My hero – YouTube
Something amazing happened tonight. To fully understand the amazingness of this event, there is some background to explain. There are sub-genres within classical music (ie – Classical, Baroque, Romantic, etc.). They represent not only time periods, but styles of composing. The farther back in history you travel, the harder it is to solidly prove who composed what. Often times composers borrowed from each other and even from their own works. JS Bach is a great example of this. He recycled themes all the time. Some of the operas credited to Mozart might have not actually been written by him. This is due to the lack of publication laws of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. It gives musicologists something to argue about at their conferences. Every year evidence comes out that proves or disproves yet another idea and changes the way musicians view musical history and individual pieces. It can cause a lot of problems. For example, Bach wrote thousands of pieces and it can be difficult to keep them straight. In 1950, a man named Wolfgang Schmeider attempted to catalogue all of Bach’s works by assigning them BWV numbers. Since then more pieces have been found, which led two other men to renumber the pieces in 1990. Now imagine this. You have a tape, or record from 1984 which labels Bach’s pieces according to the 1950 list. This year you purchase a CD from 2000 that has the same BWV numbers, but the music is completely different. And that’s Bach! Pieces by lesser known composers cause even more problems, especially as they are rarely catalogued. Performers and publishers who don’t know any type of catalogue numbers, or who don’t use the same catalogue don’t help in the confusion.
This happened to me this past semester. I had found a recording of an oboe concerto in G major by Carl Ditters van Dittersdorf. It was on a CD which claimed to be all of the Ditters oboe concertos. I took a liking to it and decided to perform it on my recital. It took a little while but eventually found a company in England that published the work. I ordered it and waited patiently for the international mail to arrive. I opened it, started practicing and quickly realized it was not the same piece. I restarted the search for the other concerto, but could not find it. So I decided to search for a recording of the piece I had gotten. But no luck. I could only locate recordings of the other concerto. It turns out Ditters wrote 2 concertos in G major, but most people were only aware of one or the other. Since they didn’t know, they did not make any distinction.
Now its not that I can’t learn music without hearing it, but it helps. Especially when working with music from a few centuries ago. Composers of the time wrote out their music by hand, and rarely duplicated their manuscripts. They were used exclusively by the composer or one performer before being placed in a pile and basically forgotten. Occassionally music would be copied, but always by hand. Performers would often times add in ornamentation of their own. Not to mention the variety of other ways each performer interprets music. Professionals often spend more time than I studying not only the music, but the composer and his life and the time period to better understand how to interpret the piece. Hence, it is very helpful to listen to those recordings.
So, I’ve been looking for a recording of the concerto I had received. Short of that, I’ve been searching for any information regarding this particular piece. I’ve had absolutely no luck. I’m also having difficulty understanding the piece and figuring out the phrasing, etc. Compounded by the problems with my accompanist (story for a different time), I’ve become extremely stressed about my hearing and recital. I spent some time today searching for information, and by some stroke of luck Google popped up a link into YouTube. It was a recording someone had posted of my exact piece, performed by Heinz Holliger. I couldn’t believe my luck! This also led me to locate the correct recording on Amazon. I’m over the moon. And more stressed out.
The recording does help, as I now understand how the piece is structured. But it also makes me realize how much work I have to do before I’m actually ready to perform this. There are things I had figured out on my own, some of which are right and some of which are wrong.
Either way – I’m a newfound believer of the statement "You can find everything on YouTube."