A good crescendo is hard to come by. A good decrescendo is even harder.
Most students will define crescendo as “getting louder”, and they intuitively know that that means you start soft. I’ve been emphasizing with a lot my students that the point of a crescendo is not so much the beginning or ending dynamic. It’s the ‘getting’ part. The joy of a crescendo is the journey from one dynamic to the other. The ‘getting’ isn’t a means to an end. The music is in the journey. |
"Modern performers seem to regard their performances as texts rather than acts, and to prepare for them with the same goal as present-day textual editors: to clear away accretions. Not that this is not a laudable and necessary step; but what is an ultimate step for an editor should be only a first step for a performer, as the very temporal relationship between the functions of editing and performing already suggests." -Richard Taruskin, Text and Act Archives
March 2021
Categories
All
|