When we face a work of medium or large scope, it is cautious to reflect on a previous analysis of the text to unify some type of meaning or coherence in the discourse. The analysis is the elevator of vision and the contemplation of the construction itself in a visual plane that moves away from the chronological or temporal reality of the interpretive reproduction, which allows us the prerogative for a more virtuous strategic planning.
In music, as in any other language or idiom, there is a syntax, a rhetoric, questions and answers are asked, ideas or fragments are born and die, configuring a melodic, harmonic and rhythmic discourse.
One of the keys to successfully developing a high-level performance is the evocation of singing, always as the first objective of perspective. For this, it is essential to search for the melody in any fraction of the work without neglecting absolutely any connection. From here, the first questions about the relevance of the materials and their contrasts arise, therefore, the moment of making decisions begins. The interpreter acts as a director to choose his protagonists and secondary actors, since it would not be correct to focus all the notes of a score in the same way.
Among the fundamental objectives in this question is simplification within a context saturated with information, from which the viewer is oblivious. Let’s put aside the nonsense and acrobatic abuses that so much admiration arouses in most of the public. What we deliberate with deep analysis is the precision of a message to capture the attention of a listener and not that of just an observer.
For the realization of a synthesis there is no better search element than the aforementioned melody, frequently found in the conduction of upper and lower voices (extreme) and which serve as guides to define more clearly the phrases and melodic complements.
One of the parameters that attracts the most attention at first glance are the symbols of articulation and dynamics, which are used incorrectly by a high percentage of musicians. The symbology of articulation and dynamics is not merely a decorative symbology (although we could consider it that way in certain styles), but is already strategically determined by a functional harmonic directionality. It would be illogical and absurd to think that all of J. S. Bach’s work (mostly absent of articulation and dynamic symbology) was executed in non legato or legato.
In my reasoning I conceive two levels that are notoriously differentiable in a musical work, but at the same time naturally inseparable as being that they are together:
- Depth level, in which we cover the whole essence of the argument; connections of tension and relaxation, which is basically the focus to be able to decide possible tactics in the interpretation.
- Surface level, the one that can be seen with the naked eye and the only existing level for exhibitionists, in it we can see all the visual graphic text. An exclusive study of this level will not take us beyond what is a standard version, which is precisely what I try to avoid when reflecting on this article.
To these two levels we could add a very significant incentive, which is the immaterial level or the soul. Every work of art is born from an imaginary world that leads to infinite sensations and memories, whose purposes can also contain philosophical, spiritual, ideological and religious claims. Without a doubt, this is the most subjective point of interpretation due to its sensitive complexity.
Good learning requires optimal observation; We use it to reconsider every movement, every detail, every interval and joint. Let’s consider which notes are known and which are not, let’s calculate tension dynamics according to the function of each progression with the necessary neatness and let’s not forget the most important thing above all else, listening. Note that we do not listen, note that it does not exist. But the perception of these notes is what is really interesting, because as performers it is up to us to listen to them for what they are and not for what they seem.
