ABRSM Teacher Development

Core Musical Skills

FILM TRANSCRIPTION

Interpreting performance
I’m going to take a small section from the Debussy prelude, La Cathédrale engloutie. I’m going
to discuss some of the composer’s markings, how those would influence our performance,
but then take it a stage further and discuss how imagination, creativity, knowledge and
understanding, also informs that performance and enables us to create a wonderful sound
world and hopefully an interpretation, which would be far more convincing and far more
persuasive to an audience.
One of the first considerations is to understand the
context of this music. It’s a story effectively, about a
cathedral which rises from the sea and in my mind
appears on the surface in all its glory, gradually more
sunlit and more defined as the mist clears. In bars 16-19,
Debussy has written peu a peu sortant de la brume, which
means we have to somehow encapsulate this cathedral
gradually appearing out of the mist. But it’s not given us
any indications, very much, how to do that, he’s simply
written sempre pp all the way through pp for the next bar
pp for the bar after that, and then two of the chords are
marked piano and marque so we know that they’re going
to be brought out.
There are no pedal markings, but I think anybody who’s
tried to play this section without pedal will realize that
that doesn’t really seem to work. And the knowledge and
understanding that we have tells us that Debussy rarely
writes in pedal markings and implies them instead by
giving you chords which otherwise can’t be sustained
without the pedal. In these particular bars, we have lots
of instances where we have dotted semibreves being held
for the whole bar, where it’s impossible to actually hold
them with the fingers. We can assume, first of all, there is
pedal marked for each bar. We can assume the dynamic
markings and also his written phrase lines over the
various chords and the undulating left hand, which again
implies to us that we’ve got something that’s very smooth
and there’s no angularity there. Let’s have I think what
this might sound like if all we do is adhere to Debussy’s
markings.
I hope that performance there gives you some idea of
what it would be like if we just simply take the information
that’s on the page. But of course there is a lot more to this.
First of all as a performer, I want to give the impression of
progression, I want to give the idea, even within these few
bars, of that mist gradually beginning to clear. What does
pp sound like? How soft is pp? Is it a range of dynamic?
In my mind pianissimo is a range of dynamics, so I want to
come from the bottom end to the top end and the bar that
follows where I stopped is actually marked piano. I don’t
want to arrive there as if it were a surprise, that in itself
is part of a progression to a later forte, only about four or
five bars further on. In order to show that progression,
what I’m going to do is give each individual bar just a little
bit more clarity of tone. To do that I’m going to voice the
right hand chord a little bit more to the top each time.
I’m going to give a little bit more flexibility to the pulse,
because I want to give the idea of the water and the
movement within the water. I want to give the idea of the
movement within the mist, so there will just be a little bit
of time taken various different points, and particularly
where we get those chords, which I’m thinking of as bells,
so again I’m going to just voice those to the top.
My musical ears are telling me that’s not enough. The
picture and the image is still not vivid enough. I need a
little bit more overall shape within the bar so that not only
do I have a certain undulation in the tempo, but I have an
arching shape within each bar, a dynamic shape that just
gets a little louder and softer, then a bit more in the next
bar then a bit more in the bar after that.
So, you can see that even with just a small amount of
imagination, inspiring the sound world, inspiring the
shape, inspiring the tone, and the balance within chords
and within between left hand and right hand, this piece is
already beginning to take on its own identity. Effectively
the performer is breathing life into those notes.

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