Peter Laban wrote:........Dale wrote:I vote rushed. Skilled, but rushed. Where's the fire?
I personally don't feel the track is overly rushed and while playing on this track is part of the speed may have been caused by the tape recorder I played back the tape on (check the pitch and you'll know by how much).
I really don't have any issue with the different responses to the piece and I know that Peter's comments are not necessarily addressing mine. However I want to make it very clear that I do not automatically equate RUSH with SPEED and that is why I said all this (I have added boldening).
ITs not about playing slower necessarily. Its about playing at the peak of your skill level AS DETERMINED by the needs of the music.talasiga wrote:......it was played too rushed.
Good music can be played as fast as that mind you.
What makes something rushed is when the sounds don't sculpt the gaps, the little silences and pauses that invite our feelings to fill it.
I have heard very fast Irish whistling and yet the player has
sculpted gaps and described the silences in all the busy articulations
and that contrast bumps everything up, heavenward if you know what I mean.
........
I don't know if rubato is something talked about in ITM. Sometimes things are done in traditions that may not necessarily have a way of verbalising them. And frankly, I do not know how the good (IMO) ITM whistler does it but in all that speed the music gasps.
One's performance can be so bad, that even at really really SLOW tempo one can be too RUSHED. Of course we'd use another word for it.
For instance, I actually know heaps of musicians, with stage histories, who cannot perform SLOW AIRS. They perform them as NOTATED not realising that the rhythm built into the notation is only a guide as to the pulse but the notation isn't everything. There needs to be a soulful interpretation, emotionally expressive. One has to PLAY with that air to evoke its spirit within the constraint of the pulse and an underpinning lyric content.
Darlings, "she moved through the fair" is not just a waltz slowed down.
I am not going to apologise for this post. So please don't apologise in yours if you feel differently. Guinness comes to mind.
The main thrust of this post is that I am not equating RUSHED with SPEED.