NYT: When Classical Musicians Go Digital

[Frank Forman]

When Classical Musicians Go Digital
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/12/arts/music/when-classical-musicians-go-digital.html

By CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM

Photo
Yehudi Menuhin's marked-up copy of Bach's Solo Violin Sonata No. 2.
Credit Royal Academy of Music Foyle Menuhin Archive

Among the exhibits on display at the Royal Academy of Music during
its centenary tribute to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin is a single
page of a Bach violin sonata. The printed page is darkened with
Menuhin's pencil markings fixing the contours of a phrase, the
direction of bow strokes, fingerings, the speed and width of
vibrato: the expression, in graphite, of a player's interpretation
and craft.

Peter Sheppard-Skaerved, a violinist and scholar who organized the
exhibition, said in an email that the page creates "a sense of
'digging away' at the material, almost as if going at it again with
the pencil might reveal more, find more of the vein of ore which we
all hunt."

That hunt is still central to the art of a classical musician. But
these days there are new weapons. Increasing numbers of players are
using iPads and laptops instead of sheet music, especially now that
the latest generation of tablets come in the same size as a standard
score. And styluses like the Apple Pencil, which was released in
November, are beginning to take the place of pencils and erasers.

If, say, in the course of a summer festival, a pianist plays a
familiar quintet with a new set of partners, she can save the
group's interpretive markings in a neatly archived file without
having to erase her usual dynamics and tempos. A young professional
hopping from one master class to the next can keep track of
multiple, even conflicting, instructions, traditions and technical
tips.

But the advantages of the new technologies aren't just clerical. Mr.
Sheppard-Skaerved pointed out that the advent of the mass-produced
graphite pencil in the second half of the 19th century coincided
with profound changes in the way a performer engaged with a musical
text. The generation of musicians who benefited from the new tool--
capable of making durable, but erasable, markings that didn't harm
paper--were, he wrote, "the first where practice was aimed at
perfection of execution, and not developing the skills for real-time
extemporization on the material in front of them, or improvisation
'off book.'"

What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable?
Conversations with some of classical music's most passionate
advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and
Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of
developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has
been shaken loose. The line between scholarly and practical spheres
of influence is becoming blurred. And the very notion of a
definitive text is quickly losing traction--and with it, the ideal
of that "perfection of execution."

An unexpected consequence of the digital shift is that it has
brought performers closer to historical sources, including composer
manuscripts. The pianist Wu Han, one of the artistic directors of
the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, said in a Skype
interview from Seoul, where she was leading workshops: "It's not
like the old days where you only have information passed down by a
teacher. Now everyone is a detective."

Ms. Wu takes pride in being an "early adopter" of the iPad and can
rattle off its benefits to the traveling musician. By her own count,
she is performing 42 works this summer. In the past, the attendant
sheet music would have filled three quarters of a suitcase. Now she
carries an entire library in a sleek tablet. Page turns have become
quiet and elegant thanks to a wireless pedal. (Where her enemies
were once awkward page turners, they're now Chinese concert halls
with Bluetooth blockers.) She needn't worry about losing her scores
or seeing the paper deteriorate over the course of a long tour. And
in master classes, she scribbles notes for her students onto her
tablet, saving a separate file for each player.

But what most shapes her music making--the myriad decisions on how
to pace a phrase or to build character through articulation and
dynamics--is the musicological groundwork of combing through early
editions and manuscripts for clues of the composer's intentions.

"In the old days, I had to wait until I could go to the library to
seek them out," she said. But now that foundations like the
Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, Germany, are painstakingly digitizing
material, it's on the internet.

With free downloads replacing expensive and unwieldy Photostats,
musicians are increasingly reading music directly from manuscripts.
The cellist Matt Haimovitz has been performing from handwritten
scores on his iPad, including Schubert's "Arpeggione" Sonata and
Anna Magdalena Bach's manuscript copy of the suites for solo cello
by her husband, Johann Sebastian.

Nicholas Kitchen, a violinist with the Borromeo String Quartet,
recalled the frustrations of his early encounters with manuscripts
in the days when studying them meant visiting a library's rare books
room and donning white gloves. With his fellow Borromeo players, he
now reads the late Beethoven quartets directly off a manuscript,
which he can display--and mark up--on his screen. Comparing it
with respected printed editions long known as the "Urtext"--the
uncontaminated, definitive version of the score as determined by
musicologists--he has found all sorts of details that never made
it into print.

"In our printed music, we have about nine dynamics, while in the
manuscript there about 20 different ones," he said describing tiny
alterations to the single letter p--for "piano," or soft--that
Beethoven marked. Some have a cross on the stem, for instance,
others a double cross. "There are 10 distinctions just in the area
of piano."

At the same time, the traces of Beethoven's creative process, with
passages crossed out and amended, sometimes with visible impatience,
inspire a different kind of playing. For a noted improviser like
Beethoven, Mr. Kitchen said, "it was important to react to the page,
but just as important was the incredible freedom to go where the ear
leads you."

The composer Dan Visconti, who uses iPads in his work with the
Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble, said the technology is "changing
the culture a little bit." He added: "Now that you can get different
versions of sheet music easily, I don't see performers looking at
something and thinking, Oh, this is set in stone. As a result, you
no longer have quite the same slavish worship of the text."

With performers engaging in the sort of sophisticated archaeological
work that used to be the province of academics, professional music
editors may become an endangered species. Or at least the nature of
their work will change, with revised editions released on a more
fluid time scale.

But Ron Regev, a pianist and the chief music officer of Tonara, the
software company, said he does not believe that the professional
editor is going anywhere as long as classical musicians demand
high-quality scores. Indeed, the digital age brings with it
advantages. "Until now, editors only had one chance to put what they
knew into a fixed edition," he said. "Now you can continually change
the score according to the most recent scholarship, and instead of
having to reshoot and spend millions on a new edition, you update a
file."

With composers also in on the digital revolution, their own creative
process--the drafts, corrections and discarded dead ends that
performers puzzle over on manuscripts--is often captured in a
sequence of updated files. Mr. Kitchen said that when his quartet
workshops a new piece with the composer, changes are sometimes made
on the spot and shared wirelessly with the players.

"What we end up with doesn't at first glance look like the
wonderfully expressive sketches of Beethoven," he said. "But there
was a final version, and then the really final version, and perhaps
the final, final version. A musicologist some day far from now will
be doing the same thing we do now looking at corrections in a
Beethoven manuscript."

In the cool clarity of the new medium, some things may be lost. The
sort of expressionist fury with which Menuhin marked up Bach or the
stenciled grace of a Schubert manuscript reveal much about the human
behind the artist. Ms. Wu said she enjoyed sorting through the
psychological clues earlier composers left behind in their
handwritten scores.

"If you have the neat printed score, you don't see the struggle,"
she said. "You can detect how brilliant Mozart was writing
individual parts instead of vertically. Mendelssohn's 'Songs Without
Words' have those beautiful paintings in them. Today, we don't know
if a composer is messy or meticulous."