Page 84 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

glasbena interpretacija ... | music interpretation ...
at the time. The first recording begins with a focal tone (being indicated by
a whistle or something similar), followed by a short verbal commentary in-
troducing the song (e.g. Wendisches Spinnstubelied Nr. 3 Matthes spann die
Pferde an) and finally the singing or playing itself. The second recording
then begins directly with the singing or playing, followed by a verbal com-
mentary, and finally the focal tone is given. According to ethnographers,
this practice has its pros and cons. The main disadvantage – with regard to
the interpretation practice – can be expressed succinctly as follows: if the
tone is sounded first, it may disorient amateur singers, i.e. lead to dissonant
singing in a different than natural vocal position or to singing outside of
the singer’s register.
Another observation from the field of historical or generally older re-
cordings is something that the average listener might not consider. Old wax
and gramophone records were significantly shorter in length than more
modern media such as tapes, CDs or DVDs. In practice, this led to some
pieces having to be interpreted faster than the composer intended when re-
cording them, and faster than the normal performance in concerts. This
is important for our evaluation of historical recordings, including the ar-
gument that “they used to play it faster in 1925 than we do today.” Such re-
cordings must always be evaluated on a case-by-case basis as to whether the
tempo was limited by the technical constraints of the medium or whether
it reflected the artistic intention. In many cases, the composer’s original in-
tention can never be clearly determined.
Listening to historical recordings brings with it a certain natural need
to surmise, supplement and imagine what the technology of the time failed
to capture, such as the sharpness and clarity of instruments, colour, precise
intonation, spatial sound, etc. It can thus be said that listening to histori-
cal recordings requires not only a significantly greater degree of active in-
volvement by the listener, but also specific activity in the field of individ-
ual acoustic imagination. At best the listener can only get a glimpse of the
actual interpretation, i.e. of “how it really sounded in 1925,” and even this is
highly debatable. The quality of the original performance was only known
by the participants in the recording, and with them it also disappeared, be-
cause the recording captured only a fraction of the overall sound spectrum.
An interesting consideration in the field of music psychology is whether
the contemporary listeners were closer to the original than all the follow-
ing generations. Why? The contemporary listeners could compare the per-
formance they heard in the concert hall with the recorded form. A similar

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