1-6-8 Goken-cho, Mito-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 310-0063 Japan
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Takahiro Sonoda
Mini-lecture #5: About Urtext Scores
Open Seminar for Piano Dec. 4, 1999 (Sat.)
Good evening, everyone. To begin with, I am supposed to give a mini-lecture at first,
so let me talk to you a bit about musical scores.
When a person performs, the first thing he sees is the score.
Nowadays, however, there's a sort of "urtext" (original text) boom,
meaning that it's OK to use anything as long as it's an urtext.
The atmosphere seems to be that anything not an urtext is not good,
so students often bring along their own urtexts.
An urtext score does not contain any indications about how to perform.
For example, urtexts of older works, from baroque to classics,
don't have any dynamic markings, and many don't even show phrasing marks.
Obviously, they don't have any pedal markings.
Moreover, while we perform on wonderful instruments like the modern piano you see now,
the works used to be played back then on the harpsichord, and before that,
the clavichord, which is sort of a tabletop piano,
which made a completely different sound. Also, while they're called urtexts,
I don't think it's possible for a person just to look at the score and immediately know how to play it.
That means that students are glad whenever their teachers are able to show how a work is to be performed.
However, when the teacher doesn't say anything and just tells the student to play the urtext score,
that puts the student into a quandary. That leads to a simple question, I think -- namely,
"What score should we use?" Looking back on my early memories,
I started learning piano at age 4 or 5, of course, studying under a Russian named Leo Shirota.
He was a White Russian (i.e., non-Bolshevik) who happened to be in Japan.
He was a wonderful pianist: since he was a pupil of Busoni, you could call him a master among masters.
Well then, since I was just a 6-year-old or 7-year-old kid, I couldn't speak any English except for perhaps the words "yes" and "no."
When told "Please," I knew I had to play something, and when told "Listen," I knew I had to listen.
That's about all I could understand. Anyway, the teacher would sit next to me,
listening to me play. He would tell me "No," and would then say, "Please listen,"
and would then play the part again. I would understand then that I had to play in that way.
What this means is that the score was just a gauge, telling what sounds come next.
The way I learned everything was to listen to my teacher's way of playing;
I thereby realized how pieces should be played.
In other words, what happened was a handing-down process from generation to generation.
I played the way my teacher played -- a kind of imitation.
That's how I started playing the piano.
That means it didn't matter one bit whether I used an urtext score or not.
I learned everything by observing how my teacher did it -- i.e.,
Beethoven was played this way, Chopin was played that way.
"Oh, the pedal is held down a little longer? Oh, is it this way?"
Sometimes, of course, I would play something wrong, and my teacher would inscribe a big circle on the score and say,
"That's wrong." That is how it gets passed down from generation to generation.
Even recently, if you visit a "Conservatoire" or "Hochschule" in some foreign somewhere,
you will find teachers still telling their students things like, "No, that's wrong,
isn't it? You have to play the melody this way," after which they show them how to do it right.
That's how it is.
You soon learn for yourself that just because something's written a certain way in the urtext score doesn't mean it's necessarily played that way.
Another thing: in contrast to a digital string of 0's and 1's,
music is something that rocks and moves very delicately, like this.
For example, although it's not rubato,
the beginnings and ends of melodies do move around in different ways.
The only way to figure out how to start out and end a melody is to listen to your teacher for yourself,
and learn how he plays it.
If you still cannot understand, you might get the beat -- always mathematical --
to always match the beginning of the phrase,
but the music will end up lacking any melodic fluency.
Therefore, I don't think that you should be such a stickler for "which version"
or the urtext score. Moreover, the more I hear people keep on talking about urtexts,
the more I want to ask them whether there were no musicians before urtext scores were published.
Of course, that wasn't the case. There have been plenty of pianists from Liszt on downward,
with a lot of annotated editions.
What I mean to say is that each and every one of them is correct.
Well, since it's gotten so complicated, with so many things around,
meaning we have to ask what all this urtext stuff was about in the first place.
Owing to the current urtext boom, there have been many different things published lately.
There's a sort of inheritance process involved that goes,
"It was written that way in the urtext score, but the performance ought to be this way."
And so, let me repeat myself: it will be faster if your teacher shows you how:
"Chopin wrote that way, but you should perform it this way."
No matter how long you stare intently at the score -- even until your eyes go red --
nothing will come out of it.
That's to say nothing of musicians who are able to comprehend the meaning of the urtext score,
as they are able to make music without being a stickler for such things.
That's what I'd like tell you all first.
However, if you go off and interpret things too freely,
people might call you "individualistic." But parading your quirks too much will just elicit the comment,
"It wasn't really written that way originally, was it?"
It is at such times that the urtext becomes extremely significant.
On the other hand, if you play precisely and exactly according to the score,
you have to add a proviso saying that "it was written that way in the urtext score,
but everyone plays it this way,"
or else the music will just sound all lifelessly dry and boring.
Also, if everyone played exactly the same way,
it would be better just to choose one person as a representative and input it in a computer or something.
Given all the differences that exist between performances,
in spite of the fact that everyone uses the same urtext,
we can say that there is indeed such a thing as expression in music. Moreover,
given how different a young person plays from the way a mature person or an old person plays,
I think you should play whatever way that you feel is right.
However, since there will always be things you don't understand as you play through a score,
it would be advisable for you to know beforehand which version is good in a certain part,
and which is bad. Otherwise you'll run into trouble.
These are not the kind of things that you can learn right off the bat.
I've been playing the piano for several decades now -- for more than 50 years, in fact.
And I know that this kind of knowledge is something that builds up gradually.
For that reason, it might be better not to make such a fuss about which version of the urtext score is best.
That's why I'd like to take the opportunity of these seminars at ATM to advise you,
when necessary, that "you should play it this way."
Well, that's my mini-lecture, but there are still a lot of problems.
For example, the problem of pedaling. It won't do just to ask, "Well, should I pedal here?"
or "Is it all right not to pedal?"
I think that such things as how to press down and lift up the pedal can only be learned by observing and imitating your teacher,
as that will give you a grasp.
Copyright ©2001 Mito Arts Foundation. All Rights Reserved. Created by TK.
Mail to: webstaff@arttowermito.or.jp
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