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 20th or the 21st 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-20th 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
