I don’t understand music criticism. It seems to me that a musician, say a piano player, is good to the degree to which he or she plays the musical notes as the composer wrote them. If the pianist plays them too slow or too fast, or misses some, etc., the pianist is doing a bad job. A music critic in the local paper today reviewed a pianist who performed a Beethoven concert last night as follows: “She plays him from the inside out, revealing his interior struggles while making fully incarnate his exterior - the irony, sarcasm, ecstatic beauty, paradox, and the leonine raging against an incipient silence.” What does any of that mean?
Hoo boy. Well, there’s criticism which seeks to understand how and why one performance of the ostensibly same music is better. And then there’s criticism which uses a lot of words weirdly with no real point. You may stumbled onto the latter there.
These two sentences don’t jibe as well as you think. Yes, the notes are on the page and the pianist has to play them, but there are a lot of details that the composer didn’t specify, like exactly how fast/loud different parts of a piece should be. One musician has a few choices like that, but a larger group of musicians has many more, to the point where different orchestras lead by different conductors can give two extremely different performances of the same piece.
If the best possible performance is “the musical notes as the composer wrote them”, then why have human performers at all? Why not have music performed by computers, following the score exactly?
Indeed. One can’t hope to answer the OP without having an understanding of this first.
Ronald, does any music speak to you or affect you?
The difficulty with music criticism, especially when it comes to classical music, is that you’re dealing with a medium that’s fleeting. You have to go beyond just examining whether the musician played the right notes at the right tempo, and describe the sort of intangible qualities that made that performance so great. That’s not usually easy to verbalize, which is why you find a lot of critics resorting to BS terms like the ones you cited above.
I should note, though, that classical music critics are far from alone in doing in this. Open up any issue of Rolling Stone and you’re sure to find an example of the same sort of pompous writing as described above, but about a rock or a rap album, instead of something by Beethoven.
There is much music which affects me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be listening to it. But we’re getting away from the main question I was trying to ask: What does that review mean? How can a performance be “ironic” or “sarcastic” or reveal the composer’s “inner struggles”?
As ultrafilter said, it’s not quite as neat as “play the notes as written.” The written notes, while imparting a lot of information, don’t give you the full picture of the music. Even in classical music, there is a lot of personal interpretation in how to play a piece. Have you ever heard a straight MIDI file of a classical piece? It’s note-for-note perfect, but lacks the expression a human musician would put into it.
Here, take for example Rubenstein’s version of the 3rd movement of the Moonlight Sonata vs the Gould version, which sounds hectic and rushed, in comparison. And, a more contemporary version, here’s Daniel Barenboim. Note how he holds the accented chords the arpeggios build up to a wee bit compared to the more staccato interpretations of Gould and Rubenstein. I’ve heard this movement of the sonata played with even more exaggerated timing on those chords.
So, same exact sheet music, three very different interpretations.
Not much. Sounds like the reviewer is trying to justify his phony-baloney job.
It’s not just music. Any criticism of an artistic performance by a single reviewer should be read for entertainment purposes only and not as a guide as to whether to experience the performance yourself.
That’s kind of like saying an actor is good to the degree he or she speaks the words as the writer wrote them. Besides the notes, composers typically indicate a feel that the piece should have, phrasing guidelines, and so on, but it’s up to the musician to internalize the piece and bring it to life, as a fine actor would a role.
Well, depending on the piece in question, Beethoven might have been deaf or was well on his way to being deaf, which understandably he didn’t take well, so that might be where the “inner struggles…leonine raging against the incipient silence” comes in. While the language is overwrought I think the writer’s just trying to give some context.
Or this. 
It can’t, unless both the performer and the listener understand the context of the piece and how ideas like that can communicated by playing it. There’s a lot more in a good performance than is evident to the average listener, and trying to describe that in language that just anyone can understand is a very difficult task. That’s not to say that no critic is bullshitting; just that some of them might not be.
For my money, listening to acknowledged performance virtuosos describing their techniques and understanding is a good way to evaluate how critics attempt the same sort of thing.
A YouTube search on “Bill Evans Interview” leads to a number of clips where he does some explaining that is as close to “layman’s language” as you’re apt to find.
Start with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYXB6pQvJcg – Bill Evans 1966 Interview
Then look at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xix9KVnPxPY – Bill Evans interveiw 1970
If you’ve felt better informed after that, look at the multi-part – Bill Evans on Piano Jazz with Marian McPartland - Part 1 starting with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIfHtPwF8wY
If Evans isn’t your cup of tea, there are other such features at YouTube by other performers.
A lot of it depends upon the audience being familiar with the piece. Irony and sarcasm both play off the audience’s expectations of how the piece will unfold, either “underselling” or “overselling” a particular phrase.
Say, for example, you have a passage that already tends toward sentimentality. A performer might schmaltz it up by swooping from note to note and letting the notes persist a little longer than normal. In doing so he would be calling attention to the inherent sentimentality of the moment by accentuating it and making it a bit ridiculous. That would be a sarcastic playing of the piece. An ironic playing might go in the opposite direction, downplaying the obvious sentimentality of the passage by giving it an entirely different flavor and setting up an ironic juxtaposition with the audience’s expectations.
There’s a lot more to an interesting performance than hitting the notes the composer wrote. Unfortunately, many modern classical performers are trained simply to “nail that note”, leading to dull, mechanical interpretations.
As someone who’s creating MIDI files of classical music, I have to say that I work pretty hard to make it my own expression. That’s to avoid exactly what you are describing.
I hate to nitpick, but who? There was a point in the 20th century when this was true. Now, I can hear Angela Hewitt play Bach and Rameau with a sustain pedal, or 20 performers with 20 interpretations of Liszt and Rachmaninoff. I think it was a fad (although I very much attempt to play Bach as though I owned a harpsichord. Which I don’t :(.)
To answer the OP, there are many cultural values that can be imparted on a sterile set of notes to change their value. Louder and faster is angrier, more aggressive. Slower and softer is the inverse. These are quick and messy sort of synecdoches. There are numerous other such examples.
Sarcastic and ironic? I doubt the author cited in the OP gives an explanation as to how this is achieved. Two dollar words are one part nitpicking, one part commodity fetishism. Rich people that goto classical concerts like flowery language. This musicologist calls B.S. unless proven otherwise.
Yes–that’s why I was careful to say “straight MIDI file,” although it’s not exactly clear what I meant by it. MIDI data can be full of expression. What I meant by “a straight MIDI file” is one that is simply a note-for-note step-sequenced inputting of a score of sheet music straight into an editor. You know, the sort of MIDI audio that would show up on really bad early/mid-90s webpages along with animated gifs and ugly tiled backgrounds.
I miss geocities.