Guest Speaker
Daniel Barolsky (profile)
Assistant Professor of Music
Beloit College, WI
Location: Humanities 1641
Transcriptions are usually classified in the liminal space between composition on one hand and performance on the other. Scholars have made attempts to define the term further, distinguishing it from an arrangement, paraphrase, or variation. Ferruccio Busoni, in an essay from 1910, resists both the categorization of creative musical processes and the hierarchies inherent within these divisions. In a radical claim, one largely ignored, Busoni argues that we include both composition and performance within the definition of transcriptions.
In this paper I will present an analysis of Wilhelm Müller’s poem, “Wohin?” as set by Schubert, transcribed by Liszt and Rachmaninoff, and performed by Rachmaninoff and Ruth Laredo. I argue that we consider the shared developmental and analytic processes among composition, transcription, and performance to better evaluate the conceptual aesthetic of the transcriber, whether she be transcriber, composer, or performer.
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