| This work is concerned with the idea of music as a concert spectacle, and with the soloist as a representation of the heroic individual. The contemporary notion of a concert is inherited from the nineteenth-century, essentially unchanged, and it is inseparable from our historicised musical culture. In this respect, the performance-history of the Tchaikovsky is relevant. Tchaikovsky famously stated that he 'would not alter a single note' of the piece, when the initial reaction from Rubinstein was unfavourable. However, in the late nineteenth-century certain important changes in the piano part were made in the commonly played version of the piece, including the famous opening piano chord sequence. Originally these chords were in the middle register, and were played Arpeggiando. They came to be played in the more sensational block-chord manner, over the extremes of the piano's range. Whether these and other changes were authorised by Tchaikovsky remains unclear; there is some speculation they were made by the pianist Dannreuther ('The Text of Tchaikovsky's Bb Minor Piano Concerto', Music and Letters, vol.50, no.2, 1969).; The Appendix attempts to examine Tchaikovsky's notion of music as a direct expression of the self, in relation to the notion of a 'music of the spheres'. Put simply, this can be seen as an opposition between a world-view which is humanistic and fragmented versus an idea of a unified, ordered universe, with music as its embodiment. The precedent for this work is the theoretical and graphic heritage of the major figures of speculative music from the Greeks Pythagoras and Plato, to the medieval Boethius, to Athanasius Kircher and Robert Fludd in the seventeenth-century, and to John Cage in the twentieth-century. |
