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Single or Whole Beat? | Wim Winters Uncovers how Beethoven has been Performed WRONG for Centuries | ✨ Featured
🕑 Added 2022-12-15 19:00:01 +0000 UTCGood evening to all of you!
This is an episode I have been looking forward to sharing with you. Wim Winters is a brilliant speaker and passionate proponent of an idea that is viewed as absurd by academics.
Sounds familiar?
You could perhaps describe Winters as the black swan of musical performance practice, much like what Odd Nerdrum is (and Caravaggio was) for painting, Heinrich Schliemann, Charles Hapgood, John Anthony West and Graham Hancock for archeology, Brunelleschi for architecture, Hans Zimmer for music, Paracelsus and Fleming for medicine, Champollion for philology, Ayn Rand for philosophy, Donald Trump for politics...
Whether you like them or not, these are OUTSIDERS that enter the scene by shaking up the belief system of an institution, making a lot of gatekeepers angry.
No one likes cheaters, and that is exactly how these front figures are being perceived by their contemporaries, because they did not follow the established rules of how to achieve a position of power and influence.
And the outsiders have a dangerous thing in common: they attract young people, meaning the next generation of potential gatekeepers, making the black swans a threat to the entire system. This is why they are often persecuted by governments and other powerful institutions.
Why are the ring leaders of classical music so angry at Wim Winters and even cancelling performers for embracing Whole beat? Because the Belgian clavichord player threatens to turn their institution and world view on its head by suggesting that orchestral music (mainly from the time of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven) should be performed up to twice as slow, because the tempo indications from the metronome mark has been misread for more than two centuries!
You can imagine the implications of the fact that students of classical music have had to perform on their instruments at painstaking speeds that are neither natural or healthy.
Whole beat is probably not just the true way of reading the metronome, it is also a tool that can change our tempo and even our world view.
As Öde Nerdrum once told me: "Whole beat has changed my life."
I hope you enjoy the interview and please check out Wim Winters' channel Authentic Sound on YouTube, where he has shared a lot of videos on the subject.
Chapter markers:
01:34 Authentic Sound and modern performance practice
05:15 Choice of tempo and the certainty of metronome marks
08:38 The original tempo indication vs Single or Half Beat
15:13 Modern performances: even the fastest fall short
19:21 "Beethoven's broken metronome"
21:43 Historical sources for Whole Beat
27:11 When did performance speeds increase and why?
32:58 Can you play faster than humanly possible? Win €5.000!
34:21 What is physically possible to play and perceive?
40:00 Life-long injuries, worn-out brains and loss of joy
45:14 Whole beat is natural for us
51:00 "Mozart is being killed" (1839 warning)
54:50 Cooperation with Lorenz Gadient
1:01:56 Whole Beat reviving classical music
1:09:40 "When you slow down, you play faster"
1:14:11 Paradigm shifts are initiated by outsiders
🎵 Listen to this Interview and all our other episodes: https://caveofapelles.com/podcast (password: check your welcome e-mail or send us a message)
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Best wishes from the producer,
Bork Nerdrum
Comments
A Culture Wars video on the subject of Winters and Whole beat, as well as another conversation with Winters will be released soon! - Bork Nerdrum
Wim Winters is a ground breaking hero of mine. I love his work, thank you so much for inviting him to the Cave and to Mr Winters for accepting.
Dear Rowan Wills, Thank you for your comment. As I understand Mr. Winters, the whole idea of having to play very fast arises in the 19th century. So we are conditioned to expect high speeds, without that necessarily being the point. Playing slow(er) then becomes a strange idea. Mr. Winters has himself pointed out (I forget in which video) that this does not mean we should half the tempo of the current standard - as the current standard does not meat the demands of single beat. Most fast passages are played somewhere about 70-80% of what single beat says.In that connection, Mr. Winters has also clarified that oftentimes, slow movements are suddenly played at speeds approximating whole beat - so there is absolutely no need to half the tempo of these movements, if the standard we are measuring up against is current performance practice. Best regards, Jan-Ove Tuv
