The Re-Imagination of Performance: The Performer as Co-Creator

On June 17, 2009, my 57th birthday, I presented a talk at the Guitar Foundation of America’s annual convention, which was held at Ithaca College in New York. Readers of my Practicing Music by Design: Historic Virtuosi on Peak Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 2019) may recognize some of the ideas I touch upon in this talk, but in 2009, I didn't have any plans to write a book. Below is the text of my talk as presented in 2009.

Introduction

The purpose of my talk today is to find ways to approach our literature with more freedom and creativity. To that end, I’ll be looking at the differences between modernist and historic approaches to music interpretation and how these may be confused with one another; then, what old recordings can teach us; continuing with a brief look at some of the performance traits — Portamento, Vibrato, Rubato, and Tempo Modification — that characterize the performances on these early recordings; and finally, how a consideration of these might liberate us from a slavish adherence to our texts and help us fashion readings of the music we play that will emerge as creations alongside those of the composer. It is this sort of creativity that was highly prized by the best of the Romantic performers.

My comments today apply mainly to the performance of nineteenth and early twentieth century music and I’ll not be referencing any guitar sources, either printed or recorded. There were no outstanding interpretive artists for the guitar from the turn of the twentieth century or before, who were trained at the level of Fritz Kreisler, Mischa Elman, or Josef Hofmann, and who wrote about interpretation and their relationship to their literature in any sort of penetrating way. But the things we can learn from the playing and writings of these legendary musicians are relevant to us and to the way we approach our performances.

I won’t be offering any easy formulae for us to apply to our literature, but I will pose a series of questions, the consideration of which may help us approach our texts more creatively. Let’s dive right in with a brief discussion about what’s modern and what’s historic.

What’s Modern and What’s Historic?

There used to be an ideological rift amongst performers: some sought to recreate accurately what they considered to be the performance practices of the past; others were so awash in the performance aesthetics of the current day that they were defended against other ideas; and still others were so involved with mastering the technique of the guitar and the superficial language of music that they were ill-equipped even to enter the fray. In the guitar world, in particular, such controversies have often been obviated by a student’s loyalty to a teacher, or obeisance to the recordings of a chosen master.

Discussions of performance practice have grown tiresome as some of the hard-won tenets of its devotees have entered the mainstream. And thoughts of reaching some sort of historical authenticity are best left to, in the words of Richard Taruskin, “moral philosophers, textual critics, and luthiers.”^[1] Taruskin convincingly maintains that the concept of historical authenticity is actually a modern construct that is “implicitly projected back into historical periods that never knew it.”^[2] Historically authentic performance — or “informed,” whichever you wish to call it — actually developed concurrently with modernism and shares its values. Taruskin puts his thesis in a nutshell when he writes that: “historical performance today is not really historical; that a specious veneer of historicism clothes a performance style that is completely of our own time, and is in fact the most modern style around.”^[3]

So, how to proceed? How to bring to life in a more creative way the literature from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and to take advantage of the freedom that many Romantic performers enjoyed? First, it seems that we need to uncover the modern constructs that we might be projecting backwards. Without being exhaustive, here are a few characteristics of modernism in the performance of classical music as put forth by Taruskin:

• It is text-centered, hence literalistic.
• It is impersonal, hence unfriendly to spontaneity.^[4]

Before I explore the anti-Romantic spirit of these characteristics and the surviving and verifiable remnants of a pre-modern performance tradition, I must mention another often-suggested approach.

This is the use of intuition as a way to find out what is good for the music. Taruskin leads us out of the thicket created by something as seemingly benign as intuition: “…our intuitions are not the fine, free, feral things we may think they are. They are thoroughly domesticated beasts, trained to run along narrow paths by long years of unconscious conditioning, endowed with vast reserves of cliché, naive posture, and nonsense. If you are a trained musician, what you will find if you scratch your intuition will be the unexamined mainstream, your most ingrained responses, treacherously masquerading as imagination.”^[5]

So, back to the modernist characteristics I mentioned earlier and their performance implications. The text-centrictricy of early music — and here I suggest that the boundaries of early music have been expanding and now include nineteenth-century music — can be seen in the proliferation of Urtext editions. I find these editions invaluable, yet often the sound of a modern, historically informed performance based upon them “presents the aural equivalent of an Urtext score: the notes and rests are presented with complete accuracy and an equally complete neutrality.”^[6] This is both literal and impersonal, a privileging of standardization, virtuosity, accuracy, perfection, and patterns of conformity above experimentation, idiosyncrasy, interaction, individuation, and creative play.^[7] As we’ll see by the end of the hour, a prescient Ferruccio Busoni was complaining about the rise of literalism in performance almost a hundred years ago.

Taruskin sums this up nicely: “The impersonalism of Early Music has resulted in performances of unprecedented formal clarity and precision. It has also resulted in a newly militant reluctance to make the subtle, constant adjustments of tempo and dynamics on which expressivity depends…”^[8]

How are we to discover these constant, unnotated adjustments, as well as the application of portamento, vibrato, and accent? “If we truly wanted to perform historically,” suggests Taruskin, “we would begin by exploring early-twentieth-century recordings of late-nineteenth-century music and extrapolate back from there.”^[9] Robert Philip comes to the same conclusion in Early Recordings and Musical Style:

A[n early twenty-first-century] musician, who finds the habits of [85 or 95] years ago merely old-fashioned, may have some difficulty accepting that they might represent the end of a long tradition, stretching back to periods which we now think of as historical rather than old-fashioned.^[10]

Taruskin adds that “The old recordings utterly debunk [the] pharisaical claim (of historic authenticity); for recordings are the hardest evidence of performance practice imaginable.^[11]

So, let‘s do what Taruskin, Philip, and others suggest.

What Old Recordings Teach Us
Timothy Day, in his perceptive book, A Century of Recorded Music, presents a synopsis of the characteristics of the performance styles of the early twentieth century.^[12] These include:

• sparing use of vibrato by string players, its discreet use by singers
• frequent use of prominent, often slow, portamento by string-players and singers
• the use of substantial tempo changes to signal changes of mood or tension, and the adoption of fast maximum tempos
• varieties of tempo, but also accentuation by lengthening and shortening individual notes, and the dislocation of melody and accompaniment
• a tendency, in patterns of long and short notes, to overdot dotted rhythms

Robert Philip in Performing Music in the Age of Recording presents these characteristics:^[13]

• pianists arpeggiated chords and dislocated the melody from accompaniment more often
• there was much overdotting, hurrying of short notes, and accelerating
• there were great differences of style between schools and countries

Daniel Barolosky, in his brilliant and iconoclastic 2005 dissertation, Romantic Piano Performance as Creation (University of Chicago), confirms the findings of Day and Philip, but adds these characteristics:^[14]

• flexible rubato
• exaggerated phrasing
• excessive dynamic contrast
• free-flowing melodies
• overt virtuosity
• mannerism
• freedom with the score
• projection of hidden voices

All of these allowed performers to express their responses to their literature in highly creative and individual ways. But these characteristics, which should be seen as the end of a Romantic performance tradition that stretched far back into the nineteenth century, were gradually disappearing beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Timothy Day explores how recordings document this shift in performance style as the century progressed. These changes include: an “introduction of vibrato and a more discreet use of portamento [as twentieth-century phenomena] observable in both vocal and instrumental performance styles,”^[15] and that “The interpretation of rhythm has become ever more literal, and distortions such as over-dotting are now, at the end of the [twentieth] century, rarely heard in Beethoven or Brahms or Elgar in passages where a century ago they were commonplace; and there is much less flexibility in tempo.”^[16]

Robert Philip comes to conclusions similar to Day’s:^[17]

• pianists played chords more strictly together, and abandoned the old practice of dislocating melody from accompaniment
• the interpretation of note-values became more literal
• the nature of rubato changed, becoming more regular and even
• Acceleration of tempo was more tightly controlled,
• the tempo range within a movement tended to narrow
• the use of portamento became more discreet and more selective
• vibrato became more prominent and more continuous
• different schools and national styles became less distinct

In short, many of the performance characteristics that can be documented on recordings as gradually disappearing throughout the first half of the twentieth century can be seen as rhetorical gestures that comprise an unwritten performance tradition, and literalism is hostile to anything that is not text. Composer George Perle relayed to Richard Taruskin in a private conversation that “The greatest single source of bad performance… is literalism, adding, ‘It’s what you expect nowadays.’”^[18]

And while recordings document the waxing and waning of performing styles, they also influence performing styles. Through editing techniques recordings can achieve a manufactured performance, free from blemishes or inaccuracies, which in turn contribute to raised expectations on the part of concert-goers.

But, adds Day, raised expectations and standards alone can’t account for the changes in the characteristics of twentieth-century performing styles from the earliest recordings up through the 1960s. Day studied performances of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat, op. 42 by Vladimir Ashkenazy (1983) and countless other pianists who recorded the piece in the last decades of the twentieth century. They all distinguish carefully between every eighth and sixteenth note. But “Rachmaninoff [ — who certainly had high standards — ] in a long passage in his 1919 recording plays quavers and semiquavers [eighths and sixteenths] both as semiquavers [sixteenths]. But it would be absurd to suggest that Rachmaninoff would have been unable to make the distinction clear if he had wished to.”^[19]

Many of the comments I made about the decline of the portamento during this period in the first installment of my “Re-Imagination of Performance” series, which appeared in the January 2009 issue Soundboard, also apply to other Romantic performance traits. And it wasn’t just performance styles that were changing as the century progressed. There arose a post-WWI, anti-Romantic spirit and a distrust of the heroic, a staple of Romantic thought. The ideas of Darwin and Freud were permeating the consciousness of artists and all areas of art changed radically.

In 1936 music historian Alfred Einstein “viewed these developments with alarm and anguish [and] noted that the new music despised ‘not merely sentimentality but every serious expression of feeling’, and that it ‘insulted’ the ‘romantic adoration of beauty, regarding it simply as hypocrisy.’^[20]

This anti-Romantic sentiment influenced performers as well as composers. Pianist “Edwin Fischer numbered Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartók and Arturo Toscanini among what he calls the ‘purifiers’ of music; the kind of performance that the new men of the 1920s and 1930s aspired to, he says, was one that ‘accords exactly with the composer’s intentions, respects the note-values and all the composer’s directions, is stripped of all unnecessary trimmings’.”^[21] Pianist Alfred Brendel remembered a time when “piano students played Beethoven as if he had learned composition from Hindemith.”^[22]

And let’s not even get into the hornet’s nest of trying to discover a composer’s intentions: everybody claims to understand them. Taruskin bluntly suggests that “the need obliquely to gain the composer’s approval for what we do bespeaks a failure of nerve,” and is “an evasion of the performer’s obligation to understand what he is performing.”^[23]

No less a figure than Arnold Schoenberg “was sure that the manner of performing nineteenth-century music that emerged after the First War, with all 'emotional qualities and all unnotated changes of tempo and expression' suppressed, with ‘a certain frigidity of feeling’, was of American origin and derived from ‘the style of playing primitive dance music… in a stiff, inflexible metre’. European conductors and instrumentalists, suddenly fearful lest they be called ‘romantic’ or ‘sentimental’, immediately capitulated, much to Schoenberg's astonishment and irritation. Jazz styles were felt by many to have been an important contributing factor to the flattening out of tempi, to the emergence in art music performance of a metronomic steadiness of pulse as a distinguishing feature of twentieth-century performing styles, an avoidance of the kind of rubato that Wagner and Liszt considered the very lifeblood of music-making.”^[24]

This is an even more trenchant observation today. The prevalence of an unwavering pulse in most popular music, real or synthesized, has created in many young guitarists an invisible, and hence unquestionable, assumption of what music is, regardless of whether they’re playing Regondi or the most current popular music. I’m making no value judgement of classical music over jazz or other popular music. They can co-exist within one performer. But just as a person who is bilingual holds different grammars within, so must today’s performers hold within themselves different grammars of performance for the different types of music they play.

Performance Grammars

I prefer not to use the word “style” when it comes to differentiating these performance traits. For many, style ends up being a series of overly simplified rules and proscriptions about what one must and must not do. As such, they tend to confuse and inhibit, rather than elucidate and liberate.

But we do need to explore how performers in the early decades of the twentieth century used performance language differently from us, and rather than condemn what we might hear as idiosyncratic or old-fashioned, we can approach our scores with more freedom than previously, or at least increase the colors of our interpretive palette and how to use them.

Let’s briefly look at:

• Portamento
• Vibrato
• Rubato
• Tempo Modification

Portamento

The use of portamento was the subject of my 2009 Soundboard article.^[25] There I explored in detail its widespread use in the past and its subsequent decline. It is considered by many to be old-fashioned and anachronistic, but I argued for its use in fashioning interpretations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music, and I’ll not revisit those arguments today.

Vibrato

Clive Brown has scoured hundreds of method books, treatises, and other relevant writings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and distilled that information in his book Classical and Romantic Performing Practice 1750-1900. There he tells us that vibrato was considered an ornament that was used sparingly and was introduced as one of a host of ornaments, more for its expressive qualities than as a permanent tone color.

But by the second half of the nineteenth century, an increasingly large number of singers and instrumentalists used it more frequently and more prominently than many authorities might have considered proper. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, many violinists saw it as an essential element of tone production. While older violinists such as Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) and his most faithful pupils disdained it, violinists such as Fritz Kreisler (1875-1963) and Mischa Elman (1891-1967) made it a foundation of their sound.

Rubato

The study of the types of rubato and how they might have been used is complex and I won’t be able to do justice to the subject here. But, in general, musicians wrote about two types of rubato: the compensatory rubato and a freer form of rubato. Simply put, in the former the performer was obligated to compensate by “paying back” whatever time was stolen (by pressing forward) so that at some point the downbeats of the bars would line up with the strict meter as though there had been no rhythmic alteration. In the latter form of rubato one need not pay back the time.

Rubato was often written about. C.P.E. Bach wrote about what sounds a lot like compensatory rubato in ensemble playing in 1753: “‘the finest lapses from metre can often be industriously [that is, intentionally] produced’ when ‘one makes an alteration in one’s own part alone, running against the organization of the metre, while the main movement of the metre must be observed precisely.”^[26] But Bach also wrote, “whoever either does not use these things at all, or uses them at the wrong time, has a bad performance style.”^[27]

Carl Czerny complained in 1839 that many employed rubato to such an extent that the pieces played were often unrecognizable. While acknowledging that a higher degree of expression was warranted in his time than previously, he added, “we must nevertheless make a distinction between a fantasia and a regularly constructed work of art….”^[28] Czerny certainly wasn’t against rubato. He advised pianists to “hold back the time when feeling gentle persuasion, doubt, tender complaining or grief, and by hurrying when sensing impatience, sudden cheerfulness, resolve or pride,”^[29] but was clearly arguing against its misuse, which indicates that the debate between the restrained and the free in the application of rubato was not new in the early twentieth century.

Finally, the compensatory rubato is most often associated with Chopin: only the melody is affected by the change of tempo while the accompaniment is played strictly in time, or as is often stated for pianists: keep the left hand steady while the right hand plays freely.

But now things get interesting. We have this wonderful quote from Paderweski in 1909:

Some people, evidently led by the laudable principle of equity, while insisting on the fact of stolen time, pretend that what is stolen ought to be restored. We duly acknowledge the highly moral motives of this theory, but we humbly confess that our ethics do not reach such a high level.… The value of notes diminished in one period through accelerando, cannot always be restored in another by ritardando. What is lost is lost.^[30]

It’s as difficult to describe rubato with words as it is to describe what actually happens in performance. Did the advocates of the compensatory type of rubato intend it as a palliative for those who had trouble maintaining the integrity of the meter? Were they attracted to the neatness and symmetry that the idea of compensation provided? Paderweski’s use of the word “cannot” suggests the impossibility of actually applying compensation every time there was a metric deviation for expressive purposes, and his use of the word “pretend” indicates that he believed others thought they were doing one thing, but were actually doing another. This was probably not uncommon before the advent of recording.

James Francis Cooke in his book Great Pianists on Piano Playing from 1913 quotes pianist Max Pauer reflecting on the first time he heard himself on record and the difficulty he had reconciling what he thought he had been doing with what he actually did:

When I listened to the first record of my own playing, I heard things which seemed unbelievable to me. Was I, after years of public playing, actually making mistakes that I would be the first to condemn in any one of my own pupils? I could hardly believe my ears, and yet the unrelenting machine showed that in some places I had failed to play both hands exactly together…^[31]

In 1923 Henry Finck wrote “that during forty years as a music critic he never heard any pianist, including [Josef] Hofmann, actually apply compensation, and calls the concept a ‘pedagogic hoax’.”^[32] Note that Finck didn’t mean that Hofmann didn’t use rubato, he just meant that Hofmann didn’t use the compensatory kind. The 1927 edition of Grove’s Dictionary stated that there was no necessity to pay back, even within a phrase. And Paderweski in 1909 stated that “Berlioz affirms most emphatically that Chopin could not play in time.”^[33]

One of the overlooked features of rubato is that great performers used it to provide their audiences with a creative “audible analysis” of the piece. Used by itself, or in conjunction with portamento, vibrato, and agogic accent, it served to highlight important structural pitches, differentiate between stable and unstable tonal areas, in short, to draw the listener’s attention to the performer’s conception of the piece.

There’s one more discretionary performance trait that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performers used to shape their conception of a piece and that is tempo modification.

Tempo Modification

This is an idea articulated by Richard Wagner in his 1869 treatise entitled On Conducting: A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music. The thrust of it is that “each theme, even within a single movement, has its own personality and hence requires its own proper tempo. This involves not only changing the tempo to suit each melody, but also making a transition from one tempo to another, with the appropriate ritards and accelerations occurring in the proper places. In addition, fast movements are taken faster and slow movements much slower than formerly. These concepts are applied, then, to the various themes in the sonata forms.”^[34] Wagner wrote, “We may consider it established that in classical music written in the later style, modification of tempo is a sine qua non.”^[35]

Contemporary accounts confirm Wagner’s practice: [Timothy Day writes that] a “London violinist complained of the way Wagner ‘prefaces the entry of an important point or the return of the theme — especially in a slow movement — by an exaggerated ritardando; and… reduces the speed of an allegro — say in an overture or the first part of a symphony — fully one-third immediately on the entry of a cantabile phrase’.”^[36]

Whatever degree of tempo modification Wagner and others employed was surely to highlight and to draw attention to important formal moments in a piece, and is quite a contrast to the often-heard perpetual motion, unwavering pulse approach of today.

The Performer as Creator

The twentieth century saw the rôle of the performer change from that of one who creatively renders the score, to one who objectively realizes the score.

Ferruccio Busoni in his Sketch for a New Esthetic of Music from 1911 thought that notation was simply an expedient device to capture the composer’s inspiration for the purpose of releasing it later. But Busoni was concerned that the musical “lawgivers” (his term) were now requiring performers to reproduce the rigidity of the signs. The more closely they did so, complained Busoni, the closer performers were convinced they could come to perfection.^[37]

Busoni maintained that performers were obligated to use their own inspiration to turn the rigid signs back into emotion and to make the work manifest. This was the essence of creativity in performance.

What the composer’s inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own.^[38]

But what Busoni saw before anyone else was the early stage of a shift from the work existing primarily as a performance, to the work existing primarily as a written text: the notation was beginning to stand for musical art itself. And as we’ve seen, as the century progressed so did the rise of literalism and impersonalism. Toscanini demanded that his musicians “play what was set before them exactly as written regardless of ‘tradition,’”^[39] and Stravinsky railed “against ‘interpretation,’ and wanted his performers to be obedient ‘executants’ of his will.”^[40] These positions typified a performance aesthetic that was gathering strength in the 1920s and was the dominant performing style by the 1940s and 1950s.

What these developments really did was to curtail the freedom with which performers approached their scores, but in such a way that this loss of freedom was cloaked in the guise of being faithful to the composer’s intentions and expressed a barely perceptible hostility to interpretation. Or perhaps this could be stated more accurately: the boundaries of what constitutes an acceptable interpretation have become increasingly narrow and “the conditioned reflexes of our mainstream performers [have given] rise to a uniformity of performance style,”^[41] which is the antithesis of a Romantic performance style that is “founded to an unprecedented degree on personal conviction and on individual response to individual pieces.”^[42]

There is one more thing. Daniel Barolosky in Romantic Piano Performance as Creation, to which I referred earlier, asks us to reevaluate a performer’s relationship to the text. Echoing Busoni, whom he does not reference, he draws from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), who defined an artistic work as a specific form of social interaction characterized by its creation and its continual recreation in co-creative ways by others. Bakhtin believed that “we as interpreters can see more in the text than the authors are capable of recognizing in their own text.”^[43]

But we have an inadequate familiarity with the performance traditions of the recent past. Beyond broad stylistic generalizations, “few scholars know of the vast variety of interpretive traditions and styles to the same extent that they understand the compositional developments in Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.”^[44] Until the last twenty years or so, the archives of early recordings have generally been unavailable, but what these recordings show, is that [these performances expose] “the myth that the musical work is as it appears in the score. Rather, the musical work is what the score becomes… formed and co-created… by its reader.”^[45]

To demonstrate these ideas Barolosky looked at recorded performances by the great early twentieth-century pianists and documented their use of interpretive devices: rubato, accent, tempo modification, but in particular, their projection of hidden voices. This is often overlooked and can be accomplished in several ways by musicians who play polyphonic instruments:

• They might bring out notes actually not made prominent in the figuration by combining [agogic] accent and ritardando, an approach often used in densely contrapuntal compositions.
• Performers might emphasize an unexpected inner voice instead of the anticipated melody. In some cases the existence of an inner melody is indicated in the score, either by accents or by a parallel line written in thirds or sixths. Often, however, a musician might create new melodies, fashioned from the relatively undifferentiated material provided by the “accompanying” texture…^[46]
• A performer might also experiment with the dynamic relationships between notes in different voices, downplaying some, bringing up others, drawing the listener’s attention to different lines, motifs, harmonies.

Barolosky’s analyses of recorded performances reveal an astonishing diversity and individuality in both the scope and effect of these pianists’ treatment of hidden voices. The results are often surprisingly original musical creations.

Conclusion

What I’ve been talking about today has largely been expressed using the language of scholarship, but it’s scholarship about something creative and I want to make sure that that does not get lost among the footnotes, the bullet points, and the dates. Creative artists have to transcend current norms and imagine something that does not yet exist. That word “imagine” is important: Imagination is all that we have with which to do this, to bring forth things that aren’t yet present, and to conceive of possibilities. Yet so many of us spend time having it suppressed, or suppress it in ourselves. The work of the creative spirit is to celebrate imagination and exploit it as we question the things we think are obvious and natural.

I hasten to add that creativity is not only about thinking original or fresh things. Some ideas may be original, but not worth pursuing. We need to be engaged in a kind of reciprocal movement between generating ideas and thinking critically about them, and I use the latter term in its sense of helping us to discover the value and meaning of things. Our imaginations help us generate ideas; scholarship helps us think critically about them.

As I mentioned in my introduction, there were no late nineteenth-century or early twentieth-century guitarists who approached their literature on disc the way, say, Josef Hofmann did. But considering what we’ve been talking about today, might we be able to imagine what such an approach would have been like on the guitar? And can we enrich our own performances by allowing ourselves to be moved by such re-imaginations?

Finally, I have to mention an effect that the ubiquitousness of modern recordings has. When we listen to a recording repeatedly it tends to lock us in to one particular realization of a score, especially when we’re being trained and are impressionable. And in an odd way, a recorded performance then becomes a sort of “text” that is unconsciously granted authority. When this happens, the elements of different or older performance grammars are not allowed to develop or become crowded out. The performers who made the earliest recordings, as well as those who preceded them, had no such constraints.

I am arguing for an approach that asks us to recognize and transcend constraints: the constraints that may be imposed by fashion — and this includes current recordings of older music; the constraints that may be imposed by default assumptions made by our relationship with popular culture; the constraints that may be imposed by our interpretation of historical evidence; and the constraints that may be imposed by what we think is our intuition. A place to start might be to begin a new relationship with some of what I have discussed today and are part of what I have termed a nineteenth-century “performance grammar”: portamento, vibrato, rubato, and tempo modification. And it’s true that we can’t know the degree to which these things were employed by performers before the advent of recordings — even by examining written documentary evidence — but our experimentation with them may function as lenses through which we might discover new aspects of our repertoire, our relationship to performance, and our relationship to our audiences.

I would like to thank the GFA for affording me the opportunity to speak with you today, but most of all, I would like to thank all of you for listening. Thank you for coming.