Work and "Werktreue"

Nothing so illustrates the gulf between the classical genre and the pop and jazz genres so well as the ontology of the musical work. As Richard Taruskin describes in an essay in Text and Act:

Pop (or jazz) culture, in starkest contrast to classical, has a concept of work-identity so fluid as to be practically indefinable. (It is a famous unsolved problem of musicology, in fact.) Classical performers are constantly exhorted to make themselves into transparent vessels: Zaslaw rails at one point against ignorant performers who are "reduced [!] to ... seeking a personal 'interpretation' based on such necessary intangibles as musicality, taste, instinct or inspiration." These, of course, are qualities pop or jazz musicians, and their audiences, prize without irony or apology. Indeed, they are an absolute requirement.

Richard Taruskin. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Kindle Locations 3589-3592). Kindle Edition.

When we listen to, say, the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 by Schoenberg, the performance is certainly of some passing interest, but the real focus is on the musical structures and expression presented by the score, in other words, it is the "work" that is foremost. What is Schoenberg doing with, say, the imitative counterpoint? On the other hand, with pop and jazz music, the "work" is of surprisingly little interest! It is the nuance of how it is performed that attracts the greatest attention. It is hard not to see this as a focus on what is perhaps the more superficial aspect, to the neglect of the more essential aspect. But as Stravinsky averred somewhere, the most interesting thing about jazz is how it is played, the compositions themselves are of little interest. Sorry for the haphazard recollection, if someone knows the source of the quote, please let us know in the comments.

In regards to the exhortations to classical performers, they used to be asked to be transparent vessels, but nowadays they are exhorted to develop their personal "brand" to pay more attention to marketing and so on. To be, in other words, like pop performers.

But let me quibble a bit at Taruskin's subtle implication that things like "musicality, taste, instinct or inspiration" are prized more by pop and jazz musicians and their audiences than by classical musicians and their audiences. Au contraire! The best classical musicians, of course, are chock full of musicality, taste, instinct and inspiration, but these elements are used to reveal and present the musical work and not just for the glorification of the charisma of the artist.

And composers? What are composers supposed to be or to do these days? God only knows...

The essay the above Taruskin quote is taken from is on Mozart and how his compositions were much more for a specific occasion and the use of the performers, including Mozart himself. The specific occasion of the essay is that it is actually a review of the, at the time, new complete recording of the Mozart piano concertos with Malcolm Bilson on forte piano and the English Baroque soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. One of my favorite Mozart recordings, by the way, and one of Taruskin's as well. Let's listen to K. 449 from that set:

Taruskin's best point in his essay is that recordings like the one above are really more monuments and exemplars of our time than Mozart's and one of the reasons he says so is that our commitment to "werktreue" or fidelity to the work, i.e. score, means that we simply don't embellish the notes and improvise cadenzas as Mozart provably did.

Taruskin doesn't mention it, but there are some isolated examples of "werktreue" in pop and jazz. I recently saw a clip of a live performance of the entirety of the Sgt. Pepper's album of the Beatles by a tribute band. Recordings themselves are an interesting example of "werktreue" in pop and jazz. Miles Davis' album Kind of Blue has great renown as a musical "work" as do pop albums such as Sgt. Pepper's and Revolver by the Beatles. The recording is both the "work" and the ideal interpretation all together.

Why a Piece of Music is Like a Person

Reading in Taruskin's account of the earliest significant collections of written polyphonic music, the four great books of organum from the 12th century composers of Notre Dame de Paris, I came across this passage:

One can only conclude that the identity of a "piece of music" was a far more fluid concept for the Notre Dame cantors than it is for us. An organum as actually performed was essentially a patchwork created more or less on the spot, or after a brief consultation, from the many available parts in the manuscripts we have...

He is talking about the fact that there are many different versions of the pieces in different manuscripts and also that each has a multitude of interchangeable sections. To a somewhat lesser extent, this is true of all music prior to the invention of recording technology and is still true of all live performances of music. [UPDATE: this overstates things. In the Notre Dame repertoire it is the actual text, the notes, that has multiple variants. In music since about 1750, the text is stable, but the variations are on the level of expression and interpretation--which I think is also very important.] Even with simple pieces, every time you sit down to play or sing them, there are real differences in the pacing, expression, dynamics, tone-color and so on. I regard this as one of the great strengths of music.

Compare to some other art forms: differences in lighting and environment aside, all paintings and sculptures are essentially the same over time. There are no 'performance' differences. But in the performing arts, such as theater and music, each performance is different. What strikes me is the analogue with persons. Every time you meet someone and have a conversation with them, there are differences. A different side of them appears--and a different side of you as well. Proust mused that we only really come to know ourselves as we are reflected in others. A piece of music only seems to come fully to 'life' in a performance before an audience.

How great are these differences? Take a famous piece like the Chaconne to the D minor violin partita by Bach. There a many different ways of playing this. Here are a few of them:

Each on a different instrument! All the same piece. But the 'same' in a way akin to the way a person is the same dressed for a formal occasion, or dressed to play soccer, or in an extrovert mood, or subdued and so on. Different facets of a piece are revealed in different performances by different people, even if on the same instruments, similar to the way different facets of a person emerge depending on the situation: at a party, in a job interview and so on. You can only stretch the analogy a little ways, of course. But it is easy to see why a piece of music is a bit like a person: because people are involved in at least three ways. First, the music is composed by a person and due to its unique fluidity and expressive qualities, some of the personhood of the composer is transmitted. Then it is performed by a different person who takes what is there and contributes yet another level of personhood with their own expression. Thirdly, there is an audience receiving this complex of expression and they receive it with their own personhood.

Music is a medium for the transmission of some aspects of being a person. It is the fluidity, the undefined aspects of music that lend it the malleability that is so important.

Now think about recording for a moment. I had to use recordings to give you examples, but I would have much preferred not to. If this blog post were a talk instead, to a live audience, I could have played the beginning of the chaconne in several different ways as an example. Myself on guitar, perhaps some friends on violin or piano. Then the point would be even stronger, because even when the same person plays the same piece on the same instrument, it is different on different days. Just as you yourself are different on different days, in a different mood, and this is amplified when you interact with another person, who is also in different moods on different days.

Recordings are fixed, transportable and saleable, which has made them so hugely important. But they eliminate the aspect of music that I have been talking about: the fluidity of music, the different-each-time-ness of music. A recording is music frozen. Interestingly enough, this aspect is least evident the first time you listen, but with each subsequent hearing of the same recording, the frozenness of it becomes more evident.

Even though I have avoided using the word, this post is really about the ontology of music...

UPDATE: I just remembered an excellent example of this. During Expo 86 in Vancouver, the great Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelić was a guest artist performing, if I recall correctly, a Tchaikovsky piano concerto with the Vancouver Symphony. There were two evening performances scheduled and a review appeared in the morning paper after the first of them. Vancouver being just a bit of a musical backwater, but somewhat belligerent about it, the critic was careful to find some negatives to mention in the review. I wasn't actually there, a friend of mine, another music critic, related to me the story. In any case, in the first night's performance the critic tweaked Pogorelić for being too something: too subdued or too boistrous, too subtle or too crude. I don't recall which! But let's say, too subdued. Obviously he read the paper the next morning so for that evening's performance he played the piece in exactly the opposite way! This is what we often forget: a great artist can play a piece of music in fifty different ways...