Performing with a Personal Musical Identity: An Examination of Musicians' Distinctive Personalities in Performances of Bach's Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas
Teaching and performing Bach’s Solo Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin is a major challenge in American violin pedagogy today. A significant reason for this can be traced historically to the mid-20th-century, when performances influenced by modernist ideology became prevalent in the classical music world. Under this influence, musicians search for objective measures to define proper performance practice of musical works, including fidelity to the notated score or to a historically informed recreation of Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas (S&Ps, hereafter). Modernist performance and pedagogy are not only established on a misleading premise that textually literal and historically accurate recreations of pieces are true to a composer’s intentions, but they have also led to complaints of uniformity and blandness of violin performances. These complaints persist to this day. In this thesis, I analyze how violinists can make interpretative decisions in the S&Ps based on their own identifiable musical personality. In highlighting the vast musical possibilities featured in a variety of S&P interpretations, I hope that the violinist reader will be inspired to implement their own personality into Bach’s S&Ps instead of feeling compelled to attribute their interpretative choices to an objective criteria such as text-fidelity or historical accuracy. In advocating for future performances based on the performer’s own unique musical inspirations, I also hope that we will further contribute to a more diverse ecosystem of violin playing today. Toward this objective, I examine cellist Pablo Casals, a Romantic, early-20th-century trailblazer of Bach’s solo string works. Utilizing Romantic string techniques such as flexible rubato and a wide range of intonation, articulation, and dynamic contrasts, he is able to channel his deep empathy, shaped by his humanitarian convictions, into distinct human emotions through Bach’s music. Then, I compare four violinists, ranging from the mid-20th-century to today, who present contrasting interpretations of the S&Ps: Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein, Christian Tetlzaff, and Shunske Sato. I demonstrate how they also utilize similar Romantic, early-20th-century string techniques to highlight their own personally identifiable music philosophies.
Bach Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas, Historical Performance Practice
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