By Geoffrey Dean
Reading the description of the new “Outside the Box” column while listening to Franz Schubert’s Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano, I remembered my own dismay when studying this piece at what I took as Schubert’s inconsistencies. My “inside the box” thinking at the time was to try to minimize the variations in intervals, dynamics, articulation, rhythm found in Schubert’s score – to move toward standardization, so that each appearance of a given musical gesture would resemble every other as closely as possible. In pursuing this standardizing impulse, I was unwittingly following the example of a long line of music editors who had purged Schubert’s (and others’) works of their native quirkiness, putting them back into the box of one-size-fits-all creative expression as they confined them to the narrowly drawn parameters of “tasteful” interpretation.
