Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Slave to the tyranny of classical music

I believe only in playing music written by dead people (OK, they were alive when they wrote it, but now they're dead) and so I started this thread so that we can discuss these issues.

I realise that many here will feel threatened by my opinions. They are entitled to think what they want. But I think the highest art known is to reproduce the exact sound intended by the composer. There should be no room for interpretation, deviation, and most definitely, no improvising.

This is the sole purpose of playing piano.

So many of those so-called music lovers who frequent the internet in search of freedom of expression come across schemes by which they actually create sounds with varying degrees of success. Such endeavour is completely worthless.

No - slavery is the only way to go!

Edit: Sorry, forgot to mention creativity. There must be no creativity. The time for that has passed.

Does it matter how they died? If we like the music of someone living do we really have to wait until they die of natural causes?



Or amused. Or threatened in an amusing way. Or encouraged to reduce the population of composers.



Does this mean we all have to buy a harpsicord to play Bach and Handel?



I thought all those old dead guys did just that, especially with their own music, and what we play of theirs today may or may not be exactly what they composed. Your confusion is confusing me.



I thought the whole purpose was to impress hot babes and get free drinks.



Funny, but in a lot of cases this is strangely true, and as P.T.Barnum said "There's a gullible piano player born every day", or something like that.



That's precisely what Jefferson Davis said, and we all know how that worked out...



True, and I think it passed when Beethoven died, which was that awesome time we've heard about in song and story, the one about "the day the music died" (which was when Ludwig drove his Chevy to the levee).

Glad I could clarify these issues.

JF

If people of the past held that view there would be NO 'classical' music at all. Composers in the past wrote for people who wanted to hear their music.



This shows a total misunderstanding, e.g. the composers of the classical period expected the performer to create their own cadenzas in their concertos. Also the score is an approximation - it can never totally define every aspect of a performance.

Also organists are still expected to be able to improvise (at least in the UK).

JF - that's a yes to harpsichords, babes and free drinks, as long as you don't do anything creative with them. I don't know who this Jefferson Davies guy is, but he sounds like he might be dead. Did he write any music?

JB - Please, please accept my humble apologies. And keep on improvising.

Serenity now. Insanity later.

Quite possibly the funniest thing I've read yet on PW. What's the net-speak abbreviation for spitting coffee all over my computer?

Ed - Glad we could share a smile over this one.

yeah..

what better bondage could there be?

If only I could improvise!

Did someone mention 'bondage'?

Touché!

TLT, Good one!! I would shudder to think what you might come up with to post on April 1 - except I'm laughing 'way too hard to shudder!

TLT - I am in the process of writing Sonata for Two Elbows, Op 1 No 1, the first in a very long series.

You are saying that it can only be printed for others to play well after I've passed - what if I just change my name?

Glen

Do you still play your triangle?

Here's how it goes Glen: composition, decomposition, performance. In that order. No exceptions.

Yes, thankyou al mahed, I kept the triangle after all (I couldn't sell it in the end) and I still practice regularly. But no improvisation.

Nope, you're underwear is too tight. : )

You might want to add these Sonatas ahead of time, though. What to do now?

Why, scales of course!

In very tight underwear.

(I don't know why my threads always degenerate into innuendo.)

Jefferson Davis - you don't know him? Well, he is dead, didn't write any music (at least non that made the top 40) but was big on slavery of a certain sort until we had a little backyard brawl where his gang got their miserable butts whooped and he was last seen slinking off into the shadows with his tail between his legs muttering something about getting revenge on that SOB Abe somebody or other with the big hat and nagging wife...I think he finally ended up getting the Nobel Peace Prize by pushing "global cooling" in a very big way...which was hot back then, so to speak.

JF