Music Video Lesson: Why the Score is like the Musician's Gospel

I'm Robert Estrin. This is livingpianos.com. Today is one of the most important subjects, which is why you must revisit the score of your music periodically. It's so important you cannot even believe it. For example, scholars, religious scholars, for example, go back to the Gospel again and again and again because they're living a certain type of life and they want to reinforce the Scripture. Well, as a musician, you must do the same thing with your music. It's vital to being able to keep something fresh and to learn something on a deeper and deeper level. Now, there are a couple of examples of this that I can give you. One is you learn a piece, you have it down. You can play it perfectly and you play it again and again and again. You'll play it all these times. Well, think about in grade school when you played the game Telephone. We have a message and you whisper it in the person next to you in their ear.

They whisper it in the ear of the person next to them and go around the room. At the end of the room, you have a whole different message. Well, if you play your piece over again and again and again, eventually you could end up with a whole different piece if you never go back to the original. Little tiny things will change. Not only that, but if you're playing a sophisticated piece of music, then there are so many nuances of phrasing and expression exactly where a slur ends, where a crescendo starts, where retard starts and ends. It's really tough just to learn the notes, the rhythm and the fingering, but to get every aspect of phrasing and expression, even if you've really studied a piece, you can always learn more.

Another example, this is going to be a tough one for younger people to even relate to because we now have perfect digital reproductions of everything. But in the olden days, not that long ago, tape recording, I grew up with tape. I owned recording studios that were tape-based studios, analog tape. And if you had a cassette tape or a reel-to-reel tape and you made a copy, the copy was always just not quite as good as the original because it wasn't replicating it the way digital technology does. It was actually just rerecording it. And if you recorded a tape of a tape of a tape, you get to that third generation and it was noisy. It was distorted. You could hear fluctuations of pitch referred to as wow and flutter. All sorts of artifacts that you didn't notice in the original recording. And the only way to get a really first-class recording was to go back to the original master tapes. That's why you see, for example, on CDs and other digital recordings: Remastered. What does that mean?

Well, the way tapes used to be made, the way records are made, is there was a master tape. Let's say it was a band. There'd be a multitrack tape. The standard was 24-track. It started with 4-track then 8-track. And that master tape would be mixed down to stereo tape. And then a copy of that stereo tape would be sent to the record company. So it's already third generation by the time the record company had it.

So in B of the remaster, they can go back to their original multitrack tape and mix it down to 2-track digital to get the quality of sitting in the studio and listening to the original multitrack master tape, which is so much cleaner than what you ended up with on records and tapes. So in your playing, you must do exactly the same thing. Refer back to the source. It is your "musical gospel", if you pardon the expression. And by revisiting the score again and again, no matter how many times you studied a piece, you will always learn more. That's the message for today. Thank you subscribers, and ringing the bell and thumbs up for the videos you like. And we'll see you next time. Again, RobertEstrin@livingpianos.com, your online piano resource.

Find the original source of this video at this link: https://livingpianos.com/why-the-score-is-like-the-musicians-gospel/

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