections as were related to the text, for example sadness or anger or hate or joy or love or jealousy. This meant that most compositions expressed one single affection. Composers sought a unity that was imposed on all the elements of a work by its affection.
Charles Burney once wrote that C.P.E. Bach was the greatest living composer, at that time, who hadever lived. Do we understand why this might have been so in those days? At the time, there was a movement of philosophy, art, literature and music so sophisticated that we don't have the understanding, the symbolic understanding, of this illusive period. The background of changes ran through every way of life at that time. We don't really know the vocabulary and we tend to look at all music with 20th century eyes and ears.
This applies not only to music. Development of the landscape garden was an expression of the philosophy of the day. It was often a political view point, a statement of the landowner's allegiance and power. Do we understand that artistic expression was a symbolic musical language of the day that was understood by the audiences? The 'Affect' was designed to recreate through the management of emotions of the audience.
When you look at a formal 18th century garden, do you think of a Baroque Suite and the statement it was making at the time?
And in the Galant style that followed, and music of the Classical period, do you ever stop to think that it was new? Do you ever stop to think of the circumstances under which it was composed? Do you ever put this music into its proper context and perspective?
You might be saying now, "Well, how can I. I wasn't living then?" What, then, am I getting at?
I am leading you back to two historic instruments, the clavichord and the fortepiano, both of which can put everything I have just said into its proper perspective. Firstly let us take Mozart and the period in which he lived. This brings us to the fortepiano, the piano he played for the FIRST time in 1771. You see, we just take it all for granted. Of course, piano music is played on a piano. But did you know that it didn't exist before the 1770's in Vienna? The predecessor would have been the clavichord (or the harpsichord.) Both instruments provide the tools for the style or rhetoric of the day. They became popular because of their ability to project emotions with crescendi and diminuendi. Something we take totally for granted. On a modern piano, of course you can play loud and soft. But not then, not in the late 18th century. Not until the first, early piano was produced and made popular in Vienna. And its sound was clear and bell-like, with a deep grumbling bass, and a thin but expressive treble, and a sweet, noble quality in the tenor register. This was the instrument for which Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven composed. The instrument was new and so was their music. And what they were trying to say is made clear by the instruments that they had at hand. The qualities of the instruments and the inherent characteristics make the music of this period come to life, totally understandable. The clavichord was the instrument for C.P.E. Bach. The fortepiano for Mozart.
To understand the style of these composers, we must be aware of the needs of their instruments. To play a Mozart sonata composed in 1775, and to understand the strange, quick succession of changing dynamics, is to understand that the piano was a novelty for Mozart at this time, and forte and piano were dynamics that, for the first time, could be changed in quick succession. So if you look at the Sonata in D Major, K.284, composed in 1775, you will quickly understand why f, p, f, p can be found in several places within this piece. As a chamber instrument, the fortepiano was there to add colour, not to overpower the other instruments. As a solo instrument, it is a teacher for touch, understanding decay of sound (appoggiatura), musical and sound-producing fingering, not just whatever comes to hand. The instrument's characteristics and requirements together help to make the music.
Phrasing is yet another topic for discussion. Knowledge of music for stringed instruments is to understand that bowing, at this time, was synonymous with phrasing. There are certain rules of thumb in string playing of this period. The rule of the down-bow on the first beat of a bar: it can change the whole aspect of a piece. And who are we to alter the phrasing of these great composers? Why do I talk about bowing? Well, how often have we changed a succession of several two note slurs in Mozart or Beethoven to one long phrase? I hate to even imagine, almost as much as I would hate the sound that this alteration would make to the quality of gracefulness in the music.
There are certain fundamental rules set down in treatises, as in Czerny's instructions on how to play Beethoven's piano works. The tempi, for example. Tempo. Yet another topic of conversation. I feel, especially with music written for the clavichord, that the tempi should be slightly slower than might be thought otherwise to accommodate the instrument's characteristics, which now become synonymous with how the composer thought. And with the fortepiano, Beethoven scherzi become not much faster than a Haydn Minuet, the instruments of the day dictating the wishes of the composer.
I could talk about extremes of dynamics, f - ppp. How often do you see mf in Mozart or Haydn, or even ff, or mf, or mp, or crescendo and diminuendo? It was not until Beethoven that these dynamics start to be used with any real sense of drama. But if you do get f and pp, it infers extremes. The criteria has to be how soft am I able to play, not how loud. And this will produce the colour of extremes on an early keyboard instrument.
The music of this period, and playing an early keyboard instrument, is about extremes, cultivating the understanding of affetto and, therefore, beginning to understand music from about the 1760s to roughly 1830.
How does this help you on a modern piano? Well, you certainly can't take the sound to its extreme and still play Mozart as it would have been played in the late 1700s. But you can understand what the music is about. You can realize that there is no need for altering phrasing, and there is no harm in learning to articulate clearly on an early instrument so that when you move to the modern grand, you can understand more clearly what tactile approach means. It is my opinion that the early keyboard instruments can provide the impetus for such knowledge, making the task of the piano teacher easier in the end.
If you do not have access or the opportunity to try these instruments, you should still try to understand that to get a three-dimensional look at music, you cannot measure everything by practising acrobatics on a Steinway, without listening, without thought, and only with mindless practising. You owe it to the composer, and yourself, to learn more about life in general at the time of the composition you wish to play, in order to understand its style.
Style, articulation, context, tempo, phrasing, fingering: they are all part of technique. Producing the sound you want through careful listening and a tactile approach, knowing the characteristics of your instrument and making it speak well, being able to produce that clear, focused sound: this is technique. Grasp the meaning of clarity and articulation that I mentioned at the onset. And above all, when playing music from another century on a modern instrument, be sure it is with the integrity of that music still intact.
| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|---|