Event overview
Historical Musicology presents a talk by Dr Kenneth Hamilton on 'The Delayed Demise of the Improvised Piano Prelude'
The improvisation of preludes and transitions was a routine part of keyboard performance-practice for centuries, but even the finest specialist treatments of the topic have claimed that the custom rapidly declined with the increasing solidification of a standard repertoire after the middle of the 19th-century, and by the end of the Romantic era was happily dead. This presentation claims the contrary: the custom of improvised preluding was in rude health until the early decades of the 20th-century, and the shift in emphasis from performer to composer in the 19th-century, while certainly real, has been demonstrably exaggerated in the laudable if misleading interests of a clean historical narrative. A sidelining of relevant written evidence, and the relative rarity of preluding on early recordings - easily explicable on both aesthetic and technical grounds - has also helped to obscure the hardy endurance of the practice in the concert-hall. Nevertheless, fascinating improvised transitions can be heard on a disc by Ferruccio Busoni from 1921, and on live recordings by Josef Hofmann, Percy Grainger and Dinu Lipatti from subsequent decades. It is highly likely that the increasing focus on recording as the 20th-century progressed, and the rise of jazz as the improvised genre par excellence, constituted the coup-de-grace for classical preluding. But if we wish to play piano music written before 1945 - in other words, most of our standard repertoire - in a "historically informed" manner, then we simply must pay attention to preluding.
All welcome, not just for graduates!
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 1 May 2012 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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