{"id":1878,"date":"2015-02-23T18:03:24","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T02:03:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/?p=1878"},"modified":"2018-03-07T18:05:21","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T02:05:21","slug":"the-interpretation-of-interpretation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/archives\/1878","title":{"rendered":"The Interpretation of Interpretation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The first wonderful sight-reading I experienced was Lucy Spitzer\u2019s flawless playing of the Berg Sonata in my teacher\u2019s studio when I was 15 or so. Before then I had no idea how good reading could be; or, we might say, what reading even was! <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Since then, I\u2019ve met other outstanding readers. In each, the skill of reading seemed to have acquired its own flavor from existing in a constellation of other skills. But while each musician was unique, one was \u201cmore unique\u201d: Leonid Hambro read so well that, when he was fresh out of Juilliard, and auditioning for Joseph Szigeti, the great violinist insisted that he <em>could not<\/em> be reading, even as the examples on the music rack grew more and more difficult, and less and less familiar.<\/p>\n<p>But perfection of the notes, though remarkable, was not the distinctive thing about Leonid\u2019s reading. Rather, it was that he seemed to give <em>a finished interpretation<\/em> at sight. I\u2019m thinking of an interpretation as a coherent meaning supported, justified and necessitated by the score, in which emotion communicates from performer to audience as intended by the composer. Working out an interpretation of a major work\u2014one that lasts fifteen minutes or more\u2014can take us months or years. Then we must ask ourselves, \u201cWere Leonid\u2019s interpretations-at-sight necessarily shallow? Are <em>our<\/em> interpretations fussy, affected and \u201cover-deep\u201d? Or was Leonid accomplishing something more remarkable than we realized? <span class=\"jb-end-of-post\"><img class=\"jb-end-of-post\" src=\"\/Mordent.svg\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first wonderful sight-reading I experienced was Lucy Spitzer\u2019s flawless playing of the Berg Sonata in my teacher\u2019s studio when I was 15 or so. Before then I had no idea how good reading could be; or, we might say, what reading even was!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1879,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions\/1879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/boykonpiano.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}