Results from musicologists and performance survey

In September and October I did a survey of the ways musicologists engage in and think about performance, asking, among other things whether scholars still play, whether performance (present or past) affect the way we do scholarship, and whether we consider ourselves musicians. If you click on the link below, the survey results should open as a .pdf file.

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BxpT7_gjKgquMTZlZjJkZGItMTI1Yy00YWZjLWExMTgtOTM2NjMwNzRhM2Fk&hl=en&authkey=CNfwlZkO

By whom?

Posted on October 26, 2010 by marykhunter

Yesterday’s mail included an ad for a Handel and Haydn Society concert where Robert Levin will play Beethoven’s 4^th piano concerto. The ad says “Beethoven by Levin, Haydn by Labadie” (the conductor). Of course the “by” could be shorthand for “performed by,” but I think the ad is both referring to Levin’s improvisations and being a tiny bit provocative. (How can a Beethoven concerto be “by” anyone but Beethoven?) On the other hand, if the publicity department of H&H  is as overeducated as you might expect in Boston, they might be able to justify the “by” in philosophical – even phenomenological – terms.  Bruce Ellis Benson’s The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music (Cambridge, 2003) provides exactly those terms. And it’s a fascinating read.

Being a philosopher, Benson can’t help getting excited about the perennial questions of where “the work” begins and ends and how to define its identity. His fundamental idea is to displace “works” from the center of the conceptual world of classical music, and replace the work-concept with the notion that music is profoundly and pervasively an activity rather than a series of more-or-less congealed objects waiting to be recreated or instantiated in performance.  You might think you recognize Christopher Small and the idea of “musicking” here, but Benson makes no reference to him or it.

Small’s Musicking starts from a more-or-less ethnomusicological observation that while all cultures have musical behaviours, relatively few  cultures have “works,” and almost none have works that inspire such reverence as those in the classical music canon. His notion that “music as a thing does not exist” seems to arise from an idea that Western classical music culture can’t be  (and shouldn’t think it is) fundamentally different from all other musical cultures  – an idea that often comes across as a large chip on his shoulder about the ossified and exclusive institutions and practices of classical music. The perception of such a chip has, I think, prevented his work being taken as seriously as it could be in the classical scholarly world. But that’s another post.

Benson is also working from experience, and, like Small, wants to put classical music in a framework more like that of other musics.   However he is less focused on the cultural universality of playing and singing than on the way classical music practices (and especially performing practices) seem to differ from their stated ideology. That is, he notes that although the dominant rhetorical paradigm about playing and singing invokes a kind of obedience to “the work” (however we define that), the actual practice is that performers add vast amounts to what is notated, often the elements that may most immediately of viscerally affect listeners, and that all performers of all notated music co-create “works” in a fashion fully equal to that of composers.

The idea that Benson uses to justify thinking about performance in this way is improvisation. He suggests that the musical world comprises a kind of continuum of improvisation, to which writing, playing, and hearing music all contribute.  Composers improvise, not only on the moment-to-moment level of putting one thought after another, but also in “riffing” on a tradition or genre; performers then improvise even when the score has fulsome instructions, because notation always radically underdetermines the sound of music;  and listeners also improvise as they make sense of what they hear. Performance, then, is not there to “instantiate” works, or even to “bring them to life,” but rather to complete and co-create them. “Works,” indeed, do not exist without performance, and the identity of any given work changes over time as performances accrue. Nevertheless,  says Benson, even as performers  in fact improvise, they claim they are not (unless they are doing what Robert Levin does).

Does the philosophical claim that performance of even the most fully notated work is improvisation and co-creation make any difference outside philosophy (and concert publicity)?  As a phenomenologist Benson claims that he’s just theorizing what already happens. He does not, however, address how, or whether, actual performers negotiate among apparently contradictory prescriptions about performance, (“express yourself”; “mind the composer’s intentions”) or whether, indeed, contradictoriness is something that performers experience in thinking about how they will play a phrase or a work. What performers experience as negotiation or contradiction is an empirical question, however: I hope I can make some progress towards answering it in this year’s project.

On the basis of taking lessons and being coached and watching my own thought processes as I play, I suspect that some level or degree of contradiction between prescription and actuality is endemic, if not inevitable, in classical music performance in the modern world. And I don’t mean just the built-in incongruence between how well one might like to play and how well one does play, but a more fundamental level of “rub” or “tension” between what we think we ought to be doing as performers and what we in fact are doing. The notion of improvisation goes some way towards smoothing out the rough intersection of an “ideal” work and an “all-too-actual ” performance, but if the slight frisson caused by “Beethoven BY Levin” is anything to go by, the relationship between composition and performance in classical music culture is likely to remain contested for some time to come.

Wows

I've started interviewing people for my project on the ways the ideologies of classical music performance connect to the actual act of performance. One question I've been asking is for my interviewees to describe one or more performances they witnessed that absolutely knocked their socks off, and to try to say why. I'm not going to spill the beans on my interviewees yet: I'm not ready to start making larger patterns out of what I've been told. But I want to offer my own little list of unforgettable performances and a bit of commentary in the hopes that you, dear readers, might want to contribute your own memories of extraordinary musical moments.

1. Garrick Ohlsson played Rach 2 with the Boston Symphony about 5 years ago. It was fine (I'm not a great fan of the Rachs). The audience went wild, of course, so Great Garrick came out again, and played a Chopin Waltz as an encore (I don't remember which one).  It was incredible. The audience was completely silent, and there was that wonderful electricity in the hall that happens when everyone is actually listening. To be entirely trite about it, the waltz sounded as though he was improvising it on the spot. Little rubatos, witty returns of the main strain, a lovely range of colours. Just breathtaking. I had the sense that I had never really heard Chopin before I heard this.

2. At Kinhaven Adult Chamber music weekend June 2008. Eva Gruesser,  the concertmistress of the American Composers Orchestra, the former first violin of the Lark quartet, who has given me some violin lessons, and whom I adore, both as a person and as a player, played the second movement of the Brahms B minor piano trio with June Wu, a doctor, and Martha Nabatian, now retired, and a longstanding amateur cellist. If you know this piece, you'll know that it spends a lot of time in antiphonal exchanges between the piano and the strings, that everyone is very exposed, and that one of its (many) difficulties is to keep it going and still retain a sense of cosmic space and unhurried gorgeousness.  It was boiling hot in a totally uninsulated hall, we were well into the 3^rd hour of one of the two final concerts in which everyone plays everything they've learned, Eva had just come back from breast cancer, and my father had died two months before. Despite the gulf in ability between Eva and the two others, this remains one of the most beautiful performances of anything I have ever heard. Eva poured her heart into the music and miraculously carried the others along with her. But it wasn’t just that it was beautiful. It was the extraordinary generosity of her playing, her capacity to take the occasion completely seriously and give the music both to Martha and June and to all of us that completely undid me, and still does when I think about it.

3. In 1973 I was an undergraduate on an exchange year at Eastman, deciding that music history was probably my destiny.  I was taking a course on the Bach Cantatas with Bruce Bellingham, and had just discovered the Harnoncourt period-instrument recordings. The one in question is the Matthew Passion and in particular the last chorus "Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder." Harnoncourt took it much faster than I had ever heard it before, and that, plus the lightness of the period instruments, plus the dance-like rhythm, was a cataclysm to me. So Bach's religious music (and thus, to me at the time, Bach himself) was NOT about the tortured yearnings of the soul of an individual genius for contact with the divine!  Wow! It was about community, about shared ritual, about the body, about, in a word, human beings that I could make sense of. This completely blew my mind. Who was Bach anyway?

What did it mean that a performance could change my sense of a composer's very person?

A concert encore, the pianist thoroughly "warmed up" by a monster concerto and knowing he had the audience in (literally) the palm of his hand. An intimate musical occasion based on, and shot through with personal associations. A recording that initiated an intellectual paradigm shift. There are others of course: my 4-year old singing " You are my Sunshine" to us and his grandparents (yes, the one who wrote his college-entrance essay about being the "unmusical" one in a musical family); Bruno Maderna conducting Mahler 9 at the Proms 2 months before he died, and my father, the confirmed non-Dionysian, flushed with excitement at the music; James Levine conducting the  BSO in the beginning of the Symphonie Fantastique as though driving a car on an ice rink ... The point is not the list, though, but rather the amazing mix of musical, historical, personal, familial, intellectual, sheerly sonic, social factors that go into an unforgettable performance. 

What are your "moments musicaux?"

Life, Death, and Busts

Some of us probably remember going to the piano teacher down the road and associate our first piano lessons with that collection of busts on the piano – Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, at the very least; perhaps Chopin and Handel and Brahms as well.

The bust as a sculptural genre goes back to the Egyptians, and is (unsurprisingly) "closely linked to portraiture, " according to the Oxford Companion to Western Art: eras that valued portraiture also produced a lot of busts. During the Renaissance and in the 18^th and even 19^th centuries, busts were made of all kinds of people – soldiers, statesmen, artists, children. Even in modern times heroes local and national are commemorated by busts.

 

Modern reproductions of busts also seems to be something of a thriving business if you look on Google. Statue.com has the following categories of busts, which I find fascinating:  

Composers, 

Beethoven, 

Presidential, 

Shakespeare, 

Nefertiti, 

Greeks and Romans, 

Julius Caesar, 

Caesar Augusta [sic] 

Hermes.

Not only is it kind of cool that Beethoven, Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus and Hermes get their own special listings apart from (respectively) "Composers" and "Greeks and Romans," (Shakespeare is simply his own category), but it tells us something pretty nifty about composer busts. With the unique exception of Shakespeare in literature, music is the only art now celebrated by busts. Indeed, I've tried Googling "Literary busts" "Busts of Artists" and so forth, with no real luck.  Yes, busts were made of visual artists and literary figures in their own times, but they have on the whole not made it into modern popular culture the way composer busts have.

Not only are busts of composers individually accepted, but you can get them in sets, kind of like baseball cards, but more awkward in the pockets:

What are busts about? When I ask people about busts, they often say something like,  "it humanizes the composers" And indeed the verbiage on the statue.com website suggests exactly that: "Mozart busts are one of the most popular items in the bust gallery. This child prodigy still reigns as one of the greatest composers of all time. His graceful music has transcended the generations not just because of his wonderful melodies, but also due to the stories that his music tells and the feelings that it conveys. Starting at age 5, he composed over 600 works including symphonies, concertos, chamber music, sonatas, serenades, operas, masses, and more." And there's more  there about the other busted composers if you want to check it out.

But why choose a bust to "humanize" a composer? If you ask me, they really don't do what people usually mean by "humanize." For one thing, they're downright creepy: all white, with sightless, pupil-less eyes, chopped off at the neck.  And why choose composers to "humanize" in this way? Why don't  painting studios get decorated with little white busts of Leonardo Da Vinci,  Delacroix, and Caspar David Friedrich?

I'm guessing the answers come in several categories. First, there's the physical setup. The classic place for a composer bust is a piano, which is a substantial piece of furniture which also serves as the musical instrument at which compositional inspiration often comes  (or is thought to come) to fruition. One could of course hang a picture near the piano, but there's something about the physical contact of the effigy with the instrument: in other words convenience  combines with a kind of spiritual communion in the bust-on-piano situation.  The following famous painting of Liszt (at the piano) Chopin ,  Rossini and others really  brings the conjunction of the physical and spiritual to the fore, because the bust of Beethoven is on the one hand exactly where you would expect a bust to be, but on the other, it's completely out of proportion, apparently weightless (what's it standing on?), and its placement in front of the stormy (natch) sky makes it look as though Beethoven is not really in the room at all, but is, rather, a force of nature.

More important than the furniture (or semi-furniture) nature of busts, though, is their associations with funerary art. As far as I can tell, busts in the ancient world (whether as bas-reliefs or 3D sculptures) were most often used to commemorate the dead.  (I could be completely wrong about this.) But whether or not I'm right about ancient busts, it is certainly the case that the Roman Pantheon as revived (if that's the right word) in the Renaissance  was a prime repository for busts, especially of dead artists, and that from the late 18^th century pantheons and pantheon-like structures (e.g. the Capitol Rotunda) have housed busts of deceased heroes. Interestingly, a Google image search for composer busts also produces a  couple of death masks. In other words, busts unambiguously remind their audiences that the people they represent are dead. This is certainly the case in the painting above.  This idea fits nicely with Bruno Nettl's observations about conservatory culture in  Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music that the composers of classical music constitute a "pantheon" whose worship is the point of the institution.

What else does the composer bust do for us?  My guess is that it has to do with music's insubstantiality, and our fascination with that, especially in classical music culture, where performances call up the spirits of its dead originators much more than is the case with, say, Gershwin musicals, Thelonious Monk tunes, or folk materials, which live more fully in the present moment of performance. It's a common locution in classical music culture to say that performance "brings the work/ music to life," which implies that the score is a corpse until the moment when a flesh-and-blood performer pumps a pulse into its veins. (We don't say that reading a novel  brings it to life, by contrast.) If busts don't in fact humanize composers by reminding us of their personalities or lives (or even, in many cases their actual appearance -- see especially the Mozart and Bach busts above), perhaps in emphasizing their deadness they do at least remind us that these men were mortal. If that's the point,  I suppose they serve, in the way that a crucifix serves to fix the mind on the sublimely incomprehensible relations of the spirit and the flesh, to make us contemplate the miracle of repeated resuscitation that is classical music. 

"You don't play like musicologists..."

Posted on October 27, 2010 by marykhunter

This was clearly meant as a compliment to me and my husband, also a musicologist, when a coach at a chamber music weekend discovered what our “day jobs” were. I suppose she could have meant “you don’t play as accurately as I might expect a musicologist to play” (and that might well be true, at least of me). But I think she meant something like “you play as if you mean it,” or “you play with expression.”

There are several possible snide answers to how a “musicologist” might play. With audible footnotes? Playing every ossia passage as well as its original? Playing every piece several times in succession from different editions?  But the point here is not to whine about how performers don’t give musicologists credit for being musicians (let’s face it, musicologists don’t usually give performers much credit for being thinkers). So let’s move on.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be told “you play like a musicologist” and for that to be a compliment?  I am quite sure that my musicology- (or at least music-history)-brain is deeply engaged when I play; and on the whole, I think it makes me play more imaginatively, more thoughtfully, and more expressively. (If only it could make me play better in tune!) To take one really obvious musicological area, it makes a difference to me to know what a Baroque violin feels and sounds like even if I’m playing Bach on a modern instrument. I wouldn’t necessarily want to make the modern one sound like the old one, even if I could, but I have a sense of the music as more bodily, more connected to speech and dance than would be the case if I had only ever heard or tried the modern set up. But of course my earthier sense of Bach derives not only from the physical feel of the animal-origin “organic” gut strings  but also from knowing something about both dance topoi and rhetoric in the eighteenth century. I think what my music-historical knowledge gives me is a kind of horizon of more or less plausible interpretative possibilities, obviously filtered through a sense of what I, as a modern person, like to hear. I’m not arguing that historically-plausible  (NOT the same as historically-informed!) interpretation is the only good kind, but I am saying that for me, at least, having some sense of the acoustic means and the rhetorical and gestural world in which a work originated really helps my creativity when I move to thinking “in” music as I play.

Playing Bach “like a musicologist” is an easy thing to discuss, of course, because the musicological issues are relatively clear and certainly well-trodden. But what would it mean to play, say, Poulenc “like a musicologist”? Beyond the obvious attention to editions, and so on (which would not be immediately obvious to anyone but the most knowledgeable), what musicological data might make a difference to performance or change the horizon of historical plausibility? Once you get into the twentieth century, the difference in sound-world between “then” and “now” narrows and what may take the place of “sound-world to be evoked or recreated” is a sense of the composer’s biography and intention – a horribly slippery topic. On the other hand, since there are recordings of Poulenc himself playing the piano, I suppose there’s the potential for playing “like a [cartoon] musicologist” by making slavish imitations of the composer’s own playing.

More seriously, though, Poulenc’s Frenchness, his Catholicism, his sexuality, his connection to the fashion world – all things discoverable by reading (or doing) musicology — any of these could make a difference to the spirit a performer might try to communicate in a Poulenc piece.  Could a performance  communicate any of those things, and if so, would it count as “musicological”?  Unless there were programme notes, most performances under most circumstances could not communicate anything as specific as Catholicism, homosexuality, or modishness (Frenchness is another matter), but they could suggest devoutness, desire, or triviality/insouciance arising from those more specific conditions. My guess is that in the world of stereotypes in which this post originated, a performance that communicated values or ideas as vague or mood-oriented as “devoutness” or “desire” or “triviality” would not count as “musicological,” however directly these ideas were taken from books about music.

And I think they wouldn’t count as “musicological” because they are ideas that come with an emotional component. What I’m getting at here is how nice it would be if “musicology” could be understood as a discipline that contributed not only to the “correctness ” of performances, but also to their depth of spirit and variety of imagination. What needs to change for this to happen?