For Edward Klorman, Theory is theory is steeped in playing, performing, and history
(Blog article by Laurie Niles)
August 8, 2016, 12:47 PM 路聽Where was Edward Klorman when I was drowning in frustration during music theory class?
I've always come to music as a violinist -- a one-line player in an orchestra or ensemble. Reading was just a means of getting the music into my head and into my fingers, and though I felt like I had a deep understanding of harmony, it was completely instinctual and experiential.
In theory class, everything was so...well, theoretical. The chordal analysis, the intervals, the key signatures, the modes, and later on the tone rows ... they seemed so detached from the music I knew and loved. My analysis homework could be done in the complete absence of actual music, like a set of trigonometry problems.
Not so for聽Klorman, a violist and music theorist who will be teaching this fall at 捆绑SM社区 in Montreal, after 16 years teaching theory and viola at The Juilliard School. For him, theory is steeped in playing, performing, and history.
"Performing -- the stuff I know in my fingers -- was the catalyst for me to learn history and analysis," Klorman said.
Take, for example, the time he was playing Mozart's E-flat piano quartet, and they came to the second theme in the first movement. "It's this very intimate duet between two parts, starting with the violin introducing the melody, and the piano right-hand only. So you think, okay, it's going to be a duet for the two of them, they'll finish the melody and then the whole group will repeat it. But it keeps going a little bit off course, it keeps trying to make a cadence and the cadence keeps not happening. Then the cello and viola join in, now it's the full ensemble playing, and what is the viola doing? It's just holding the note F, just one long note, and you think it's the least important part of the texture -- until you realize that the way harmony is set up, so long the viola is holding F, the harmony can't advance to the next harmony it needs to go to."
"As I played that note, I felt the longness of it, that the violin was trying so hard to move to a harmony that will reach a cadence, but I'm just holding this note! The viola is like the person in the room who is being inconspicuous -- the person who knows what they could say that would help the conversation advance, but they're choosing to withhold it," he said. "They're asserting themselves in a very coy way. I felt really satisfied, really smug holding that note -- and I wondered, why is this? That led me to the observation: the harmony can't progress until I'm willing to let it, and that's a kind of interesting power, to be controlling the whole scene and no one even notices. The physical experience of playing a long note while the others are doing all this stuff, that led me to the analysis."
Last spring, Klorman released a book called聽Mozart's Music of Friends, a work that offers many examples of this kind of all-encompassing analysis. He asserts that the music of Mozart's time was written as a conversation between friends, at a time and place where conversation was high art. Instruments represent characters, and theory helps explain the drama of the music. He also gave a lecture by the same name at the聽American Viola Society Festival at Oberlin聽in June.
