The pianist’s freedom and the work’s constrictions: what tempo fluctuation in Bach and Chopin indicate

Abstract

The concept of the musical work has triggered much discussion: it has been defined and redefined, and at times attacked and deconstructed, by writers including Wolterstorff, Goodman, Levinson, Davies, Nattiez, Goehr, Abbate and Parmer, to name but a few. More often than not, it is treated either as an abstract sound-structure or, in contrast, as a culturally constructed concept, even a chimera. But what is a musical work to the performer, actively engaged in a “relationship” with the work he or she is interpreting? This question, not asked often enough in scholarship, can be used to yield fascinating insights into the ontological status of the work. My thesis therefore explores the relationship between the musical work and the performance, with a specific focus on classical pianists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I make use of two methodological starting-points for considering the nature of the work. Firstly, I survey what pianists have said and written in interviews and biographies regarding their role as interpreters of works. Secondly, I analyse pianists’ use of tempo fluctuation at structurally significant moments in a selection of pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederic Chopin. This analysis is based largely on tempo graphs of recordings which I have generated using Sonic Visualiser software. The key question that runs through the thesis asks how constraint (as imposed by the work on the performer) and freedom (for the performer to make artistic decisions) are implicated in the performance of a work. I conclude by suggesting a model for the work-performance relationship inspired by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s writing, which reflects the paradoxical nature of the musical work’s “existence”.