STUNT PEOPLE, Part 3

Intro: Originally, Stunt People was going to be in four parts, but I've decided the last part is really on a slightly different topic, so that will be recycled into something else. In this last section, I focus on the separation of musical "thinkers" and "doers" and how this plays into the often inappropriate exaltation of the Composer.

The bifurcation of composer and performer is regarded in new-music milieus as “normal,” but what is the nature of this norm? In The Rules of Art, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted a complex of aesthetic values that were and sometimes still are accepted almost without question in the arena of Western art, and that indeed had come to be regarded as both normal and universal.

“the science of … the progressive emergence of a relatively autonomous field of [artistic] production … which … asserts the absolute primacy of form over function, is also … the science of the emergence of the pure aesthetic disposition, capable of privileging in the works … (and, potentially, in everything in the world) the form over the function.” (pp. 287-88)

For the “science” to function, not only the producers of art works, but critics, curators, impresarios, professors, and of course, audiences and consumers, must all embrace the same essential aesthetic assumptions. Among these is a fundamental distinction between ‘fine art’ and commercial or popular art. Art is deemed “fine” based on purely aesthetic attributes, that is, “form;” this distinguishes it from work that aims to entertain, pay tribute, or engage in ideological or political advocacy, i.e., that has a “function.”

Important artworks then are not the product of ordinary people who, in creating art, create themselves and create culture, but a timeless expression of universal truths. And the pure truth must be a unified thing; collaboration is counter to conceptual unity and purity of aim. Therefore, each serious work is the product of one creative being, his vision unsullied by much input from others. Such an artistic creation cannot be the product of an artisan’s dabbling; the performing arts creator who is a part of the spectacle risks lacking the conceptual distance from her project to preserve the purity of her big statement. Furthermore, if she performs alongside others, she risks the loss of her uniqueness as the creator.

Bourdieu has given us a context for asking an essential question; is the closed, dehistoricized framework of ‘new music’ threatened in some way when the creator is one and the same as the interpreter?

The performing arts present special issues within his framework, because the role of the performer is clearly distinct from those of creator, consumer, or critic. The performer is essential especially to the creative artist who does not wish to perform, because someone must actually enact the work; the creative artist can play the role of Auteur and the performer can do the stunts. Yet the performer is also a threat to the unity of the artist’s vision of truth—her own creativity is the real danger to the author. This is surely why David Mamet famously refuses to allow actors to change his dialogue even slightly. In order to be fully realized, plays and films must be acted and costumed, music must be played or sung, dances must be danced. Nothing a priori prevents a choreographer from dancing her own dance, a writer from acting his own play, a composer from playing her own music, but the modern creative artist chooses to live in the constant tension of maintaining the role of auteur by staying offstage (or –screen) while continually under threat of losing ownership of her work to performers. Hitchcock negated the creativity of actors that could have competed with his vision by controlling them like chess pieces from behind the camera. (Readers might hasten to remind me of Hitchcock’s frequent brief appearances onscreen, but that would be missing the point, precisely that the triviality of Hitchcock’s work in front of the camera boasts of his power by reminding us ironically of his omnipotence behind it. God has no need of strutting like a peacock; only his pretty flesh-and-blood puppets like Grace Kelly and Cary Grant need worry about how they come off on camera.)

While most current composers don’t play or sing particularly well, I have on a number of occasions heard a composer who did perform talk about how badly she wanted not to play in her own piece on an upcoming program: “I want to sit out there and just listen.” It may seem quite unremarkable that one might experience pleasure in sitting back and listening to others play, and I feel sure that I’m not the only musician who has felt an urge immediately before a performance to sit down in the audience and relax, or leave and see a movie. Why did Mozart play his music and why did Miles Davis play his? We presume that one reason they played was simply because, for each of them, the identity of a creative musician assumed such participation. For them, creating music was not a complete experience without the vibrant experience of direct involvement, without the slightly elevated heart rate, without the active point of concentration that Viola Spolin wrote about in the context of improvisational theater. This notion of creative participation puts the composer not above the music, nor around it or apart from it, but inside of it. Looking at a current arena much broader than that of the academy-based avant-garde, many of those who invent music wouldn’t think to exclude themselves from performances of their own work. One surmises that the desire to send musical messages that motivates the creation of music drives the performance of it as well; the two are often part of one continuum.

The bifurcation of ‘art’ composers and performers is ultimately not a duality, but a triality made up of musical creator, performer, and consumer. If we assume here that they really are distinct roles, various real musical scenarios collapse distinctions not only between two, but even all three of them. The vocal music of pygmy communities is characterized by contrapuntal improvisation on the part, typically, of all those present. (The question of whether or not improvisation is the same as composition is one I’d like very much to deal with in the future. However, the only thing that need be said now is that, composition or not, the music present in the room is generated by the same people that are playing it—indeed they are generating it in their very playing—and by the same people who are there to take it in and appreciate it.) Zikhr music is a Sufi ritual music where some elements—primarily the text, which is commonly “There is no God but Allah”—may be prescribed, but which is nonetheless partly improvised and performed by the congregation present. These scenarios that exemplify the collapsing of all three roles in musical performance certainly lie at one end of the continuum, though this is not to say that such circumstances are uncommon.

Moving along this line, there is certainly no shortage of examples of the collapsing of two of the three distinctions. Jazz readily provides examples in which the performers are also composers—not necessarily in the sense of published music, but the players and possibly singers have created much of the music we hear through improvisation. In this case, the consumers are commonly a distinct group, but the same musicians might be jamming together without an audience, in which case the participants are their own consumers, collapsing even that division. A group of people at a party who sing and play popular songs together are both performers and consumers, though generally not composers.

However, in the world of modern concert music, the distinction of roles is different from these other examples. The composer’s desire to sit and listen to the performance collapses the distinction not of composer and musician, nor of musician and consumer (as in the private jam session, whatever the idiom)—but that between composer and consumer. The avant-garde composer is more likely a consumer of concerts than a performer of them, and the stereotype of the highly specialized audience at new-music concerts is probably associated with this phenomenon. Cliché or not, it is clearly true that, aside from very select groups of affluent patrons and a usually small number of interested musicians, ‘new-music’ audiences are typically comprised largely of composers—professional composers, amateur composers, and undergraduate and graduate student composers. Indeed, the jokes regarding the cluster of composers in this milieu are legion; in the foyer, one may hear wry comments like—Composer A: “I’d better get in there, Composer Z will be taking roll!” One of the primary functions of such concerts is so that Composers A through M can hear the new pieces that Composers N through Z have composed; next month, vice versa.

The composer is always somewhat distinct from the small group of patrons who have long been on the subscription list; she has, after all, written one or more of the pieces, possibly coached with the musicians, and she will take a bow and perhaps walk up on stage at the end of the presentation. Still, most of her experience around the actual event is spent in a chair hearing her abstract-time creation put into real time. Indeed, she has an identifiable power that derives from the fact that she can sit bemusedly as others sweat—yet she and her fellow composers provide an at least small audience for the event as well. There is nothing hurtful in and of itself when composers—or musicians of any kind, for that matter—populate an auditorium. However, I really don’t think most of them understand that their alliance with the audience rather than the spectacle will generally result in their understanding less about some aspects of their own music than perceptive playing musicians will. The performers will know how it breathes, how it speaks.

I have several times had the experience of playing a piece for other musicians before the composer heard my interpretation, and having that small audience engaged and admiring of both piece and composer; when the composer heard me, he or she insisted that I play differently in some fundamental way that made little sense to me in terms of the piece I had before me. When the same musicians heard the result later, they confided to me that the piece was now significantly less effective. The composer follows the conceit that, as auteur, he must understand how the music should be played or sung, but that understanding is abstract. Abstract understanding is beautiful and often necessary, but music is not abstract insofar as it takes place in real space and in real time. Composers’ insistences about the ‘correct’ way to play their music often result from an implicit unwillingness to concede that the work has its own life and does not always match their image. Perhaps the more removed the composer is from actual performance, the more likely this is to occur. Also, I believe, the less removed she is, the more likely she is to go with the musical flow and accept what the piece is becoming—something she can feel the necessity of much more easily if she is part of the spectacle, and therefore, part of the becoming.

Though hired bands have played Western music for centuries, a good deal of the composer’s authority was clearly intricately linked to the fact that he led the ensembles and often soloed as well. At least until the opening of the nineteenth century, that cachet therefore did not stem simply from the very fact of his being a composer. That simple fact, however, is often the source of the value judgment today. It is not unusual at all now for inexperienced composers of twenty-three with little or no performance experience to presume to enlighten expert and experienced professional players and singers how musical works can best be realized.

And this reflects directly back to the issue of the composer as participant or consumer; in those relatively rare instances in which I’ve played a piece with the composer, the performer is relaxed because the composer tends to hear each musician as one component of a musical body of which she herself is another element. She is not sitting and taking notes on each musician’s foibles; instead she is facing directly many of the same challenges that they are. (Hard to hear? Water in the instrument? Out of tune?) When she does make a suggestion or criticism, her presence as a part of the whole means that her comment seems clearly an effort to knit together an effective whole, rather than in part a ritual in which she puts a group of musicians through their paces from a chair. She is the first among equals.

The composer’s stamp on the performance evolves much more naturally through example and through osmosis – rather than because she simply tries to explain to everyone exactly how to approximate her vision. She also establishes social relationships that are by definition cooperative, which means that the thinker/doer chasm (to which I made reference in a previous “Stunt People” post) is largely collapsed.

Often musicians lack a heightened awareness of this chasm, not because they are snowed by any one composer’s megalomania as because they still subscribe to a system of values that assumes that composers—those who don’t improvise or transcribe or interpret, but who write music, and I do mean write (those whose work is not entirely oriented in notation are not generally on the same pedestal)—possess superior critical faculties and are simply smarter than others. Yet, given someone else’s score of only modest difficulty to read, many successful young-ish composers—and I know this from a good deal of first- and second-hand experience—can’t execute fairly straightforward rhythms accurately, may not really differentiate between 6/8 and 3/4 time, and can’t score-read or sightsing in a fashion resulting in anything recognizable as music, and this is despite the fact that they write often very complicated scores whose responsible preparation for performance necessitates such facility. Their own compositional preoccupations appear to be almost completely formal. Given these current circumstances in ‘new music,’ the widespread notion that most composers can hear exciting music ‘in their heads’ has become pretty dubious (though what it actually means to hear in one’s head is a question well worth exploring in the future); what actually ends up on paper may sound quite different from the sounds in their heads. However, perhaps partly because no one can know just what someone hears in his head, the notion of the mysterious creative ability of anyone who fashions intricate scores does not die.