Make Their Own Kind of Music? Part 2

There is much praise in the classical music world for musicians deemed “true to the composer.” On the other hand, those who are perceived as using the music as a vehicle for their own musical personalities or outlooks are often excoriated. We can challenge such assumptions, but classical teachers and musicians may not be so much concerned with honoring composers’ actual intentions as with an extremely literal view of the relationship between notation and performance. My own piano teacher, Margaret Kohn, specifically referred in my childhood to her rebellion against the unabashedly Romantic aesthetics of her own teacher, Jan Smeterlin. Smeterlin played in the relatively free manner of many turn-of-the-twentieth-century musicians, including at times the direct contradiction of notated dynamics and articulation. His student’s rebellion was a modernistic embrace, in her words, of “the printed page”—though I must say that she, in turn, interpreted scores far less rigidly than many younger pianists. Consider, however, the supposition that the musicians of Smeterlin’s generation adhered more precisely to the printed page in many respects than previous generations of keyboardists. He was, as far as I know, not given to harmonizing a figured or un-figured bass, improvising cadenzas, lavishly adding ornaments, or throwing in extra octaves, for a few examples, all commonplace practices in earlier generations. The issue with pianists like Smeterlin may not be so much disregard of the printed page as that the historical adjustment of performers to such detailed scores was quite gradual. In the late eighteenth century, there had simply been a lot less score to follow, in Bach’s time less than that, in the fifteenth century even less, and so forth.

The classical teacher might insist that close adherence to the written score is not what it’s all about, and that he does indeed encourage his student to go her own way. He could point out how he encourages her to play Chopin with rubato, that is, rushing in certain places and broadening in others, especially in the right hand. Hence the rhythm will not always adhere precisely to what is notated. It is likely, in fact, that he may consider “unmusical” a student who, perhaps due to timidity, plays Romantic music in strict time. He might note that he may at times encourage his student to begin a passage marked forte slightly more quietly if that marking is followed by a crescendo that may be difficult for her to effect if she is starting at an already loud dynamic. The teacher may perhaps have the student roll a chord that her hands are too small to encompass where no roll is indicated, or even leave notes out of that chord.

All of this suggests that I shouldn’t be too hasty in dismissing the freedoms available to students of classical music. However, such freedoms accorded the classical music student don’t alter the fact that, for the classical pedagogue, the parameters limiting performer freedom are ultimately rigid. The teacher encourages rubato because Chopin and his contemporaries are assumed to have employed a good deal of it in their own playing. The adjustment of the dynamics to effect a better crescendo simply places a slightly higher value on Chopin’s crescendo than on his marking of forte; the hope of the teacher is that the intentions of the composer overall will be better served with this compromise. There is no issue of superseding the composer’s marking in the interests of a negotiation between different perspectives. The choice of either rolling the chord or leaving out a note or two is simply based on the question of whether we will consider the composer’s instructions with regard to time or those with regard to pitch supreme. There is no question of, even just occasionally, completely disregarding the presumed intentions of the composer, but sometimes there is simply the necessity of having to choose between intentions.

The classical teacher may well admire some fairly unconventional traits associated with performing artists like Maria Callas or Glenn Gould, and maybe this undermines my assertion that the focus of classical performance training is adherence and continuation rather than synthesizing and creating. Still, Callas actually adhered in many respects more closely to the score than a number of other singers of her generation; her unconventional vocal technique was more at issue, and this may not have been a matter of choice (though it still is undoubtedly a factor in why she is admired). Gould may be a more relevant example because he genuinely questioned the assumptions of the classical establishment in some respects, as in his famous abandonment of the concert stage in favor of the recording studio, as well as in his own eccentric responses (at least in terms of the time in which he lived) to the printed page. However, I’m not convinced that admiration for Gould is, in itself, sufficient evidence that the reverence for the composer’s text has been meaningfully challenged recently in the classical music world. In fact, I have known pedagogues who admire Gould, yet encourage even their older and more advanced students to play quite conventionally, as if such experimentation is only the special privilege of a talented aristocracy.

The teacher of classical music may well believe that it is in a possible future role as a composer that the student may stretch the envelope, differentiate herself, and rebel. This, however, only emphasizes my position that, while playing music originally imagined in the past at an instrument in real time, the student is not encouraged to experiment beyond a tightly circumscribed limit; the notes, rhythms, dynamics, articulations, and form are mostly seen as a given.

It would seem that classical training fosters not just the teaching of certain artistic disciplines, but the expectation that the conceptions and underlying attitudes of these disciplines will fully circumscribe the performing life of the student. This is supported by observing what it is that a large number of serious classical music students do not learn. I have conversed on a number of occasions with teacher/musicians, who thought it remarkable that a piano student can play a piece of great difficulty—a Chopin Concerto, for example—yet not be able to break into playing Happy Birthday at a party. I was certainly such a musician until, some years ago, I began to accompany singing students who occasionally had no conventional sheet music and, also when my teaching life began to focus more on general musicianship; I still struggle far more with extemporizing than many other musicians with less in the way of “chops.” Furthermore, in my considerable experience, the more presumably serious and skilled both the student and her teacher are in relation to European art music, the less likely it is that either has much ability to extemporize.

Very recently, there are a number of visible performers who aim to mix traditional Western music not only with avant-garde pieces, but music in (or near to) contemporary popular idioms as well. Recently on Public Radio, just to cite one example, there was an intriguing story about the pianist Jade Simmons, who performs programs that combine both elements of traditional ‘classical’ and avant-garde music with elements of hip-hop music and other pop traditions. However, few such performers that have received much attention actually seriously re-interpret “classics” in ways that meld them in some way with the recent music presented. In most cases, the older music is allowed to remain pure, unlike anything in a popular idiom, which is, in turn, fundamentally intended to reflect the performer’s own life and culture. A performance of Brahms or Schoenberg still is likely to be praised for revealing truths about those composers, not as vehicles for exposing us to a new musical performance personality. Pop music (in the broadest sense) of the past invites the generating of new ideas; Coltrane’s performances of Richard Rodgers’ My Favorite Things were probably as ‘creative’ as his playing of his own tunes.

Consider a couple of scenarios regarding the teaching of non-classical music that I think fairly represent the musical training of American kids in recent years—the lucky ones, because so many learn nothing about music at all that they can’t pick up easily online or on the radio. The musical educations, for example, of a young saxophone student who studies with a jazz player and that of a guitar student taking lessons with a steel-string folk rock player are themselves probably dissimilar in some respects. The saxophonist student may study some classical repertoire to develop her reading and her technique. This is probably not the case with the guitarist who is learning the basics of folk guitar; the technique is entirely different from classical guitar technique, and the student may never be required to develop his reading much. Still, the respective teachers are likely to share an interest in imparting to their students an understanding of stylistic habits rooted in the past. The teaching only of present-day currents probably does not exist, for there is little controversy regarding the notion that it is good for us to understand something about the roots of whatever we are playing in the present; here again, understanding something about Hamlet on terms other than our own is desirable. The jazz teacher may be quite insistent about her student learning something about the blues, and, if necessary, what it means to swing—and she will probably correct him whenever he fails to achieve it. The guitar teacher may well alert his student when she fails to use voicing, figuration, or even bending of pitch that adhere to a range of stylistic conventions of guitar playing. Therefore one teacher takes the position that a saxophonist should know something about how Charlie Parker or Cannonball Adderley played, and the guitar teacher thinks a guitarist should be familiar with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Pete Seeger, and Jimi Hendrix as well.

To this point, the focus of these teachers’ concerns appear comparable to those of the classical piano teacher’s—who wants her students to learn about Beethoven’s style, to follow Schubert’s dynamics, etc.—in that they are all learning about musical traditions originating in the past. Are the teachers of saxophone and guitar always so interested in their students developing into innovators? Are the visions of the saxophone and guitar teachers for the one student to play as much like Coltrane as possible forever, and for the other always to play something like Hopkins? Or is the idea rather that acquaintance with important pre-existing styles informs the range and taste of the student in forging her own way of playing, and hence—this is critical—forging her own music? I suspect that the answer is in between these two suppositions.

Teachers’ efforts to go beyond merely using the learning of traditions as valuable examples can have the effect of placing such figures as Hopkins or Coltrane in a rarefied mold similar to that applied to “the classics.” This may sometimes result in pious beliefs about what today constitutes ‘authentic blues’ or ‘true jazz’ aesthetics comparable to the “correct” adherence to musical scores we see encouraged in classical music lessons. Many years ago, I got to know, for the first time, a seasoned jazz pianist with many students, and I noticed, despite all of the fascinating currents in jazz at the time, how tightly circumscribed his notions seemed to be of what music is good and, indeed, of what music even qualifies as jazz. The expansion of jazz pedagogy in recent years illustrates how often, though certainly not always, a narrow bebop-oriented definition of jazz—or, at any rate, a “straight-ahead” concept—is assumed. Perhaps it’s inevitable that ideas of purity and fidelity applied to a style or a tradition can justify inflexibility as surely as fidelity to a composer can, especially when that composer is seen ultimately as a participant in a tradition as well. If we were to put our focus on which habits of musical education are extremely likely to enable sweeping creativity, jazz, rock, or folk instruction might well disappoint us just as much as classical teaching.

We must be realistic; after all, it is not only classical musicians who are very good at talking the talk of “creativity” while lacking the freedom to walk the walk. But if we instead focus on which teacher provides the student the chance to interact regularly with a number of different types of musical situations in relative comfort, the non-classical teachers do often achieve something most of the classical teachers do not. There are genuine contrasts between the classical pedagogy and the others at issue.

The guitar and sax students are likely to learn to play in a far more expository fashion than a classical music student. The saxophone student, in lessons and perhaps also in a school jazz band, will be encouraged to move toward taking improvisatory solos. This skill will not only be handy in ensembles playing jazz per se, but in groups playing gospel, funk, blues, or rock and roll. If the student becomes an at least proficient improviser, she will be able to walk into many situations and make music comfortably with her colleagues.

As I stated before, the guitar student probably learns to work from lead sheets and tablature. He may have been shown certain voicings, formulas of arpeggiation, and so forth, but ideally he becomes highly familiar with them and not only uses them with ease, but can perhaps extend his arsenal to related but different voicing, accompanimental figuration, and so forth. He has, if he’s worked hard, similarly learned to enter into different situations, maybe playing with singer-songwriters, handling lead or rhythm parts in rock bands, folk or country groups, bluegrass, etc., and to manage in these all pretty well. The saxophonist and the guitarist can fill the room with music with a minimum of notation or on-the-job instruction. They can extemporize, vamp, and solo; they can make music that is not entirely pre-planned take shape.

Recently, I was at a sort of vocal-music salon, during which a jazz pianist with a lot of accompanying experience played for several women as they jammed a bit on a Gerschwin tune from Porgy and Bess. Some of what he did had been, in a sense, worked out, but much was not. He was comfortable in either situation; he was also playing music that has straddled the genre categories of classical music, show music, and jazz. I wouldn’t be able to pull off what he did with such aplomb, but neither would most of the people I know who can play Beethoven or Debussy with sureness. In this way, he and I are isolated from one another, and this isolation is, I think, analogous to the alienation between relatively open-minded American music-lovers and classical music, especially as it is perceived in this country.

Make Their Own Kind of Music, Part 1

To what extent does an actor strive to embody Hamlet by transforming himself into the character and to what degree does he attempt to transform the Prince of Denmark into himself? Let’s cast Shakespeare’s tragic hero, who famously produces a play within a play, as a representative for Western works of the distant past in performance. In contemporary theatrical presentations of a play such as Hamlet, changing the location of the events, changing the period in which the events take place, and even changing the sex of some of the characters are all prevalent. Certainly it has long been common, and continues to be, to cut lines or even scenes from scripts. All of this suggests that it’s consistent with the values of current theater to morph Hamlet into a man that a contemporary actor can embody with some naturalness and a man that contemporary audience can easily recognize.

Hamlet’s trip through time enables him, to a large extent, to become a part of current culture, rather than simply a figure of historical and cultural importance. However, when it comes to the discourse around so-called classical music, most teachers, impresarios, and journalists live, perhaps far more than they realize, by the principle that the primary destiny of the performing artist is to chase after the often elusive origins of the piece and lose herself in them—though she is not likely to succeed in this. I think this aim stands directly in opposition to the manner in which Americans typically use performance as a way of transcending alien genres into vernacular ones; this is part of the structure of American performance culture. But classical music is typically not allowed to travel though time, and therefore remains in this sense un-Americanized. It’s easy to blame the association of the music with high society, tuxedos and gowns, etc., but much of the other music has been played in similarly highfalutin circumstance, just as Bach has been played outdoors in t-shirts and jeans. Admission to the opera doesn’t necessarily set the fan back more than tickets to a hip club or an amphitheater; pop consumption just looks a little different. Such explanations, of which classical musicians are so fond, don’t hold much water.

Americans of many ethnic backgrounds, the young no less than the old, have a clear and profound interest in music of the past. Everything from the many adaptations of pre-twentieth century African-American spirituals in twentieth-century and 21^st-century music to the remarkably imaginative hybrids of seemingly incongruous musics masterminded by current deejays argues that this is so. Jazz musicians are well-known for playfully quoting recognizable tunes, particularly as they take solos; often, these quotations are not of material associated with jazz, but are deliberately “inappropriate.” One musician will allow his solo to momentarily wander into “Three Blind Mice,” and another lets hers veer into Bach’s Minuet in G. It’s not an accident that these musical excursions don’t quote “Sophisticated Lady” or “Freddie Freeloader.” The pleasure of the moment lies in the ironic citing of something both musicians and listeners tend to take lightly, but that they nonetheless share, that they can recognize together. The pleasure in genre-bending recognition links musical renditions as disparate as Nina Simone’s “Go Limp,” which sets a humorously heartfelt narrative about civil rights protest to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” and, in a completely different medium, Dick Dale’s well-known ‘cover’ of the Greek rebetiko song Misirlou. Why don’t these musicians stick purely to their own respective genres? They have a choice, and they opt to incorporate material from left field. This, I think, is a fundamental trait of imaginative American musicians.

Especially given that, among other unlikely interlopers, centuries-old European concert music has, on occasion, found its way into the American musical biosphere—the successful rock arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as interpreted by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer is a fascinating example—the gradual disappearance of Bach, Mozart, Verdi, Berg, and Stravinsky from this country’s musical life doesn’t seem inevitable. However, something in our apprehension of the music of Bach, Mozart, and the others chosen for presumed immortality says, “Hands off!” Consider intuitively how many American teenagers who have grown up with a significant amount of intellectual stimulation would be quite open to listening not only to bebop or early twentieth-century blues, but to traditional West African music, Indonesian music, and so forth—yet would instantly roll their eyes at the idea of spending an evening with Bach or Dvorak. Music from just about any time or tradition—no matter how antique—could be important, but it must have plasticity, it must not be untouchable. The classical music student is allowed to go toward the piece, but the piece isn’t allowed to degrade itself by becoming part of the student’s world.

I couldn’t teach without a genuine interest in the origins of old works. Lillian Loran, perhaps the most remarkable of my music teachers (and that’s saying a lot) has, in her own way, argued that the performer’s agency is secondary to the presumed roots of the work. With regard to Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, for example, she asserts that a text seeming to value nothing about a young bourgeois woman but her marriage and her child can take on depth merely from the performer’s decision to take a walk in that woman’s shoes. (And this from a singer born in the 1920s who experienced fierce frustration with the restrictions imposed on women when she was young, and who has often said to woman students, “Nice girls can’t sing!”)

I can’t imagine disagreeing with this fundamentally empathic conception of performance—the idea that trying on the music and text like an article of clothing can increase understanding. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to me that Lillian is any more correct than the singer who believes there to be enough roles to play—whether in a full-length opera or a short song—that she needn’t play a sentimental woman imagined by two men. Such a decision puts more agency back in the hands of the performer, who chooses not to sing even a famous work if it advocates a view she finds objectionable. And, in a broader analogy, Lillian’s view of giving up part of the self in interpretation is no more correct than the teenager who gives up playing classical piano because he knows that the present-day subculture that celebrates Haydn, Schumann, and other Western composers leaves him no space to be, anthropologically, himself. He can’t identify with what he knows of classical-music experience.

But what if the woman singer of Frauenliebe und Leben were encouraged to sing of her own artistic life instead of a child or suppose she sang about another woman? Suppose a man sang it about his wife, or about another man—and this was reflected in the words, perhaps sung in translation? (There was a period during which several gay men I knew sang Frauenliebe as a kind of musical coming-out.) And to open the subject up much more broadly, suppose the boy studying a Chopin ballade were encouraged to wander into his own fantasia on Chopin’s themes in which he could morph the music into funk rhythm? My position isn’t that Schumann or Chopin’s text or music has to be adapted to this degree to achieve “relevance.” Every adaptation and interpretation can explore the relationship of composer to performer in a different way, and to a more obvious or more sublimated degree. But with the door to such exploration almost completely shut—at least in educational contexts and most high-level professional scenes as well—the various personal and cultural needs for such exploration are frustrated.

“Classical music” isn’t really a term about the past; it reflects our present-day habits involving music originally conceived of at various points in the past. It’s a truism in current music scholarship that there are relatively few qualities common to everything we categorize as “classical,” nor do many of the features we associate with the pieces have much to do with their initial conceptions. The very fact that we often refer to avant-garde music as “contemporary classical” humorously points up how far from literal meaning the term classical has traveled. The pedagogy associated with classical music often cultivates qualities with which the music became associated only long after it was composed. The music of Landini may be as fundamentally different in conception from Haydn symphonies or from Bartòk’s string quartets as any of these is from the music of Dr. Dre, yet the musics labeled “classical” are lumped together as if all of them flow from the same source. The term “classical music” is only meaningful insofar as it organizes and re-classifies various past European musics, packaging them with a modern gloss.

Classical music lives in public and non-profit institutions. One can learn about it or indeed participate in it at a university or conservatory; one can hear it or play or sing it at the symphony, opera, or ballet. The fact that these institutions are the locus of classical music suggests that such music is for the public good. Therefore the values fostered are considered to be ethically, spiritually, or intellectually beneficial. We hear on public radio all the time about the orchestra that is going to bring “quality” music to children—and hence function as an oasis of virtuous culture—even as those who run such institutions say that they want to reflect popular culture in their orchestra programs. The relative longevity of institutions that foster classical music necessarily suggests that they have at least the implicit support not only of exacting critics, impresarios, and scholars—at least the relatively conservative ones—but also of many people with simpler sociological inclinations. What then are the relatively straightforward values that classical music is supposed to teach us? What is it that “classical musicians” do that is supposed to ennoble us?

It strikes me that what they do—or rather what we do—is to attempt to teach young people obedience to a perceived elite of musicians—some dead and others alive—and a close adherence, albeit stylized adherence, to their evident performance requirements. For the most part, the instrumental or vocal teacher of the Western tradition teaches a highly standardized response to the written score with the idea that such adherence will become, as it were, the student’s chronic musical condition. Brahms is not a vehicle for the student to extemporize; Brahms remains Brahms. The teacher will insist that a passage of Brahms specified to be played forte should be played forte, whatever that means. But Brahms has been dead for some time, and I’m not sure that even a composer as relatively recent as he strictly believed in the modern tenets of “classical music.” When the student prefers triplets to the written duple rhythm, it is the student’s teacher, not Brahms, who is likely to insist that the student play duplets. If the student prefers doubling the root of a given triad where Brahms doubled the third, the teacher will surely observe the Law of the Score yet again. These choices are not simply made out of a conviction that the given passages will be more effective if played in accordance with Brahms’ instructions, but specifically because the composer so instructed. (In fact, many teachers perhaps unconsciously collapse such a distinction simply by defining “effective” as that which adheres to the composer’s markings.) The long-range goal is to teach respect for the intentions of the composer—here is an example of the assumption that the score reveals all of the composer’s intentions—above one’s own inclinations, however deeply felt or thought-out the latter might be. But it is the immediate teaching experience rather than relationships with composers that normally accustom students of classical music to score-adherence.

There are certainly areas in which a pedagogue of the classics will give his student permission to exercise greater “freedom.” However, permission is a key word because, when it comes to contemporary renditions of Western art music, there is at least implicitly a higher authority from whom or which one seeks a sanction for whatever one does. Given that current music teachers are not the inventors of these notions, and that the composer’s intentions are clearly more complex than meets the eye, who is the real authority invoked when it comes to making decisions about the performance of classical music? There is no simple answer to this question, but there would seem to be a kind of virtual institution of classical music, an entity that has developed certain habits and assumptions. Like social mores in broader communities, highly subjective beliefs come to be seen by classical musicians as inviolable truths about the music, and many practitioners have gone through considerable efforts to protect and reinforce these ‘truths,’ most of which reify the idea that a performance of classical music should be about the composer, not the performer.

As the musicological community has been telling us for some time, the notion itself of composer’s intentions is a problem, on so many levels. To begin with, following precise notation (or composer’s recordings) is not necessarily the same thing as adhering to intentions. In a normally improvisational style, should one refrain from improvising because the composer didn’t notate her own solo and hence give written permission? Should one play a transcription of the composer’s recorded solo rather than perform one’s own because the former adheres to the intentions of the composer? On another level, suppose there are genuinely conflicting indications? A musician who functioned absolutely without any questioning of a score would not be able to filter out mistakes or miscalculations. What happens when freedom is more ‘adherent’ than textual obedience? For example, a number of players and singers associated with Mozart’s music expressed distaste for the increasing amount of ornamentation heard in Mozart performance in the 1970s and 80s—one I very specifically remember was the late Metropolitan Opera conductor Jan Behr, but I also recall the vehemence of a woman in a criticism seminar with Andrew Porter— even though it was uncontroversial among historians that such embellishments were characteristic of Mozart’s performances. This situation illustrates vividly that a manner of performance that has little to do with the intentions of the composer at all, but only with the habits of a much later generation of musicians, is sometimes regarded as accurately representing the work of the composer purely because it more directly reflects what many of us see when we look at the score.

On an even more basic level, there have been many composers, especially those who lived before the middle of the eighteenth century, who had little notion that their music would ever be played after they died, and it is generally acknowledged that they would have had no particular conception of faithful performance of their music. Richard Taruskin has proposed a powerful critique of current-day practices in early music claiming such fidelity, essentially arguing that contemporary musicians and scholars are fond of calling their own stylistic habits and preferences "authentic." And if ‘fidelity’ has more meaning in terms of the musical desires and beliefs of today’s performers and teachers than in those of canonical composers, we might well question that there is a meaningful distinction between the current realities surrounding classical music and the exploration for which I’m arguing. Playing The Well-Tempered Clavier on Yamaha’s latest keyboard model is, in fact, no less ‘authentic’ than playing it on a nine-foot acoustic Yamaha grand, and the Romantic-style arrangements of seventeenth-century songs and arias that classical voice students commonly study are no truer to Cesti or Paisiello than a treatment of them as ‘standards’ with the continuo part notated as a lead sheet. Let’s be wary of our pretensions regarding the true re-creation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet; though it may continue to be a valuable repeated experiment, we can only vaguely approximate it, and the project tempts us to ignore the importance of who Hamlet is now, in the 21^st century.