History’s greatest composers wrote for their pianos, and a new Slate article by Jan Swafford argues that only an old piano can play Beethoven‘s Moonlight Sonata as Beethoven intended it. In fact, “music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn’t just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can’t even be played as written on modern pianos.” Today, musical recordings drive the classical piano scene, encouraging the dominance of Steinways and the “standardization of pianos,” Swafford writes. “In the days of Beethoven and Schubert, it was a matter of one man or woman (such as the legendary Nannette Streicher) with hammers, saws, planes, and chisels, and there were myriad visions of what a piano could be.”[%comments]
The Piano Matters
TAGS: music
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But it is very true that Poem of Li Bai ( greatest poet from Tang Dynasty) should not be read using current chinese language. Some of chinese dialect should give you the more original interpretation of the poem
When Lincoln center had such poor acoustics, one wag wrote, “You can’t make a refrigerator sound like a piano.”
This illuminates the point that the concert hall is the largest instrument of all.
Humbug!
Beethoven was half deaf when he wrote Moonlight Sonata. Does this mean that only somebody with significant hearing loss can hear what he intended?
I have to think that the composers of that age knew that the notes they were writing would end up being played many different ways on many different instruments. After all, they had witnessed the transition from harpsichord to piano.
When it comes down to it, I would much like to hear Beethoven played on Beethoven’s original piano, but I don’t think that’s the only true expression of his works.
One point that’s been going around my head for a bit … the piano was originally intended to sound like a harpsichord but with velocity-sensitive keys. Viennese pianos of the era do sound quite a lot like harpsichords. Musicians have always driven the innovation of musical instruments-look at Haydn and his use of the valve trumpet. Beethoven was certainly no different, and I doubt he hankered after the good old days of the harpsichord-indeed, he anticipated the repetition lever by writing pieces too fast to be played without it. (He was deaf by this point so it was no loss to him that the pieces couldn’t be performed.)
However, in 1976 Yamaha introduced the CS80, which had polyphonic aftertouch-this is a whole new layer of performance control, allowing key pressure to affect volume (or a host of other aspects of the sound-vibrato and filter characteristics were common choices on the CS80). It seems to me that modern art-music has suffered a schism from popular music and most contemporary art-music composers would eschew something like a CS80-even though it’s over thirty years old-as being the sort of instrument Vangelis would use, but not a serious musician.
Popular musicians, however, tend to use more musically conservative forms. So atonality and unusual rhythms-even those used by composers like Beethoven, well-established notions-are uncommon in popular music and seen as pretentious.
So … why this split between musical conservatism and instrumental innovation in pop, and the opposite in art music? I know there’s been some economic thought put into art music as a deliberate attempt to be high-falutin’ and keep the riff-raff out … but given the horrible sounds you can make on a synthesizer (as Tristram Cary, in my view brilliantly, did) why has art-music not embraced it and the greater instrumental control it offers?
I’ve often wondered what works Mozat and Beethoven would have written if they had a synthesizer at their disposal.
You should compose at the piano. I think only the piano is neutral enough so you can judge your music in the right way.
By the way, there exists a very clever program named Easy Song Builder with which you can compose a song just by listning and choosing. It makes a .mid file, and also only uses the piano-sound.
Try it out and be amazed!
Go to http://www.compose-music.com
thank you very much for sharing