The Clarinet BBoard

Re: How

Author: kdk  Date:   2025-08-26 18:12 Clearly, I have extra time on my hands this week. One obvious influence over the issue of "classical" composers' intent vs. performers' interpretive freedom is the advent of recordings over the last century or so. We can actually hear how 20th and 21st century composers meant for their music to sound. There are many recordings made by the composers themselves as conductors (or at least by closely associated conductors - think Robert Kraft - under the composer's supervision) or as soloists. The extent to which they stuck to their own notated tempos and specific expressive gestures gives some idea of how invested they were in the details once the music was published. And notation became more precise and detailed through the later Classical, Romantic, and "modern" eras. As a result, "urtexts" probably have more meaning in Bach or Mozart, where the sparsity or absence of expressive detail in the original notation has led over the centuries to more and more "stuff" being added in by later editors. We don't really need urtexts of Stravinsky (except to edit out actual errata - unintended misprints) or Shostakovich. Maybe less sloppy engraving and proofreading would help, and those corrections are significant, but removing layers of hand-holding by performers and editors added long after earlier composer's death can be illuminating. If Mozart wrote a florid passage with no phrasing or articulation at all, we may want to know that the articulations and dynamic gestures in someone's modern edition were the editor's ideas and not necessarily anything Mozart was committed to. If we see expressive marks and staccato notation all over a Bernstein piece or one by Honegger or Stravinsky, it probably was something the composer meant to ask for unless there's an editor cited. That modern performers should necessarily want to reproduce a composer's original intent is obviously an ongoing point of dispute here and elsewhere. Whether or not composers of 200 years ago or ones still living actually cared deeply about the details of what they wrote in their scores is yet another question for a different discussion. And transformation of "pop" music in myriad ways by a plethora of performers is, likewise its own deeply engaging thread. Karl

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