“What you will do will be simpler, but more truthful.”<\/p>\n
That is one of many insights from the late pianist and teacher Gy\u00f6rgy Seb\u00f3k.<\/p>\n
I frequently describe my admiration for particular artists who can translate the piles of notes on a printed page into something meaningful for the listener.<\/p>\n
In a 1987 masterclass in Holland, Seb\u00f3k, a particularly patient and gifted explainer of an artform that so often defies description uses the slow movement of a Haydn sonata to explain a part of this process.<\/p>\n
He asks his pupil to separate interpretation\u00a0that comes from inside the self from an instance where the musician understands the music but is not personally involved — or, as he puts it, “in quotation marks.”<\/p>\n
It all boils down to playing each note a slightly different way. These tiny, subtle nuances add up (there’s more after these two videos, equally insightful to anyone interested in discovering how a sum of tiny little decisions and gestures adds up to something beautiful):<\/p>\n