What Else Can Grieg’s Historical Recordings Tell Us?
Abstract Between 1903 and 1906, Edvard Grieg recorded several of his most popular pieces on piano rolls and gramophone discs for commercial use. Like many of his peers, Grieg, as a composer and virtuoso, grasped the opportunity of the new century’s technology for disseminating his music...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Scandinavian University Press
2020-01-01
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| Series: | Studia Musicologica Norvegica |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.idunn.no/smn/2020/01/what_else_can_griegs_historical_recordings_tell_us |
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| Summary: | Abstract
Between 1903 and 1906, Edvard Grieg recorded several of his most
popular pieces on piano rolls and gramophone discs for commercial
use. Like many of his peers, Grieg, as a composer and virtuoso,
grasped the opportunity of the new century’s technology for disseminating
his music outside concert halls for broader audiences. The remastered release
of Grieg’s collected recordings from 1992 by the label SIMAX offers
a unique access to Grieg’s performances of his own works. The overall
issue, what a modern listener might learn from a historical audio
document like this, will be addressed in the examination of a selected
track on the historical recording: the ‘Norwegian Bridal Procession’ (Brudefølget
drar forbi), No. 2 in Pictures from Folk Life,
Op. 19, belonged to his most popular pieces and was recorded by
Grieg both on piano roll and gramophone disc. Opus 19 is a cornerstone
of Grieg’s ‘national romantic’ aesthetic, and marks the beginning
of a fruitful period of music-dramatic cooperation with Bjørnstjerne
Bjørnson, from the 1870s on. Grieg’s recordings have, as any other
mechanical sound reproduction, their interpretive limitations. However,
they provide unique insight into what is the most emergent of all
historical sources, musical performance, when analysed carefully
and combined with other sources of information, such as musical
sketches, scores, the composer’s and his contemporaries’ testimonies,
or concert reviews. Moving from generic features of Grieg’s performance
style to the individual peculiarities of his interpretation, the
aim of this inquiry is to enable a new understanding of Grieg’s
performance practice as deeply related to the aesthetic
conception of music as musical poetry. |
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| ISSN: | 0332-5024 1504-2960 |