Talk:Les noces

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Little more about the piece

I added some appreciative comments about the originality and expressiveness of the piece, and also the bits about how and why it is rarely staged today.

Karlchwe 18:27, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


Use of the Pianola

It is simply not true that the 1919 version was abandoned on account of any difficulties of synchronisation between Pianolas and live instruments. I've altered things to reflect this, as succinctly as I can, and added a link to the Pianola Institute website, which discusses this aspect of Les Noces in more detail, at the bottom.

Pianola 17:20, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

dsgoen I added the reference to Boulez's 1981 performance. I don't know how to make the reference and the reference pointer relate to each other, so I bit of help would be nice. I also added the reference to the scoring and instrumentation, as well as the "one critic" who likened the piece to a black and white film.

Pianola I was the pianola player in the Boulez 1981 performance. I have given many hundreds of pianola concerts around the world over a period of 35 years, including quite a few with other instrumentalists, most recently the Rachmaninov Third Piano Concerto in Brussels last June, for which I made the rolls, using my own computer program.

I don't want to splash my own name around on the main web page, but I am going to remove the "citation needed" tag, with regard to the synchronisation of the pianola with other instruments. If anyone needs further information, then they might refer to http://www.pianola.org/history/history_stravinsky.cfm.

The pianola was effectively bad-mouthed by Stravinsky, who had sold a period of exclusivity for Les Noces to Diaghilev, when he must have known that the practicalities had not been sorted out. Pleyel were late in producing the keyboard cimbaloms (luthéals), which were not finally ready until 1924. Well into the exclusivity period Diaghilev had not seen the music, and threatened to take legal action against Chesters, presumably as a way of putting pressure on his friend, who had to re-arrange the music for the four pianos. This, and not any notional lack of synchronisation is the real reason for the abandonment of the 1919 version.

I have personally transcribed all the papers relating to player pianos in Stravinsky's archive at the Sacher-Stiftung in Basel, so I hope my assertion will be trusted.

By the way, Robert Craft used pianos in place of the pianola in his recording.

Pianola 10:53, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Capitalise

If the article refers to a proper noun (as this one appears to), it should be called 'Les Noces', not 'Les noces', I won't move it as I am not familiar with the subject. --George D. Watson (Dendodge).TalkHelp 16:31, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I realise that this work isn't an opera, but if it was, it would not have a capital N - see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Opera#Operas:_original_language_titles and also a recent discussion at the Opera Project on capitalisation of French-language titles here. It's a real can of worms. --GuillaumeTell (talk) 16:55, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
I defiantly think that “N” should be capitalized. I can find you a hundred sources that capitalize it that way, but I know of none in which the “n” is lowercase. --S.dedalus (talk) 06:17, 14 June 2008 (UTC)