Judith Zaimont wrote:

>When Auden wrote of Music, he wrote of it personified in its maker: "The
>Composer" is the poem's title.  I, too, see the composer as the 'heart'
>of music, and clearly reference the score as the encapsulization of the
>composer's vision.  The virtues, and the deficiences, of a given piece
>are intrinsic; they are the product of the composer's vision.  One may
>encounter appropriate or inappropriate performance (in all gradations),
>but the item at hand to be presented can only be one current realization
>of the composer's creation.

How about the case of Aaron Copland who re-wrote one of his pieces on the
basis of a performance he heard at Juilliard? As a performer, I deal with
*many* composers, and my duo regularily commissions, and tours with new
works.  It is my experience that the last thing most composers want is a
performance that is "appropriate"; what they want is a performance that is
inspiring, exciting, creative, artistic, unique...  and oh yes, faithful to
the score.

Actually, I find myself in a bit of a quandry here.  I'm constantly all
over my students about taking inappropriate (!) liberties with a score,
and I try to impress upon them the two principles that a) *everything*
they do must be justified by the text, and b) everything on the page
must be realized in their interpretation.  However, it sounds like you
are confining the role of the performer to that of a mere conduit of the
composer's wishes, almost like a pair of surrogate hands.  Judith, I don't
want to misrepresent your thoughts here, and if I am, flame away:-), but
if this is what you are saying, I totally disagree.  All artists must be
true to their vision:  the composer, through medium of sound, realizes
his or her vision of the final piece by means of the score; the performer,
through the medium of his or her body (and its instrumental surrogate),
realizes his or her vision of the score by means of the sound created in
performance.  I put it to you that both processes are co-equal in the
final creative act of realizing the musical work.

>...Many of us do read score just as we read a novel or a treatise -- and when
>we do (if we do it with skill and knowledge) we are fully visiting with
>that work.  Score-reading permits the luxury of savoring at length, and in
>great detail, a moment within the piece which, in performance, may be only
>a fleeting wonder.  There is extra satisfaction in being able to pull apart
>the moment; inquire into and then understand how it is constructed,
>prepared and left; and then put it back into proportion within the work as
>a whole.  Matters of orchestration, "point", architecture, clarity of
>utterance, etc.  are all there clear in the score.  Score reading is
>especially useful in coming to understand a composer's syntax, as this
>highly-signifying aspect of a composer's style (if not well-understood by
>the performer) is often the most cavalierly-treated element in performance.

One can also "read" a play by Shakespeare, but even though one gains
enormous insight by studying the work as a "text" (something, by the way,
Shakespeare himself, according to the meager evidence available, would have
found puzzling; the "play" was what happened on stage; the written text was
the "book of the play"), even so, it does not achieve full flower until it
is *properly* produced in the theatre (see below).  And there are, of
course, an infinite number of proper productions, just as there are an
infinite number of bad ones.

>In score, the piece is truly itself, unclouded -- and, perhaps,
>unilluminated -- by the imposed filter of a specific performance.

What about "the imposed filter" of the performance in your mind while
reading the score? There is no such thing as music unmediated by sound,
whether the sound is real or imagined; i.e., there's no such thing as music
"no how".

>Indeed, for me, studying score is truly a "mind-to-mind" encounter.  (And
>JS Bach's is one of the supreme musical minds it has been my pleasure to
>meet, in score and in performance.)

This recalls to mind something Northrop Frye said to us once in class.
Commenting on some critics's notion that the poetry of *King Lear* was too
good to succeed in the theatre, he said, "a play that is 'too good' to act
is, by definition, a bad play...  and *King Lear* is certainly not a bad
play." I think the same idea can be applied to a musical score.

Cordially,

Leslie Kinton,
Piano Faculty, The Glenn Gould Professional School,
Royal Conservatory of Music, Toronto,
Anagnoson and Kinton duo website: http://www.pianoduo.com