Let
the
music
play
You might not realise that you know the third movement
of Fryderyk Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor,
Op. 35, but you do. It’s the Funeral March, the slow,
solemn tones that have accompanied the last goodbye
of everyone from John F. Kennedy to Leonid Brezhnev.
Yet this piece of music, so strongly identified with such
a specific mood of stately gloominess, was not intended
to be performed solely at funerals. In its first impression,
Chopin did indeed call it the Marche Funèbre. But in the
second impression, that direction was removed – and it
became, simply, Marche.
“There are a number of explanations, but the one
I find most intriguing is this: if you are told that it is
a funeral march, you hear a funeral march,” says John
Rink, Professor of Musical Performance Studies, and
Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at St John’s
College. “If you are told it is simply a march, you are
invited to hear the funeral aspect, but you are not told
to. It allows that flexibility – and you can make it your
own if you wish. The performer becomes not only
a respondent but a generator of new ideas.”
Rink’s research and life’s work spring, in part, from
a fascination with this mystical space between page and
performance. A world authority on Chopin and a jury
member at the International Chopin Piano Competition,
he studied at Princeton University, King’s College
There can be no performance
without an audience. Professor
of Musical Performance Studies,
John Rink, discusses the spaces
and connections between
composer, musician and listener.
I N T E R V I E W L U C Y J O L I N P H OTO G R A P H Y A N N A H U I X
London and Cambridge, and holds the Concert Recital
Diploma and Premier Prix in piano. Today, he sits in
a bare-walled practice room, with only a piano and a
couple of rather sinister metal seats for decoration. (“Be
careful with that chair,” warns a departing student. “It’s
got bits of sharp metal sticking out of the back…”). Rink
is animated, leaning forward, in his element. He shows
no sign of wanting to be anywhere more comfortable.
A few decades ago, study of musical performance
was discouraged. Performance was either something
mysterious and untouchable (and therefore not to be
analysed, in case it vanished under scrutiny) or it was
a necessary evil, with performers themselves mere
conduits for the composer’s intentions. But Professor
Rink has pioneered a new way of thinking about
performance. The traditional communication chain –
composer writes the music, performer communicates
it to listeners – is now being challenged. Performers
are now seen to be actively creating the works they are
performing, along with whatever texts they are working
with, which are handed down by composers or other
creative artists.
With that thinking, Rink believes, comes the task
of understanding what that creative role is. In what way
is the work of the performer creative? What knowledge
is imparted in, or generated through, performance – not ›
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only on the part of the performer, but on the part of those
observing? How does performance vary across different
cultural contexts or idioms? “These are all important
questions to ask and issues to understand – not least
because performance, and indeed music, could hardly
be more ubiquitous in people’s lives.”
But where do you start trying to pin down something
as elusive as a ‘good’ performance? The ever-present
nature of music means that it’s something different to
everyone: an audience of one thousand will respond in
a thousand different ways. We need to begin, says Rink,
by throwing out the notion that any piece is ‘supposed’
to be performed a certain way.
“There may be value systems or sets of criteria which
define how something is ‘supposed’ to be performed,
but they cannot be and they are not absolutes,” he says.
“Musical notation is under-specified and under-defined.
It’s skeletal and primitive. Whether it’s jazz or Western
classical music, you can’t transcribe it in its complexity.
There is just too much subtlety going on. It’s not a freefor-all – you would wish to understand it in terms of its
context and so forth – but what the performer is picking
up and conveying is never going to match what the
composer had in mind at any given time.”
Some elements of performance are intangible,
he agrees. Last year he was moved beyond words
by 21-year-old Kate Liu’s performance of the Piano
Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 at the International
Chopin Piano Competition, which won the bronze medal.
“A friend called her a sorceress: she cast a spell over the
audience, though I don’t think she was even attempting
to do so. She continually looked up to the heavens, as if
communing with some higher power. She touched the
essence of humanity, the deepest grief, through subtle
touches on the keyboard. Afterwards, I spoke to another
friend, whose opinion I respect hugely, and said: ‘Wasn’t
that unbelievable?’ And the person said: ‘It left me cold.
I felt it wasn’t sincere.’ That, I found fascinating.
“I could never have agreed with that person and,
indeed, why should I? But while some things are
intangible, in others you can very concretely define what
makes a particular performance hang together and what
gives it direction, according to the criteria you are using.
And as there are no absolutes, quality or meaning are
determined according to an individual’s own criteria.”
Chopin was not a composer who dealt in absolutes,
Rink points out. There are testimonies that he never
played a piece alike twice, and he took his zeal for
annotation and improvisation to the extreme as a
composer. Any of Chopin’s given works come in multiple
versions, whether the original manuscripts or published
copies. He changed his mind constantly. Indeed, when
it comes to Chopin, there is no such thing as a ‘definitive
version’: it’s a great paradox, Rink says, that the work of
this most distinctive of composers speaks so differently
to each individual.
So written music becomes a starting point for
infinite journeys, rather than an end in itself. “We
need to think more in terms of possibilities,” says Rink.
“The quest for understanding is never-ending. There
is no single answer. And that process of engagement,
that quest, is right at the heart of what it means to
be a musician and to be someone who think about
responses to music. Perhaps you have answers for the
moment, but you are always required to go further.
And that quest is not just relevant to music, but to
PERFORMANCE IN PRACTICE
There is no shortage of opportunity for undergraduates to
perform in Cambridge, but one organisation is working hard
to ensure that they have the chance to see the other side – to
witness the greatest stars of the musical world in concert.
Camerata Musica exists to bring student audiences to classical
music, and in the past decade has offered concerts by artists
of the distinction of Dame Mitsuko Uchida, Sir András Schiff,
Pinchas Zukerman, Daniil Trifonov, Viktoria Mulova, Piotr
Anderszewski, and others. Founded by Dr John Adamson
(Christ’s 1981) and the late Neil Plevy (Peterhouse 1978), the
Camerata Musica concerts reserve fully half their tickets for
students and, thanks to generous alumni sponsorship, offer
these at heavily subsidised prices. To find out more please visit
cameratamusica.org.uk.
life. That’s how you could view the world around you,
and chart your own destiny.”
Rink started playing the piano aged three, and
vividly remembers correcting a mistake his sister made
in a piano lesson, gleefully pointing out that she should
have played an A. The teacher was astonished and
tested him: he had absolute pitch (also known as perfect
pitch) – able to identify any given note with no reference
point. He listened to music constantly growing up –
Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Chopin’s Waltz Op. 64
No. 2 – finding it “totally, overwhelmingly fascinating;
never getting enough of it.” He still performs regularly,
sometimes on the 1846 Pleyel ‘pianino’ that is kept in his
office at the Music Faculty – and the type of instrument
that Chopin used in his own teaching.
Among numerous other books, studies and
directorships, Rink directed the £2.1m AHRC Research
Centre for Musical Performance and Creative Practice,
where his research focused on how creativity and
originality in performance can be fostered through
teaching and practice. He published, with co-author
Christophe Grabowski, the Annotated Catalogue of
Chopin’s First Editions. And his most recent project
harmonises perfectly with a refusal to be pinned down to
a definitive version: the Online Chopin Variorum Edition,
funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is a new
kind of edition, which not only contains digital images
of Chopin’s manuscripts but allows the user to analyse
and compare versions, tracing the creative history and
dynamic evolution of the music. The project team is
now working on a version which will allow a musician
to combine elements from different sources, producing,
if they wish, unique editions for every performance.
And now there is a new challenge: Rink is the
inaugural director of the recently established Cambridge
Centre for Musical Performance Studies. Again, he’s
at pains to point out that there are no rigid structures
here – “Cambridge thrives on its purposefully chaotic
effervescences of activity,” he says – but, rather, a focal
point for activities: events, talks, support for young
musicians, an artist in residence.
Music, in whatever form, is at the heart of everything
he does, and everything he is. “But it’s very hard to
define – perhaps as a feeling that you cannot live without
this. And that grip increases over time. You push yourself
harder and harder. The standards get higher and higher,
not only your own standards, but the expectations of
others. In some ways, I feel that I understand it. In other
ways, I cannot explain the power that it has. And that’s
wonderful, in a way. If you could explain everything
in music, it wouldn’t have the hold that it does.”
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