The Art-Music, Literature and Linguistics Forum
March 29, 2024, 12:04:47 pm
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
Did you miss your activation email?

Login with username, password and session length
News: Here you may discover hundreds of little-known composers, hear thousands of long-forgotten compositions, contribute your own rare recordings, and discuss the Arts, Literature and Linguistics in an erudite and decorous atmosphere full of freedom and delight.
 
  Home Help Search Gallery Staff List Login Register  

The inadmissibility of "interpretation."

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: The inadmissibility of "interpretation."  (Read 793 times)
0 Members and 2 Guests are viewing this topic.
ahinton
Level 6
******

Times thanked: 30
Offline Offline

Posts: 837


View Profile WWW
« on: January 17, 2014, 12:45:01 pm »

It may be instructive to compare any well-known musical composition with any well-known poem. The essence of the poem, in its printed form, remains unaltered, whether a small, narrow and unattractive type face is used, or a more carefully prepared and acceptable design. In the same way the essence of the musical composition remains unaltered even when the conditions of performance change: in the one the words remain the same, and in the other the notes remain the same.

When several editions of the poem are compared, small differences are often found; mainly differences of punctuation, but sometimes also "alternative versions" of the text. This situation resembles what we find in the case of various editions of a musical composition. We might think of the task of the editor and printer of the poem as similar to the task of the performer of the musical work. They each strive for accuracy, and where there are differences, they would do well to explain them. If we choose a pleasant performer for a piece of music, it is no more significant than choosing a pleasant type-face and layout for a poem.

It will be observed that there is no place for "interpretation" in that. The "interpreters" about which there has been so much hullabaloo since the time of Liszt and Wagner are really a kind of cuckoo in the nest.
On hearing about the first cuckoo in this particular nest, I must disagree with what you write, to the extent that what's under discussion here is interpretation in the context of what is left to the performers' discretion by the shortcomings of conventional musical notation. Your example of a poem really doesn't hold good here, in that there is a world of difference between what is prescribed by printed verbal expression and what is left unprescribed by printed musical expression; for that reason alone, I am unable to reconcile your analogy between the editor and printer of a poem and the performer/s of a musical work, because the conventions of the printed word as addressed by the former offer considerably less licence than those of printed musical notation addressed by the latter.

In considering your analogy, however, it occurs to me that there is a similar rôle for the editor and printer of a musical work as well and this really is more akin to that of the editor and printer of a poem.

Now poetry may be appreciated in a second form: it may be spoken or recited. This gives rather more scope for interpretation, in that the reciter may vary his or her speed, change his or her tone of voice, flutter his or her eyelashes, and so on. But just as the musical performer will not play a "wrong note," so will the reciter of a poem not substitute a "wrong word."
Yes, the interpreter of a poem is far more closely analogous to that of a musical work in that you are now referring to each in terms of performance, but wrong words and wrong notes are by no means the entire story here because, as I stated, the sheer amount of inevitable licence provided by musical notation is so much greater than that offered by the written/printed word.

When we turn from true poetry to the theatre, we find much more liberty, especially with Shakespeare where so much of the text is corrupt. Actors do not seem to have the same concept of faithfulness to the text. And operas are treated in much the same way; vast chunks omitted and passages rewritten.
Whilst this is true, the very fact of the sheer age of Shakespeare's texts is itself another issue altogether, in that they were obviously written in the language of their time but that the English language - even British English - has changed massively in terms of usage over the past 4˝ centuries and more, just as musical performance conventions and, to some extent musial notation conventions have undergone changes between the time of Byrd and our present age.

So, Liszt's desire to insert his own speeds, flourishes, loudnesses, emphases, and so on, where they expressly contradict what is written in the score, seems to have become a widespread one - part of human nature. Performers cannot help inserting themselves into the performance. The B.B.C. does it too, when, assuming some kind of ownership, they chop up compositions and transmit them one movement at a time. But it seems to me that such crude and selfish behaviour shows a less than appropriate respect to the original creators of art-works: the composers or poets.
I would be wary of comparing Liszt's treatment of music in his performances with the kind of cut-and-(not)-paste treatment sometimes meted out to musical works by BBC and others when presenting bite-sized chunks of larger works for listeners with inadequate attention spans! The point about the former is that a musical composition is living thing at all times and, as you yourself observed, Bach was far from averse to tinkering around with his scores after they'd been written down, so it's not a habit that began only with Liszt! The shorthand of figured bass notation also allows for interpretative licence.

It is also prudent to remember in this context that Bach and his contemporaries, Mozart and his, Liszt and his - and so on - all improvised, although in the past century or so, the tradition of composer as performer has weakened consierably to a point which I imagine none of the composers whom I've just mentioned would even recognise or understand from their own experiences and the art of improvisation has largely (though by no means entirely) become confined to organists and jazz musicians.

Ronald Stevenson, whose immense Passacaglia you very much appreciate, has spoken of what in reality are imaginary dividing lines that some people have nevertheless sought to insert between the arts of composition, improvisation, editing/arranging/transcribing/paraphrasing and performance as a negative influence upon the ways in which listeners have been persuaded to regard music as a whole; he even wrote a three-movement piano piece, Le Festin d'Alkan, within the scope and scale of which he sought consciously to explore some of these.

Leaving improvisation on one side for a moment, what is your view of the principle of composers arranging, transcribing, paraphrasing, &c., the work of others? Bach often did this kind of thing, just as Godowsky (and others) did it to the works of Bach (and others), sometimes long after the event of the original composition. Would you be content to be without Liszt's Schubert song transcriptions or the Godowsky studies on the études of Chopin (to name but two of countless thousands of examples from piano repertoire alone)?

The late and much lamented Shura Cherkassky once wrote to me that he thought that a Schumann transcription of mine was well written but that he did not approve of altering Schumann's works (which is wryly amusing coming from a pianist whose irrepressible imagination and spontaneity caused him to "alter" them every time he performed them!); as it happens, the piece is a paraphrase of a paraphrase, it being of the second movement of the composer's G minor piano sonata which is itself a paraphrse of his earlier song Im Herbst (it is dedicated, incidentally, to Ronald Stevenson).

Again, since you mention Liszt, I once had both the audacity and temerity (not to mention the sheer idiocy) to arrange his Norma Fantasy for viola and double bass (though that is strictly an arrangement - or perhaps more properly derangement - rather than a paraphrase).

In your view, should I perhaps have desisted from perpetrating these things on the grounds that tinkering with another composer's work is some kind of artistic civil offence?

Just as a matter of interest, how, for example, might you perceive works such as Anthony Payne's realisation of Elgar's Third Symphony and its performance in the present context? At the time he realised that he would die long before completing it, Elgar vacillated between stating on the one hand that someone in 50 or 500 years' time might come along and complete it or write a better one and on the other that no one should tinker with it as they would not understand.
Report Spam   Logged

Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum


Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy