Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Life experiences, personality and emotion in music

I'm going to throw out an idea that may seem a bit counterintuitive. As a father of two (son 21, daughter 16) it seems to me that young people are especially adept at making mountains out of molehills. It's the lack of life experience that can make each emotional event a major drama. As we get older and grayer we've experienced major moments (marriages, divorces, births, deaths) and the little ones don't impact us as much. It would seem to me that an older player may very well play with less emotion and would seek to bring out musical details rather than play for the emotion with dramatic dynamics and plenty of rubato. Does that make sense?

This is very true and well put, I was trying to say something like this earlier in the thread, but I like the way you get this accross.

The problem here is that I don't have the faintest idea what this drawing with a 'greater palette' means. I know what it means with respect to painting or photography, but as to how that concept transfers to musical performance, I truly have no idea.

I'm not suggest for a moment that the concept is meaningless, but I do believe it's an esoteric statement -- one that does not translate easily into aspects of musical performance that are actually observable.

Another thought, like Pogo's teacher who is 70 years old and still plays like a demon, the older musicians that I love, tend to retain their amazing youthful qualities. They don't lose the fire and brilliance, the need to communicate, the energy, enthusiasm, excitement, freshness etc.

I think it's because he golfs.. haha

Good Lord. Never mind.

Btw, I'm not sure either that a 60 year old, on average, has experienced very many emotions more than a 40 year old for instance..

I suspect that's true. I don't think it's necessarily even true that a 60-year old has experienced a greater variety of emotional events than a 40-year old. And as for the subjective appreciation of those events, as others have noted, it's possible that a teenager has a more emotional response to a particular event than an adult would have.

This is just too complex a subject to make generalizations about.

What more evidence do people need other than sheer experince? Not to mention what you hear in a performance...

Yep, that seems to make sense too but wearing stores' hat, I'd argue that music training (and practice) is exactly about this: Where the common man reacts to these experiences by "mellowing down", an older artist might strive consciously and actively to draw upon all of it to make art..so he might not necessarily drown out the emotional aspects but rather focus on the important bits in a very active and conscious way when making music (or any other art) while also giving due attention to other musical details.

Please discuss only music in this thread. Let the flame wars continue (or not, if the mods decide to shut that down) in the "boring people.." thread.

1) One interesting question was if personal life experiences really matter in one's ability to generate an "authentic" interpretation of any given piece of music. The specific example discussed there was the Funeral March from Chopin's sonata.

2)If they do, how is it that young people seem to be able to give as authentic an interpretation as those of older more "mature" and experienced musicians (or is it just an illusion? Do you think that given equivalent musical and pianistic abilities, a pianist later in his life would have a better interpretation of the piece than his own interpretation 30 years ago? You could discuss this in the light of the 1955 and 1981 Glenn Gould recordings. If you thought the 1981 recording was more "mature", do you have specific musical terms that can describe why it was the case?

3) Pianoloverus raised the issue about child prodigies and how some of them seem to be able to come up with very good interpretations of many compositions. I speculated that it might simply be mimicry of the highest quality. Some others agreed too. Discuss.

(Can't remember if there were other interesting questions posed in that thread. I do wish to (yet again) point out that perceived emotion and felt emotion need to be distinguished. My stance is that one can certainly perceive the melancholy and the desired effect that the Funeral March intends without actually having to go through an internal grieving process (either at the time of performance of any time in the past) and that is sufficient to generate an "authentic" performance of that piece.

Discuss.

One simple answer is that expression in performance requires a technique, just as playing the notes requires technique. Technique can be taught, presumably to the receptive child as well as to the adult. This "teaching" may come in many forms, i.e., teachers and other performers. I think life experience contributes to understanding the depth of what needs to be learned, but apparently it can be taught by rote as well: Witness the prodigy child.

I remember an interview I heard with the great Shakespearean actor Laurence Olivier, who said that he couldn't actually be Hamlet eight times a week because the emotional range would kill him. He had to develop a technique to make the audience believe he was Hamlet. My view as a performer is similar to his. In performance we can't really go to those extreme emotional places or we would lose control of all else. The art of performing is about control, so that the listener has the emotional experience that we performers have imagined.

So, yes, I think it's important for artists to be part of life, to experience life, in order to empathize with one another and in so doing reach out through music.

Which reminds me of Evgeny Kissin saying he had to take at least three days break in between performances in order to "recharge"...
However, I find lots of musical performers giving it everything they've got during a performance. When everything is perfectly controlled, I find myself bored. I like a bit of spontaneity.

Good Lord. Never mind.

Which reminds me of Evgeny Kissin saying he had to take at least three days break in between performances in order to "recharge"...
However, I find lots of musical performers giving it everything they've got during a performance. When everything is perfectly controlled, I find myself bored. I like a bit of spontaneity.

I think Kissin was simply saying that a performance requires energy and can be draining. Also, I think a performer can give it everything and give a perfectly controlled performance. To me, loss of control implies technical limitations.

IMO adjectives like "perfectly controlled" or "spontaneous" mean diffferent thinkgs to different people.

This idea of spontaneity is very interesting. I think I know what you mean. It's a certain excitement, that the performer has a devil-may-care, throw caution to the wind attitude. I think this is very good acting; it's what a great performance should be.

When I was studying the Hammerklavier sonata, I read an article about it by the great Donald Tovey. He said the piece was meant to sound craggy and technically "difficult." Well, I thought, I'm going to find an easy way to make it sound craggy and difficult. This is, I think, the performance ideal: Find a way to create spontaneity.

What more evidence do people need other than sheer experince? Not to mention what you hear in a performance...

These are the sorts of statements that people tend to make when they don't actually have any basis for a proper argument.

Anything that is as obvious as you want to suggest should be describable in terms of common-sense language. If it isn't, why might that be?