Name: Ron Alexander Memorial Lectures in Musicology: Pheaross Graham
Start: 2024-10-14T16:30:00
Location: Braun Music Center

Stanford University Department of Music

Abstract: As a novel approach to performance analysis, I adopt Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of acting to explore the hermeneutics behind a recorded instrumental performance. Taking the 1930 recording by Sergei Rachmaninoff of the Scherzo from Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭ Minor, Op. 35 as a case study, I explore Rachmaninoff’s subject position to illuminate empirical performance data that risks over-reduction if used in isolation. Stanislavski’s approach entails an immersion in the dramatic characters’ worlds to understand and internalize their motivations, circumstances, and emotions while synergistically calling upon the actor’s own experiential history. I consider myself the “analyst-actor” and Rachmaninoff-cum-the-Scherzo-recording as the “character” I embody at the piano. In this role, I saturate myself with Rachmaninoff’s lived experiences, states of mind, life narratives, and pianism as felt corporeally. With signs of breathlessness emerging out of this process, I construct a hermeneutical reading that, on the one hand, finds in his performance traces of his exposure to and contraction of diphtheria and the Spanish Flu and, on the other hand, understands it as channeling his experience allegorically in sheltered exile. 