I've been doing some analysis lately, an odd pair of pieces: Mozart's extraordinary Streichquintett in g minor (KV 516) and Barney Childs' Eighth String Quartet. I had the ambition to do a close reading of the pieces, trying to get at as many details as possible, and I found myself doing this by actually copying the scores out. This is a very old-fashioned way of getting to know a piece of music, but it is no less valuable for being old-fashioned, especially because copying is a kind of slow motion performance and one in which each notated detail gets its own time for consideration.
In the Childs Quartet, about which I'll write more in a later post, a piece composed entirely of very slow and sustained chords, the sonorities of these chords -- their densities, balance, registration, and beating due to relative consonance or dissonance -- needed to be experienced in real time by sustained timbres not possible on a piano. For that reason, I used my notation program as a sequencer in order to hear the piece in something approaching the specified timbres, and I now have a much better idea of how the piece works or doesn't work.
With the Mozart, I've been making an arrangement for piano, four hands, because (a) it's music that I've always wanted to play, but don't happen to play the specified instruments with sufficient virtuosity, and (b) because this music is all about scoring patterns, going from one instrumental combination to another, and using the changes in patterns to project the tonal material, and the act of translating the score into another instrumental medium inevitably forces one to engage with these patterns. So far, I've been able to get away without changing any of Mozart's notes (i.e. transposing up or down octaves or doubling at octaves) but I have been led to some very interesting solutions, with, for example, at one point the "primo" pianist having to wrap her arm around her partner in order to play a melody in the bass and a countermelody in the treble, while her partner plays the accompaniment in the middle. I suspect that a polished arrangement will probably demand some registration changes, and perhaps some subtle doublings, but my working score has already proven to be a great way of getting into the nuts and bolts of a remarkable piece of music.
2 comments:
at one point the "primo" pianist having to wrap her arm around her partner in order to play a melody in the bass and a countermelody in the treble, while her partner plays the accompaniment in the middle
I love it. That's kind of what it is like to play the viola parts of K516.
It's been over 50 years, but I'm sure I remember my first college music teacher, Edgar Sholund, having me copy out passages from orchestral scores (the Schumann piano concerto for sure, and I think a Beethoven symphony); and then having me write new pieces using exactly the same rhythms, chords, etc.
And later, when there was still no money to buy the scores, I copied out almost all of Webern in order to study him.
Later, as an art critic, I copied a number of drawings and paintings in order to study them -- including a fullsize facsimile of Duchamp's Large Glass.
I recommend this. You learn so much this way!
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