What We Must Do

To what extent is taste in music actually taste. Do the preconceptions in scholarship prohibit us from making choices we would otherwise be inspired to make, or is the academic pedagogy that has replaced apprenticeship forced us to confine our musical inspiration within teachable building blocks that can be assembled into what we would regard as a complete performer? Certainly the role of musical education is not an insignificant one in the homogenization of performance practice. The bureaucratic limitations of accreditation alone make it impossible for most schools to educate their students outside of the confines of acceptable pedagogy. Every music school has their listening skills, theory, music history, and ensemble requirements. Yet the interpretation of music and the theories, philosophies, and practical execution of interpretation is left as an afterthought that is only taught as a surplus quality of the student of music. Scholarship falls into a similar trap however. Many scholars write with the intention of telling performers what can and can’t be done in performance based on their understanding of the Text. Even when this is not the case it is most common that you will read of a scholar lamenting the lack of this or that attribute in a musical performance, yet have no intention of mounting the challenge themselves. Indeed many don’t have near the ability to do so and have no respect for the challenges of performing the music they otherwise know so intimately.

Performance is the final act of composition. This is not a new idea, but one that has been forgotten by the musical world. Even great opponents of the Text-over-everything approach to music making, people like Richard Taruskin, fail to dole out the precious ration of authority given to performers. The triangle of authority between Performer, Text, and Audience has always been more of a flow chart with all of the authority flowing from the Text and Audience to the Performer. The expectation of this is that the performer then gives back to both a product that reflects the authority they have bestowed upon the performer. This denies the inherent authority of the performer. The performer has a role as a medium for the text and as a vessel for the audience, yet the decisions the performer makes in performance must transcend the bestowed responsibility of these two. The performer MUST be a creative force in the process of music-making if music-making is truly the goal. The problem in assuming such a prominent role in the creative process is one of credibility. Neither the audience nor the scholar give much credit to the performer when the composer is a titan like Beethoven or Brahms and most criticism reflects primarily whether the performer got it “right” or “wrong”. This apathy trickles down from there and the Composer becomes the final word on musical choices and the audience has been taught to expect what the composer wrote. Yet, how many times have we heard the Goldberg variations performed with intense historical accuracy and yet not be moved one bit, and then be moved to tears by the distinctly a-historical approach of a master like Glenn Gould. We hear pieces like Listz’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 endlessly in shops, cartoons, and commercials and it just fades into our subconscious, and then are jolted by the performance of Georges Cziffra. The difference is the performer taking charge. When the performer decides to introduce himself to the creative process and to pick up the authority they alone can wield as the person who is bringing the page into the audible, temporal world music is truly created. But how do performers learn how to do this? What rules can be learned and what scholarship followed?

To achieve credibility the performer must be abreast of scholarship and ideally be a scholar himself. Yet he must NOT shun the innate musical and human instincts of his being. In “olden days” the tradition of music making was passed down more-or-less orally. Now, with the variety of music being performed across history and with various performing traditions operating simultaneously, to inherit just one tradition becomes impossible. The post-modern world we live in exists at the crossroads of all tradition. Taste then, is a helpful tool when deciding what is possible because it spans all musical performance traditions. But how do we know what it is and what its limitations are? Most treaties present a very strict interpretation of what to do, yet often they encourage the practitioner to exercise “good taste” when any sort of objective terminology fails to capture the central point being made. It is then apparent that Taste shifts and is not beholden to one particular rule or tradition. And as we pursue historical performance practice we are constantly pursuing, knowingly or not, a sense of historical taste. This is a noble pursuit, yet not a final solution because no matter what type of historical taste we find, we are still existing within our modern world and are creating Bach with songs like “Uptown Girl” stuck in our heads. The performer's job is to span this gap and present the work both on the terms of its original text, but also present it to the audience in a way that can inspire in a vital and present way.

[This is contrary to the popular notion that you must “meet people where they are”. Not only do I find this attitude embarrassing (thinking of the rash of classical flash mobs that plagued us a few years ago) but mostly I find it incredibly condescending, as it assumes that people would like classical music if only they KNEW they liked it. If you make something good and relevant, people will find it, no matter where it is.]

In many respects the performer's role is actually one of a creator of taste. This is especially true if we want our performers to be artists. To be an artist a performer must be more than a copy machine that gives us exactly what we put in. An artist doesn’t produce music, he creates it. So no, Taste isn’t the point. Authority is the point but Taste is the weapon and the tool. Understanding the expectations and wading deep into the waters of credibility is something that SOMEONE must do. A case needs to be made for the performer taking ownership of the creative process to which he is the heir. This kind of ownership needs to become more the rule than the exception if the music is going to survive. Recordings make it entirely too easy to access this music and if we just produce it the same way every time our audiences will die because we aren't giving them a reason to come. Monteverdi isn’t the reason the audiences are aging and diminishing. It's the way we engage him in the process of composition. It is within our ability to create something that can only be experienced if you go and experience it. We must do this.