̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - John Rink

Judging Chopin: notes from the jury

jeh98 — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 15:44:00 +0000

In his day job, John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John's College. As a specialist in nineteenth-century music and performance studies, he is also one of 17 members of an international jury appointed to judge the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw this autumn.

Hosted by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, the competition occurs once every five years and is one of only a few devoted entirely to the works of a single composer. Professor Rink, whose musicological research has focused in particular on Chopin, highlights the importance of the competition to budding concert pianists as they forge their careers.

Rink attributes the enduring popularity of Chopin’s music to its “timeless” quality: “One of the reasons why Chopin remains such a popular composer – and, as we will hear in the competition, a composer who invites ever-new interpretations – is because of the rich potential and possibility within the music, which means that it’s not tied to a given time. Instead, it is open to all of us to feel, interpret and make our own as we wish. And that’s a very special property."

During his short career, Chopin (1810-49) composed some 270 works, all of which involve the piano, with the majority consisting of solo piano music. He is widely regarded as one of a handful of composers who understood the instrument “from within”. After attending a recital given by Chopin in 1841, a contemporary critic wrote: “In truth, nothing equals the lightness, the sweetness with which the composer preludes on the piano; moreover nothing may be compared to his works full of originality, distinction and grace.”

Professor Rink’s research has resulted in the publication of books, articles, editions and catalogues of Chopin’s works, as well as a range of books and articles on the subject of musical performance. He currently directs the £2.1 million AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, and the online research projects Chopin's First Editions Online (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation). He is also a noted lecture-recitalist, specialising in particular on performances using historic pianos.

In Warsaw he will be part of a hand-picked international jury, led by Polish pianist Katarzyna Popowa-Zydroń and comprising classical pianists and music specialists from Poland, Russia, France, Japan, China, the USA, Argentina, Vietnam and Latvia. Their work will be undertaken in three successive rounds of five days each, culminating in the nail-biting Finals when the winners will be chosen. Rink comments: “Listening eight hours a day to pianists playing Chopin may sound like a pleasure, but it will require intensive concentration and enormous stamina, as well as the application of consistent, sound criteria in order to give each competitor a fair crack of the whip. ̽��ֱ��debates between members of the jury are likely to be lively, to put it mildly!”

For Rink, practical musicianship and scholarly research are not alternatives, but rather two sides of a unified approach to performing, analysing and writing about music – experiences he will draw on in his role as competition juror.

“One of the things that a scholarly approach has helped me to develop over the years is ways of understanding other people’s performances in their own terms. What is a pianist doing? What is he or she trying to get across? Have they discovered something in the music that I have never found there myself? Such discoveries can be enlightening and invigorating. Even if I disagree with aspects of their performance, I may nevertheless regard it as a brilliant conception.”

̽��ֱ��Chopin Competition recitals commence on 3 October 2015, with the winners’ concerts scheduled for 21 –23 October at the Warsaw Philharmonic Concert Hall.

A series of videos created by the Chopin Institute, documenting the jurors’ personal expectations and approaches to the competition, is available on YouTube.

This article was originally published on the St John's College website.

As 82 of the world’s most accomplished young pianists gather in Poland for the 17th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, Juror and College Fellow Professor John Rink reflects on the challenges and rewards of selecting the winning performances.

Frederic Chopin

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��“Unpublished Prodigy” who caught Mendelssohn’s eye

tdk25 — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 05:00:35 +0000

A signed letter, believed to be one of the last ever written by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn, is going on public display for the first time as part of an exhibition about an unrealised musical prodigy of the Victorian age.

̽��ֱ��document, which was written by the composer just months before his death in 1847, was a reply to the father of John Robert Lunn – a gifted musician and composer who is the subject of a new exhibition at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, where he studied.

Although he is now regarded as a highly talented composer, Lunn never pursued a musical career and his compositions remain almost entirely unknown. ̽��ֱ��letter suggests, however, that not only was Mendelssohn impressed by the young Lunn’s musical ability, but that Lunn’s father had requested a meeting with the great composer, who regretfully had to decline as he was due to leave the country and return to Germany.

Lunn’s father wrote to Mendelssohn in 1847, following a performance of the composer’s oratorio Elijah, during which the 16-year-old Lunn transcribed the music he was listening to by ear. Judging by the response, his original correspondence, now lost, appears to have sought guidance regarding how best to develop his son’s musical talents. Mendelssohn replied, saying that Lunn “must possess a very good ear for music and must be able to form at once a correct idea of what he is listening to”.

̽��ֱ��letter expresses Mendelssohn’s regret at not being able to meet with Lunn and his father before leaving England, and states that he would have liked to have the time to form “a personal acquaintance” with Lunn in order to best advise him in his future career.

It offers a tantalising insight into what might have been had the meeting taken place. Professor John Rink, a Fellow of St John’s and Director of Studies in Music at Cambridge, said:

“Mendelssohn’s letter is fascinating. Presumably the questions put to him by Lunn’s father had to do with his son’s musical prospects and how his talents might best be developed. Lunn might well have followed a different musical path had he met and been advised by the composer. His ability to “form at once a correct idea” of the music he was listening to indicates that he had an excellent ear. No doubt he would have excelled in music had he not chosen to study mathematics instead.”

As it was, Lunn never took on a career in music, choosing instead the quiet life of a country vicar in Yorkshire. Music remained his passion, however, and he wrote a great number of settings and compositions, most of which were never published. During his lifetime, Lunn performed only small concerts and recitals in local church halls. His music is today regarded as being an outstanding paradigm of Victorian composition.

Mendelssohn’s letter was given to St John’s after Lunn’s death in 1899, but was presumed lost several decades ago after the College Chapel’s Song Room where it was held was flooded. It was only recently rediscovered in a vault in the College by Library Graduate Trainee Richard Sellens, who curated the exhibition. Richard said:

“It was surprising to find such an important document among a stack of frames and papers. ̽��ֱ��letter was probably the last Mendelssohn wrote in England, and one of the last in his lifetime. It acts as a bridge between a brilliant composer coming to the end of his career and one who could have been just starting out on his, had things taken a different turn”.

̽��ֱ��exhibition, which can be seen in St John’s College Library, explores Lunn’s life and influences from being a childhood prodigy, through his time at St John’s, when he refused to allow himself a piano in his room so as not to distract him from his mathematical studies, to his many unpublished and unheard compositions.

“Lunn may not be very well-known”, Richard said, “but he is a great example of a typically Victorian composer”.

Featuring previously unseen material from Lunn’s own personal collection, the exhibition brings to light the creative process of this gifted, but obscure, musical figure.

Unpublished Prodigy will run until 25 September. It can be seen free of charge Monday-Friday from 9:00-5:00 in the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge.

A previously unseen letter by Felix Mendelssohn is to go on public display in an exhibition about an unrealised British musical prodigy, revealing that he narrowly missed an opportunity to meet the great composer and perhaps transform his career.

Mendelssohn’s letter is fascinating. Presumably the questions put to him by Lunn’s father had to do with his son’s musical prospects and how his talents might best be developed. Lunn might well have followed a different musical path had he met and been advised by the composer.

John Rink

St John's College, Cambridge

Left: Mendelssohn’s 1847 letter to the father of John Robert Lunn, then aged 16. Mendelssohn was excited by the young man’s musical talent, but unable to meet him. Lunn (right) never entered a career in music, but his compositions are highly regarded.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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̽��ֱ��virtual Chopin

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:12:09 +0000

March 1, 2013 is the 203rd anniversary of the birth of Fryderyk Chopin. Not only is Chopin still a household name: he is probably the most enduring composer of his age.

For some, this comes down to the ineffable beauty, subtlety and technical refinement of his work. Others point to the fact that unlike many Romantic composers, Chopin rarely tried to convey a specific message or story through his music. Publishing under neutral titles which gave little away, he preferred to leave interpretation to the listener. ̽��ֱ��result is that even today, audiences tend to find something uniquely personal in each and every piece.

Yet while listeners can simply sit back and enjoy the music, the obscurity of Chopin’s intentions makes understanding his work a challenge for anyone seeking to get closer to the composer himself. Chopin is both fascinating and frustrating in this respect, because he rarely left behind just one version of his compositions. More often, there are three, four, five or more - any number of which might be an “authoritative” representation of how he wanted the piece to sound. Listeners, performers and researchers alike may find this liberating, but also bewildering because there are so many options from which to choose.

John Rink, Professor of Musical Performance Studies at Cambridge, is director of a project which is transforming the way in which we understand Chopin’s work by bringing this compositional cornucopia together in one place. Launched in 2005 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the “Online Chopin Variorum Edition” (http://www.ocve.org.uk) is still under development, but eventually it will provide digital images of all the available primary sources of Chopin’s music - whether sketches, complete manuscripts (both Chopin’s and those of copyists), first editions, or later impressions. Thousands of pages from these documents are already available, and the entire site is free of charge. Users anywhere in the world can explore, compare and combine elements from the great composer’s music, comment on it as they go, and ultimately construct their own version of the Chopin work to an extent that has never before been possible.

Purists might call that sacrilege, but Rink believes that it is very much in the spirit of what Chopin wanted. In fact, he describes as “indefensible” the notion that a given version of Chopin was necessarily what the composer would have intended for all time.

“For Chopin there was no single, definitive version: he continually changed his mind,” Rink says. “We might identify a particular source as representing his conception of the music at a given moment, but the next day he might well have heard, played or notated it differently. We therefore need to understand his music as existing in a state of flux, a process involving not only the composer but all those who later come into contact with it – including performers, listeners, editors, critics and so on.”

Contemporary evidence confirms that Chopin’s genius was restless and boundless, in that he continually modified his work on paper while correcting errors, refining the notation, or indulging in other creative possibilities. To minimise the risk of piracy, he also published separate editions in France, England and the German states, usually leading to the release of three distinct versions of his music which might be altered yet again - either by Chopin or his publishers - when a given print run sold out and a new impression was required. Even his rare, sensational public performances were a creative act: according to one of his piano tuners, Chopin never played his own music the same way twice, instead varying his approach to suit the occasion. ̽��ֱ��numerous variants that he pencilled into the scores of his students hint at the improvisatory character of his playing.

Rink can point to numerous examples already available through the Variorum that prove just how flexible the Chopin work is. ̽��ֱ��C minor Prelude Op. 28 No. 20, for example, is a notoriously controversial piece precisely because nobody is sure what Chopin really wanted. Remarkably, the debate hinges on the ending of a single bar. Trivial though that may seem, the music sounds completely different depending on which version is played – one is brighter, the other sombre, introverted. Either could be correct, but then again both versions might simply represent what Chopin wanted at different times. Even more striking, perhaps, is the fact that the piece exists in two original versions: one nine bars long, the other thirteen. Only the latter is performed nowadays, but the former – which was not meant for publication – may reflect Chopin’s earliest conception.

In some cases users can see several layers of corrections on the page itself. ̽��ֱ��Second Ballade Op. 38 is a case in point. Here, Chopin wrote two different endings and then vacillated between them; his manuscript shows the original ending scribbled out and replaced with a second version, which made its way into one of the first editions whereas another conforms to the original. Again, the effect is quite different depending on which ending the pianist chooses to play, as the second version is more imposing than its understated counterpart.

Rink believes that despite this seemingly limitless variety, Chopin’s music should not be altered capriciously. “To make a musically sensible decision about what you put forward as a performer, you need to have sound criteria along with the knowledge and judgement that can accrue only over time,” he says. This last point is critical: “merely having access to the original sources does not in itself allow one to make informed, convincing decisions about how this music ‘should’ be played and understood.”

For this reason, the Variorum provides more than just an archive of digitised manuscripts and printed editions culled from dozens of international libraries and private collectors. Visitors to the OCVE site can browse a full index of the materials that have been uploaded, select a work, then view the different versions on offer. But the main feature of the Variorum is the ability to select and compare particular bars or passages across all the different sources for a given piece, thereby revealing the music’s creative history. Background information is provided at an overview level and on an in-depth, bar-by-bar basis. ̽��ֱ��site also works as a “virtual notepad”, enabling users to jot down ideas about the music as they work their way through it. They can keep these annotations to themselves, or share them with others.

Despite the growing significance of digital media in the arts and humanities as a whole, no musical resource quite like this has ever before been attempted: the Variorum offers unprecedented opportunities to compare and reconstruct Chopin’s creative process in a way that would not be possible on the printed page - where even the comparison of a few bars in different sources requires a large desk as well as juggling skills. In time, Rink hopes that the Chopin Variorum might serve as a model for “dynamic editions” of other composers’ works.

For now, it means that rather than having Chopin’s musical legacy mediated for us, we can, if we wish, make up our own minds about how to hear or perform his works. Ironically, this seems to have been Chopin’s very intention. “Music does not exist in a single, correct version,” Rink notes. “It constantly changes over time. Chopin reminds us of that because he himself kept changing his music. Whenever we perform or listen to it, our experience is different from the last. By putting his compositions into a digital space, we can model and capture that evolutionary process. In doing so, we breathe new life into Chopin’s music and witness for ourselves his compositional genius at work.”

One of the greatest composers of the 19th century, Fryderyk Chopin, had an irrepressible creative imagination, and his music experienced continual evolution as a result. Now, a new online resource is bringing the many versions of his compositions together in one place, opening up new possibilities for performers, listeners and researchers alike.

For Chopin there was no single, definitive version: he continually changed his mind

John Rink

̽��ֱ��Virtual Chopin

̽��ֱ��Morgan Library, accession number Heineman MS 42.

Detail from Fryderyk Chopin (1810–49), Polonaise in A-flat major for piano, Op. 53: autograph manuscript, 1842–43.

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Six hours of total performance

bjb42 — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:00:17 +0000

More than 30 musicians will take part in a six-hour celebration of performance in Cambridge this weekend.

̽��ֱ��“Total Performance Event”, on Saturday evening at Robinson College, will start around dinner time and continue into the small hours of the morning. On the way, the audience will be treated to performances by “Sweete Violence” from Basel, the Hills Road Folk Group, the Ealdwick Ensemble, an Indian dancer, the jazz quintet METROPOLIS, and soloists such as the singer Lesley-Jane Rogers, oboist Christopher Redgate and clarinettist Roger Heaton.

Conceived by John Rink in collaboration with Jeremy Thurlow and Ewan Campbell, the event will mark the climax of a major conference on performance studies which is taking place in Cambridge this week.

For generations musicology has focused on the study of composers and compositions, but it has neglected the fact that music as an art has as much to do with the work of performers. Rather than just acting as mediators who convey someone else’s music to an audience, performers have to be highly creative in their own right. Whether they emerge on the spot or over time, the decisions of performers have the potential to shape music in altogether unique ways, influencing if not determining how listeners experience that music.

What performers do and how people respond to what they do are the key subjects of the conference, which has been organised by the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP), based in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music.

More than 140 delegates from around the world will hear some 90 research papers on such subjects as how musicians imagine and visualise music before or as they play it; how composers and performers together create “new music”; improvisation across a range of styles and traditions; the complex relationship between recorded and live performances; and how to perform music in the first place – whether the works of the classical masters, modern compositions, or improvisations.

Unlike most academic conferences, however, this one will end by immersing its participants directly in the subject matter itself, with a six-hour journey through a vast range of musical idioms. Those attending the event at Robinson will have a radically different experience from that of most concertgoers.

John Rink, Professor of Musical Performance Studies at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ��Total Performance Event is the culmination, if not the acid test, of three days of scholarly discussion about what performers do, how they do it, and how people respond to it.”

“Listeners will feast on a performance smorgasbord – a ‘tasting menu’ – that will celebrate the role performers play not only in bringing composers’ music to life, but in creating it themselves.”

More information about the work of the AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice can be found here.

A “total immersion” event in Cambridge this weekend marks the climax of a conference examining the work of performers and their creative role in making music.

This is the culmination, if not the acid test, of three days of scholarly discussion about what performers do, how they do it, and how people respond to it.

John Rink

Rachel Titiriga from Flickr.

Musical instrument.

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Creative research on musical performance

lw355 — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:07:03 +0000

̽��ֱ��five-year AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) will address key questions about how musical performances take shape over time, how knowledge is transformed into practice in performance, and how understanding this creative practice varies across different traditions and cultures.

‘Scholarly interest in musical performance has practically exploded during the last 20 years,’ said Centre Director Professor John Rink. ‘Whereas musicologists once understood music primarily in terms of notated texts, the experience of music in sound and through time, as well as the creative processes behind it, now inform research of the highest quality and urgency. Performance studies are at the top of the international research agenda – one which CMPCP will shape for years to come.’

A grant of £1.7 million from the AHRC has provided ‘Phase 2’ funding to establish the Centre in Cambridge in partnership with King’s College London, the ̽��ֱ�� of Oxford and Royal Holloway, ̽��ֱ�� of London, and in association with the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal College of Music. CMPCP will build on the achievements of its predecessor, the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), which focused on musical recordings and was based at Royal Holloway.

Cambridge’s contribution to the Centre will be spearheaded by Professor Rink, who will lead a project on creative learning and ‘original’ performance, and Professor Nick Cook, who is investigating music as creative practice. Professor Cook, who previously directed CHARM, was elected last year to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s 1684 Chair of Music.

Cambridge is well placed to host CMPCP thanks to its outstanding performance environment. But as Professor Cook explained, its strengths as host institution go even further: ‘Because music is a central feature of everyday life, its scope extends beyond the arts and humanities into the social and even the hard sciences. Cambridge’s pre-eminence in all these areas, coupled with the possibility of creating working relationships between researchers in different disciplines, make it an ideal location to develop a musicology for the 21st century.’

For more information, please contact Professor John Rink (jsr50@cam.ac.uk) or visit www.cmpcp.ac.uk/

A pioneering research centre studying live musical performance as creative practice launches in the Faculty of Music in October with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

firepile on flickr

Violin

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