EASTER 2016 | CAM 78 33

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.

INTERV IE W LUCY JOLIN PHOTOGR APHY ANNA H U IX

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 ›

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

EASTER 2016 | CAM 78 35

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.

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 free-for-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

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.”