When Does an Interpretation Truly Become Your Own Performance?

Building a Piano Piece · Season Three: From Score to Interpretation: Building a Performance of Your Own · Article Twelve

“Play your own interpretation” is readily confused with the pursuit of difference. An unusual tempo, a pause where others continue or a conspicuous colour can create a personal marker without creating a personal interpretation. Conversely, a performance close to tradition may genuinely belong to the pianist if it is not unexamined inheritance but a design retained after textual, structural, auditory and practical judgement.

One’s own performance is not defined by novelty, and “I like it” does not sufficiently support it. When teacher demonstrations, famous recordings and familiar movement are removed, it can be reconstructed from evidence and hearing. It adapts to another piano, a cold start and new understanding without losing its central relations. The performer accepts responsibility for its choices and consequences.

Every performance differs; not every difference is judgement

Bodies, training, instruments and memory make exact identity between two performers impossible. Research can measure individual differences in timing, dynamics, articulation, pedal and movement. Work on pianistic sound and expressive individuality shows that individuality appears through combinations of parameters.

Individual difference can nevertheless arise from hand anatomy, technical limitation, anxiety, an erroneous edition or accidental loss of control. Calling every difference interpretation turns the personal into protection from evaluation. Interpretation requires a further step: the performer recognises the difference, judges whether it serves the work, and can retain, change or remove it.

Seven ownership tests

1. The text test

You know which edition you use and which marks derive from composer-related sources, an editor or your own notes. At an important variant, you can explain the adopted text instead of unconsciously combining editions. A personal interpretation begins by respecting the real boundaries of its problem.

2. The structure test

Tempo, phrase, dynamics, voices, articulation, repeats and ornaments refer to explicable relationships in the work. The reason need not be an academic paper, but it cannot stop at “this feels more moving”. Which arrival, contrast, voice or long direction does the choice make audible?

3. The audibility test

The intention can be heard in a recording made from ordinary listening distance. Singing inwardly does not guarantee that a voice reaches the listener. A bodily feeling of broadening can sound merely unstable. Separating inner intention from external result is necessary for personal judgement.

4. The reproduction test

Decisive relations recur across three performances and a cold start, without requiring millisecond duplication. If the climax falls at a different structural level each time, rubato appears only under anxiety, or balance depends on accidental keystrokes, the design is not yet possessed.

5. The transfer test

On another piano, in another room or at another dynamic condition, you adjust physical means while preserving structural purpose. Interpretation is not a fixed movement attached to one keyboard. Greater resonance may require less pedal; a brighter instrument may require a changed onset. Phrase direction and hierarchy remain.

6. The model-removal test

Stop listening to the principal reference recording for a period. Reconstruct from score, notes and your ear. If a hesitation remains only because a famous pianist waits there and you cannot state what it connects, remove it. Later, listen again: if you can compare without automatically reverting, an external influence has been assimilated.

7. The revision test

A choice that belongs to you does not require permanent defence. A new source, clearer analysis, recording on another instrument or improved technique may demand change. Being able to abandon a cherished effect demonstrates that you possess judgement rather than being possessed by the effect.

Build an interpretation dossier

The dossier should not cover every bar in commands. It preserves enough to reconstruct the reasoning:

• edition and significant source questions;
• current tempo corridor, structural lower and motor upper boundaries;
• principal phrase routes and harmonic arrivals;
• voice-focus and articulation logic;
• pedal principles rather than a mechanical map of every depression;
• candidates and reasons for repeats, ornaments and rubato;
• recordings compared and propositions adopted or rejected;
• dated baseline, interim and final recordings;
• unresolved problems and the next review date.

The purpose is not to freeze a work. It preserves a history of judgement. Returning months later, the player can distinguish evidence-based decisions from accommodations to former technical conditions. Change becomes traceable learning rather than the conclusion that everything before was wrong.

A final-season experiment

Choose a piece already playable from beginning to end and suspend reference recordings for seven days.

On day one, audit the text and remove old marks of unknown origin. On day two, record a balanced baseline and state the three largest problems. On day three, work only on tempo, phrase and harmony. On day four, work only on articulation, pedal and voices. On day five, construct two complete interpretations—not a correct one and a deliberately wrong one, but two defensible designs with different priorities. On day six, randomise listening and ask another listener to describe perceived structure rather than evaluate your personality. On day seven, make a cold complete take and fill in the seven tests.

The retained design need not be the most exciting. It should make the greatest number of important relations audible with the least unnecessary rhetoric, and be carried reliably by current technique.

“Your own” does not mean created alone

A personal performance is formed with the participation of many others: composer text, editorial criticism, teacher language, historical treatises, recording traditions, piano making, research and listener feedback. Denying these dependencies does not make a performance more original; it makes influence invisible.

Personal agency appears in selection and responsibility. The performer did not create the work but decides how incomplete evidence becomes sound. The performer did not invent tradition alone but can distinguish which traditions apply. The performer cannot determine every listener response but can test whether an intention becomes an audible result.

Research into performance training increasingly examines how structural, imagery-based and narrative models change expressive parameters. A study involving tertiary piano students does not decide a work for an individual. It suggests that expression need not remain an instruction to feel vaguely; structural models and recorded feedback can be trained. Research on self- and other-evaluation likewise reminds us that internal assessment needs external auditory calibration.

After three seasons, what has been built?

Season One began with the construction of a piece: reading, rhythm, fingering, segmentation, pedal, memory, recording and performance. Season Two placed practice in a longer system: choosing repertoire, planning, retaining learning across days, diagnosing plateaux, reviving old works and maintaining a portfolio. Season Three asked what authorises decisions after the notes are available: tempo, phrase, articulation, harmonic direction, voices, repeats, ornaments, rubato and reference traditions.

Together, the seasons do not promise a guaranteed procedure. Piano learning moves repeatedly among text, hearing, movement, memory, environment and judgement. What is built is not only a work. It is an ability to convert vague problems into observable tasks, external knowledge into one’s own experiments, and sounding results into revision.

“One’s own performance” is therefore not a badge awarded at the end of learning. It is a commitment that currently holds, can be explained and remains open to review: mature without being final, personal without being arbitrary, influenced by tradition without becoming a copy.

An interpretation becomes the performer’s own not because nobody has played that way before, but because the performer can form it from evidence, realise it in sound, rebuild it under change, and personally revise it when required.

Primary sources and further reading

• Timing, articulation, dynamics, pedal and individuality in piano performance
• Structural, imagery-based and narrative models in expressive piano performance
• Self- and other-evaluation in piano performance
• A framework for timing, dynamics and articulation in musical performance
• Research on performance cues in expert musical memory

Continue reading: Building a Piano Piece series page

If you would like to bring these ideas about listening, understanding, and practice to the keyboard, you might try ScoreFlow, an app I developed to make score reading and daily practice flow more naturally together.