Breaking rules for the sake of breaking rules isn’t usually art; it’s just anarchy. And following rules for the sake of following rules is just mindless conformity.
- David duChemin, "Don't Break the Rules"
For a while now, I've been following photographer David duChemin's blog. This recent post from him really hit the nail on the head. I think the kind of expression a lot of guitarists have come to equate with "soul" is what duChemin aptly calls "anarchy."
Communicating with the audience
An expressive performance creates, for the listener, the feeling that the composer and/or performer wants them to experience.
It doesn't mean holding a chord a bit longer, hitting some note louder, speeding up, or slowing just because you're trying to "express yourself" and that's how you feel it. That might fool a superficial listener, but it's not going to hold up in the long run.
There are certain conventions that have evolved over the course of music history in order to accomplish this goal of creating an effect for the listener. This is where ritardandi, rallentandi, accelerandi, accent, dynamics, etc come in to play. This is phrasing.
If you don't understand these things and aren't using these things appropriately, there's a very good chance you're not really communicating with your audience effectively.
Learn the "why"
If these things are applied too clinically or carefully, they may still fail to communicate fully, but they will probably still produce a more convincing performance for the audience than when they are used "intuitively" but inappropriately.
duChemin offers some great advice, too, for the artist or musician who wants to develop a genuine sense of expression. Think "musical expression" when he says "photographic expression":
Art created in adherence to rules is art about rules, not about passion or beauty or any other thing about which humans have made honest art over the centuries.
That’s not to say there aren’t helpful principles, but they are only that. They’re guides to help us make our decisions, but divorced from the Why, separated from the reason they became rules in the first place, they’re more a shackle than a permission to experiment and express. I know the usual response to this discussion is that you have to know the rules first, then you can break them; I think that’s baloney too. Just knowing the rules is useless. We need to understand the principles of photographic expression, the reasons these rules came into play to begin with in the first place, then use or ignore them in the service of our vision as we need.
- David duChemin
A mercifully brief rant
I started thinking about writing this post when I watched William Kanengiser play Sor's B minor etude and read the comments:
Now, anyone capable of listening to this recording objectively will hear plenty of accelerandi, rallentandi, and everything else smithsherman claims are not there. These things are not even subtle, and sometimes they're pretty dramatic.
So why are they undetectable to loadermen, smithsherman, and the 56 thumb-uppers? It's no wonder classical guitarists in general still have a poor reputation compared to other musicians.