EPTA Germany Conference: "Between fidelity and improvisation"
A fascinating insight into the German piano teaching community’s approaches to creativity
I wrote most of this post yesterday on the train from Ludwigshafen back to my home in nearby Frankfurt. I’d been at the EPTA Germany autumn conference, Zwischen Werktreue and Improvisation (which translates roughly as Between Fidelity-to-the-Original and Improvisation).
It was a wonderful experience, full of contrasting approaches to creativity. There’s lots to share!
The actual motor of music is love and listening
“Lesen Sie den Urtext, aber spielen ihn nicht” — “Read the Urtext, but don’t play it”
This quote sums up the theme of the conference beautifully. Among the speakers are some seriously impressive classical musicians, but with a remarkably creative approach to playing classical music. The quote shouldn’t be taken literally: the point is not that you should ignore the Urtext but that you shouldn’t be beholden to it.
As Prof. Gregor Weichert, himself a well-known classical performing and recording artist, said in a talk on Friday afternoon:
“Der eigentliche Motor der Musik ist die Liebe und das Hören”
“The actual motor of music is love and listening”
Prof. Weichert went on to draw the distinction between practise (which belongs to the past) and intuition and love (which belong to the present), and he said that one of the most interesting challenges about being a performer was finding the balance, because too much imagination dissolves what you have learnt through practise.
The unspoken counterpart of that statement being that too little imagination kills the love. That’s not just a beautiful sentiment, it also has a practical application: the speakers at the conference were all highly imaginative in their work and that has led to their success as teachers, with the majority working as professors in the many German conservatories.
Three Themes
Broadly speaking, the conference split into three themes:
Creativity when performing and analysing existing works, with a particular focus on Schubert and Chopin
Creativity in our approach to teaching
Using creativity to explore theory with students
I can’t possibly hope to capture everything, but I’ll briefly summarise some of the talks.
Creativity in performing and understanding existing works
Prof. Dr Arabella Pare gave a fascinating talk on Franz Schubert’s sonata fragments. She suggested that due to his foreshortened life we think of Schubert himself as a fragment — incomplete, somehow, or perhaps even lacking — and that this has affected his later reception. Perhaps we have misunderstood his experimentations with sonata form because we’ve compared them against Beethoven’s; perhaps if Schubert had enjoyed the quarter century more life that Beethoven experienced, we’d have a better understanding of what he was working towards. She discussed the many attempts to complete Schubert’s fragmentary sonatas, including those that are currently on offer in the current Urtext editions, and played some of her own attempts. She illustrated how these completions tells us as much about the authors as about Schubert himself, and explored two questions that arise from such completions:
can there be such a thing as a “correct” completion? Do we try to honour the composer’s intentions, as best we understand them, or should our completions be a dialogue between the composer and ourselves?
when performing completed fragments do we have to make it clear to the audience where Schubert’s own work ends and the other author’s begins? If we do or don’t make it clear, what impact does it have on the audience?
Both raise interesting questions that confront composers every day. Indeed, can anything be finished, or can it only be abandoned?
Prof. Dr Hardy Rittner’s talk on Frédéric Chopin was a perfect complement to Prof. Dr Pare’s in that it also explored the unwritten. He explored the many nuances of Chopin’s music that are either difficult or impossible to notate, with a particular focus on what he labels “Überlegato”, i.e. the holding or emphasising of melodic notes within a pianistic texture to bring out different voices, something that is often labelled as “latent polyphony” (“latent Mehrstimmigkeit”). He discussed different methods of attempting to notate Überlegato, all of which have both advantages and disadvantages. Where for example Daniel Türk might use multiple voices to precisely notate every single held note, resulting in an accurate but visually complex score, C.P.E. Bach might imply it with a simple slur, which is easy to read but less precise. C.P.E. Bach’s approach is closer to latent polyphony, whereas Türk’s is manifest polyphony (“manifeste Mehrstimmigkeit”). Different editions of Chopin use different notational approaches, including what Prof. Dr Rittner calls halbmanifeste Mehrstimmigkeit (semi-manifest polyphony) where sometimes one approach is used, sometimes the other. Confusing! But simultaneously enriching! He argued that we should take the time to explore whether there is potential latent polyphony in Chopin’s works, and experiment with what approach fits us best. He finished the talk by playing Chopin’s Etude in F minor, Op. 25, No. 2, with such beautiful nuances that it quite literally brought me to tears.
Creativity in our approach to teaching
Angela Bauer gave a talk on the history and future of the Städtische Musikschule Ludwigshafen that she leads. The school is run by the city, and she herself says that in its current form it is an Auslaufmodel (obsolete model). I can’t explain this adequately as I don’t have much grasp of the intricacies of how the school is funded and run — experience with German authorities suggests to me that it is probably excessively bureaucratic and its goals are old fashioned — but what I can say is that she strikes me as someone who has the intelligence to recognise the problem and got the character required to see carry out such a complex and long-winded institutional transformation. She’s remarkably matter-of-fact about both the successes and the difficulties of making these changes, and she seems to have the right balance of assertiveness and flexibility to actually carry it out. The school offers teaching to a very high standard, and she emphasises that this must be preserved, but at the same time the school has to evolve to meet the needs of a city with a rapidly changing population. This is real creativity at work: neither easy nor glamorous, but vital.
Maria Anna Waloschek’s talk explored Team Teaching in detail, and drew on her experiences of studying in Budapest, where she was encouraged to take lessons with multiple teachers. More recently she has been involved in redesigning a masters programme at the conservatory in Münster, and in doing so explored the various different forms in which team-teaching can occur within music schools. It reminded me a great deal of my conversation with Jeni Warder about the collaborative structure of her Keys Music School, which I’ll explore in more detail in an upcoming post. Both Jeni and Frau Waloschek think that when teachers work collaboratively, it has an enormous power to improve the outcomes of their students. I confess that I’ve always loved the flexibility of teaching alone, but I left the talk inspired and thinking about how wonderful it would be to collaborate more frequently with colleagues!
Creativity in teaching theory
Prof. Paolo Álvares gave an interesting presentation of how teachers can use improvisation as a way of getting students to understand New Music, i.e. the modernist music of the early 20th Century. As someone who struggles with this particular genre, I wasn’t the ideal audience member, but I really agreed with his point that improvisation can really help students to understand the principles and mechanics of a genre — indeed, that’s pretty much the main point of this site! — and I particularly enjoyed it when Prof. Álvares held up his hands to demonstrate the shape of characteristic chords from particular composers.
A real highlight for me were two wonderful contributions from Prof. Helmut Lörscher. On Saturday he gave us some wonderful models for how to teach chordal theory in an engaging and practical way, with examples ranging from Franz Lizst and Olivier Messiaen via Mauricio Kagel to Bill Dobbins and Kenny Barron. He followed it on Sunday in the closing concert of the conference, which was a real joy. He performed solo versions of various pieces from his jazz trio, most of which drew on classical inspiration, including Bach’s 13th Invention in A minor amongst others. Before the concert he had asked us to contribute suggestions for a live improvisation, and you can only imagine my delight when he picked mine, which was “Mozart and Miles meet, get drunk, fall out, then reconcile”. The brilliance of the resulting improvisation came astonishingly quickly, quoting both Mozart and Miles Davis in one another’s style and I could have almost burst with joy. But then he outdid it in the final piece of the set, where he requested two different musical themes and two different composers. The audience selected Summertime by Gershwin and the Intermezzo in E flat major by Brahms in the style of Rachmaninov and another composer whose name I didn’t catch but who I think may have come from Latin America. I don’t mind saying that the resulting improvisation blew my tiny mind: he immediately played the theme from Summertime in the style of Rachmaninov’s C# minor Prelude with astonishing clarity and after that strong start it only got better and better.
I left feeling exhilarated and inspired. Thanks to the EPTA Germany council for organising such a wonderful conference!
More to come
In May 2025 EPTA Germany is running a seminar that continues the Zwischen Werktreue und Improvisation theme — I’ll update you nearer the time.
In the meantime, if you’re curious, you can read complete texts of speeches from previous EPTA Germany conferences on their website (German language).