I know Jon especially was interested to hear from non-performers about the
question of how they feel Re: an artist who memorizes or who doesn't, but
I thought I'd throw in a performer's perspective too.

First, though, as a watcher/listener: For different types of performers,
I'm now realizing I have different standards.  I'm seldom bothered by a
pianist using the music, because the pianist doesn't face the audience,
so it doesn't form an obvious barrier.  So the question for me is
purely aural/interpretive there: does the pianist play more freely,
authoritatively, intelligently, beautifully with or without the score?
In string quartet concerts one is essentially eavesdropping on an intense
interaction among four people; and using scores is the convention there
anyway.  (Who expects a SQ to memorize even one early Beethoven?) For
players who face the audience, I like to see/hear a soloist NOT use a score
if possible, in part because the stand is a physical and psychological
obstacle.  For singers, I feel even more strongly about it: because of
the texts, and also the lack of an instrument in the hands, tucked under
the chin, up against the mouth, between the knees, the stand can seem more
of a barrier than it might with a solo instrumentalist who is already
performing THROUGH some visible medium.  However, I wouldn't expect a
singer to pull off something newly written, or a very tricky score like
George Perle's Dickinson Songs, without a score.

How the use-of-score is handled is also relevant: the performer must know
the music well enough to use the score only as a reference point, or else
contact is lost with the audience.  Another consideration for s singer, at
least, is performance context: If one is singing with a chamber ensemble
(i.e., everyone else is using the score), is it more appropriate to sing
without the score if one has memorized the work, or (as noted Re: Clara
Schumann in another post) does it seem like "showing off" or bad manners?
Finally, another factor is the amount of rehearsal time one has with
colleagues.  If a soloist has enough time with his/her pianist or other
recital partner/s to get comfortable not only with the score (which one
can do on one's own of course) but with the flow of that music between the
performers, then off-book is the way to go.  Without enough rehearsal to
produce that comfort zone, that sense of being able to feel each other in
the performance, it's risky to put the score away.

So, I'm already into the performer perspective a little.  As a singer, I
know that anytime I am off book, I give a better performance.  ANY time.
So if I'm doing a work that's new to me, I'll try to get off book as soon
as I can.  If I have enough rehearsal time with my pianist, you bet.  But
there can be yet other considerations that the gentle (?) listener may have
no idea of:

When I was first giving concerts in NYC, in the '80s, it was my
commitment to sing anything I did without the score if humanly possible.
It freed me -- and still does -- to take in the music through my ears
rather than through my eyes.  A strange claim, perhaps, but true, and
adding a different spin on the term Augenmusik: as long as I'm still
watching a score, my sense of the music remains relatively linear, and the
sounds of the players/singers I'm with literally feel as if they enter my
head in a different way.  Without the score, I hear not only "in the round"
but also feel much more centered in the present moment.  Not to mention the
sense of direct communication with the audience as well as one's fellow
players.

However, in the early '90s I suffered very badly from Chronic Fatigue
Syndrome, which not only destroyed my energy for several years and created
a great deal of physical pain, but greatly impaired the crispness of my
mental functioning.  In the worst months, I would look at a computer screen
or a score and my mind would go to grey fog.  Happily, after a lot of
medical and alternative-medical trial and error, I've gotten through about
90 percent of the CFIDS, except for some excess avoirdupois picked up
during the years when I couldn't exercise a little on a good day without
paying for it with 2-3 days of prostration.  (No, Dave, I won't digress
into the Fat Singers thread here, but will say, relevant to the present
subject, that you don't know what a performer's been through till you've
walked a year, or maybe ten, in her moccasins.) So when I went back to
singing as I recovered, at first I couldn't trust my once-fabulous memory
for new material.  It felt humiliating to sing certain pieces of standard
repertoire with a score in front of me, but for a couple of years I did
rather than not perform.

The shift happened when I was getting ready for a Robert Starer 75th
Birthday concert in Manhattan last January.  Allan Kozinn had just written
a NY Times piece on this subject of memorization -- which is not so
infrequently discussed as you may have thought, Jon!  -- with the general
conclusion being (as I recall: remember what I said about that memory!)
that in standard sonata/song repertoire it was insultingly lazy to use a
score, but in a contemporary piece it was much more kosher.

I knew my repertoire for the concert -- a chamber song-cycle with 3
instrumentalists -- very well, having recorded it just a year before with
the composer, and having sung some concerts with parts of the cycle since
then.  Even though it was a contemporary (1994) piece, I didn't want the
damned music stand in front of me.  So I made sure I knew it, and with some
very real apprehension gave the NYC performance "naked," as it were.

It was one of the most enjoyable and complete performance experiences
I have ever had.  Everything came together -- words, music, dynamics,
interactions with the other players and with the audience, intentionality
of what gestures I used.  I know that, had I used the score, it would have
been a very different performance "out there" as well as inside, for me.
(P.S.  I did drop one one-measure repetition of a word in the last song,
and no one but my colleagues onstage knew.) And the experience gave me a
lot of confidence to return to memorized performance, whenever possible.
I just enjoy it so much more, and so does the audience.

That's my 48 cents on the subject!  Clearly a provocative thread for this
lister.

Regards to all,
Danielle
http://www.HVmusic.com/artists/danielle