Unframing

When I was maybe 8 or 9 or so, I heard on the radio a piece that I was practicing that week. I think it was a Clementi sonatina. And I remember being shocked and thrilled by the revelation that the music I heard on the radio and on my dad’s LPs was all made by people, people playing instruments just like I played an instrument. Before that moment I don’t think I understood that what I did at the piano was the same thing as music, the magical sounds that filled the house. I mean, I must have known it was people; I liked to listen to the Aldo Ciccolini LP of Chopin Waltzes (yes, I was a young nerd), and surely I understood that it was by a person. But somehow I didn’t understand that what that person did was the same action that I was doing when I played the piano. It changed how I thought about my practicing and it also changed my listening.

When I was in my early twenties, I spent a summer at the Chautauqua Institute. I was enrolled in the piano program, but was working as a model in the art department, and I spent all my spare evenings and late nights in the art department. I befriended people in the printmaking and ceramics studios and sort of audited the printmaking class. I made some prints I’m still proud of (and not a single pot—clay is hard). I listened to a lot of drawing and painting instruction, and I hung out with a lot of artists. My hands and my clothes were dirty, spattered with ink and charcoal and clay. I also had a lot of issues to work out at the piano then, and I was definitely running away from the practice room, but that’s another story. Anyway, towards the end of the summer the art students went on a field trip to the Cleveland Art Museum, and I tagged along. The teachers gave us a great instruction: find a painting and sit down and draw it. Really look at it and draw it. And for the first time, when I looked at the paintings in the museum, I felt like I could see them out of the frames, could see them stretched on the easels, being made, could see marks being made by the artist. Of course I knew that art was made by artists—but I had never been able to see the paintings, even the famous paintings, out the frames before spending a summer seeing paintings being made.

Now I’m in my fifties, and for the first time I’m editing an edition of piano music by a composer I love (Agnes Tyrrell’s Op. 48 etudes, coming in 2024 from Certosa Publishers). And it feels like a similar revelation: I’m seeing editions as being made from handwritten originals. And of course I KNEW that. I know different editors make different decisions—when I played the Chopin etudes I consulted about 8 different editions regularly, and I often pull out multiple editions of pieces with students to look at different choices and possibilities. And of course I knew that what showed up in the printed edition wasn’t necessarily exactly the same as what showed up in the manuscript. And I have learned pieces from manuscript before; I was in college and grad school right before notation software was a thing, and I used to play handwritten music by my composer pals. But I’ve never made my own edition from a handwritten score. It seems like such a simple thing—but I’ve never done it before, and I feel like it’s making me see the artifacts of the printed editions out of the frame.

I’ve spent so much of my practicing life imagining myself in conversation with composers and, yes, editors. When I was practicing the Chopin etudes, I kept finding moments with discrepancies between editions. Over and over I would look at lots of different editions, and try it the different ways, and agonize about what made the most sense and fit my hands best, and then I would decide how I was going to do it…and what I came up with was always what Mikuli had chosen. So now with other Chopin pieces I go to Mikuli first, and tell my students “there are other editions and possibilities, but I found that Mikuli’s choices fit my hands best, so I’m showing you that to start with.” When I’m practicing from a printed, edited score, it’s always interesting to see what the editor has to say about the fingerings, which finger goes on which note. When I learned a Mozart concerto a couple of years ago with fingerings by Andras Schiff, it was like taking lessons with him: over and over he would make a decision that would surprise me, and I couldn’t figure out why he had made that choice, and then I would see that he was thinking long term, and that putting THIS finger HERE made it much, much easier to remember to make THIS change later in the piece. Brilliant and humbling. So I’m used to thinking about the composer and the editor.

But I’m not sure I ever quite thought about the actual printing of the music. I didn’t quite see the pages unbound, or going through the press, or hanging to dry,. Agnes did publish her etudes in her lifetime, and at first glance it looks like printed music—the (with giant air quotation marks but also, I confess, some sincerity) sacred score. But that edition is a mess. It’s hard to read, and has lots of errors. And now that I’m working on editing another edition, trying my best to have the marks match Agnes’s intentions, I can imagine the person typesetting the original printed page.

The pedal markings are probably where I’m thinking about this the most. The first printed edition is missing some of Agnes’s pedal markings, and has some others wrong. When I play from someone else’s edition of someone else’s music, I definitely obsess about exactly when to put down the sustain pedal (which lets the notes keep ringing) and when to take it off (which stops the ringing). Did the composer want it off here or here? But in general when I play I make pedaling changes day to day, piano to piano, room to room. If I’m playing in a room with lots of reverberation, I might use the sustain pedal much less, and if I’m in a really dry room, I might use it much more. But choosing exactly where to put that asterisk * that means “take the sustain pedal off right now” feels much more important. Placing the mark in the edition feels permanent.

I’ll give Agnes’s pedal markings and fingering numbers as clearly as I can, so that the marks someone else looks at are as close to the same as the manuscript as possible. I’m confident I’ll do a good job, and I’m sure there will be at least one error, even though I’ll proofread as obsessively as I can. I’m so grateful that I can have another perspective shift like this at this point in my career. But I can’t help thinking that it would have been so good for me to have this experience much, much younger. Am I going to make my students dip their toes into these waters? Absolutely.