A Minute with Miles

When musicians and music scholars prepare performances of works by dead composers, they often get stuck in arguments over determining what the composers’ “original intent” was. And while I certainly recognize the importance of scholarly accuracy and authenticity, and of staying true to the composers’ wishes, I think that sometimes musicians forget that dead composers were once alive. Back in 1980 a pianist I know was preparing a performance of the Copland Piano Concerto, a performance that Aaron Copland himself was going to conduct, and the pianist had the opportunity to play the piece privately for the composer. After the first movement, Copland asked, “Why are you playing it so fast”… and the pianist, a little flummoxed, said that he was just trying to follow Mr. Copland’s printed metronome marking. “You know,” Copland replied, “I wrote this piece over fifty years ago. That may have been the tempo then, but this is the tempo now.”

Virtually all major composers of the 19th, 20th, and now 21st centuries, of whatever nationality, have made important, and in some cases extensive contributions to the chamber music repertoire.

You could write a book about the life of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann– and as it turns out, Telemann himself wrote three – three separate autobiographies.

I had the enormous good fortune as a young man to get to work with the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Rostropovich, or “Slava,” as everybody called him, was the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra when I played in that ensemble, and with all his other engagements he still somehow made time to give master classes just for members of the orchestra.

In the world of instrumental and vocal teaching, most teachers approach their students with certain basic principles in mind. For me, one of those principles is that whether we’re dealing with individuals or with ensembles, there’s no separating technical goals from musical goals.

The efficient and graceful use of the body is crucial to both sports and musical performance. But there are certainly many mental parallels as well.

Our notions of “truth” in the history of musical ideas and performance practice may not always be quite as solid as we think.

Cello students everywhere have struggled with Popper’s “High School of Cello Playing,” a book of études that’s a kind of Mount Everest of cello technique.

Counterpoint, also called polyphony, is the art, in musical composition, of combining two or more simultaneous lines of music.

“Program music” is instrumental music that attempts to tell a story, paint a scene or picture, or convey impressions of a character, place, or event. But no matter how sonically descriptive, music is always open to a range of interpretations—sometimes far removed from the composer’s intentions—and no two people will ever hear the same work in exactly the same way.