Unnoted
Buried in the middle of my May 27 rant about whether music could be both truthful and beautiful, I alluded to a 1950s LP I tracked down featuring a group called the New York Brass Quintet. I described their playing as sounding more like either a jazz combo or a reduced pit orchestra for a 1950s Broadway show than a contemporary brass quintet. Since the comment went unnoticed—admittedly it was a digression within a very contentious topic—it seemed worth revisiting this week.
I still can’t completely figure out why that group sounds the way it does. Did they all have a Shubert Alley gig on the side or were they moonlighting in a big band? I found a nice page about the group with some sound samples, but not much else, so any additional information would be most welcome. But, in the meanwhile, their sound raises some interesting questions about performance practice.
Most people will readily admit that an identically notated musical phrase will sound blatantly different if interpreted by a singer or instrumentalist steeped in show tunes, swing, blues, bluegrass, metal, Hindustani classical music, you name it. This is why so-called musical purists find it so disconcerting to listen to rockers cover Cole Porter, or, contrapositively, to hear Ethel Merman in a disco setting.
However, unlike the myriad musical styles which are largely defined by the interpretive license taken by performers, classical music is supposed to be about following the score. And still there are plenty of record collecting obsessives who can not only tell the difference between Bruno Walter, George Solti, and Herbert von Karajan’s takes on the Beethoven symphonies, they can also distinguish between Karajan’s four different traversals of the cycle. This, of course, is further proof that there are plenty of details that can never be prescribed in a score, and even when they are it does not mean that they will be followed in practice. Even a composition that is very precisely notated can yield a wide variety of performances—something I discovered a couple of years ago when I started collecting different performances of Elliott Carter’s music. And yet, while critics will deplore a performance that either went too far astray or didn’t go far enough, there isn’t an exact line in the sand about what a classical performer can and cannot get away with in a performance.
Early music oboist Bruce Haynes, in his provocatively titled book The End of Early Music, argues persuasively that there have been three basic performance practices for classical music: romantic, modern, and so-called historically informed performance. The book is largely a polemic against what he perceives as the sterility of modern performance practice, which in his view has attempted to eradicate performance variance. Haynes’s disdain for such an approach seems somewhat reminiscent of Kyle Gann’s ongoing bête noire: Uptown music-making—something I was reminded of when chancing across this comment in one of Kyle’s recent ArtsJournal posts:
[E]very other recording I find is too fast, too textural, too “expressive,” too classical-too Uptown.
While I probably would not describe it using quite the same language, Kyle’s analysis of misguided interpretive priorities seemed spot-on in what was an assessment of various unidiomatic John Cage performances. This might seem ironic given the seeming interpretive flexibility of Cage’s music, but Cage had very specific ideas about the proper performance practice for his music, even if the precise pitches and durations were not always specified in his scores.
Ultimately, how a piece of music is performed often shapes an audience’s perception of that piece more than the notes the composer has written in the score. But since so much of what constitutes performance practice cannot be notated, it is ultimately out of the composer’s control. Many composers hate to acknowledge this—myself included—but it is undeniable. Determining the musicians who perform your music can be even more crucial a decision than an orchestration choice.