Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner I get it. Some folks think you can learn something from Youtube.

I'll start by admitting that I haven't had time to read the whole thread, only bits here and there. Sorry if this already has been said.

Instead of asking yourself "can I learn interpretation by listening to other performances" you could ask yourself "can I learn interpretation if I never listened to other performances?" The answer to the second question is no. It would be like trying to learn how to pronounce English without ever hearing it spoken. No matter how many written pronounciation guides you read, you could never get the nuances right. And after all, what is right? English is a language that evolves and the conceptions of correct pronounciation varies around the world.

Music is a language in the same way. The notes on the sheet are like letters in the alphabet, they say what sound should be produced, but nothing about the fine nuances of how it should sound. What we call "correct interpretation" is in fact nothing but tradition. A tradition that lives on and evolves when musicians listen to the interpretations of earlier generations, keep what they like and add their own ideas. It is because we grow up listening to this music, we get accustomed to what it should sound like and therefore we are able to reproduce it. Pianists that grow up in a different cultural environment might grow up with a totally different perception of what this music should sound like, LL is a well known example of this. If you never listened to other musicians playing classical music, you'd be so far out and offer such strange interpretations that nobody in the classical world could stand listening to you (think LL*10^6).

I'm sure someone will think "but of course you can tell what is the correct interpretation, because there's a natural way to play it", but this is not true. The only reason someone thinks it's natural that some music should be performed a certain way is that he has heard similar music performed that way so many times.

That can't be right, or no one could ever convincingly perform music they hadn't heard someone else perform earlier, which is nonsense. I've been working on several pieces I have never heard anyone else play. And I think I have at at least a small idea of how they should go, just from the notes on the page.

But you probably have heard a lot of music in the same style, which give you a framework for how to interpret the music. If you take a piece of music written in a style you've never heard before and make an interpretation based only on the written score, you are very likely to end up with an interpretation that is very far from the composer's intention.

Sorry the confusion, I edited my first post to be more clear on this matter.

I'm surprised by this confession! Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't it you who, some while back on this forum, insisted that all music had to be memorised hands separately so that one could start from any place in the score before one could dare to offer a performance to the public?
Hardly possible, I would have thought without hours of banana-driving drill. Don't you think that before possibly frightening, with such demands, the living daylights out of some poor kid reading this forum who was about to perform in public and who was not so well-prepared that you should have owned-up that you don't always follow your own advice?

It's very distressing to me that a poster can't express a dislike or lack of preference for a particular performer without getting attacked in a deeply personal way.

There should be some Piano World Forum approved way to say that

"this particular performer does not move me as much as others do"

without getting pelted with rotting vegetables. Or worse, as is the case in this thread.

But nobody can be really sure what the composer's intentions were unless he was around within living memory (even then, maybe not).
I was a child when Handel/Sargent and Bach/Karajan were still believed, by some, to be the way to perform the music of these masters; in my teenage years performers like George Malcolm or Raymond Leppard seemed to have been giving the key to intepreting their music. Nowadays the playing of George Malcolm is hardly considered "authentic." Scholars and performers are regularly re-thinking the way in which we perform music from previous eras. And who's to say we've got it right today? Maybe Sir Malcolm knew best after all!

Exactly what I was saying. There is no absolute right or wrong, because we cannot know the composers real intentions. Still, most people have their own perception of what is right or wrong, all based on tradition. What we think is the natural way of performing something is not necessarily how the composer imagined it performed, it is what naturally fits into the current tradition. Without this tradition, the "natural way" of performing something would be completely different.

YES, but I'm not offering a performance to the public! When I did my diploma I could play from memory any point and either hand, apart from some Bach - I read that from the score.

Yes, because you learn your interpretation from your teacher and, before anyone comments that that seems a bit narrow, it depends on the teacher!

There is no such thing as "correct" interpretation since any piece of music is capable of individual interpretation.

Interpretation is purely a matter of personal taste.

Obviusly there is such a thing as correct playing,note values,timing etc and perhaps there may be such a thing as 'correct" technique though I doubt it.

Yes, but there is an informed one.

RogerW is right when he says that you really wouldn't know how to interpret a piece of written music if you had never heard music of that tradition. As an example, I am learning a piece that has "Tempo rubato" indicated at the outset. So you go to a music dictionary and you learn that rubato means "a limited freedom of rhythm and tempo when performing a piece of music where the time extension applied to one note is taken (hence 'robbed) from an adjoining note or notes". OK, so how does one know exactly how much freedom is allowed and exactly where one should rob the time within a passage? Should one hand keep strict time while the other plays around with time? That's where listening to the acclaimed masters of the tradition, the Rubinsteins, the Horowitzes, the Michelangelis, can help the performer interpret "tempo rubato" since the written notation offers no clues.

The same problem exists in jazz. You can play a written transcription of an Oscar Peterson solo but unless you have heard real jazz being played you would not know how to interpret the indication "swing eights". Your performance would not swing and would not sound like jazz. With Youtube one can listen to and watch the greatest performers of any style, borrow from several, and thus arrive at our own interpretation which is true to the tradition but is not an exact copy of any one else's.

Yes, kbk, there is an informed interpretation and you can get "informed" by watching the greats on Youtube.

You'd be much better off asking your teacher.

I don't think it should be taken for granted that everyone has, can afford or needs a teacher.

Steven

That then is a problem. I meet mine for lunch most weeks. What is embarrassing is that my 'practice' since stopping lessons is so patchy and random I can't play to the appropriate standard for her anymore. But 'needs', yes.

There is no better teaching, no better masterclass than watching Horowitz, Rubinstein, Michelangeli, Argerich, Hamelin, Polloni, Richter, Kissin perform on Youtube. And it's all free.

Yes there is, but you gotta pay.

That may very well be the case, but your initial assertion that one cannot learn by watching Youtube, is, IMHO, not supported by any evidence.

kk,
You are certainly right on this one.

jprof, you need to read the entire thread, there are plenty of interesting opinions. JAP, what that's supposed to mean is anyone's guess.