Craig Schlegelmilch writes:
John Bell Young stated...
>>So Leslie is again dead right when he says that motivic richness is lost
>>when students (and some very famous professionals, too!) gloss over the
>>pristine detail of the smaller sense units in favour of making some ersatz
>>large statement that, as a matter of form and content, was neither intended
>>or even implicitly composed.
>
>So what? It makes sense that there is some dictation of phrasing in
>the form, especially in the repertoire of the late 18th and early 19th
>centuries, but why shouldn't the performer be allowed interpret the piece
>as he or she sees fit? While it may be true that you cannot take the
>identical approach with pieces in different periods, there are elements of
>post-Classical performance that may fit (or even add) the performance. Use
>hindsight to your advantage.
Not quite. Hindsight ought to be used to the composer's, not the
performer's advantage. But in any case, it's usually the opposite that's
true: the conventions of the past, both compositional and interpretive,
continue to inform and thrive, in one form or another in the musical
products of present. It would be quite impossible, for example, to
understand or perform Schoenberg without a grasp of Brahms's contributions
to developing variation. But the cavalier imposition of one's personal
agenda onto the specific exigencies that govern compositional organization
and interpretive discretion must never be allowed to take priority, but
only to inform one's judgment. Thus too pose the question "so what" to the
indispensable and dare I say irrefutable fact that smaller rhythmic units
governed articulation and form in the classical era is to elevate ignorance
to a virtue, and to give way, without any justification whatsoever to an
essentially irresponsible interpretive attitude. This is hardly the stuff
of speculation, but centuries old principles. Nor is it a question of some
kind of ersatz "improving" on those principles, but of harvesting them for
their expressive content which is preternaturally rich, without any
superficial help from exogenous sources or from some delusion that, by
virtue of our modernity, we know how to do things better. From that point
of view, we might as well ask Madonna to sing Donna Elvira. No, I'm afraid
to say that Mr. Schlegelmiulch's argument is specious at basel, serving
only to debase the issue to tiresome dogma, and giving way precisely to the
perceived lack of freedom it hopes by so doing to assassinate. Performers
cannot simply play a work of Mozart, for example, as he "sees fit", at
least where that implies that he can do as he pleases: ignoring issues of
motivic inflection would be ot jettison the entire baroque and classical
era Diaspora of music-as- speech. Anyone with even a cursory familiarity
with that aesthetic knows full well the judicious precision that composers
of those eras labored to reproduce in a sonorous gestuary the rhythms and
characteristic of speech rhythms and poetry, of rhetoric and punctuation.
>I'm all for historical integrity, if its relevant (like a teaching or
>documenting situation or even history for the sake of history). But it
>still baffles me today why people in the Western Classical tradition
>insist on historical accuracy all the time and dismiss something that
>isn't. These pieces will evolve in performance if you let them and
>frankly, I see no harm in doing so.
There is no such thing as historical accuracy, insofar as we can only
rely on the accounts of contemporaries and the corps of traditions handed
down through generations to arrive, through dialectical means, at some
reasonable idea of how musical interpretation might have been apporached.
Integrity, however, is another issue, one that cannot be so easily
poo-pooed in order to satisfy some errant emotional need. The acquisition
of knowledge and the cultivation of the theoretical systoles that informed
articulation, phrasing and sound production in another era is not something
intended to deviate into mere dogma. Indeed, whoever believes it does not
only misunderstands historicity and the issues at hand, but misses the
point. Today we listen with different ears than our ancestors 200 or
300 years ago. Expert musicians, informed by those traditions and the
valuable documentation of scholarship, are hardly the ones to dismiss an
any approach that is worth its salt, but it will call into question an
interpretation that is woefully uninformed where it counts and that
willfully ignores the specific demands that proceed from COMPOSITIONAL
procedure. This is not a matter of ego, but of thoroughness,
professionalism, and in fact, of the kind of devoted musicality that
leaves no stone unturned en route to unraveling the multivalence of a text.
Historic performance practice (an unfortunate turn of phrase to begin with)
has no monopoly on truth, which is irrelevant anyway in the all-too-human
subjective household of musical delivery. But absent its findings and
the erudition and explicit interpretive advice offered IN WRITING by
contemporaries in past centuries, what remains is a skeleton, a rotting
carcass without meat on its metaphorical bones, a encephalitic infant with
no hope of growing up, old or even intelligent. So the question to pose,
in the final analysis, is not "So what" but "why not?" Or perhaps "who
needs intellectual laziness and the spiritual malaise of those who simply
don't care enough?."
>Perhaps I read too much into the message, but it seems to be such a common
>thread in all that is said in Western Classical circles. Am I out of line
>here or is there some truth to this?
What you must do is dig much deeper, and explore these issues in a much
broader, and yet more detailed context. My comments are hardly the reified
patter and redundant mimicking of the generalized polemics to which you
refer, but the contemplative, considered and pragmatically tested ideas
of one on the front trenches. It's not that you read too much into the
"message", which is to say, the issue of historical performance practices
and all it implies, but that you fail to read enough.
John Bell Young
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