Donald Francis Tovey's Analysis

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“Players should understand what they play;” that’s the starting statement of Donald Francis Tovey’s Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas. Joel Lester, based on Tovey’s opinion, discusses the relationship between analysis and performance stating that “as analysts use scores as avenues to the pieces they analyze, […] they can –and should, I would argue– refer to performances in order to get at the essence of the pieces they analyze.” He also believes that musical scores function as “a map of the piece” and “are not the piece itself.” Apart from this, he characteristically refers to performers as being “richer and more limited than scores” and to performances as being “necessarily only a single option” for a piece. That happens because …show more content…
In such a way, he lays the foundations in regard to a new type of interaction between analysis and performance, by proposing the …show more content…
Maus refers to significant personalities and opinions, discussing Charles Burkhart, William Rothstein, Edward Cone, Peter Westergaard, Wallace Berry and Heinrich Schenker. By analyzing practical problems regarding particular pieces, like Beethoven’s Opuses 7 and 109, Maus concludes that “the performer is like an analyst, except that the performer conveys analytical information by performing rather than by talking or writing.” Regarding performers, he claims not only that they are not obviously required to somehow “bring out” a motivic relationship that an analyst may identify, but also that this would be a mistake. He also proposes that the only theoretical issue that performers and listeners will understand is the division of extended passages of music into shorter spans. As a result, he states that “communication about internal boundaries is the most plausible example of performance as analytical communication in the context of public

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