Anna Scott (ACPA) contributed to the book Rethinking Brahms, edited by Nicole Brahms and Reuben Philips, with a chapter about performance and embodiment in Brahms's chamber music with piano.
If we are to rethink Brahms, we must play him differently. In chamber contexts, this means not playing well with others, in the sense of both improperly and asynchronously-an approach that comes naturally to those who have embodied the early-recorded styles of musicians close to Brahms. Unleashing these styles in his Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, Op. 100, and Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34, reveals a conception of Brahmsian identity steeped in risk, potentiality, and variability: qualities that are prized in chamber playing in theory, but often actively discouraged in practice. This coarser, more reckless and individualistic mode of performance destabilizes understandings of how Brahms's music should sound, and also poses the question of whether the field might benefit from a more discordant ecosystem of thought and practice, with new findings in the latter demonstrating the contingency of the former, and vice versa.
Soundfiles belonging to Chapter 9.
Read the chapter here.
Rethinking Brahms
As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present.
Edited by Nicole Grimes, Associate Professor of Music, University of California, Irvine, and Edited by Reuben Phillips, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford.
