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I believe that the music of a composer is the
prime consideration in the varied aspects that performance entails.
Difficult as are the gathering together of historical data, concepts,
media and performance practices, the structural facets and, deepest of
all, the concept that gives rise to a composer's sense of form, structure
and sonorities - yet these compose an additional responsibility and work
of the performer in every age. If a work of musical art is worth learning
and performing then it merits the labour and the passion that is involved
in penetrating the vision and structures of the person who created that
work.
This means that the composer comes first, the performer
second. The performer does not create the composition anew. The performer
presents a version of a composition - but it is a pitiful impoverishment
of great art to hold that each performer's presentation has its own
individual validity - a view that has become fashionable recently. This
stance makes no provision for performances that are superficial, puerile,
uninformed or idiosyncratic. The argument that a performer creates a
composition anew in performance may be interpreted at best as a
contemporary interpretation of that work. However, this forces the
composition into a localised and dated interpretation, much of which
imprisons the original work in a constricted time frame. Great art always
reaches beyond such boundaries.
There is no doubt that each
interpreter imparts, naturally, his or her perception of a composition to
a performance; one cannot and need not deny the existence of the
performer. To acknowledge each performer's individuality, or lack of it,
is essential. However, a musical composition is a concrete edifice
containing myriad facets of structure and interrelationships. These must
be perceived and illuminated according to the composer's vision, not to be
recomposed or decomposed according to each performer's inclinations.
A performer with scholarship, wide technique and passion may also
have a vision. But, in order that a vision of someone else's work may
operate with integrity and respect - the least one can expect from an
activity that deals with and depends upon someone else's materials,
concept, construct and passion - the acknowledgement of all these
attributes of the original work of a creative mind and spirit is
requisite. Such acknowledgement draws upon the capability to perceive, and
the desire to fulfil, that original vision. The wonderfully amazing
quality of great interpretation by great performers lies in this
fundamental recognition - empathic and/or conscious - of incontrovertible
features of a particular musical composition that account for its form,
shape and sense of its communicating significance. These are the basic
elements, fully respected, including one's matured vision and responses,
that produce a totality of integration of creative and recreative art. If
such a communion does not take place, a performance is apt to be, more
likely than not, a hollow academic exercise, or egocentric and
narcissistic display. Great art that is worthy of the name does not emerge
from impositions of the latter infantile urges.
Such integration
as I have summed up is a kind of marriage with the composition, composer
and the era, but one that is not based in the imposition of one's
individual will upon another. It is of a kind that respects the individual
thought and spirit of the originator, and it also requires a good deal of
honest study of one's own style of thought and awareness of cultural
responses and expectations of taste and judgement resonating in one's own
time. The latter may be virtually alien to those of the original composer,
era and work of art; however, study and considerations involving the past
and the contemporary can indeed lead to a profound sense of aesthetic
identity and intellectual conviction in an all-embracing vision. This
synthesis promises inspiration. It must be remembered that inspiration is
born of physical and metaphorical perspiration. The communion of labour
and inspiration have seldom failed to produce illumination.
© Rosalyn Tureck 1998
© 2019 Graham G Hawker
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