THOUGHTS ON MUSIC
& IINTERPRETATION … good performances, bad performances PART I
Long
Exchange in NewMusicBox provoked by a post from composer Alexandra Gardner …
you can read it all here:
The
original post provoked a sizeable outpouring of comments and thoughts, most –but
not all— from composers. It
surprised me a bit that there were so few commentaries from performers.
And also on
Gardner’s subsequent posting, a few days later, on "Good Performances" … this was definitely in the Department
of “Hmmm … you gotta wonder” because it drew many fewer commentaries. Dear me, can so few composers think of
a good performance or two? Are we
as a community so querulous and complaining? It cannot be.
Also in the Department of "you gotta wonder" ...
the comment –on the “Good Performances” posting no less- from a composer who says, “ …the orchestra where one
member stopped playing and started laughing “… agghh. Words fail me.
Maybe that commentary should have gone in the “Bad performances” blog?
No matter. I want to weigh on this, as an interpreter who’s played and
commissioned a good bit of new music, as one who is not based in the US, and as
one who increasingly programs that new music with pieces from the
repertoire (Part 2 will deal with that). As I read these
comments I found coalescing in my mind a whole bunch of things that I’ve wanted
to write about more extensively for some time now.
All of them have to do with that essential composer-interpreter-listener
tripod. Some of them are random:
this is not a super-organized essay with stuff like footnotes ;=))
In her
original post, Gardner quotes Daniel Felsenfeld, who says about a poor performance,
“by this I do not mean a player who is
not exactly flawless but rather an unprepared and uncaring performance”.
Both of those words –unprepared
and uncaring— are in a way
loaded. An unprepared performance
is almost by definition an uncaring one: the performer didn’t care enough about
the piece to prepare it adequately.
In a way the situation Kyle Gann describes in his comment several days
later is also uncaring, although superficially it seems like the opposite. “The
performers are fantastic. The first rehearsal is the day before the
performance. Expert sight-readers, they play virtually all the notes, more or
less at the right times, but the piece never gels. No time is given to understanding what this particular piece is all
about. … I had a piano
concerto played by a top-notch new-music ensemble on the above pattern. The
next year, a group of non-music-major students played it after rehearsing it
weekly from January to May. The student
performance sounded much more purposeful, intelligent, and together.” [Emphases
mine.]
Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? A great chamber-music colleague in a previous life of mine said,
“Time does something to music that
nothing else can do.” Time,
plus, of course, intention and desire.
Ralph Kirkpatrick writes about “preparing
an interpretation”. Such
a turn of phrase sounds almost 19th-century in the context of some
of these composers’ comments, doesn’t it?
Pretty sad.
I try in general to avoid pejoratives, and adjectives in general: to be
tolerant and open and Buddhist and such.
But here I take a stand: when the way the system works is that the first
rehearsal is the day before the performance, in which the players have to be
expert sight-readers in order to survive … Well, I say that Entire System is
twisted and bad. Bad for the
music, and by that I mean bad for the composer, bad for the performer, bad for
the listener, which is everyone involved.
Twisted because it basically says, “Time Is Money, boys and girls, so warm
up fast, get those high kicks lined up, and on to the Next Gig. How you might feel that gesture or that
phrase –assuming you might have the glimmer of a nanosecond to even FEEL, in this
context—has nothing to do with anything that matters.”
Every molecule of my being rejects this as a way of making music:
short-term, long-term, any-term, period.
Nothing wrong with being ace sight-readers: that’s been part of our
toolkit for various centuries now, for professional reasons and for our own
pleasure. The problem enters when
that gets confused with interpretation, and the preparation and time necessary
for the latter. And that comes
about, in large measure as a consequence of that nefarious “Time Is Money”
construct.
So I say: YES, Kyle Gann, you go right ahead, maestro, and demand a
minimum of three rehearsals. And performer
colleagues, YOU demand that minimum of three rehearsals and X preparation
time. And for heaven’s sake, ask questions
and listen – talk to one another.
Someone will doubtless say, This
is all well and good, Cervantes, but the REALITIES of our world are that this
is the way it is right now.
Well, I say: so CHANGE THAT. Start right now to do what you can to
change it. Demand that time. If composers start to demand it and performers
do too, pretty soon things will change.
Reality is what we make it, we just need the imagination and the
intestinal fortitude, las agallas as we say in Spanish, to make the reality that the art deserves.
Chris Cerrone comments that “Mozart
is ritualistically slaughtered every day by aspiring students” and (further
up) Pam tells an anecdote from a teacher of hers, quoting Virgil Thomson as
saying, “ … Your music should be able to
stand up to the most incompetent performances”. I agree.
Mozart, and various Bachs, and how many others, have survived thousands
of performances from the ridiculous to the sublime. Why should any composer creating right now set her sights
any lower?
Who knows how much of the music that’s being created right now, with
dedication and sincerity, talent and skill, will stand the test of time, stay
for posterity, blah blah? Well, we
don’t know, so we interpreters have to give the very best service we can to the
music we believe in. That’s
the only answer I can think of.
Yes, I said that: “The music we believe in”. The music
I believe in may not be the same music that my colleague in Paris or Madrid or
New York or Mexico City believes in, and that is all to the good. That way lots of different music gets
played, by interpreters who believe in it.
I will go further and say: If you don’t believe in it, don’t play it. It’s not fair to the composer, to the
listener, or to you as an interpreter.
Assuming an interpreter is what you are and aspire to be, as opposed to
some kind of living, breathing MIDI reproduction machine.
Of course when we are studying we work on all kinds of music: that is
how we form judgement, context, and taste. I’m talking about later on, when you’re out there in the Big
Bad World, as a Professional.
This only goes for soloist and chamber colleagues: If after giving it some time you don’t
have convictions about the piece, or aren’t excited about it, you shouldn’t be
playing it. Just that simple. Maybe you keep it on your music shelf
for later examination, but you have no business playing it right now: chances
are good it will result in one of those lacklustre realizations to which we
have all snoozed off at one time or another. It’s not fair to you, to the
composer, to the listener. If you
feel your group pressured you into playing it then you need to all sit down and
work out a better consensus process for selecting rep. Maybe it wasn’t written for you, or
even for your instrument (this has been known to happen).
What is written is the score, whether it looks like George Crumb or
Johannes Brahms. It is that basic
document from which we depart and to which we must always return.
This is assuming that the piece interests you, that it engages you, that
you feel you will have something to say with it: If the score is ambiguous
after you’ve studied it thoroughly, ASK.
If there is idiotic accidental-enharmonic notation because of Finale or Sibelius,
propose a change. If you sense
what the composer is trying to do but the writing for your instrument is badly
conceived –or even if it doesn’t work for your hands, jiminy-- propose a change
or an Ossia. Liszt proposed some of his own, in
consideration of pianists who hadn’t his genius at the instrument. Musicologist colleagues, please correct
me …
I was glad to read Andrew H’s comment, “If you’ve written something so weird that nobody notices when you get
a bad performance, the joke’s on you, so to speak. Certainly you’re not doing
yourself any favors by blaming it on the performers; and if you can accept some
responsibility, you’re a step closer to fixing the problem. … Honest question:
If you’re not writing for real performers and a real audience, with
understanding of the shortcomings of each, then what business do you have
seeking a performance of your work?”
He goes on to remark, “There’s no
shame in writing for yourself, but you can’t expect someone else to understand
foreign concepts unless you take the time to teach them. And yes, that means
audience education for anything which isn’t closely related to standard rep for
that audience.”
And by the way, why can’t
performers share that audience education with composers? When we are really inside the skin of a
piece, when we have really prepared an interpretation, in Kirkpatrick’s
beautiful phrase, we are uniquely capable of doing that.
Andrew H starts by observing, “isn’t
it in some sense the composer’s fault for writing a piece that’s not
followable, such that even the performers can’t get it right? Should we ever
allow ourselves to be absolved of that responsibility?” I have to say, dear Andrew H, that I
think it’s not anyone’s FAULT in particular. I like better your word responsibility.
This put me in mind of a favourite quote from (yes, again) Kirkpatrick’s
Preface to his edition of the
Scarlatti Sonatas:
“As every composer and writer knows, there is no better way of finding
out what one really feels than having to set it down on paper, or having to
communicate it through an artificial and restricted medium. A composer cannot write down an
orchestral score without having eliminated every element of the haphazard and
non-organic: he has to do much more than merely float on the seas of his own
emotions. He must adopt definite
concrete means of conveying those emotions through a medium over which he no
longer has any direct control, nor any control at all other than the manner in
which he has set his notes down on paper.”
Kirkpatrick goes on to describe a parallel process for the interpreter …
“The performer’s problem is less formidable, but similar. He must be able to marshal the
spontaneity of his sensations into a coherent, ordered performance which he can
produce at any time and under any circumstances. To this end, he must sense what elements of a piece are
fixed and unchangeable in their relationship to each other, what is basic
syntax and structure, and what is mere rhetorical inflection, what can be
improvised and altered from performance to performance. Only by this security in relation to
basic musical elements can he achieve true freedom and spontaneity in
performance. The ability to make
departures depends on a thorough knowledge of what one is departing from.”
The last sentence in that memorable paragraph, I feel, applies equally
to the composer.
In the “Good performances” post, Gardner writes:
“While the ‘us vs. them’ dichotomy between composers and performers is
apparently alive and well, it seems highly unproductive. The last time I
checked, we are all musicians. Maybe we are approaching the language of music
from different standpoints, but we are all in the same field. I may not be a
performer, but when I’m working with a musician or ensemble, I enter into that
relationship with the expectation that we are all striving to reach the same
goal. It doesn’t always work out, but even if it doesn’t, the world keeps
turning. Both good performances and bad performances are a two-way street—it’s
up to both composer and performer to work together to determine how things are
going to shake out.”
I can’t believe there is still some sort of “us-vs.-them” dichotomy
between composers and performers. Didn't that die a a well-deserved death a decade or so ago?
How can this be? It’s not
only “highly unproductive”, as Gardner says: it’s absurd. To begin with, it makes hard labour out
of something that should, in the end, be FUN. A major factor must surely be the above-mentioned “Time is
Money” fake world which we must all set to work and change.
So how do we make it better –at least in the short term? I say: Think, listen, talk.
David Wolfson comments, “ … I’ve
found that musicians rarely want to tell you if you’ve written something
unidiomatic for their instrument; they seem to feel it’s their responsibility
to somehow make it work.” Yes.
In my experience this is too often true.
For reasons with which I won’t bore the assembled e-multitudes, it took
me a long, long time to learn how to do this. I think musicians have a kind of basic reverence for
composers, for the act of creation.
This is really wonderful, we should indeed have that reverence; but it
shouldn’t make us deaf and dumb.
If anything, it should heighten our curiosity and daring.
Looking back, I think it was working with student composers here in
México during and after my Fulbright-García Robles year which did that for me. In reality, all I learned was to ask
the same question I ask the score of a composer whom I can’t call up on the
telephone: “What’s going on here? What are you trying to say?”
You simply can’t dive in saying stuff like, “This doesn’t work”: to begin with it’s just not kind. (Plus, would
you do that with Brahms?) You have
to ask; and then be prepared to reciprocate by speaking honestly about things
that you just don’t get, that don’t work for you (and be sure you yourself know why that is) or that –in your
opinion— don’t meet the goals the composer has stated; and then propose
solutions based on your own convictions about the piece as an interpreter.
If there is a composer out there who says that I as an interpreter have
no business having convictions about the piece, I say, Go home and play with your inflatable MIDI doll, honey, I fear we have
nothing to talk about.
To the composer who says that he shouldn’t have to explain things
verbally to the interpreter, I say, Wake
up and smell the coffee my dear! You will
have to talk with audiences in an approachable and non-condescending way;
figure out how to do it with performers as well. Not only will it help your
musical life, it will help your personal one as well.
To the performer who finds it difficult to talk with the composer about
instrumental or other issues, I say, Find
a way, dear. Ask questions of the
composer and also of yourself: What’s going on here (in this passage, in this
section, in this piece)? What is my story about this piece? What would I say to a non-specialized
audience to introduce it? The
very best question to ask the composer, always --for me at least-- is What are you trying to do here?
Sometimes the instrumental difficulties can be resolved SO easily it’s
almost laughable. But to find that
out you have to ask, and, as I mention above, sometimes based on your own hands
and your own convictions about the piece –and with the score always present—
you propose an Ossia. That same thing about musical life and
personal life goes for interpreters as well, some more people skills never hurt
anyone!
I agree with Kirkpatrick when he says that the score must be as clear as
the composer can possibly make it.
Once you write down what’s in your inner ear, it’s not exclusively yours
any more. Involving a good,
thoughtful interpreter in the process, once you have a close-to-final version
of the score, can help you get the distance you need in order to understand what you
might have omitted. But once you
finish that process, you have no control: you’ve given the piece to the
universe.
I remember when I was working on John Corigliano’s Fantasy on an Ostinato. At a certain point in the piece he puts
the indication “unhurried”. It’s in a place where I suppose one might be
tempted to move briskly along.
That one word Unhurried, as I thought about it,
completely changed my perspective.
It also made me think twice about every meno mosso I ever saw afterwards. Or Debussy’s tempo indication at the beginning of his 2nd
Étude Pour les tierces (for Thirds): Moderato ma non troppo.
Now that is one to think about!
This is all part of the work that each of us, composer and interpreter,
must undertake.
You have to be mindful of your words and have your brain in gear before
you move your mouth. This sounds
like more basic “people skills” but I have to say that a good percentage of the
reasons behind the composer-performer dichotomy to which Alexandra refers would
be helped along mightily by a good dose of those. A recent example: I asked a Symphony colleague here about a
commissioned piece which the orchestra was preparing. He made a regretful face and said, It’s just not a good piece.
Knowing and respecting the composer and her music I asked, Good heavens, why? Oh Jeez, he said, the
harmonics for the ‘cellos aren’t properly written. Such a pain!
OK sweetie, It’s a pain; but that’s a deficiency in how the score was
prepared, not poor architecture or conception or inadequate through-composing
or fundamental stuff like that.
