This is the second installment in my first blog piece, “Stunt People.” In the first post, I focused on my own professional experience as a ‘new music’ pianist coming to terms with scores with fiercely difficult performance demands. I used Xenakis’s music, in particular, as an example of how literally impossible score demands can seem superficially to give the performer freedom—because she must decide what to play and what not—but is more likely to provoke malaise and anxiety in the performer. Now I’ll turn more to one of the most characteristic aspects of Modernist ‘art music:’ the dissociation of performance from composition that has developed gradually from the beginning of the nineteenth century and culminated in the genuine bifurcation of musical creation from musical performance we see in much avant-garde music. I think that this phenomenon is highly significant in looking at the aims and overall culture of ‘new music.’

Many will notice that the culture I’m describing seems more the hard-core modernism of several decades ago—or, in terms of 2009, perhaps the work of academics—than the one in current downtown New York, or even in the alternative spaces of L.A. or San Francisco. However, I do think the current university scene is crucial as a training ground for many younger composers. I also will argue in the future that the fundamental identity of the ‘downtown’ scenes, however pop-influenced, depends as much on its differentiation from commercial music as does academic music, and that this fact serves to keep evidently distinct "avant-garde" genres united.

In this post, my intention is to challenge the assumptions about distinctions between composers and performers characteristic of the world of contemporary music, but I essentially bypass the issue of the distinction between the activities themselves. In a later blog, however, I’ll come back to this fundamental question.

Stunt People Part II

My association of the extreme difficulty of many avant-garde scores with alienation—anxiety as aesthetics—constitutes one important aspect of the dynamics of ‘new music’ culture. But just as important an issue as the ever more extreme score demands is the simple distinction of composer from performer—that is, in music that has, in the sense of the Western European tradition, been composed at all.

Some composers will probably argue that this bifurcation doesn’t even exist, but the notion of its existence is hardly eccentric, for many scholars and musicians have at least alluded to it. It seems pretty clear that, while musical performers of Western music in the fourteenth or the sixteenth or the eighteenth centuries certainly were not all composers—far fewer were professionals in the contemporary sense either—it is difficult to find persuasive examples of Western composers who were not constantly engaged in the performance of their own music before Modernism. Not so for the formally trained composers of recent decades, many of whom can only play or sing at a rudimentary level and certainly can’t play their own often very demanding works; those who can really play often don’t want to. Some have some expertise ‘playing’ the computer and such expertise is a viable musical skill. However, generating music digitally, even in live interaction with other instruments or voices, rarely is the same thing as playing or singing music in real time, whether on entirely acoustic, amplified, or electronic instruments. The latter requires that the experiencing of time must be in the body, and in most cases more intimately associates tactile experience with sound vibration.

The fact that composers of the past played their own music does not, of course, prove that it is unnatural for composers not to perform today. Creating music is an activity that will always depend on the needs and wants of a given group of people at a given time. And cross-historical comparisons are often specious; the characteristically nineteenth-century rise of the popular and charismatic musical performer—paralleling in many respects the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie—should rightly raise suspicion of easy comparisons, for example, between Bach and Liszt as composer-performers. The advent and evolution of electronic enhancements and commercial recording should cast suspicion on similarly facile attempts to compare the performing lives of Liszt and Steve Reich. How can we presume on a historical basis to measure whether or not a composer of today is fully engaged in musical life?

To advocate for narrowing the gap between composition and performance is a present-ist pursuit, not one that is justified by history. I have no wish to discount the work of those who were or are more composers than playing musicians, for my critique is not aimed at the often talented individual composers who don’t play or sing, but at a complex of values associated with a culture that distinguishes performing music from creating it.

Though Bartok, Busoni, and Rachmaninoff certainly were masterful keyboardists, the evidence suggests that Debussy, Stravinsky, and Ravel, all highly proficient, were not capable of setting the highest performance standard for their music. Messiaen could be considered as having made significant impact with his performances on organ (including improvisations) and piano, as well as in his compositions. But as we consider other relatively recent composers, it’s clear that, though Berio, Copland, and others were sometimes performing composers, it seems intrinsically clear that they are somehow not composing performers; their music has clearly been most notably performed by others. Berg, Ives, and Morton Feldman, not to mention Schönberg, are other examples of composers not particularly known as public performers, though they were wonderful musicians.

The level and intensity of composer performance in new Western concert music continued to drop. Boulez is, of course, the most striking living exception to the current tendency among classical musicians; while he has been considered a pivotal composer, his fame as a conductor of others’ music has probably outpaced the renown of his own compositions. Esa-Pekka Salonen is the closest parallel to Boulez in a younger man, but as skillful a composer as he is, it would be difficult to argue that his music has comparable significance to Boulez’s fifty years ago. He would have to be counted, even for most dedicated listeners, as a musician whose conducting prowess provokes unusual curiosity about his music. (I will argue later that conducting isn’t performance in the same sense as playing or singing anyway, but that’s a matter for another day.)

Does the weakening of the link between contemporary ‘art’ music and general intellectual life in the Europe and America correlate with the evident differentiation between those who write the music and those who play it?

The reality is that the trope of the playing (or singing) composer continued through the nineteenth century and didn’t die out after the First World War at all (though it became less evident among ‘classical composers’). Composition and performing were not separate entities for Paganini, Godowski, or in many cases, Liszt; they also weren’t separate for Percy Grainger or Fats Waller, and are not for Joni Mitchell, Sonny Rollins, or to a lesser extent, Philip Glass. If musicians trained to be chamber or orchestral players challenged the highly dubious view that a smooth lineage can be observed from historical periods clearly past straight through to ‘contemporary music,’ they might see a different continuity: the impetus on the part of creative people to put their own music across with their own energy and inflection. It is not at all simply a previously useful construct foreign to the cultural demands of the 20^th or the 21^st centuries. One might also view all of this from another angle and state simply that one of the peculiar and therefore defining characteristics of avant-garde music is that its composers tend not to perform their own music – or that of anyone else.

The project of music as an autonomous and weighty art form created not by mere musicians but by geniuses of structural design was no doubt served by the bifurcation. But it seems to me that especially younger people searching for musical outlets today seek something not only available in rock or rap, but more broadly in any music that melds the pre-composed with the extemporaneous; this assumes creative input from the performer. The classical music world’s fixation on the fully composed musical work resists this impulse by pretending that an art form that demands to be experienced in real time and space can be frozen, unsullied by daily experience. In so doing, it dates itself, relegating itself to an existence as a Grand Old Tradition.

In the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, there are several freelance musicians who are active both as composers and as performers. And, on a broader scale, there are a number of ‘contemporary classical’ composers of some reputation who can also boast of their distinction as performers. To mention a few North American composers alone, Reich, Frederic Rzewski, and Laurie Anderson are all composers with classical credentials who have presented and performed their own music over the course of many years. However, these are also composers who are, at least in part, associated with certain ideas of post-Modernism and, in any case, stand in at least implicit opposition to much of the body of contemporary art music; the fact remains that, as a subculture, classical musicians view composers and players as separate, as masters of different talents, and, perhaps less consciously, as groups with distinct roles and statuses in society. In a conversation I had with a composer who has also been a professional performer, I told her that I hoped that I would hear her play again soon; she replied that she had all but given up performing, saying that she doubted that she could pursue careers both in playing and composing. At the time, she regarded the two as distinct professions.

The split is further exemplified by the habit for more than the last half-century of composers blaming (at least in part) performing musicians’ relative lack of interest in their music on the conservatism of institutions of Western classical musical performance and education. And there is no question that the orientation of vocal and instrumental pedagogy—for example, encouraging music students to prepare programs comprised of something from the Baroque or Classical period, something Romantic, and something (often just barely) 20th-century for a competition—tends to alienate students from working with a present-day focus. Certainly in the mid-20^th century, books and magazines focusing on symphonic, chamber, or operatic music frequently quoted the conservative views of big-name performers—Bernstein (a composer also, but regarded as conservative there too), Callas, Rubinstein—as evidence that composers were out of touch with the musicians that really mattered to a significant public. (Today, ironically, the pool of truly celebrated classical players and singers has so shrunk that few are any more renowned than the top current ‘contemporary classical’ composers.)

However, to see these tensions typical of recent Western ‘art music’ in such terms is probably to miss the point. Today’s players and composers may bicker, but there is an agreed-upon difference in vantage points; a relationship between the groups has developed that I would characterize as a hostile alliance. The attitudes of performers toward composers may often be cool, and vice versa, but the view of each group with regard to the music world overall is remarkably similar. These values prescribe that people are either thinkers or doers, and, when it comes to composers and performers, it is easy to see who plays which role. The thing to understand is that each accepts her role. (Furthermore, this hostile alliance can function as a metaphor for much American cultural life.)

This split has left composers often no longer identifying specifically as musicians at all: pianists and violinists often identify themselves as “musicians,” at least at first; composers as “composers,” or sometimes even “professors” (composers are often introduced in social situations by appellations like ‘Dr. Smith!’). This has left to performers the role of a group of trade specialists whose worth is measured in large part by how spiritedly they follow directions—a characteristic that can be identified as readily in the world of the symphony orchestra as in new music. The notion, particularly powerful in the 1950s through the 1980s, but still institutionally strong, of an increasingly radicalized community of composers opposing an increasingly reactionary pool of performers is, in itself, the concoction of a subculture that cannot reconcile in one person the two things that have always been reconciled in one musician—the seemingly more introspective phenomenon of creativity and invention and the evidently more physical and sensuous phenomenon of sending musical sounds ringing through space. The point of agreement in this subculture that one group is brilliant and goes its own way while the other is made up of happily dutiful servants of art can be linked to the fact that nearly all are educated at the same or similar institutions. One need only view American university music programs, or those in the conservatories described in Henry Kingsbury’s study Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System, to get compelling examples of the thinkers/doers bifurcation.

This division did not simply happen by chance, of course. The effect of fundamental social change on European intellectual and artistic life of the sort detailed notably in Lydia Goehr’s Imaginary Museum of Musical Works fostered an increasing desire on the part of composers to give up the image of themselves as artisans in favor of one of quasi-literati (in the case of the avant-garde, they increasingly embraced an image of quasi-mathematicians!). But someone had to get her hands dirty, someone had to do the stunts. This would be the professional performer, who would have to deal with sweaty hands and shaky feet, who would have to worry about what she would wear, who would have to work in real time.

Specialization in the classical music world is illustrated even in the very simple and very common circumstance in which a violinist complains that the composer must not be a string player to have written such a passage; clarinetists and flutists are frequently bemused about the awkward or even impossible trills they are called on to play. Nobody who really knows her way around the instrument, they all say, would write such a figure. Curiously enough, the highly formalist composers who taught students of my generation (in the 1980s) fancied themselves highly practical with regard to every aspect of their compositions. The fact, however, that they often encouraged their students to learn one instrument in each of several sections of the orchestra may ironically give a clue to the diminishing practical instrumental or vocal considerations in their music. Their attempts to become barely competent at a bunch of instruments rarely could include the mastery of any of them; a certain dilettantism resulted. When, in contrast, a superb cellist who has no keyboard expertise wishes to write for piano, she is nonetheless likely to approach the project with the desire for that player to appear to best effect in concert just as she herself wishes to. She wants the virtuosic writing to be worth the player’s while; she is apt to believe that, if you’re going to knock yourself out playing tough music, you should shine once you’ve mastered it. Hence the issue may not be so much what one plays so much as that one plays something really well.

Composers' own study of viola, oboe, and tympani in recent generations came to signify their expertise, just as the doctorates awarded to them in increasing numbers did. They thus viewed themselves as justified in being impatient if the player was struggling—“I know it’s playable”—but the terms under which they learned these instruments did not cultivate a musical environment in which players are in control and happy. Today’s young composers mostly don’t even bother with all of this; many know no instrument well—their composition teachers don’t encourage them to, probably because it would distract them from the entirely autonomous activity known as ‘composing’—and often have studied no instrument with any seriousness at all. They lack the hands-on experience that would qualify them as dilettantes.

Can we establish parallels between social changes and the splintering of musicians – and perhaps others as well – into thinkers and doers? Might we see more general patterns evidencing a move in the direction of specialization, culminating in the worshipful and mystical cult of the modern auteur? Yes, but we should keep in mind the lesson of Goehr’s essay; the roots of the current situation can be found in fundamental social and aesthetic changes that largely took place in the eighteenth century. The next time you hear a classical music fan attack Schönberg for not being a composer for the common folk, you might agree with them, and then nonchalantly add, “And Beethoven—same thing!”

The past two centuries have witnessed not only the increasing Western phenomenon of musicians dividing themselves into groups of creators and performers, but also the normalization of the split; most of today’s symphonic musicians probably cannot imagine why they would even consider composing their own music. Most composers in this world regard most performers as able in matters re-creative but unfit for creative activity. A composer friend recently mentioned another composer who had made a comment about his piece that had been extremely helpful; he attributed her perceptivity to a ‘composer’s sensibility.’ Does such a comment simply reflect a pre-existent bias on his part that people who make scores are fundamentally more sensitive to the cogency or power of the music? Perhaps the other was far more willing to say something about his music other than “nice piece!” because she had social permission to do so. I have heard many performers make extremely subtle observations about new pieces—despite their acceptance of the role to which they’ve been relegated—but this composer had probably rarely heard such observations, or at any rate noticed them. This suggests biases about who does and who does not have creative potential and therefore may have insight about the creative work of others. Musical and often inventive performers have accepted a mysticization of creativity that alienates them from the lofty pursuit of “composition.” Similarly, composers cling to a notion that their training, often focused more on scores than on performance in real time and space, qualifies them uniquely not only for fashioning works but for aesthetic understanding. And perhaps, in a funny sense, they’re right. Maybe the second composer’s observation was ultimately valued because it would improve the text—because it would make the score a better-proportioned and more persuasive document.

As musical as most professional composers undoubtedly are, their mastery of producing texts removed from the realm of real time and space are perhaps valued above all in their own culture. It is eminently possible that this is one reason for the composer-performer bifurcation; the composer positioning himself back in that trench where the stunt people work somehow threatens the primacy of his frozen document. Thus, according to modernist ideals, participation in performances of one’s own music compromises one’s identity and persona as a composer. And we’ll see that it’s critical to this social construct that the ‘contemporary composer’ ultimately casts her lot in with the audience, not with the players; oddly she cultivates in herself a closer identification with the spectators than with the spectacle itself.

MSO

STUNT PEOPLE

The following is my first blog. It is the first section of a four-part blog about the relationship between anxiety or alienation and the performance of avant-garde music. The first two parts will focus on the actual experience of playing the music. The second two will deal more with the separation of the identities “musician” and “composer” and the issues of power involved which, in turn, relate back to the issue of alienation from the first two parts.

Future matters I’ll write about include: education and the “culture industry;” Beethoven the ‘philosopher composer’ and deafness as a metaphor; the post-Romantic split between “philosophical” and performance-based music, with Liszt and Busoni as special schizoid examples; notation, improvisation, and the nature of musical experience; and issues that go well beyond music! Write me to agree, disagree, correct, or otherwise comment.

Introduction

An actor like Christian Bale is admired for losing massive amounts of weight, perhaps risking his own health, to star in the The Machinist; he reportedly isolated himself from colleagues while playing a serial killer in American Psycho. I also heard him in an interview in which he spoke in an American accent (Bale is British) and declared that he was playing an American part and that the accent was essentially his current reality. But more recently I heard Bale insist indignantly that his colleague Heath Ledger was way too good an actor to let a role (the Joker in Batman) affect his own life and ultimately death, as some had evidently claimed. Why does Bale make such a judgment when it is the very conflation of reality and fiction associated with actors like himself that leads to such speculation?

Of course I don’t think Ledger died because he played the Joker, but playing a role can have its affect on people, both in the mind and in the muscles. The same is true of music; the Kronos Quartet decided against performing a several hours-long quartet by Morton Feldman because the players were experiencing repetitive-motion stress. Fidelio is reputed to have shortened the career of Regina Resnik and Roberto Devereux that of Beverly Sills. The metaphorical nature of Romantic archetypes like the girl H.C. Andersen’s story “The Red Shoes,” who nearly dances herself to death and Antonia in Offenbach’s opera, The Tales of Hoffman, who, like her mother, is unable to stop singing and therefore dies, start to look uncomfortably literal in this context. An author’s choice of subject on the one hand and his (usually his) use of those who staff his creation are related. Though the Romantic myth of the creative artist in the garret is powerful, it is, beginning in this era, often the ‘re-creative artist,’ who sweats blood to bring the dream to life.

“Stunt People” is my attempt to sort some of this out in the context of the performance of what is insistently called “new music” (though there is all kinds of music that is, in fact, new). As the overt violence of pre-World War II modernism has been gradually been sublimated to a formalistic style associated especially with the academy, the hurdles required of those who sing and play the music has intensified. It continues to become ever more demanding and ever more ungrateful to and for the performer.

STUNT PEOPLE – Part 1

A few years ago, a colleague and I were preparing to play a couple of concerts that included a set of short pieces written in 1979 by a noted French composer. One of the pieces has a metronome marking exceeding 160 quarter-note beats per minute; this though the piece not only is generally full of sixteenth-note motion (2/3 this tempo is certainly considered to be fast when there is a lot of sixteenth-note motion), but also requires the two players to play these fast notes in tricky, irregular patterns. Finally, the difficulty of the parts is compounded by the fact that the two players must constantly dovetail with these irregular patterns, and this dovetailing itself is also irregular, and creates another dimension of difficulty.

Given that there was plenty of other work to do in putting our program together, I suggested that we put just the one piece aside, perhaps to pick it up again at some point. Its demands seemed daunting, and the program was, after all, supposed to be a labor of love; no one was paying us to play anything in particular. My partner suggested that we work at the piece at a still quick, but somewhat slower and more approachable tempo, and not worry about where we ended up.

I continued to work at the piece, well under speed, and my new aims appeared in some way to free me to observe things about the piece more dispassionately. Quite quickly, it was quite clear to me that we would never get to the notated tempo and that no one else was likely to either! I say this advisedly, for how can I know the capabilities of every single musician? Yet I stand by my assertion – the tempo is virtually impossible. Any active musician has seen and heard performers with extraordinary physical capabilities, but the world is not littered with pianists able to play twenty percent again as rapidly as I. (And few of the world’s most brilliant technicians have any interest in playing such music.) Furthermore, though musicians are often surprised at how much faster a piece may go if they work on it over a long period of time or return to it several times, it doesn’t always make sense to devote a year to a piece of limited scope that doesn’t aesthetically inspire such a sacrifice.

When I was still trying to approach the composer’s notated tempo, I was anxious, and my observations were those of an anxious person: in my mind, a skillful composer, who has worked closely with many musicians and is herself a skilled practical musician, had designated a tempo that I (slob that I am!) could not achieve, try as I might. Other people can presumably do it, why not me? When my concert partner told me that she found the tempo at least improbable, and took partial responsibility for the proposition that our aim should be to put together a convincing realization of the piece on our own terms, much of my anxiety was erased. It was suddenly so clear that the piece could not and would not be moved at the notated tempo, and that “our own terms” were pretty good. Anxiety had clouded my judgment and inhibited the use of my imagination in finding the most viable and musical way to make the piece come off, and in this instance, it personalized an aspect of performance that perhaps ought to have been, shall I say, more objective.

What a civilized idea, to play the piece musically, persuasively, at a tempo where the clearly intended effect of great speed might be projected without attempting the impossible. And what could be a more simpatico attitude toward a composer than ours? We wanted to make her piece a pleasure for us and for our listeners, not a trial to get through.

But there is a problem: the anxiety over matching the performance to the score is not just an issue of personal neurosis. Classically trained players and singers are actually supposed to do what the composer says to do, and our playing was, in fact, at a tempo significantly below the composer’s written one. What aestheticians call ‘score-adherence’ has been critically important to the practice of “contemporary classical music.” Even rhythmic freedom routinely accepted in Chopin or Brahms is mostly discouraged in Stravinsky, Webern, and Bartòk. A good deal of my anxiety had been handled by the change in our approach, but not all of it. I began to think about how, as presumed specialists, I and other players and singers encounter these issues over and over again. As we are presented with pieces of the last half-century or so, there is – with good reason, given the demands for frenetic virtuosity in score after score – at least a quiet fear that something will be completely beyond us. And despite the aesthetic softening of Modern scores a bit over the past couple of decades – or perhaps because of it? – the more recent the score, the more likely this is to be a concern. I inevitably wonder if I’m justified in thinking something can’t be done or can only be done with some alterations, or perhaps only be done under great duress? Furthermore, to actually open up a discourse about our human limitations with other professionals feels just a bit risky, because the talk can easily be viewed as a discussion of individual limitations.

There are many freelance musicians who would immediately argue that a lot of compromises must be made with new music, largely because it’s new and untried; why stress so much? Play it at a tempo at which one can make it musical, and negotiate with the composer – who is so often present at the last rehearsals – regarding any tempos or techniques that aren’t working out. I do all of those things too, yet I maintain that the anxiety is quite conducive to the music at hand. In worrying, I treat the situation as though there is a lot at stake musically, as if the tempo and the composer’s specifications with regard to extended techniques are as important as the basic notes and rhythms. Perhaps more important, there is a kind of aesthetic symbiosis between my worry and the pressed, forced tempos.

Consider that when I was quite young and finishing my undergraduate years, I was given quite a hard time by a graduate student who had entrusted me with a monstrously long and difficult piece. I had already practiced the piece a good deal when he told me how disappointed he was with me and that he “knew his music was playable.” (If it happened now, I might ask him how exactly he knew, since he couldn’t even have begun to play it himself. Later I found out that he had subsequently given it to a man much older than I, perhaps the leading new-music keyboardist in the area at that time; the fellow reportedly returned it to the young composer with the words “I couldn’t get past the first page.” (However, this pianist wasn’t under pressure to do the piece; in another situation, he might well have felt that he had to find a way.) This performance never materialized. Another case suggesting that not everyone is open to compromise involved a superb and versatile colleague of mine who plays much of the most difficult music in the contemporary repertoire expertly. However, a local composer gave him a lot of grief because he could not maintain a harrowing tempo without leaving out a few notes. Such negotiation isn’t always a simple matter.

When I heard a highly praised local freelance pianist play music that I had performed by Boulez and Berio, I was struck that his big, strong-looking hands belied the fact that he was managing the most difficult passages by playing them at about 2/3 tempo, which changed the character of the music – but neither composer was present. It seemed to me that I hadn’t actually been willing to compromise to that extent in music where the tempo has clearly been achieved – at least not without a fight. Yet years before this, I had been forced to essentially make up one staggeringly difficult movement of a Peter Maxwell Davies piece and, several times recently, I played an etude by Unsuk Chin that I couldn’t have been playing at faster than ¾ the hyped-up tempo. (I suppose that Chin has a Disklavier that managed it quite well.)

The issue may be most baldly laid out in the case of Gyorgy Ligeti, most of whose music is a genuine pleasure. A harpsichordist who spoke with the composer about his thrilling solo piece Continuum told me that when she informed him that she couldn’t get the tempo quite within his 4-minute time limit – here the time is possible, but the player must be sure that she is performing on an instrument that can be played very fast and a certain sacrifice of individual articulations in favor of the bigger swirls of notes is usually required to be within the limit – his oddly humorous response was that she simply couldn’t play the piece. The music of Ligeti, while far more engaging and enlivening than that of most composers of any era, is supposed to be an intellectual music, a reflective, philosophical, though also mathematical, music. Yet ironically, to make such a live-or-die issue of its timing makes playing Continuum in large part a daredevil act. Ligeti was fun-loving enough that one could well imagine him writing a piece intended as a dare to an Evel Knievel of the harpsichord. But the famous biker was always front-and-center when he attempted his unlikely feats. Ligeti, on the other hand, hadn’t the chops for Continuum, and if I play it (and I did, very slightly under tempo!), the composer is the star of the event; I am the stunt double.

The implications of Ligeti’s attitude about the tempo of Continuum go beyond the specific work or even the composer. Any musician who has heard a composer boast that his sonata is harder to play than Boulez’s sonatas knows that one basis for high regard in new-music culture is to create such musical high-wire acts. This is probably due both to the perception that the composer gives no heed to issues of difficulty and that such harrowing difficulty requires great expertise. Logically enough, composers who write the music most difficult to play also often get the bulk of available rehearsal.

These scenarios present us with a microcosm of personal, professional, and cultural alienation and anxiety; this is because anxiety is a necessary component of the existing dynamics around “new music.” Musicians willing to enact the stunts imagined by those we call “composers” – keep in mind that we often don’t refer to creative musicians like John Coltrane, Ricki Lee Jones, or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan as “composers” – have the opportunity to see disturbing aspects of the avant-garde close up.

How rigidly performers are under a kind of jurisdiction of composers can be explored in another anecdote. Some years ago, I heard Claude Helffer play a program of European avant-garde piano music in San Francisco (originally the program included Debussy also, but that was dropped; it must have been judged not sufficiently contemporary, for we Americans are only supposed to take interest in programs that are all avant-garde, all music by women, all cartoon music, all something). The program included Xenakis’s Evryali; I liked what I heard and resolved at some point to work on it. However, once I acquired the score, I found that the piece was – not unknown to the composer, of course – impossible. That is, I could find no way to play everything on the page, in the conventional sense.

Of course, to be faced with a score that appears to demand that which cannot be done, can be upsetting to a musician whose expectation is that she is to respond similarly to, for example, a Stravinsky score. Is there some new tradition (as it were) that renders the requirement of making certain choices understood? Somehow the player must find a way to leave things out, to prioritize, perhaps to abstract, maybe even to have the intention of playing everything without actually doing so. Perhaps Xenakis’s intention was that a new attitude toward notation necessitates an erosion of the very idea that one would even try to read the score literally. Is the score actually meant for performance at all? (Some have suggested that there are pieces by Xenakis that are essentially textual works rather than pieces primarily intended for performance.) For a composer to demand this a priori of a player is not invalid. But keep in mind that the score of Evryali contains no explicit acknowledgement that Xenakis does not expect the player to play every note.

Do I delude myself in thinking that I want to free things up for performers, yet am objecting to music in which big decisions are in effect left up to players? But are they really? It would be disingenuous of any composer who lived and worked in Xenakis’s milieu to pretend that the performer is encouraged to extemporize, to transform the piece significantly as a jazz player might in, say, rendering a standard almost unrecognizable. Xenakis was part of an environment where fundamental adherence to the notated score was understood and everyone in new music knows it. In the “contemporary classical” music world the composer’s authority trumps any freedom for an interpreter every time; that is, a performer may be entrusted with choices, but they’d better be the right choices, for one has only the freedom that the composer grants (a subject much joked-about even with regard to composers as committed to chance operations as Cage was). Certainly the half-hearted nature of Boulez’s forays into performer choice is well documented. There is still little agency on the part of the performer, so how is one to go about choosing what to play without any delineated practice, without any tradition to help make these decisions?

If Xenakis indicated exactly what the player can leave out, gave her specific choices about what to play, or even included a detailed program note explaining that the score is not intended so literally, the task of the pianist would immediately look and feel very different. As it is, the score leaves the player with the feeling that she is desperately trying to get every detail she can and if, tomorrow, she should be able to get one more detail without breaking too many bones, she should do so. That means that she is in the metaphorical position of running to catch up to something, even when she performs the piece. The aesthetics of this sprint to a finish line that is never quite reached is essential to new-music ethos. And remember that the composer usually wants someone else to play this game; the fact that she is most often not a professional performer protects her from having to face this particular anxiety herself (and believe me, I understand that she will have her own causes for anxiety).

Many composers have self-admittedly taken to demanding unplayable tempos because they want a particular sense of “struggle and urgency;” the idea that a fine ensemble playing their music for next to nothing is scrambling and panting through the performance pleases them. Again though, the composer’s desires is achieved abstractly through the notation; he does not specify “by all means pant, even drool” because any specifications giving the performers permission to manifest stress will paradoxically diminish their anxiety; everyone must instead try not to struggle, and hence they are more stressed. And the more stress, the more ultimately score-compliant the performance.

Xenakis is not releasing players from the necessary compliance familiar in performances of Brahms or Bartòk. Under circumstances of a pretend freedom where one is forced to make sweeping interpretive decisions, yet with the awareness that it should all be something of which Xenakis would approve, is it a surprise that most of even the most enterprising players – these are the players who are genuinely interested in the music! – ultimately close the score and look for something else to play? The experience becomes one not simply of anxiety, but of alienation.

MSO