PLAYING BY HEART IN PIANO PERFORMANCE: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Abstract

The professional memory of a musician-performer is a «conceptual iceberg» that confuses artists and scientists from the point in history when the development of musical text, genre and style, compositional and, directly, performance skills provoked the need to abandon printed sheet music in the context of a concert performance. Given the fact that studying the creative phenomenon of playing by heart is impossible without including the historical context of the development of this area, we consider it necessary to present to the scientific community a panoramic overview of the development of musicians’ relations with this branch of skill. The purpose of the work: to investigate the historical path of the evolutionary development of views on the memory of a musician, to provide a comprehensive and verified review of the available information regarding the transformation of the problem of performance without score by representatives of piano art in the plane from practice to theory. The research methodology is determined by the purpose of the work and involves a historical, systemic and ontological approach. Scientific novelty: it is for the first time in the Ukrainian scientific discourse that it traced how views on the playing by heart demanded by the era and circumstances changed in the performing community over time. Conclusions. Having looked at how the views of performers on the general skill of a stage artist changed over the course of 200 years, how the skill of playing by heart was personified, we can state that, being within the stylistic limits of baroque and classical-romantic music, the attachment to the freedom given by artistic playing by heart leaves us no alternatives. This question does not lose its relevance even in the 21st century, and perhaps especially in the 21st century, when the modernity of the musical language sometimes makes it impossible for the artist to abandon the notes on the music stand. At the same time, taking into account the fact that, as practice shows, the professional memory of a musician-performer significantly goes beyond the purely utilitarian need to play without notes, we consider it appropriate to put an equal sign between deep fusion with the musical text and the artist’s level of professionalism.