Stephanie Frakes, PhD, The Ohio State University presents "Chopin's Cantabile, between consistency and variability."
It is well known in scholarship that Frédéric Chopin drew stylistic inspiration from Polish folk music, counterpoint, and opera. The lyric cantabile, known for its ornamented melody and tempo rubato with the bass, was an operatic genre - often underestimated today - that inspired a great many of his lyric melodies. Within these, the 15 passages he explicitly marked cantabile offer a rich context for understanding how Chopin maintained the style's inherited, essential qualities of simple, decorative melody above a relatively sparse and unobtrusive bass, worked out in tempo rubato, while integrating elements drawn from his other two primary categories of inspiration - contrapuntal writing and the dynamic rhythms of Polish music. Read more
Stephanie Frakes received her PhD degree in Musicology in December 2012 at Ohio State with a dissertation entitled "Chopin's Cantabile in Context." She is a past recipient of the Chateaubriand Fellowship (from the French government) and Presidential Fellowship (from The Ohio State University), and has presented at international conferences in the United States, Poland, Italy and the United Kingdom. Her secondary specialization is vocal accompanying, in which she holds a master's degree.
