Spontaneity
Spontaneity
I always feel a bit guilty about not being able to reply directly to comments made about my rants; it seems rude – but if I did, I would have even less of a life than I do away from cello or computer. But I am – usually! – very grateful for the thoughts offered. One thing that has struck me recently, however, is the occasional remark about how thinking too closely about the music might cause one’s playing to be lacking in spontaneity, or will somehow interfere with one’s musical instincts.
It’s not true! Just as mastering the technical challenges of a piece is the only way in which one can hope to perform a work with true freedom, so mastering the musical challenges is our only route to true spontaneity. To take the Bach suites, since it was my writing about those that provoked a few of the comments in question: of COURSE one has to play them – as all music – with spontaneity, changing bowings, dynamics, colours, etc every time one plays them; but everything we do must be based on the music, not just random changes put in merely because we haven’t tried them before. The suites are full of the most extraordinary imagination; but they are not whimsical. This is not the music of chance. There is a divine order to the suites – enveloping the compassion, humour, tragedy, joy, and so on – that one must understand and respect. And one can only do so by studying the music in minute detail and asking oneself ‘WHY does he write that?’ To take my favourite analogy, that of acting: a fine actor will scour the part he or she is playing, every word, every stage direction, in order to understand the motif behind every word or gesture, in order to BE the character. Only then, when he/she is convinced and can live inside the part, will true spontaneity occur. An actor playing Hamlet will, I’m sure, bring varying degrees of darkness, doubt, self-loathing to the part in different ways every night; but he will not (hopefully) come on stage with a pair of frilly pink knickers perched on his head. That would be personal whimsy – really not part of the role. (Well, who am I to decree how to play Hamlet? But I think you get my point.)
Similarly, every slur, every dynamic we alight upon in the Bach suites, or in any other music, must be ruled by the harmonic and metric content, not superimposed just because it might ‘feel good’. (Perhaps the link frilly knickers might feel good on the actor’s head; it still doesn’t make them right for the part.) And, constantly in attendance as one studies, it is one’s musical instincts that lead us to our personal truth about the music; it is those instincts, fed with musical data, who will tell us, not merely what the harmonies are, but what they MEAN – to us.
And here endeth today’s rantette…
