Topic: Rachmaninoff Meets Stanislavski: An Allegorical Archive and The Topos of Breath

Abstract: As a novel approach to performance analysis, I adopt Konstantin Stanislavski’s method of acting to explore the hermeneutics behind a recorded instrumental performance. Taking the 1930 recording by Sergei Rachmaninoff of the Scherzo from Frédéric Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B♭ Minor, Op. 35 as a case study, I explore Rachmaninoff’s subject position to illuminate empirical performance data that risks over-reduction if used in isolation. Stanislavski’s approach entails an immersion in the dramatic characters’ worlds to understand and internalize their motivations, circumstances, and emotions while synergistically calling upon the actor’s own experiential history. I consider myself the “analyst-actor” and Rachmaninoff-cum-the-Scherzo-recording as the “character” I embody at the piano. In this role, I saturate myself with Rachmaninoff’s lived experiences, states of mind, life narratives, and pianism as felt corporeally. With signs of breathlessness emerging out of this process, I construct a hermeneutical reading that, on the one hand, finds in his performance traces of his exposure to and contraction of diphtheria and the Spanish Flu and, on the other hand, understands it as channeling his experience allegorically in sheltered exile. 

Pheaross Graham is a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in the Department of Music at Stanford University. He completed his Ph.D. in Musicology at UCLA with a dissertation entitled “Visions of the Pianistic Self: Don Shirley, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Music Performance Studies.” His expertise lies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western art and African American music. Broadly speaking, his research offers new approaches to performance analysis. As an M.F.A.-holding concert pianist, he works at the seams of theory and praxis, interrogating the inner worlds of marginalized concert performers by querying their aesthetic strategies for countering social, racial, ethnic, and class-based erasure within “high art-” leaning performance. His current book project, I Am Not an Entertainer: Don Shirley, Green Book Pianism, and the Middlebrow Problem, addresses a Black artistic experience in the 1960s. It examines how Donald Shirley—subject of the 2018 film Green Book—consciously stimulated engaged listening, pushing against the grain of racialized entertainment in the U.S. He argues that Shirley connected seemingly politically disengaged “nightclub” music to the Civil Rights Movement while working to musically challenge otherwise discriminating audiences. For today’s Alexander Lecture Series presentation, however, he will focus on the concert pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Admission Information

• Free admission