Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2007-09-06 22:46
As I expostulated in another thread, intepretive choices have ranged across extremes, certainly since recordings were being made, and according to historical accounts, long before that. Composers performing their own work have in many cases departed radically from what they wrote.
Familiarity with the composer, his oeuvre, historical practices, musical theory, interpretations by other people, other musical works, and life in general are all important in assisting with interpretive choices. But (to me) music remains a performing art, and the next performance will be more important than all that has gone before.
So, look at the score, and with an open mind ask, "what does this suggest to me, here, now, in this day and age, and to people I know and want to communicate with?" Ask it many times. The answers might include things that the score does not literally indicate. It might even include things the score specifically says not to do - How? Because like other written documents, scores can sometimes be enigmatic, or even self-contradictory.
Another question: are you playing for people immersed in scores in their laps, tallying up differences, or for people listening to the flow of music in time, experiencing something beyond the little black marks?
Some geniuses - the "great" composers - have tapped deep into aspects of people that remain in force across centuries, and across many widely varied interpretations. Most of their music is in fact very accomodating to different approaches. Some of those composers objected to performers in their own time who transformed their works into show-off music, but that's a very specific case, and I'm certainly not limiting my suggestions to that set of choices (though in some pieces and contexts, even the show-off treatment may be justified.)
Are we disrespecting composers if we add or subtract from their literal score? I think it depends on the motivation, and maybe on the results. Someone indicated such changes create something new, something that's no longer the music of the composer. I disagree. As a composer here pointed out, the music of the composer, to the extent it exists outside his/her head, is a printed list of suggestions. Ideas. No performance will ever match what was in the composer's head. Further, if the same composer tried to write it down again, it would be different, probably a great deal so. That happens all the time.
Good music is virtually alive - it changes.
Should people who feel this way just write their own music and stick to playing that?
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