style in performance ❧ 149
in cultivating the ability to reconstruct the allemande from inside out. Yet one
cannot give a course in harmony in a master class or in a coaching session.
Or one may be asked to give the elements of a Mozart style. Indeed, there
is a great deal that passes for Mozart style which I think is worth just about
as much as those eagles and those machine-made broken pediments. It usu-
ally consists in taking the life out of every phrase and making it sound tinkly
and lace-beruffl ed. How can one tolerate the imposition on Mozart of exterior
mannerisms if one has never learned inwardly to sing his music?
In dealing with Couperin, you can explain the harpsichord, you can explain
the ornaments and the titles, but where have you arrived? Absolutely nowhere,
because you have not been able to explain the cadence of the French language
and the nature of Couperin’s musical phrasing. Even if you point out that
Couperin’s indications of articulation are meticulous and accurate, it does no
good unless by long slow work you have been able to inculcate a notion of style
rather than the notion of styles.
The same is true with Scarlatti. It is one thing to point out stylistic manner-
isms and quite another to convey a genuine conception of style. It is useless
merely to tell someone to get rid of Longo in favor of a decent text and to
eliminate all of Longo’s crescendos and diminuendos and echo dynamics and
to remember that one-manual Italian harpsichord. If, however, one is helped
to fi nd out how a Scarlatti sonata was made, how it grows from within, many of
these exterior mannerisms automatically become intolerable.
The intransigence that I’m showing here stems from my belief that since
keyboard players are autonomous, they should be independent-thinking peo-
ple. This is not necessarily the case with people who are destined only to play
ensemble or orchestral music all their lives. There are other collective infl u-
ences that can help to salvage individual defi ciencies in notions of styles or of
style. Yet if one is asked to coach a string player in an unaccompanied Bach
cello suite or a violin partita, what is the use of talking about Bach bows and
short-necked fi ddles and fl at bridges if you cannot get him to understand the
harmonic structure of the piece as growing out of a fundamental but often hid-
den bass line?
But all of what we have been talking about leads back to the conclusion
that true style can only grow from within, and that only styles can be imitated
from without. In the apparently trackless labyrinth of the foregoing, we can
nevertheless return to some points of orientation. We have indicated a differ-
ence between style, styles, stylishness, and stylization. We concluded that they
all had common qualities of consistency, concentration, cultivation, identifi -
ability, and communicativeness—in short, that as far as they succeeded, they
were the essence of themselves. We decided that styles can be original and per-
sonal, and can also be common and collective, depending on the nature of
the society and the relation of the individual to it. We have seen that taste can
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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