Word: tk
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...TK: One reason is that they're great pieces. But you're right to think that other pieces could fit. There's no Mozart or Bach here. First, you have to pick a piece that you know enough about to make a plausible reconstruction of the first performance. For a Bach cantata, you may not know enough about how it worked or when it first was performed. These five pieces also span a broad history of music. We go from the very late Renaissance to 20th-century music. For a person who only studies music in a limited manner, this...
...TK: These pieces are icons, they're placed on a pedestal and worshiped like gods in most books. In this book, we stop studying once the first performance is over. There's a whole lot of scholarship on the later influence of these pieces, but all of those things are built up after the piece. I'm interested in what these pieces were like when they had no history at all, when they played the first note and you didn't know what the second note sounded like...
...TK: No. The book is not intended to be a textbook. It's intended to be for people who are interested in music. The pieces are pieces that people interested in classical music probably know something about. We are using it as a textbook, but it's not written to be a textbook, and I hope it doesn't look and feel like a textbook...
...TK: Part of this comes from my interest in early music, finding out how music sounded when it was new. It's not because you're trying to tell everyone that they must play the piece as it was played at its premiere, but I think that music is most interesting when it's in its originally intended context. Beethoven didn't write his symphonies for musicologists and critics; he wrote it for prospective ticket purchasers. Those were his people. The other aspect is the reinforcement of how exciting performance is. We have CDs, and this is great...
...TK: I don't think that any of these pieces got their best performance at their premiere. And they've now been performed in many different ways. There are jazz versions of Handel's Messiah, there are Christian Rock versions also. Things become a masterpiece by subsequent people acknowledging them as such. Other things are masterpieces because you can just look or listen and say, "This is a masterpiece." The Rite of Spring was hated at its premiere. But it was still a masterpiece then, in absolute terms...