In a dynamic collaboration, Rachael Beesley (violin), Artem Belogurov (fortepiano), and Octavie Dostaler-Lalonde (cello) present this inaugural international solo and chamber music masterclass, held in the Lutherse Kerk in Haarlem, Netherlands.

Titled "Haarlem Sessions - Exploring the Classical Style", this immersive program invites curious students and professionals of the fortepiano and HIP strings to delve into the Classical style.

When looking at music through the lens of performance practice, one begins a never-ending quest where each new piece of information has the potential to drastically change the way one plays and hears music. Being performers ourselves, we like to see this information as tools that enrich our expressive possibilities and give meaning to the works we approach. When looking at music from the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, this detective work is turned mainly towards written documents: musical notation itself in the autograph of a work and its various editions, annotated scores, treatises and methods, concert reviews, letters, etc. Combining all of these clues creates an image of possibilities that our modern imagination can feed from to recreate in sounds a possible version of a performance style of the past. But it always remains hypothetical and we should see it as such - an interesting game to play to continually get a richer and deeper understanding of what music is about.

When approaching Romantic music, however, the historically curious performer of today has access to a unique source of information that sheds light on the way music was performed at the time: historical recordings dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to composers who made recordings of their own music, many of the early recording artists were intimately associated with composers whose music constitutes today’s so-called standard Romantic repertoire. These recordings document an invaluable source of information about composers’ preferences and stylistic context, or at the very least how they heard their music played. The Romantic Lab is a platform where we engage with this aural evidence by applying both analytical and practical approaches, and using imitation as a way to reconnect with styles that have disappeared during the 20th century. 

What are early recordings?

The early recordings (also called historical recordings) we refer to here are among the oldest recordings extant of musicians born and educated in the 19th century. Since around 1890, several technologies were used to preserve sound, among them Edison’s cylinder phonographs, piano rolls and reproducing pianos, and disc gramophones. One important later development is the invention of the electrical recording process in the 1920s, which produced clearer and fuller sound.  These recordings preserve styles of playing significantly different from what we hear today in both the mainstream Classical world and Historically Informed Practice (HIP) performances. Some of the features that stand out are tempo, the use of portamento and vibrato, rhythmic freedom, tempo flexibility, vertical alignment between individual instruments and between the hands of a pianist. This list goes on and encompasses nearly every aspect of music making. Listening to these recordings is both illuminating and inspiring. More often than not, we are struck by how every aspect of the playing contributes to the whole in a harmonious, but highly individual and expressive manner.  On our “Resources” page we have compiled a list of books and articles that cover the history of early recordings and analysis of the playing styles preserved on them. 

What do we do?

At the core of this project is imitation of historical recordings with the goal of getting a better understanding of the Romantic styles of playing as well as acquiring technical skills to produce the expressive devices we hear on these recordings. We start by selecting recordings that are of special interest to us. For example, there may be a recording  by a student of the composer who wrote the piece of music, or there is a particular aspect of the performance that strikes us as especially expressive or successfully integrated. For each of these recordings, we use the following method: 

- Listening: We listen to the recordings multiple times as a whole and to small sections. 

- Analysis: We then analyse the performance and annotate the score using a system of signs that we find most effective at visually representing various features (this has some degree of variation depending on the piece). 

- Imitation: We practice and play along the recording separately and then come together to compare our impressions and notes, and try to imitate the recording one section at a time.
Throughout the process, we keep discovering new details that our ears didn’t register with the first listening sessions, so we repeat these steps several times. Moreover, playing along with the recording has been key in achieving the best possible result. We record ourselves at frequent intervals and compare the result with the original, using a visualizing software to study the differences in detail. 

- Filming: Once we feel we have familiarised ourselves with the recording and can produce a close imitation of the whole piece, we get together with our sound engineer and videographer and film the imitation, using gut strings and a late 19th- or early 20th-century piano in the house of one of our generous hosts.

Why imitation?

We believe that imitation is one of the most effective ways of learning to play in any style. It is an important part of every performer’s musical upbringing: we imitate what our teachers demonstrate, we imitate what we hear on the recordings we like, we imitate our colleagues while playing chamber music - in orchestra, string players imitate their fellow section members to an incredible level of precision at all times! Teaching music is still often done and has been done for centuries through imitation: Leopold Auer recalls his teacher Joseph Joachim frequently uttering: “So müßen Sie es spielen” (That is how you must play it!) after having failed to explain something with words, turning instead to his violin to demonstrate his preference. The pupils “tried as far as possible to imitate him” - and those “less fortunate” who couldn’t, instead “fixed their attention on one or another of the great virtuoso’s purely exterior habits of playing — and there they remained.” (Leopold Auer, Violin Playing as I Teach It). In our experience, imitation can teach us something that passive listening cannot, and we hope that this method will get us closer to the meaning; the expressive motivation behind those foreign stylistic features, rather than merely mimicking them at random.  Moreover, imitation lets us fully integrate the style into our physical playing as we strive to find the technical means to produce certain effects, and practice them repeatedly. We thus form new physical habits and develop techniques that we can later on apply spontaneously to other appropriate repertoire as well, having created new expression-style-body-instrument connections by doing this exercise.

Through this project we came across the work of several colleagues who also used imitation and similar methods. Some of them use imitation sporadically as part of their performance practice work, some use it for teaching (for example Clive Brown; Job ter Haar; Kai Koepp; Pierre Goy, Denis Pascal and Jean Saulnier in Geneva), and others have used it systematically for PhDs or independent research projects, going very far with the precision of the imitations and related research. Among the latter are Anna Scott, Johannes Gebauer, Sebastian Bausch, Emlyn Stam, Sigurd Slåttebrekk, and Kai Köpp. Links to their and the work of others can be found on this website on the “Resources” page.

The Blog

This blog is an online platform for sharing the results of our experiments and work-in-progress. We will also post observations and findings, as well as historical written documents that corroborate (or contradict) what is heard on the recordings. It is also a platform for discussion of the potential of this approach and its relevance to performing musicians today.  We hope to introduce the late Romantic styles to modern audiences by letting them hear and see how this can be done by two young performers of today. Down the line, we hope to inspire other musicians to expand their expressive possibilities and bring back from near oblivion lost aspects of music making. On the Romantic Lab website you will find videos and texts. The videos are imitations of specific recordings that we found to be especially interesting. They usually consist of a single take, with no editing of the sound, and are the result of weeks of work - they are imperfect attempts, but the closest we could manage at that time. The idea is that this is a laboratory, and what we are sharing is a learning process and a method, hopefully with improvements as we become more familiar with the aspects of playing that differed from our own as we embarked on this journey.

The videos are accessible independently from the blog posts. The blog posts are dedicated to the discussion of various topics: our experience and observations through the process of imitation; the methods and notational systems we use; specific expressive features (tempo and rhythmic freedom, vibrato, portamento, ensemble playing, rolling of chords, etc) and their treatment in recordings; annotated scores to illustrate the recordings (and our imitations of them); national schools; comparisons of several recordings of a piece, etc. In addition to our own material, we think it is important for the Romantic Lab to include the work of others who have done and are currently involved in similar or related work: for that reason, a page is dedicated to resources including websites and articles, books, texts, and recordings (both historical and modern). This list will grow as we meet new colleagues and get to know their work, or discover new source material.