The Composer and Recording

[ahinton]

Do you think in your music that "it has to be exactly THIS way" regardless of who is playing and where it is being played ?

If you read the rest of what I wrote you'll see (hopefully) that this is the very opposite of what I meant and mean! In other words, whatever the composer may think au moment can and almost certainly will change, continuously! - so there can never be a "right" way.

[ahinton]

No. Not unfrequently, performers come up with solutions I hadn't thought of which I prefer to my own

I've had precisely the same experience (and perhaps unfortunately put forward a figure of speech in my earlier post); a composer might think that a particular way is the best way at any given time but will likely change his/her mind when someone comes up with something better - this cannot always be guaranteed to work but, when it does, it's so rewarding!...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Clearly they should be followed as closely as is possible. But even with that, there is still much that cannot be specified.

Both Pears and Vickers were presumably "following the score" in their interpretations of Grimes yet with extraordinarily different results. Is one of them wrong simply because his interpretation displeased the composer?

I think there might be all sorts of reasons that are "beyond" the score in this particular case, aeolie - by the time Vickers came to the role, Pears' was the only sound Britten wanted to hear singing it. It might be interesting to compare the Britten & Pears (& Culshaw!) recording for DECCA with the BBC television film of the opera - not to mention the excerpts from the premiere cast conducted by Goodall: Pears' voice is so different in the '40s. What, I wonder, was Britten's reaction to the changes in Pears' voice and how these affect the listeners' reactions to the work.

And we mustn't neglect the effect on performers of the recording studio conditions. Acoustics, temperature, manouevreability - "don't worry if there's a mistake, we can patch it up after"; "only two minutes of studio time left to get these bars down!" (and, in the days of 78s, "we've got to fit these bars onto one side"): these all have their impact on the finished results.

[MrGongGong]

If you read the rest of what I wrote you'll see (hopefully) that this is the very opposite of what I meant and mean! In other words, whatever the composer may think au moment can and almost certainly will change, continuously! - so there can never be a "right" way.

Sorry , that came across the wrong way.
I don't know anyone who would be like that but I think many folk who have never played or composed music imagine that the score is some kind of set of very precise instructions for actions that result in music and the aim is for it to be the same each time.

I tend to collaborate with players if that's the kind of thing i'm making , hardly a new idea and it seems to have worked well in the past

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Reading this thread, I am reminded of an anecdote concerning Brahms and Pierre Monteux, who at the time was a young Violist in a French String Quartet. Reportedly Brahms spoke to the French Musicians after they played one of his works and he complimented them effusively. Brahms stated that he had recently heard the same work performed by German Musicians and that the 2 performances were completely different regarding tempos, dynamics and phrasing, yet he loved them both.

From the number of anecdotes in which performers "remember" what Brahms said about how he wanted them to play his Music, it's easy to come away with the impression that he'd prefer his Third Symphony to be in F major, played by an ensemble of bagpipes, kazoos, recorders and wobble boards, with the movements played in the order 3, 2, 1, 4 and concluded with a rousing chorus of My Old Man's a Dustman in 7/8 time. I don't know why Brahms in particular attracts so many myths - perhaps it stems from performers finding it so difficult to perform.

I understand that a Composer would want to have some control over the performance of their own works, but as to specifying exact timings and tempos, it makes one wonder, in the age of recorded music, why they would ever want their works performed at all, once they have been recorded under their own supervision? Surely there must be some room for the interpreters to leave their own marks on the music.

Perhaps because "Live" sound is so much better in many cases to even the very Hi-est of Fi. Or because, as has been said earlier, there are so many different ways of performing a good work faithfully: Krivine, Bruggens, Chailly, van Immerseel, Norrington and Gardiner (to name just six) all scrupulously heed Beethoven's directions as given in the scores, but they all come out with radically different performances - that's why it's called "Live" performance: the Music breathes differently with each careful performance. It doesn't need an "I'm sure the composer wanted a molto cresc e accel here and just forgot to put it in in any of the sketches and fair copies he wrote, or any of the four editions he supervised in print"!

Perhaps a Composer is simply not the best person to arbitrate these issues, as their involvement with the music may potentially interfere with their objectivity.

I cannot accept this argument: who can possibly arbitrate if not the person who imagined the work into being? Their "involvement" is the ultimate "objectivity".

[ahinton]

Another factor here - not least becuse of the shortcomings of conventional music nontation in terms of providing precise "instructions" - is the particular expectations of different composers; expectations, that is, not only of the extent to which performers do their work justice but also expectations of the extent to which their own notation might help towards this. It is clear that some composers give a good deal more information in their scores than do others, but I'm not so sure about whether that factor is always a reliable indicator of the extent of the composer's expectations. Brian Fermeyhough's scores, for example, provide much detail about what he appears to be aiming for - so do those of middle-period Schönberg and some of those of Percy Grainger (have a look, for example, respectively at the Suite Op. 25 for piano and Country Gardens, though preferably not simultaneously) - yet the scores of Sorabji, for all that some contain many notes per square metre, look quite alarmingly bare when it comes to performance instructions. Any thoughts here?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes - I think that (one of) the points about Ferneyhough's scores is the relationship of performer to work. As he said yesterday, (or so I understood him) when a performer "masters" a work (not necessarily one of his), they take it apart, playing bits over and over again until their muscles achieve the fluency required to perform the notes in these sections as fluidly as possible. So, as they master the work, the work itself seaps into their conscious and subconscious thoughts and actions - the work mastering them, in effect, until the work and its performers reach a temporary symbiosis ready for the public performance. If a performer hasn't performed the work for some years, another process of confrontation and assimilation begins and a new symbiosis is reached. The work hasn't changed - as often as not, it's even the same edition they used last time - but the performer has: which aspects of the work receive his/her/their attention and priorities this time is part of the "living", ongoing relationship between the performer(s) and the work, and the performer(s) and themselves.

The same is true of the listener and the work, of course, at perhaps a less intense level of physical activity. And these features are of far greater importance and interest to me than the superficial "let's make this more 'expressive'" type of performance.

You mention Sorabji - BF spoke of Webern's Op27 Piano Variations, where the published score is very "white" with precious few pedal markings amongst other things. And yet Peter Steidler's edition incorporates the nuances with which Webern told him he wanted the work to be played (some of them written into Steidler's score by the composer) - including pedalling, turning isolated notes into long, drawn-out arpeggios. There are composers who want their Music to be "interpreted" rather than just ("just"??!!) "performed" - and the Music benefits from such interaction. The task of the performer in these works is different - just as it is for performers of Music from older traditions. A one-size fits all approach to Music doesn't work.

[aeolium]

From the number of anecdotes in which performers "remember" what Brahms said about how he wanted them to play his Music, it's easy to come away with the impression that he'd prefer his Third Symphony to be in F major, played by an ensemble of bagpipes, kazoos, recorders and wobble boards, with the movements played in the order 3, 2, 1, 4 and concluded with a rousing chorus of My Old Man's a Dustman in 7/8 time. I don't know why Brahms in particular attracts so many myths - perhaps it stems from performers finding it so difficult to perform.

I don't know why the Brahms anecdote which richardfinegold mentioned should be so implausible. Surely it is perfectly possible that a composer could value two different interpretations of his work - not all of them have been fanatically controlling and demanding to require only one kind of performance. As you yourself indicated with Stravinsky's recordings, composers may change their performances as their compositional style changes (and they may indeed change the works themselves, as Schumann was constantly doing).

There has grown up a belief in the score as a kind of holy text, that there is contained the ideal product of the composer's imagination which performers can strive to bring to life. But the comments of two composers here, Richard Barrett and ahinton, show that it is by no means as straightforward as that. And there was a time when the score was not treated so reverentially, but more variable according to the requirements of different circumstances (as Handel reworked his Messiah for different performances), where composers would reorchestrate works from an earlier generation, where improvisation and ornamentation was part of the completion of a work - and still today, cadenzas are places where performers are invited (in some cases, compelled) to make their own contribution to the music.

Some philosophers of music and writers on music have also been sceptical about the excessive veneration of the text. Roman Ingarden, in his The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity, argues that the musical work does not exist fully in score: the composer cannot specify all the work's details because notation is not adequate for the task. As a result we cannot know which performance best represents the work as an ideal aesthetic object; we can't know enough about the ideal work to know that. "The composer's artistic achievement is...the creation of the work as a schema subject to musical notation...that displays a variety of potential profiles through its performance." Daniel Leech-Wilkinson agrees, writing "It is far from clear that composers have always, or even often, believed that their works were fully conceived by them, having a single ideal form, which they would specify fully if only notation were adequate to the task.....By tying our view of a work to a composer's intentions we are putting ourselves in a position where we can only fail to perform the work. The composer's intentions can never be known sufficiently."

I cannot accept this argument: who can possibly arbitrate if not the person who imagined the work into being? Their "involvement" is the ultimate "objectivity".

But does this mean that you think Britten was right when he condemned the Vickers ROH production of Grimes, the composer being the ultimate arbiter?

[french frank]

(Fom Richard Finegold) Perhaps a Composer is simply not the best person to arbitrate these issues, as their involvement with the music may potentially interfere with their objectivity.

I cannot accept this argument: who can possibly arbitrate if not the person who imagined the work into being? Their "involvement" is the ultimate "objectivity".

But, in that case, what happens decades later, when the composer is no longer around to 'arbitrate'? Must performers regard the work as set in aspic, a museum relic tied to the person, time and place of its origin? Or does it permit more latitude in performance - and why would that make a difference?

[richardfinegold]

From the number of anecdotes in which performers "remember" what Brahms said about how he wanted them to play his Music, it's easy to come away with the impression that he'd prefer his Third Symphony to be in F major, played by an ensemble of bagpipes, kazoos, recorders and wobble boards, with the movements played in the order 3, 2, 1, 4 and concluded with a rousing chorus of My Old Man's a Dustman in 7/8 time. I don't know why Brahms in particular attracts so many myths - perhaps it stems from performers finding it so difficult to perform.


Perhaps because "Live" sound is so much better in many cases to even the very Hi-est of Fi. Or because, as has been said earlier, there are so many different ways of performing a good work faithfully: Krivine, Bruggens, Chailly, van Immerseel, Norrington and Gardiner (to name just six) all scrupulously heed Beethoven's directions as given in the scores, but they all come out with radically different performances - that's why it's called "Live" performance: the Music breathes differently with each careful performance. It doesn't need an "I'm sure the composer wanted a molto cresc e accel here and just forgot to put it in in any of the sketches and fair copies he wrote, or any of the four editions he supervised in print"!


I cannot accept this argument: who can possibly arbitrate if not the person who imagined the work into being? Their "involvement" is the ultimate "objectivity".

Yes, ferney, regarding Brahms, yes there are a large number of anecdotes about him tolerating different styles of interpretations of his music.
I would suggest that it must be due to a trait that possessed which you find difficult to believe--, namely, he was tolerant to different
approaches to his music. Not every Composer was as controlling as Benjamin Britten.
Regarding the objectivity of a Composer concerning his or her own creations, personally I think it would be very difficult to be objective about one's own work.

[Richard Barrett]

Regarding the objectivity of a Composer concerning his or her own creations, personally I think it would be very difficult to be objective about one's own work.

It isn't really a question of being objective but of having some kind of vision of how the music could sound.

Going back to the question of notation: it's a medium of communication between composer and performer, and as such is characterised by the complexities and ambiguities at the heart of any form of human communication, which composers (and/or performers) may see as a restriction or limitation, or (more fruitfully I think) as an opportunity, to create the conditions wherein every interpretation potentially renews the music in some way. Even in the case of fixed-media electronic music where sounds composed in the studio are projected directly into the performing space, quite different experiences can arise from different acoustics, choice and placement of speakers, how active the live diffusion of the sound is, and so on, as MrGG I'm sure will confirm.

There's an enormous range of degrees of specificity in musical notation, from the precisest possible indication of every sound and/or action (as in Stockhausen's Klavierstücke I-IV), to a few brief words (as in the same composer's Aus den sieben Tagen) describing some particular way of thinking about improvisation, but explicitly specifying no sounds and/or actions at all. (Something that interests me particularly is the interweaving of these extremes in the same composition.)

And going back further to recording: it becomes very easy to confuse a recording with "the work", particularly since in a huge amount of the music we hear (ie. popular musics from the early 20th century onwards, to name only these) the recording actually is the work. But I think it's in the end restricting to think we know, or need to know, what "the work" actually is, and what "the composer's creation" actually consists of, let alone what Brahms may or may not have preferred.

[vinteuil]

... the education I received was literary rather than musical : but one of the things you learnt very early on was that writers were very often not the best judges of their own works. It's as if some of what they were writing when they were creating 'works of genius' emerged from parts of their brain which were doing things of which they were not directly conscious in their more mundane lives. And often a subsequent critic is able to shed light on the values and significance of a piece of work of which the originator may have been only dimly aware.

I don't see why composers would be different in this.

[Richard Barrett]

... the education I received was literary rather than musical : but one of the things you learnt very early on was that writers were very often not the best judges of their own works. It's as if some of what they were writing when they were creating 'works of genius' emerged from parts of their brain which were doing things of which they were not directly conscious in their more mundane lives. And often a subsequent critic is able to shed light on the values and significance of a piece of work of which the originator may have been only dimly aware.

I don't see why composers would be different in this.

There certainly are differences - remember, we weren't discussing "the values and significance of a piece of work" but the fact that a musical score (or even a recording, since that was the original topic) isn't the final result of the creative process in the way that a book is. Performing the score and supervising a recording of a performance are stages in that process too, in which the composer may wish to be playing a part (not in order to "control" the results but in order to continue to be immersed and involved in the music. That's my own experience anyway).

I don't think there's any way to generalise about whether composers' own interpretations of their works are more or less authoritative than anyone else's. It's something that varies enormously from one case to another. I have the feeling that such arguments are in any case historically bounded. In past centuries, all composers would be performers, but you can bet that if someone say in London picked up a copy of Corelli's op.3 concertos and performed them there, they would have sounded very different indeed from Corelli's own performances in faraway Italy, and the idea of making them sound "authentic" to the composer's wishes would probably not even have occurred to the London performers. Nowadays and no doubt in coming times, much of the most "contemporary" music is and will be again produced by composer-performers, since music made with computers tends to blur the roles of composer and performer anyway (and that of instrument-builder too).

[Lordgeous]

Richard Rodney Bennett was relaxed about 'interpretation' - except performers ignoring his tempo markings!

BYW, does anyone know why Britten, who committed practically all his own works to tape, as performer or conductor, asked George Malcolm to direct the recording of Cantata Academica?

[aeolium]

I don't see why composers would be different in this.

One factor might be the quality of listening for particular sounds - and perhaps this is also true of some poets. Yeats seems to have been one of those poets for whom listening was an important part of the compositional process. Sometimes the difference between the finished poem and earlier drafts might be mere consonants, as in the poem "Those Images", where for many drafts the last lines appear as "Recognise the fire/That makes the Muses sing" but the final version has "Recognise the five/That make the Muses sing" as if the poet has been mis-hearing the word before. And so the readings of his own work by Yeats are invaluable as providing at least an idea of how he heard the poem in his own mind. Perhaps this is also true of some composers' interpretations of their own work though of course it's impossible to generalise.