Is a classical musical score more like a novel or a play? In other words, is a score like the text of a novel or poem, whose meaning, at least in principle, is given by the words themselves, and not by how someone reads or declaims those words? Or is a score like the script for a play or a film, where the meaning is only realized in performance, with different performances possibly evoking very different meanings?

What is the meaning of Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example? Almost four decades ago, the Sydney Theatre Company did a production of this play with the forest scenes set in a nightclub, and with the same actors doubling and cross-dressing (eg, the actor playing the daytime Duke also played the night-time Fairy Queen). This interpretation gave the play a whole different meaning to the traditional whimsical comedy, and made it a psychodrama about sexual identity and gender presentation.

The musicologist Nicholas Cook has argued that we would benefit from thinking of written music as more like a play script than a literary text (Cook 2001). Not everyone agrees. Stravinsky argued against musical scores being interpreted at all – the performer just needs to identify the composer’s intent and then execute it faithfully (Stravinsky 1942/1947). We might call this approach the Master and the Emissary approach, with the performers (at worst) subordinate slaves to the God-composer. My impression is that this is the overwhelmingly dominant view from classical (or art) music musicians, musicologists, and music educators. This philosophy of the roles of performers and composers is, of course, totally at odds with improvisatory musical genres, such as jazz, or organ recitals, or Indian classical music.

There are many problems with the Master-Emissary model. The first is discerning the composer’s intent. No musical notation can incorporate every single aspect of a performance, so there will always be scope for different interpretations of the very same score. Cook (2014) gives an example of two different interpretations of Schubert’s Gb major Impromptu Op. 90 No. 3, by pianists Murray Perahia and Eugen D’Albert.  Perahia’s interpretation emphasizes Schubert’s regular 4-bar phrasing, while D’Albert plays through the phrase breaks every four bars, in order to emphasize other emotional moments he finds in the music. These emotional moments happen at different places to the ends of the 4-bar phrases.  The two interpretations are very different and neither one is more correct than the other.

The second challenge in discerning a composer’s intent from a musical score is that norms and practices about how to read musical notation are not objective nor static, but change over time and across cultures. Until the second half of the 19th Century for example, a notated piano chord would usually have been played as an arpeggio. A third challenge is the same faced by anyone seeking to verify the internal states of an autonomous software entity, an agent: We can’t ever know definitively what another person’s true intentions are, or were. In the case of software agents, a sufficiently clever agent can always simulate any required internal mental state to fool an external observer (Wooldridge 2000).

Personally, I have always had a moral objection to the Master and Emissary model of musical performance (as previous posts on this blog will show): By what moral right does the composer assert control over the performer? The idea of a musical score as a script rather than as a text provides another model for the relationship between composer and performer, closer to one of equality. If the meaning of a score is only realized in and through its performance, then the performer can not be a slave to the composer. Rather the two must be understood as equals, engaged in musical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual dialog with one another. The score initiates this dialog and it is the locus of the dialog (the content about which the dialog occurs). The form of the dialog, and its specific contents, arise from the score and from stylistic interpretations which are reasonably appropriate to the form and style of the composer.

What is reasonably appropriate for any particular score, of course, may depend on many factors, including cultural and performance practices and technologies (such as instruments) that were common at the time of the composition of the score, along with all manner of cultural and technological factors since that time. We play Bach’s music on keyboard instruments it was mostly not written for (pianos, electric pianos, synthesizers, accordions, vibraphones, foot pianos, a mile-long xylophone), or in styles he did not know (eg, as piano trio jazz), or together with novel dance forms (eg, Breakdancing), yet most people accept that as appropriate. These performance instances are all dialogs between the performers and the composer, through and over each particular score, and the music’s meaning emerges from them. The meaning of Myra Hess’s piano arrangement of Bach’s Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, for instance, is inextricably linked in the English-speaking world, with her performances in her National Gallery concerts in London during World War II. Likewise, we can better hear the intricate cross-rhythms in Bach’s orchestral music by seeing these rhythms realized through break dancing.

That Bach’s music supports such diverse interpretations indicates how sophisticated it is, and how much Bach brings to the dialog with the performers. I doubt he’d be offended, as he himself did something similar with his arrangements and transcriptions of the music of others, particularly that of Italian composers. Performance as a dialog with the score and the composer is not at all disrespectful, but shows a higher respect to the composer as a musician.

In each model, what is the performer doing or seeking to do? I believe that performance of a musical work is an exploration of a space of sounds, a journey of ideas, emotions, and spiritual states, which the performer seeks to convey to the listener. In the Master & Emissary model, the performer is seeking to visit this space and report back to the listener, as neutrally as possible, what he or she finds there. The performer seeks to erase him or herself from this report, in the way that many news journalists seek to be objective. In the Dialog model, by contrast, the performer is not seeking to be an objective news journalist, but more of a travel writer, conveying his or her own ideas, emotions, and spiritual states as they are provoked by the journey of performing the score, unfurling through time.

References:

The analogy of news reporter vs. travel writer is due to Clifford Geertz, talking about the doing of fieldwork in anthropology.

Nicholas Cook [2001]: Between process and product: Music and/as performance. Music Theory Online, 7 (2), April 2001. See: www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html

Nicholas Cook [2014]: Between art and science: Music as performance. Journal of the British Academy, 2: 1-25.

Clifford Geertz [1988]: Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford University Press.

Igor Stravinsky [1942/1947]: The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1939-1940. Translated by George A. Seferis and Arthur Knodel. Harvard University Press.

Michael Wooldridge [2000]: Semantic issues in the verification of agent communication languages. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 3: 9-31.

Acknowledgment: This post was inspired by a conversation with Aleksandr Doronin, to whom I am most grateful. Responsibility for any errors or infelicities is mine alone, however.