Believe me when I say that I'm as sorry as you are that my pathetic somment system is down once again. But as they say, the internet is always a little bit broken.

At one point in my blog description I said it would contain my thoughts about music. This pretty much hasn't happened, as you tiny group of long term readers know. I don't listen to much contemporary music, so I generally don't join into discussions in that area. I do, though, have lots of opinions about "classical" music, and had a recent thought which I considered blogworthy. If you are not interested in classical music or or fairly ignorant in that area, just stop reading now or you'll just be bored (like you aren't already).

Here goes. There are some things in the history of music which have generally been considered, for lack of a better term, wrong turns. As an example, quite a lot of the music students I have talked too over the years have condisidered the work of the second Viennese school (Shoenberg, Webern etc.) to be such a wrong turn. This is not to say that a wrong turn doesn't lead to some good pieces here or there, or that it doesn't contribute to the development of future music. It's just an idea in music that for some reason or other just doesn't work. I and a very few others condiser the entire classical period to be an example of this, but that's not what I'm going to talk about. What I want to talk about is the piano concerto. I become convinced on Sunday evening that the piano concerto, especially as it came to be developed in the romantic era by folks like Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Brahms, and many others, was an idea that didn't work well. This realization hit me due entirely to the fact that WCPE, the local classical station, chose to play one of Bach's keyboard concertos, I believe it was number seven. This concerto was performed by a pianist and a small string group. The piano part ran pretty much without break through the piece, much of it soft (I'm keeping from the term piano to avoid confusion), and none of it very loud. Thus there was constant interaction between the piano and the other instruments. The effect was quite pleasant.

As I was listening, I thought of the Tchaikovsky concerto with its blastissimo portions and said to myself, something went wrong. I suppose what happened was simply that the modern symphony orchestra came about somewhere in the 19th century, thus the piano concerto evolved to fit the larger orchestra. As a consequence, the concerti became less "concerted" and more competitive. The piano in these concerti often played solo, or very loudly with the whole orchestra, or muddled along with sections of the orchestra. The parts are just not capable of being balanced due to the numbers involved.

Don't misunderstand me. I do enjoy many of these concerti. I also think the piano can make a good orchestral instrument. I've heard many syphonnic pieces where a piano added significantly to the overall color. But I think the piano concerto is a dead end, and I think this is borne out by the fact that very few piano concerti have found success since 1914. I would love to see more chamber music for piano though. Brahms and Dvorak, just to name two of my favorites, wrote absolutely wonderful music for pianos with small groups. I hope that more follow in their footsteps.