Style

Transcript

• 00:00

  [MUSIC PLAYING]Chopin's music.Unique, instantly recognizable, even 200 years after his birth.This young pianist plays on an 1842 Pleyel piano,the same model the composer used.

• 00:20

  An increasing number of today's musiciansprefer to perform Chopin's work on period instrumentsto get even closer to him to produce musicthe way he would heard it.It's something different to play the pieces on the instruments

• 00:42

  of the composer's time, because then you are directlyinto this-- where you understand the actual asceticof the composer.Which means things are much more understandable to usabout phrasing, and about sound, and of about dynamics.And this is Chopin's very own Pleyel piano.It's no longer played, but still gives important clues

• 01:03

  to what he was aiming for.I think Chopin likes this instrument a lot,especially because of the turn he could get out of it.A soft turn in the middle register,clearer in the treble, with the possibility of playing nuancesand pianissimo passages that modern pianos no longer have.

• 01:24

  Many pianists are fascinated by Chopinprecisely because he composed mostlyfor their instrument of choice.The others never really interested him.He only wrote for the piano.This is a very, very particular sensitivity to the sound,to the vibrato, to the freedom with a certain amountof classicism.

• 01:45

  It is in some ways like a 19th century Mozart.And since Mozart is one of the few composers who Chopin trulyadmired, that complement would have been music to his ears.

The term style is used in many different academic areas, notably in creative arts and fashion. In the context of music, style is sometimes used in its wider sense as a synonym for genre, but in a narrower sense it refers to common features in the music and its performance in a particular geographical area, community, or even for an individual. These multiple understandings of the word within academia and within society sometimes result in misinterpretations within academic discourse.

When used as a synonym of “musical genre” by academics and nonacademics, musical style can designate the widest category divisions of music, such as classical, popular, jazz, folk, or world music. Most of these denominations tend to have very unclear and porous boundaries, and overlaps and hybridization are frequent, especially in the most recent pieces and interpretations. However, it has also been argued that through time, composers and musicians have always challenged the boundaries of musical genres, from Bartok including eastern European traditional music influences in his compositions following the classical forms, to the creation of the concept of world music in the late 20th century, promoting traditional music beyond the boundaries of national traditional culture, encouraging cultural exchanges among different musical genres.

The word style can also be used to describe subgenres within such broad musical genres. The example of world music and its subgenres is particularly illustrative of this. The definition of the concept of world music as a marketing tool in the late 1980s, despite dividing all musical styles into Western and “other,” could be seen as one of the main results of a new consideration for traditions and musical styles around the world.

Because of the huge diversity of music in the world, the new definition of this concept is relatively unclear, and the term tends to be used with different meanings. The case of world music is particularly significant in this definition of style because it includes an innumerarable number of musical styles identifiable as subgenres, and notably comprises traditional and classical music from non-Western countries, both religious and secular.

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