What's the Point of Rubato?

[Serial_Apologist]

The aleatoric conductor- or performer-choice music in Lutoslawski or Boulez probably arose from a similar impulse taken further: the creator's need for more subjective performer-input, more creative performer involvement, to a musical realisation. To try to “Make it New” every time.
So too for the listener: why does someone buy 3 or 4 or 5 Sibelius Symphony cycles? It’s not in the hope that they’re the same, or more “faithful” than the last one, is it?

My assumption would be that in Boulez's case the aleatoric component was introduced in-part in reaction to his (and other serialists') failed attempts to install total control of all parameters in music, leading on the one hand to unperformability in terms of accuracy, (one of the realisations that had led Stockhausen into electronic music), and on the other to recognising that the range of serialisable parameters susceptible to escape itself eluded categorisation, because the limits could never be finally decided.

Lutoslawsky never as far as I know went as far in seeking total control over formal elements within his own music as this, even when he was writing dodecaphonic music: I think he was interested in extending the aural fascination of superimposed rhythms and the accumulating suspense of repetition, of building up inner tensions from intersecting lines in which unison precision is broken up to dramatic effect by each player simultaneously playing the same scored material as his or her colleagues over pre-determined durations of time, controlled by the conductor. David Bedford, who for a time in the 1960s was influenced by Lutoslawsky and the Polish school he was then assocated with, as well as Xenakis and Ligeti, wrote about his own introduction of flexible timings producing the same, if not greater complexity, as that which he had earlier tried introducing by complex serial juxtapositionary means which had turned out to be of extreme difficulty to interpret, and also exhausting to pre-calculate!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Maybe a more accurate phrase for the rubato fg is describing is a "trickle-down effect" - letting people believe you're going to give back what you robbed but actually never doing so.

Now you know politics aren't really allowed here.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

.Lutoslawsky never as far as I know went as far in seeking total control over formal elements within his own music as this, even when he was writing dodecaphonic music: I think he was interested in extending the aural fascination of superimposed rhythms and the accumulating suspense of repetition, of building up inner tensions from intersecting lines in which unison precision is broken up to dramatic effect by each player simultaneously playing the same scored material as his or her colleagues over pre-determined durations of time, controlled by the conductor.

Lutoslawski never wrote dodecaphonic Music in the sense that it is meant with regard to the Second Viennese School or to Boulez: there is a 12-note theme in the Funeral Music, but it is never used as a series: it's more akin to the twelve-note theme of the Second Violin Concerto of Bartok (to whose memory the Funeral Music is dedicated). Symmetrical twelve-note chords are a prominent feature of his Music from the '60s and '70s, but again, these are not used in a Serial way.

Lutoslawski was attracted to aleatoric devices after hearing Cage's Piano Concert shortly after he had written what he later called the Postlude (he called it that because it had become the last work he wrote in the style that he had been using in the '50s) - the attraction to aleatoric devices for Lutos was the simultaneous transparency and complexity of texture by the simplest of means that it enabled in his work. (In many ways, it owes as much to Sibelius as it does to Cage.) And the "play" between the "collective ad libitum" and strictly measured Music offered new dramatic opportunities that he'd felt were lacking the works immediately preceding his re-invention of aleatoric techniques.

Not entirely sure what this has to do with rubato? At isolated moments, the individual players in an orchestra can play a fragment at any speed within given parameters, and even vary the speed at which they play them - so long as they do not coincide with anyone else playing that fragment. But when these passages start and stop is the choice of the conductor, again based on parameters (increasingly strict parameters as time went on - the amount of aleatoric passages in the Fourth Symphony is much smaller than in the Second) set out in the score. The audience does not "hear" - is not meant to hear - these individual variations in tempo; the mass result (heard as a shimmering harmonic sound mass) is what's intended by the composer.