Les préludes: Part 1

As I’ve whimpered before, my Scarlatti renditions are often rough, touch-and-go, error-ridden. Putting one together in a week or two, on top of my other obligations, is challenging.* Preparing a ii-V-I intro often feels like yet one more thing I have to cram in, often the day or two before the concert.

Yet as soon as I start working on the intro, I notice that it immediately improves my performance of the sonata. I think there are a few reasons for this. When improvising, paradoxically, I often make fewer errors than when playing prepared pieces. Maybe because I’m more likely to be playing things I audiate, that is, hear clearly in my head, or maybe just feel-hear with my fingers—but that in any case are less mediated by reading or remembering or intentive-style thinking. That is, I’m playing more intuitively. And this intuitive flow state carries over into the beginning of the sonata. By contrast, preparing to launch into a cold start, particularly of a piece that is technically challenging or musically imposing, can feel like standing on the edge of a diving board.

Playing my own introduction also gives me a sense of command, ownership, authenticity—a word which shares a root with “author” and “authority”. I feel less like I’m trying to prove something as an executant, an occupational hazard with these typically flashy, virtuosic Scarlatti pieces. Instead I’m just expressing myself, creating music for music’s sake.

And this isn’t just an internal psychological shift. By playing these unique introductions, I’m in fact distinguishing my performance, however rough-edged, from the ten zillion others (seven zillion of which are on YouTube) from the get-go, so that it isn’t entirely about minute differences in interpretation or execution.

In the next post I’ll go into a little more detail about how I go about devising these intros.

*Scott Ross, the harpsichordist who released all 555 Sonatas on 34 CD’s in 1988, recorded them in just 15 months. That’s about 8½ per week, and he claimed not to have known many of them before undertaking the project. That’s just…I don’t know what that is. I don’t even know why I bring it up, it kind of depresses me.**

**Seriously, though, it’s mind-bogglingly inspiring. Did I mention he was already beginning to feel the first serious symptoms of AIDS, then untreatable, when he started recording?