When Musical Directions Don't Say What to Do, but How to Be

New York Times

14 hours ago

At a recent rehearsal with my string quartet, we had barely begun the slow movement of Beethoven's Op. 59, No. 1 when we stopped playing and started debating. One bar near the end of the mournful theme was marked decrescendo. So far, so clear: Play more quietly. Two bars later came a crescendo — the opposite. But nestled between them was a single word, written in Italian under the staff: morendo, or 'dying.'
Beethoven already had us fading the volume. He could have simply extended the hairpin, that greater-than sign composers use to indicate a decrescendo. So why reach for a word? He seemed to be after something more than a drop in volume, a sense of life draining out of the phrase. But did he mean for the pulse to slow, too? Or just for the sound to grow thinner, paler, more frail?
Morendo is a comparatively straightforward example of what musicologists call paratext: words used alongside musical notation. Musicians routinely wrestle with interpreting oblique, ambiguous and outright surreal markings as they try to bring a composer's idea to life. The most famous example is Satie, whose performance indications skirt the boundary between mysticism and Dada: 'Light as an egg' and 'Like a nightingale with a toothache.' Percy Grainger asked for one passage to be played 'with pioneering keeping on-ness.'
Others are more poetic, such as the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who offers this image in the preface to some of her scores: 'When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope without dropping it or falling.'
In an interview, Jan Grüning, the Ariel Quartet's violist, said that linguistic cues are often more concerned with instilling an attitude in the performer than with specific musical gestures. Sure, he said, a metaphor like morendo might inspire 'a heaviness, a slowing of the speed' in his bow arm, 'so that it has that feeling of running out of oxygen.'
But most of the time, 'the words don't tell you what to do,' he said. 'They tell you how to be.'
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