When & how do we know?

[emitfo]

I did a brief search of when musical notation came into being but I didn't see anything. This is what I'm curious about: How do we know that the way we play Bach (and others) pieces is actually the way JSB played and intended them? Obviously we don't have any recordings so his interpretation, so to speak, of his own work may be quite different from what we hear and accept as accurate today. It doesn't have to be Bach, the idea is that musical notation did not come into existence in exact, accurate completion at time "X" and from that point on we had exact duplicate of what was played.

Just something I've been ruminating on the last few days.

[Jim Garber]

There are a couple of articleson the origina and history of musical notation on this page (http://www.dolmetsch.com/musictheory2.htm).

Even before the early days of our current system there were earlier notation systems for music.

From Dr. Brian Blood (on that Dolmetsch site):

It appears that the Egyptians from the 3rd millennium BC practiced some kind of musical notation and that various systems were in use in the Orient in ancient times. A Hittite (or Hurrian) love-song, from about 1800 BC is the earliest example of musical notation we have. In the ancient Greek, Oriental and Jewish traditions, ekphonetic notation, a system of grammatical accents indicating inflections in language or liturgical texts, was in use as early as c. 200 BC. The invention of the Greek system of prosodic signs, from which both ekphonetic and neumatic notation are derived, is generally attributed to the grammarian Aristophanes of Byzantium (257-180 BC). Although many fragments have survived from this period, the Greek Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the Western world.

The short answer to your question is that we don't know exactly to the molecular level what Bach intended but we can guess pretty close esp since Bach was extremely popular and know by his contemporaries and subsequent musicians. Besides we have many of his original transcriptions and that may be as close as we will get.

[John Flynn]

I have a friend who is a career professional symphony musician and I once asked him a similar question. He said that that even WITH notation, we don't have accurate interpretations of how the great composers intended for thier music to be played. Conductors and thier orchestras, as well as individual musicians, started putting thier own spins on the each score from day one and that has evolved to this day. He said most modern symphonies do not place a priority on trying to be "historically accurate." Thier drive is to make great music. The score, as written, is the beginning of that process, not the end.

[Klaus Wutscher]

Actually, this is something I still have to figure out... arriving late to the "sight reading party" (after playing for 15 years) I am still amazed at the differences in interpretations of any given piece. Tempo, phrasing, dynamics... I still have to learn a lot, I guess.

To address your question more specifically, there are still hot debates esp. in the Early Music Movement about ornatmentation. In early music and barock, there still seemed to be quite a bit of improvisation around (JS Bach himself was supposedly a great improvisator) and afaik, esp. ornamentation was expected to be applied "accordingly". This made sense in a musical continuum where all musicians were speaking the same musical language, but it probably leaves a few people scratching their heads in the 21st century.

Therefore, I find it quite funny when some people religiousely insist on correct "authentic" interpretation and instruments, given what precious little we realy KNOW about how the music did sound.

This is my answer but I would love to hear from board members who know more about the subject (read: most anybody:p )

[JeffD]

This is very interesting to me.

I think, in an important way, this is an impossible speculation. Even if we were to be able to play a piece of Bach's music exactly as he played it, we would not hear it exactly as his first audiences heard it.

We hear so much music all the time, from television, radio, CDs, everywhere. Our brains are filled music, harmonies, and tone intervals not common 250+ years ago. Our musical expectations, conscious and unconscious, are very different.

It is impossible to get into the mindset of Bach's contemporaries. What would they find they find bizarre, what would they perceive as a dissonance, what would they have an emotional reaction to, what musical experiences would shock them, or amuse them, or strike them as new and intereting? If I am not mistaken equal tempering of keyboard instruments wasn't popular till the middle of the 19th century, so some very basic musical experiences, things even the least musical among us today take for granted, had not happened as yet in Bach's time.

I think it would be impossible to really know what it "sounded like" to Bach's contemporaries.

[Neil Gladd]

Yes, there is a lot more to it than just playing the notes. Anytime you try to play music from outside of your own culture, the first step is to "get a clue." This applies whether you are a bluegrass musician trying to play classical music, a classical musician trying to play jazz, an American trying to play Brazilian music, a German trying to play American music, or anyone in the 21st century trying to play anything written in the 18th century. Beyond the notation, you need to learn the performance practices: how did musicians of a certain country, style and time period actually play the music.

For the 18th century, we have some books written then that discuss interpretation:

Johann Joachim Quantz - On Playing the Flute
C.P.E. Bach - Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Intruments.

There is also a book on the violin by Tartuni, but the two above are the only ones I have read.

Once you get into music from anytime in the 20th century, there is less of an excuse for not getting the style, as we have recordings. THIS is why I collect 78s, to hear Abt, Siegel, Calace and de Pace play their own music, so I can get a clue. There are many recordings of Copland, Stravinsky, Bartok et al playing and conducting their own music, and if you want to play jazz or choro, there is no excuse for not listening to Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington or Jacob do Bandolim giving definitive performances. Many 19th century musicians lived long enough to record in the early 20th century, and even if their are no recordings BY Beethoven, there may be recordings out there by a student of a student of Beethoven.

You maybe won't entirely get any of this music from the notation alone, but the clues are out there if you make the effort to look for them. Read and listen.

This is also one of the reasons I like playing contemporary music. If you have a question, you can ask the composer directly. What a concept!

[RSW]

For 19th century performance practise, I highly recommend listening to the recordings from Adelina Patti, she was one of the greatest singers of her time (born 1840, died 1919 and made recorded over a couple of days in 1905). Her style was really rooted in the late 18th century and early 19th century opera and was a model for all musicians of that era and well into the early 20th century. What's of interest is timing, her execution of ornaments and certain expressive devices such as 'mezze-voce'.

For the old music (pre 19th century), I do think it helps to get a feel (experience) with the old instruments and the type of stringing and plectrums (if we're talking mando) used, not forgetting maybe basic technique.

Tartini wrote a (actually a student's notebook) treatise on ornamentation which give fundamentals for learning to improvise cadences. This book is hard to find and may only be available in 'facsimile' which is what I have.

[Neil Gladd]

For the old music (pre 19th century), I do think it helps to get a feel (experience) with the old instruments and the type of stringing and plectrums (if we're talking mando) used, not forgetting maybe basic technique.
Yes, I meant to mention that, too. Just having the right instrument (meaning the type of instrument played when the piece was written) will teach you something.

And Patti is a good example of what I mentioned about 19th century musicians who recorded in the 20th century. I think I have one of her recordings, somewhere...

[JeffD]

There is a Beethoven string quartet that I heard a few years ago that has some strange intervals. Well strange to his original audience they must have been, but when I heard it I could not help hearing blues. A very jarring experience for me, but it was what started me speculating about how an audience is "prepped" by its culture and time.

[John Kavanagh]

It does depend on how far back you go, too. There's a more-or-less unbroken tradition of playing and teaching from Bach's time (early 18th century)- thoough certainly some tastes and practises have changed. The notation, too, is specific enough that we can be sure that we're playing the notes he wanted, in the right order and relative time, but not about subtleties like exact tempo, articulation, and tone colour.

On the other hand, I know people who have spent a lot of time studying and performing the music of the 11th and 12th century, and the notation is pretty vague, and there's some symbols we're not sure what they mean. Some of it's like pop music, where the chart is intended as a memory aid for someone who already knows how it's supposed to sound. They have to be creative about the rhythm and some of the pitches, and all the arranging. What they've come up with works as music and has its own integrity, but they can't be sure how close it is to what the composers expected to hear.

[billkilpatrick]

i've always felt there was a fundamental difference between those who choose to re-create a piece of music and those who choose to re-enact it ... the former being musicians - the latter, historians.

nothing wrong with history and the study of it ... but music is an art and those who choose to innovate in it must appreciate that people who perform any given piece of music are artists in their own right and subject to - ahem - "artistic" license

in his day, i'm sure jsb himself would have exited some concert halls muttering to himself and others with a smile on his face.

... subsequent to intervening years - me thinks - nothing much has changed.

[santonelli322]

Just to add another wrinkle to the "authentic" debate, there is quite a bit of study that has been done about the tuning systems used by Bach and the composers prior to him prior to the eventual adoption of 12 tone equal temperment system. If you ever have the opportunity to hear baroque and pre baroque music done in original tunings it is quite different. Johnny Reinhard and the American Festival of Mircrotonal Music is a good starting place for those interested in exploring this further.