I second Baris Kilicbay's reply to Bob Draper:
>But music is an art of performance and you need interpreters to appreciate
>it. Painting is a concrete art, the creation and the result are the same.
>If you will change anything in the painting, this would not be Van Gogh or
>da Vinci anymore... You can play Bach's keyboard suites in a modern piano
>or use female voices in the b-minor mass, this would not affect the music
>itself...
Or rather, it would affect the music at the moment of performance, but it
would ultimately not do any damage to the true creative artifact, the notes
on the page. What we do as interpreters is more akin to a critic writing
about the Mona Lisa: he is attempting to clarify the meaning behind the
painter's brush strokes, we are trying to clarify the meaning behind the
composer's notes. Because we are communicating our critical message
through sound, it is legitimate to rewrite details of a performance
(scoring, dynamics, tempo etc) if we think this will make the music's
meaning clearer than it would otherwise be - just as the critic of the
Mona Lisa will draw attention to particular details in the painting.
What we think the meaning is and how we present it is of course a largely
subjective process, involving both the experiences of the performer and the
type of audience he is playing to, and some angles of the work will always
be lost. But that's the only justification for having so many conductors
and pianists out there. If you think a particular interpretation obscures
some important facets of a work, you can listen to another - or even
better, you can go back to the score and read it yourself - just as you can
go and look at the Mona Lisa if all the art critics don't get you anywhere.
Free competition rules (although you will argue, of course, that the market
is skewed in favour of Mozart and 'big names')
(This brings me back to another pet hate of mine, the CD culture:
it's one of the unfortunate psychological effects of the permanency of
recordings that people see records just as much as 'primary literature'
as the notes on the page and expect 'the truth' from them, whereas as
I've argued, musical performances are only always 'secondary literature'.
There'd be much less hysteria about 'faithfulness to the score' if we
could only go to ephemeral live concerts)
Felix Delbruck
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