The 3rd movement (Allegro ma non troppo) from the piano sonata op. 57 (Appassionata) by Beethoven.

• The score
• A Numula program that renders it
• The rendition with nuance
• The rendition without nuance

Goals

I distinguish between two general goals:

1. musical effect: conveying a particular sequence of moods, feelings, and emotions to the listener.
2. trying to sound like a human performance

My goal in this rendition is 1); I want to convey overwhelming awe, mystery, and excitement. 2) is a non-goal. If the effect I want requires something physically impossible, so be it.

However, there's a big overlap between 1) and 2). Nuances like ritardandi/pauses at phrase endings are necessary for 1) because they convey the structure and logic of the piece; they may also be necessary for 2) because of physical limitations of hands and fingers. There are lots of places where the notes rush on without any pause, sounding mechanical and facile; the ear is very good at detecting this. I need to go through and fix these.

Numula has a feature for adding random timing jitter, normally or uniformly distributed . I've experimented with this; in this piece, normal with a stddev of 7 milliseconds is about right. But this isn't used in this version. I'm not sure I like it; it makes the performance sound more human, but it doesn't make it more musically effective.

Program notes

• The first 20 measures seem to me like a transition, not part of the movement. So I skipped them.

• The development and recapitulation are repeated, with first and second endings on the repeat. I divided the piece into sections to avoid duplicate text.

• The exposition and and recapitulation have mostly the same structure. I factored the nuance specifications so that I could use the same ones for each part.

• Almost everything (score and nuance) are encoded using shorthand notations; in fact I developed these notations to make it feasible to do this piece.

• The nuance specifications are structured as described here.