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 21st-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 21st century.
