B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

Three-day festival explores intricacies of Brahms

By Hope Green

When classical music fans are asked to choose the greatest composers of all time, many will instantly name the "three Bs": Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. But during the 19th century, some contemporaries of Johannes Brahms chided him for being too heavily influenced by musicians of the past, including those other two alliterative heroes in the set.

	Leslie Parnas (center), a music coach at the School for the Arts, works with second-year graduate students Letitia Hom (left) and Jennifer Peterson as they rehearse Brahms' Third Piano Trio in C Minor, Opus 101, for a lecture-demonstration at the Brahms festival.

His leading detractor was a fellow German composer, Richard Wagner.

"The Wagnerian camp felt that they were writing the music of the future, and looked at Brahms as an old-fashioned composer who looked toward the past," says David Epstein, a noted musicologist who will be leading a workshop as part of a three-day Brahms festival at BU. "Now a century and a half later we see how totally untrue that is. Brahms was anything but an old fogey with his head in the sand. He turned all the ideas from past modes of writing and thinking about music to a very unique, personal, and quite forward-looking way of performing it."

During the first week of April, the festival will give the public a rare opportunity to join music scholars as they celebrate and study Brahms' music in depth. Entitled Brahms: Perspectives on Performance, the event features workshops led by Epstein and other prominent Brahms scholars, paper presentations, and concerts where students and faculty will perform together. The School for the Arts is cosponsoring the event with the BU Humanities Foundation and the American Brahms Society.

"I hope that even people who are not musicians will attend the symposia and workshops," says violinist Letitia Hom, a second-year graduate student at SFA. "Maybe classical music isn't as popular these days as Eminem, but events like this one help the public understand what we as performers find so interesting and so great about Brahms. His music is not pure entertainment -- it's very cerebral -- but once you understand what he's trying to do, it's amazing."

The festival's director is John Daverio, professor and chairman of SFA's music history department. A violinist, he is also the author of a respected biography on Robert Schumann, who became a close friend of Brahms after helping him launch his career.

Brahms, says Daverio, poses a unique set of challenges to performers, whether it's tempo, tone quality, or the nuances of musical color that are controlled by fingering and piano pedaling.

"The music is very complex from a rhythmic point of view," he says. "It's not as square and predictable as a lot of other 19th-century music. Another big difficulty is the question of balance. Most composers write only one melody at a time, but with Brahms there are often two melodies going on at once. Bringing out the various lines and balancing them .with one another is rather difficult."

Distinguished guest speakers will work directly with students, bringing scholarly research to bear on performance issues. Among them is Epstein, a professor emeritus at MIT and author of Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance. One of his special interests is the relationship between the nervous system and issues of timekeeping in music: the dynamics of tempo, rhythm, and meter.

Epstein will coach two SFA piano students as they rehearse Opus 118, a cycle of six piano pieces Brahms, an accomplished pianist, composed late in life. "Tempo is going to be a central focus of our session and also pacing, because Brahms developed a system for control that is subtle but extremely powerful," he says.

In another workshop, participants will take a rare journey through Brahms' Third Piano Trio in C Minor, Opus 101. Session leader George Bozarth, executive director of the American Brahms Society, has closely studied an original manuscript of the work that was marked up with the composer's verbal commands to performers by an observer who was present at his rehearsals.

Hom is part of a trio that Bozarth will coach in the workshop. She is excited by the prospect. "Musicians usually don't have access to original manuscripts," she says. "When we buy music in the store, it's not necessarily what the composer intended because it's gone through several editions. Over time, whether by mistake or on purpose, people change things."

Understanding Brahms' intentions, Hom says, "helps us get more out of his music. And if you know what you're doing, it always comes across for the audience."

Brahms: Perspectives on Performance will be held Thursday, April 5, through Saturday, April 7, beginning with a concert on Thursday at 8 p.m. in the Tsai Performance Center. For a complete festival schedule, visit www.bu.edu/sfa/news/calendar.html.

30 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations