Interpretation and fidelity to the composer's wishes

[guest2]

"Mahler was at the height of his career as an interpreter when he said, 'I consider it my greatest service that I force the musicians to play exactly what is in the notes.' And indeed, among a thousand musicians scarcely one will be found who has the will and ability really to decipher and play what is in the notes. Almost exclusively they play as quickly or slowly, as short notes or as long, as loud or as soft . . . as the instrument allows them to without discomfort. For this reason only, mechanical production of sounds and the definitive fixing of their pitch, their length and the way they relate to the division of time in the piece would be very desirable. For the true product of the mind - the musical idea, the unalterable - is established in the relationship between pitches and time-divisions."

Thus no less a man than Arnold Schonberg, writing in 1926 in an article entitled "Mechanical Musical Instruments." He has convinced me already! But he goes on to muddy the issue badly by saying something in favour of "interpretation":

"The sound-relationships established by means of notation need interpreting. Without interpretation they are not understood. Not only does each age have different tempi and make different demands on performance, but even the demand for greater or less clarity in the constitution of the texture alters. Just think, for example, how in our time people have been content to play only the theme of a Bach fugue in an audible way, keeping everything else as unobtrusive as possible, while perhaps in Bach's time no part was allowed to stand out."

I am not sure he is right there, because nowadays many people want Bach's music to be played exactly as it was in Bach's time, don't they.

Finally he writes this: "Imagine a musician attendant on a mechanical instrument which he commands. This is what he has to do: he needs an exact knowledge and understanding of the work he is to perform, and has to influence the reproducing apparatus so that in the matter of dynamics the performance attains the degree of clarity and expressiveness matching his insight and taste. He is in a position to draw for this purpose upon every means of altering the tempo and the sound. Like an organist, he does not himself produce the sound, but that makes his position no worse than that of a pianist who can alter nothing after the key has been depressed. So far as rhythmic relationships are concerned he will still be able to effect as many modifications as a good musician requires. . . ."

Does that perhaps conflict with the opening quotation? And in any case the "total serialists" of the fifties did not share his attitude did they? They attempted in their own way to give the composer control over every aspect of a piece, leaving little room for "interpretation" and "expressiveness."

Let me end with a question: if we in the modern world had the opportunity would we prefer always to listen to recordings of Bach playing his own work - over and over again - or would we find it worth while to hear interpretations of Bach's music as it has been rendered in the various styles of more recent eras?

P.S. There doesn't seem to be a suitable board for this sort of discussion of interpretation in general - perhaps the administrators would be kind enough to make one?

[Reiner Torheit]

A worthy topic, but also something of a performance-practice minefield :)

Confining myself at the moment only to Bach (since I am not up on Mahler at all) - it is worth mentioning that JS Bach's own son CPE wrote a most useful manual about performance practice, in which he mentions quite clearly that the notation alone was not sufficient to perform the music stylistically. There are quite a few ambiguities which still leave modern performers divided in opinion.

For example, in a Gigue movement, typically in 12/8 time, how should a dotted notes be interpreted?  Exactly as written; "reduced" to a crotchet-plus-quaver; or augmented to a crotchet tied to a dotted quaver and followed by a semiquaver?

And then there is the whole issue of double-dotting in "French overture" style...

We, in the C21st, are the prisoners of Mahler's ruthless logic - we see the composer as the dictatorial auteur whose written record is a sacrosanct and untouchable fact...   but in all probability we are actually looking at an aide memoire in which a considerable element of the performance was intended to emerge from the performer's taste, discretion, and familiarity with the stylistic demands of the repertoire in question.

There's a rather well-worn anecdote about Handel in Italy which illustrates that even performers at the time couldn't agree on what the written notation implied in practice.  Handel had been asked to contribute music to a concert,  in which his music would be the first half - and the second half would be Corelli's works performed by Corelli himself.  Handel purposely wrote "in the French style" to avoid an unwanted comparison with the greatest living exponent in the host country.  However, when rehearsing his music, he found the Orchestra Leader unable to understand the correct bowing and stylistic interpretation needed for French-style music.  Pushed for rehearsal-time and legendarily short-tempered, Handel grabbed the Leader's violin from him, and proceeded to demonstrate how the music was supposed to be performed.

After the rehearsal, Handel realised he had been somewhat brusque, and by way of making conversation to smooth things over, he asked the Leader if he intended to stay and listen to Corelli rehearse?  "Yes, I do... you see, respected Sir... Corelli, it is me.  I am Corelli." 

Perhaps the joke has been over-egged over the years, but underlying it is an important point about baroque style and notation...  even two eminently respected masters of the era could not agree how the notation on the page should be interpreted in practice  ;)  Corelli saw one thing - Handel intended another by exactly the same written notes  ;)

[smittims]

A fascinating topic, gerard, well set out. I haven't time to give it justice now but I will revisit it when I can.

Meanwhile I will answer your question about Bach interpretations. I'd choose to hear other different people's interpretations rather  than just hear the master himself all the time, because I  don't think the composer necessarily knows or can convey in performance everything  in his music. Listening to composers' own recordings is immensely important,but it's not the whole picture. Again,  I would support this by examples but  I haven't  time to quote them now. Hopefully I will return to this topic.

[smittims]

I think many 20th-century composers, such as Stravinsky and Webern, stressed the accurate playing of the printed note and didn't encourage freedom of interpretation becaus they were faced with massive problems of inaccuracy among the musicians of their day. Stravinsky's first recordings of 'The Rite of Spring'and 'Symphony of Psalms' with the Straram Orchetasra illustrate this , and though he said at the time that he was satisfied with them I think he knew that there was a long way to go before it was safe to allow performers freedom in his music.

By the 1950s, with such dedicated ensembles as the Cologne Radio Orchestra, it was possible to get the necessary precision to play total-serial works such as 'Gruppen', where every detail apears prescribed precisely bythe composer. I think this represents something of a limit, after which composers start writing-in increasing  allowances for some freedom (e..g 'Pli selon Pli' and 'Jeux Venitiens') as if they realised that adherence to the letter was killing spontanaiety .

Comparing , as I often do, contemporary perfromances with those of the past (e.g. 1930s recordings) I hear a much greater precision these days, but a much less thrilling  pefrormance.I think 'replay' has instilled  a fear of making slips which would formerly be forgotten but which stick out on each repeated hearing. An extreme illustration of this is the 1958 Prades Festival recording of the Beethoven A major Cello sonata with Pablo Casals and Alfred Cortot who was then in his 80's and whose dexterity had clearly declined. There are two passages where he plays some spectacular wrong notes in a chordal passage. I don't mind them  because I know what he meant to play and because the peformance is much more thrilling than many a note-perfect  studio recording  where the pianist gets it right maybe on take 4.

Accounts of peformances in the 19th century often reveal that  it was customary to play a work more slowly and clearly at its premiere or when it was otherwise unfamilar . Of course these pefrormances were not intended as recordings to play again  and again,and later performances would be freer.

I often think that basing HIPP on  published manuals and  biographical accounts can give a mistaken impression that we 'know' what the music sounded like. But early recoridngs reveal many details not mentioned in contemporary letters and critiques. So I wouldn't be surprised to go back in time and hear Bach playing very differently from today's 'period' organists.

.

[Roehre]

Accounts of peformances in the 19th century often reveal that  it was customary to play a work more slowly and clearly at its premiere or when it was otherwise unfamilar . Of course these pefrormances were not intended as recordings to play again  and again,and later performances would be freer.

Not only 19th C music, smittims.
Its my personal guess, that in an age when performances of pieces where much rarer than nowadays,  and  with e.g. Haydn or Mozart works most of the time being a premiere, the first time the music upto the double bar was played at a slower pace than the repeat - just to make the themes/music clear to its (most of the time musically educated) audience.

I recall either to have seen or to have read an interview with Mengelberg in which he expresses this being the reason why he made differences between the first and the second time he played a passage following repeat signs.


Back to the freedom of interpretation of musicians and conductors.
I find it very striking, that the works by Mahler, who as composer wrote down in his opinion exactly what the conductor needed to know and to "obey", are played in such a diverse way.
You'd hardly imagine that a Mahler symphony played by say Bernstein is based on exactly the same score as the same one performed by say Haitink...

[smittims]

Yes, I think there's a paradox at work there. I well remember someone saying to me that they couldn't understand why there was so much argument about how Mahler's music should be interpreted , since he had put such detailed instructions in his scores.

I don't think this  is  a mystery to be resolved by a snappy remark, but I do think a clue to it may be that 18th century music had  an agreed style of playing and execution, depending on the time signature,the notation and the idiomatic origin : confronted by  a gigue or a choral piece in 'stilo antico' a tranied musician would know how it should go.

By Mahler's time the options were much more open; it wasn't at al clear what tempo, for instance, was 'right'. So Mahler's music isn't easier to interpret because of the  many directions; rather the many directions were necesary because the music was more difficult to interpret.

I think it's significant that  Mahler (andto a lesser extent       Elgar) were professional conductors, whereas their great contemporaries Delius and Sibelius weren't , and the latter two often  omit detailed performing instructions, as if they  wanted to leave the performer some freedom, or maybe weren't too concerned about recognising problems of interpretation. Anecdotal evidence has them often praising almost any performance.

[Roehre]

I think it's significant that  Mahler (andto a lesser extent       Elgar) were professional conductors, whereas their great contemporaries Delius and Sibelius weren't , and the latter two often  omit detailed performing instructions, as if they  wanted to leave the performer some freedom, or maybe weren't too concerned about recognising problems of interpretation. Anecdotal evidence has them often praising almost any performance.

An interesting observation, as Richard Strauss was composer as well as conductor, and his scores generally speaking are less detailed than Mahler's.  However, the Strauss orchestral works are much less subject to extremes in interpretation like the ones we experience in Mahler's.
Of course Mahler's music is much more "neurotic" (if you like) and "multi-interpretable" than most of Strauss', but that sole factor cannot explain these differences.

As said, an interesting observation, smittims.

[Tony Watson]

I well remember someone saying to me that they couldn't understand why there was so much argument about how Mahler's music should be interpreted, since he had put such detailed instructions in his scores...

By Mahler's time the options were much more open; it wasn't at al clear what tempo, for instance, was 'right'.

And yet in my score of Mahler's 5th, I can't find a single metronome marking.

[IanP]

There are also various interesting cases of composers who left very precisely notated scores, but in their own performances/recordings do something else entirely - some of Debussy's piano rolls are like this. And I've known plenty of contemporary composers who (say) give a precise metronome mark (sometimes without any further tempo instruction), but when one plays the work at that marking, it's much too slow or too fast for them.

[Michael R]

I come at this problem from two ends – I compose and I perform. I wish I could get away with writing as much loose rubbish as the Schoenberg quote in the thread starter. But then I suppose this is balanced by his tight theoretical conception, great music and real contributions.

I can’t stand electronic music – I had, as part of my requirements, to spend 8 hours a week in the dreaded Columbia Princeton Electronic Studios. This operated 24 hours a day and my slot was Thursday 4pm to midnight. It was on the 2nd or 3rd floor of a building on 117 or 119 Street and Broadway and the remains of the Hudson Bay project were (and probably still are) stored in the basement. I am not quite sure how this got there, but as nuclear material can’t be moved by road in New York (or the States as a whole) and there is no rail service nearby it swelters away in the basement in its own nuclear fashion which made my experiences psychologically queasy as well as musically uncomfortable.

Music is a physical human experience. When younger all I wanted to be was the fastest instrumentalist. This involved such detailed and immature idiocy as working out that the fastest co-ordinated controlled responses the human anatomy could produce was articulated 16th notes at tempo 186, and that it was possible to exceed this by tuning reflex actions and slurred flurries – but then this cannot be conscious music making – and then one of my teachers pointed out, “An insect can flap its wings 4000 times a second. Is this what you want to be?”   

This was one of the turning points in my life, when I started moving away from being an instrumentalist to composition. But the physicality of it all, the human expression, has always been fundamental. When I write, I write for the human to get into the act and action of playing. I suppose at the time (the mid to late 70s) it was all about technique, composers were writing physically difficult music to perform and while I superficially went along with the ethos, I tended to write everything laying under the fingers – possibly even too much so, and especially for these times.

But then, some are writing for the far future, for when e.g. the human has mutated into a multi-armed creature. I find this sort of prediction based conception a bit too far ahead for me, like the doctor who declares the patient dead several years in advance (sorry Schoenberg, I stole that from you).

Re interpretation of my own work, when I was younger I did occasionally meddle with the interpretations by others of my works. Sometimes I got it right, and quite often, wrong. For example when the Arditti Quartet played my 2nd I stuck my oar in at two places. One it didn’t really matter – my interpretation was only marginally worse than theirs (in the context of their overall performance) but in the other place I got it totally wrong. There are 4 bars which I totally messed up on their behalf… So for composers – if you have performers of the level of the Arditti Quartet who have bothered to develop an interpretation of your work, GET OUT OF THE WAY! At the time I was upset as I would have interpreted this work differently (and had indeed done an arrangement for string orchestra and performed this I think 3 times, so I ‘knew’.) But as my 20-20 hindsight tells me, I didn’t! Their grip of this piece was far more mature than mine at the time.

Then as a performer – I always try and get inside the composers head. With the music of living composers, and premieres, and they are present I can just ask them – or much better, sort it out with them before attending a rehearsal. With composers not present, I feel I understand what they want as I compose myself – I understand their scores. Then the detail always tells me something. If they have given a metronome mark, I will always refer to that first. Ian has said living composers that he has worked with seem to have a problem with their own metronome markings. I have found this only in the case of one composer, who was the soloist as well in his own concerto, and that was just his having written one passage a bit too fast for him to play cleanly and together with other musicians - one passage in a 25 minute work with 120 time signature and tempo changes. In my own compositions, there has rarely been a problem – although it might seem difficult on the page, as I have set it up so it lies under the fingers, or with ways to fake it using open strings (not too often with the latter method unless I really want that effect) some of it tends to play itself. I really don’t like the ‘when it gets difficult, add a little expression’ syndrome. 

I have found different problems with different composers – Mozart – to give it some weight but keep it light and not silly – to avoid that chicken-on-the keys ‘on top’ of the rhythm/tempo. I have done some quite interesting detailed analysis of rhythmic feel, and measurements taken show I like to place fast music a specific fraction ahead of the beat – also I make sure I address the ‘illusion’ aspects of tempo such as long stretches at the same tempo seeming to get slower. Beethoven needs weight but without becoming ponderous. Same with Brahms, which has a tendency to become even more elephantine. With both of these composers, especially Brahms, to acknowledge the importance of the harmonic journey – here I find Schenkerian thinking very helpful, but then I suppose I was taught this along with my basics – my imitation Bach inventions and fugues were ordered according to Schenkerian graphical thinking because my teacher told me to do it like that (and supervised me!). But then this has helped a lot with working out the layering of the interpretation – what needs to stick out and what needs to be middle, and background etc. I have even been asked to coach a known soloist for recordings of the unaccompanied Bach Partitas – and here she found my Schenkerian analyses very useful to ‘layer’ her playing and shape the pieces as whole entities. 

Tchaikovsky, to give it the gravitas it merits and not fall into the kitsch-or-Stalin’s-funeral syndrome – his metronome markings and instructions really work. Dvorak the same. And both composer’s details – some of Dvorak’s seeming slips of the pen make a telling difference.

I find I have to approach each piece of music as something new and fresh even if it is not new to me.

Re the standard problems – one of my coaches said to me ‘The job of the orchestra is to head for anomie and all fast music and slow music to become andante, all loud and soft passages to become mezzo forte, all note lengths to be the same. The job of the conductor is to prevent this from happening, to pull – stretch the music ‘apart’ and to bring it together. Especially when not physically hampered, I have not really had a noticeable problem with this. There have been very few occasions when I have had to ask players to ‘hold the note the full length’ or ‘cut off when I indicate’. And the quality and kind of attack, sustain and cut-off/note ending (what electronic sound-makers call the ‘envelope’) is always what I want, without me having to say a word. If I DO have to sing something, it is generally because my gestural language has been inadequate (or a player is missing, and the part is NB to the passage being rehearsed). If the nuancing of the music is part of an overall conception of the piece and recognizes where it is in the piece and the conducting gesture is right rehearsal does not become the dismantling of a machine, but the group partaking in an organic and living experience and it is consensual.

So no, no mechanical machines to reproduce the notes. There are programmes like that now in common use for a few hundred pounds. And they are horrible. They are not even quicker – they are slower than pen and ink and to me quite unintuitive. The only advantage they have is that the parts can be extracted by pressing a button and the mistakes in the score and the parts are consistent. But the sound they make is appalling and they circumvent the communication between performers making up the interpretation which is what to me making music is about. So if you use them as even just a compositional tool you have a battle not to become trapped in something that makes your work contrived. As far as providing a performance, forget it. Even a flawed sloppy but human interpretation will be better. So, no conclusions in this, except no machines please.

Sorry this is so long winded but it is not even a beginning because this is a topic I agonize about a lot.

[smittims]

Hi,Michael, you say

'Sorry this is so long winded '

and

'I wish I could get away with writing as much loose rubbish '.

Well, I think you have.  :)

[guest2]

I can’t stand electronic music – I had, as part of my requirements, to spend 8 hours a week in the dreaded Columbia Princeton Electronic Studios. This operated 24 hours a day and my slot was Thursday 4pm to midnight. It was on the 2nd or 3rd floor of a building on 117 or 119 Street and Broadway and the remains of the Hudson Bay project were (and probably still are) stored in the basement. I am not quite sure how this got there, but as nuclear material can’t be moved by road in New York (or the States as a whole) and there is no rail service nearby it swelters away in the basement in its own nuclear fashion which made my experiences psychologically queasy as well as musically uncomfortable.

I'm confused here - I googled "Hudson Bay Project" and it seems to be all about polar bears! Was it also an electronic music project?

I very much approve of the idea of electronic music in theory, but in practice I have heard few interesting examples. Its practitioners seem to go too far away from the traditional attributes of music such as rhythm, line and harmony; instead they prefer for some reason to produce just interesting noises.

Tchaikovsky, to give it the gravitas it merits and not fall into the kitsch-or-Stalin’s-funeral syndrome – his metronome markings and instructions really work. Dvorak the same. And both composer’s details – some of Dvorak’s seeming slips of the pen make a telling difference.

Could you cite an example of where Dvorak does this, please? The scherzo (is it called that?) of his eighth symphony is in my opinion one of the most successful orchestral movements ever written, and the tiny ornamental figures on the woodwind contribute a good deal to that success - is that the sort of thing you mean?

[Michael R]

I'm confused here - I googled "Hudson Bay Project" and it seems to be all about polar bears! Was it also an electronic music project?

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember it referring to - well Manhattan Project is to Atom Bomb as Hudson Bay Project is to Hydrogen Bomb. It could just be the initials. And that is the dirty dark secret in the basement of the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studios.

I very much approve of the idea of electronic music in theory, but in practice I have heard few interesting examples. Its practitioners seem to go too far away from the traditional attributes of music such as rhythm, line and harmony; instead they prefer for some reason to produce just interesting noises

.

The problem to me in the American approach is that it all seemed to me to be imitation music - one talked of one’s ‘ensemble’ in relation to the collection of wotsits and cyberstuff inside machines that made sound. And everyone’s output sounded, well sort of like imitation instrumental music, though phoney. And you had to produce substantial pieces for your portfolio. I really tried to get out of this requirement. One of the heads there, Mario Davidovsky said to me at one point, “You want your degree, you do as I say!” I even tried my supervisor, Chou, Wen-Chung. He said, “We were the first, and so you are obliged, even from a historical perspective to do it.” So I finally knuckled under and got on with it. I just didn’t like it and the requirement of having to spend 8 hour stretches there –mine was from 4pm to midnight on Thursdays – sometimes much later – and then a horrible and dangerous subway ride home. I lived on Staten Island at the time, so even if I got out on time I had a two to three hour trip with changes and waits and stop-overs followed by a ferry ride and a bus ride or long walk at the other end. One night I was surrounded by a gang. I had an old battered suitcase which was full with several thousand dollars worth of equipment. It was a hot bleary and close New York night and I was dressed in my customary disguise of T shirt and shorts – no-one would dream of thinking that this kid (I looked much younger than my years then) was carrying around thousands of dollars worth of Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Studio in the battered cheap suitcase. One of the guys suggested I get involved with his sister who he employed as a prostitute, and if she ‘liked it’ I wouldn’t have to pay. I politely declined his (and her) kind but insistent offer.

My pieces sounded like, well, imitations of my ‘real’ music. My electronic music teacher, Bulent Arel (he was really nice) was as disturbed by the darkness in my work as was a kindly senior and elderly philosophy lecturer in another institution who found my compulsory essays disturbing.

And so I fulfilled my electronic music requirement and produced two or three substantial electronic music works.

I like the European Cologne/Stockhausen approach even less, if that is possible. This starts from, to me a healthier perspective in that the medium is recognized as new, and therefore it is correct and legitimate to go for something which is outside the realm of proper music. But the naïveté of e.g. Stockhausen expecting to just record two frequencies onto tape and expect the higher one to act as harmonic of the lower just floored me.

Could you cite an example of where Dvorak does this, please? The scherzo (is it called that?) of his eighth symphony is in my opinion one of the most successful orchestral movements ever written, and the tiny ornamental figures on the woodwind contribute a good deal to that success - is that the sort of thing you mean?

Yes, although he just calls it ‘Allegretto grazioso’ with a metronome mark of dotted quarter = 50.

But then there is e.g. the scherzo of the 9th, and even more so the two collections of Slavonic dances, which are quite superb pieces too. For these sort of markings number 1 of book 1, and number 7 are interesting, as is the well known number 8.

And he also does it on slow music, for example a slow Slavonic Dance like the e minor number 2 of book two (number 10), and the slow movement of Symphony 8, where he uses these to differentiate where you are in the form.

And one of the ultimate usages to me is the tenuto markings in bar 5 and 6 of the New World slow movement, which to me the whole movement swings around.

Come to think of it, Smetana also uses these sorts of note/expression definitions and articulations in a significant way to define the interpretation too!

[John Cummins]

"Mahler was at the height of his career as an interpreter when he said, 'I consider it my greatest service that I force the musicians to play exactly what is in the notes.' And indeed, among a thousand musicians scarcely one will be found who has the will and ability really to decipher and play what is in the notes. Almost exclusively they play as quickly or slowly, as short notes or as long, as loud or as soft . . . as the instrument allows them to without discomfort. For this reason only, mechanical production of sounds and the definitive fixing of their pitch, their length and the way they relate to the division of time in the piece would be very desirable. For the true product of the mind - the musical idea, the unalterable - is established in the relationship between pitches and time-divisions."

Simply what Mahler wanted.  Composers are, according to their temperaments and intentions, more or less interested in others' differing interpretations.  What is interesting in the case of Mahler is how successful are interpretations that depart significantly from his notations; I don't know enough of various interpreters to say anymore.  Does anyone?