There are legitimate or at least understandable cases when one may hear a familiar piece of art music in a key different from the one it was originally written. In some cases transposition was done by the composer to accommodate the capacities of different instrumental or vocal ranges (e.g., Bach, Rossini).
In other cases transposing was done by generations of musicians who considered playing the piece in the original key unreasonably difficult or cumbersome (e.g., Paganini's First Violin Concerto). Or because some musicians wanted to play works they love but the range of their instruments could not accommodate the work in the original key (e.g., the French violist Antoine Tamestit's concert performances of Bach's D-minor Partita for unaccompanied violin.)
Still other cases of transposing are traditionally accepted acts of charity toward aging (or under the weather) opera singers for whom a semitone difference can be the difference between a credible performance and a humiliating, traumatic disaster.
Then there are the artifacts of early recording technology when the lack of universal standards for recording and/or playback equipment (78 RPM shellac records, early wire and tape recorders) had resulted in recording of familiar pieces whose perceived key could differ by a semitone or more from the original.
Two more things to mention for the sake of completeness. First, the experience of hearing familiar music in a wrong key may have no causes external to the listeners mind. Instead the experience may be due to some kind of neural degeneration of or damage to the relevant part(s) of the brain (In his very late years the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter suffered from just this affliction. While his fingers played in the correct key, the music he heard in his mind's ear sounded distressingly sharp by a semitone.)
Finally, the question of what key a piece of music is being played in does not have an objective answer (the way questions in physics or mathematics do). The reason is that a key depends on the more fundamental notion of pitch, and the standard determining what counts as a particular pitch not only has changed dramatically (even ridiculously) over time but remains to some extent 'fuzzy' even today.
Did Bach play his A-minor Violin Concerto in the key of A-minor? If so, then today's performances by star violinists and top modern instrument ensembles must be playing this work in B-flat minor. After all, the frequency of the tuning pitch A (above the middle C) has gone from about A=418-420 hz in the time of Bach and Handel to today's A=440-444 hz (and higher!), which makes modern performances a semitone higher.
In what keys exactly did Beethoven 'play' his works in his mind's ear, given that the turning fork he kept (now in some British museum) was set at A=456 hz! This, again, is a semitone higher than the A=430 hz used in the fist half of the 19th century, and today it still sits roughly in the middle between A and B-flat.
What about (admittedly exceptionally rare) music-lovers with hyper-acute absolute pitch (my brother is one) for whom the practice of some orchestras to tune way above the so-called 'Stuttgart Standard' A=440 (as high as A=448 in Vienna and A=450 in Moscow) produces not just more 'brilliant' orchestral sound, but makes the music sound perceptibly off-key compared to performances of the same music by other orchestras?
All of the above, as I said, are cases that are at least understandable. Recently, however, I came across a case that I simply can't understand; and being unable to understand it turned out the be the least of my problems. The case in question is a 2017 concert performance of Liszt's Second Piano Concerto in A major (S.125) by the distinguished French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet with Orchestre National de France conducted by Emmanuel Krivine. This performance was recorded for broadcast, and when the recording was made available on-demand as a 256 kbs mp3 stream, I simply downloaded the streaming source file (so no actual streaming and/or re-recording took place on my part) and proceeded to listen to yet another interpretation of a work I've loved for years despite a few minor reservations. What I heard, however, was a piano concerto in B-flat major, the key which, as far as I know, Liszt never authorized in print or privately as an alternative to the key in which the work was published.
A quick mental check of possible reasons behind this surprising experience produced no plausible candidate. It did not seem to me in the least likely that a musician of Thibaudet's caliber and reputation, one who made a commercial recording of the concerto for a major record label and who played the work many times in public with the most prestigious orchestras and conductors, would suddenly (and for no apparent reason) insist on transposing the work up by a semitone for that particular Paris concert. As for his instrument, Thibaudet has been a Steinway artist for years, and judging by the piano tone in this recording he certainly was playing an excellently regulated modern grand which, given the pianist stardom, must have been prepared by a competent tuner-technician. Finally, this far into the 21st century, I simply cannot imagine that advanced digital recording technology used to make such concert recording could be responsible for the kind of artifacts one could expect from some early magnetic tape or disc recordings. In sum, then, I just cannot understand how a performance by a star musician in a major European capital, recorded by a major European broadcaster, ended up being in a wrong key.
But that's not what has been keeping me up at night. What troubles me is that I absolutely loved what I heard (and still do). It is not just that the upward shift by a semitone made instrumental timbres and colors brighter and more sharply etched, and not just because it also added a bronzed sheen to the piano tone, giving slightly better defined pitch to Liszt's otherwise barely pitched 'burping' bass notes at the extreme of the instrument's low range. It is because all that (and more) came with a palpably quicker tempo which shaved at least two minutes off the concerto's typical duration. And that removed those few minor reservations I've always had about the work. The bombast, pomposity and, yes, vulgarity of certain episodes became diluted to the point of inaudibility because the music in these episodes now sounded almost Eroica-like: tense, angular, impatient, brutish - as if Liszt was channeling Beethoven for whom he played as a prodigiously gifted 11-year-old boy.
Alas, my thrills came at a price. Being in love with an artificially and almost certainly accidentally created musical mutant feels worse than intellectually distressing and aesthetically perverse. It feels downright pathological. I can't even explain to myself what exactly it is that I am in love with. I'm certainly not in love with a work of art because the mutant has no artistic parent - not Liszt, not Thibaudent, not even some Duchamp-like prankster who vandalized the work as a way of making a silly meta-artistic statement. The best I could do was to think of the mutant as being akin to Duchamp's found objects and hope that placing it in a certain context - the private concert hall inside my head - will make our relationship feel less pathological than it really is. But then I am not even clear on the exact nature of the alleged pathology...
What a mess have I gotten myself into, and all because of a fucking semitone...
6 comments:
Great essay, Boom!
I’m a bit puzzled about your claim that key depends on pitch. The pitch of a note, its frequency, can vary as you illustrate, but key is about the relationship between notes - tonic, dominant, etc. - which will not vary according to pitch. Think about it, if you transpose something on the piano down an octave the frequency of the notes will be different but their relation to one another will be the same: the piece will still be in the same key. Of course, tuning to a higher or lower A can affect the tone, timbre and colour of the music, but as I understand it, not the key.
@Colin:
>> Key (i)
(Fr. ton; Ger. Tonart; It. tono).
In tonal music, the abstract arrangement of musical phenomena such as melodies, harmonies and cadences around a referential or tonic PITCH CLASS. <<
NEW GROVE DICTIONARY OF MUSIC (emphasis mine).
Octave is an equivalence relation in tonal music (hence notes separated by octave belong to the same pitch class).
But why bother with all that? Specifying a pitch - e.g., middle C - obviously does not require a reference to a key. Now try to specify, say, the key of Bizet's lovely symphony without referring to to a pitch (pitch class).
It’s about the relations between notes, not their absolute frequency. As you point out, middle A can range from 432khz to 446khz, with the modern standard being 440. But all the notes will bear the same relation to each other. In answer to your question “Did Bach play his A-minor Violin Concerto in the key of A-minor?” the answer is yes, albeit most likely at a lower pitch than used nowadays outside performances on period instruments which tend to tune lower.
Colin,
I am still holding my breath waiting for you to tell me what the key of Bizet's SYMPHONY IN C is without having to mention the tonic pitch-class "C".
After all, according to you, a key is given by an ordered structure of intervals - which, by the way, suggests that you simply confuse a GENERAL TYPE (e.g., major/minor key) with a SPECIFIC INSTANCE of that type (e.g., F# major).
Sorry, I thought asking me what key Bizet’s symphony in C was in was a rhetorical question. As to your other point, again I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re on about.
I suppose there’s another way of looking at this, which is that the musicians decided to play the Liszt concerto in B-flat major rather than A major, just for a laugh. I’m surprised we don’t hear about such pranks more often.
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