Composer vs. Player

pete

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
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I work on Saturdays. One of the things I do at work is either have Pandora or YouTube up and running. Today's music was the Debussy mix on YouTube.

I took a look at the comments for the piece. It was original piano roll recording of Debussy playing it. Made in 1913. Farther down, there was a response to a post, that -- cleaned up a tad -- said, "You're an idiot for saying that the composer is playing it too fast."

On the surface, the sentiment is logical: the composer is playing the piece how it was meant to sound, to him. However, if you think about it, that person's wrong: a performer is the one that breathes life into the music. It's his interpretation of all those black dots on the paper. There's another angle, too: what if the composer's not that great a player on whatever he composed the piece for? I remember a quote from Chopin in the form of, "Liszt plays my music the way I imagine it." I also know that the reason why Peter Schickele doesn't play clarinet on his premiere pieces is because he's a better piano player than a clarinet player.

Now, I've never composed anything that I'd care to mention. I've done arranging and rearranging, though. I can say that if player X plays something I've worked on better or in a more interesting way, I'd have no problems with that and might rewrite the part(s) to include those changes.

What do y'all think?
 
The player breathes life and their interpretation into the music that they are playing.

But many players are "stuck" in a certain "fixed" interpretation of music which is ok for the educational purposes. But if the player feels a certain variation on that strict structure then I say go for it.

after all, look at the music of Mozart and such before him ... most of the music written back then was NOT for the modern clarinet. If we had such strict concerns we should play period correct instrumentation. :)
 
I'm all for that. The proper clarinet model for each and every composition ever attempted, all in a quadra-quintuple carrying case with a fake leather cover...

Of course, I'm the guy who just bought a Selmer (Paris) Mazzeo system horn, so I've got a leg up on most of you.

H'mmm. I wonder if Selmer ever made a Paris model Mazzeo system alto clarinet?
 
I had a wonderful and pithy comment, but I pressed the wrong button and deleted it. Let me try again.

IIRC, speaking of Mozart, let me talk about larger ensembles, as the one I had referred to in my initial post was about solo piano.

If you thought a composer getting one person to play a piece as "he intended," I'd suppose that if you have an ensemble of 30, you'd have the problem 30 times worse! Especially if you consider that the "conductor" back in Mozart's day was possibly just a guy beating a stick on the stage to make sure that everyone is playing at the same tempo. Additionally, the music didn't have much in the way of articulation markings, volume recommendations, etc. (I'd love to say that I learned both of these factoids in Music History or Theory, but I learned it from Peter Schickele's "Schickele Mix" radio show).

Speaking of Peter Schickele, there is one point where I can say that the performer's doing it wrong.

I have three different recordings of Schickele's Monochrome III for nine clarinets (an extremely nice live recording is here -- I'd guess you'd say that this is the fourth version I've heard). Two of the three recordings are made the way the composer intended: nine clarinetists in a circle or semicircle. The third is from a decent player that overdubbed the parts. The third one is the worst because he didn't understand one of the composer's points: if you have more than one person playing the same part, they'll each have slightly different timing and that produces a distinct tone. Overdubbing makes the music sound a little mechanical -- which you can also hear if you don't play around with random quantizing in music performance software -- and the tone color is distinctly lacking. This is all because the performer didn't understand the point. Most of this is even written in the score I have for Monochrome III lying around somewhere, so there's no real excuse.
 
I remember watching an interview with Leonard Bernstein, talking about conducting. Some new students were conducting Stravinsky, badly.... Turned out they'd been listening to Stravinsky's own recording. Bernstein's observation was that Stravinsky was a wonderful composer, but terrible conducter..

And when Rachmaninov heard Horowitz play one of his piano concertos (I think the third) he commented that Horowitz had taken it and made it his own. Played it better than Rachmaninov did...

So yes, great performers are sometimes able to get more out of a work than the composer. And a great composer will acknowledge this, unless ego gets in the way...

One reson I prefer listening to Bernstein conducting The Vienna Phil, compared (say) to Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Phil. Von Karajan conducted the notes, while Bernstein conducted the music in the notes...

But to ask the question another way, what do you think of Nigel Kennedy's Four Seasons?
 
I have wondered about the lack of articulation, volume indications and other trends in the sparse versions of "classical works" as well. Does anyone know if period, "marked up" copies of these works still exist? What did they use to make the markings? Pen? Pencil?

I have caught a few of the guys who play for me using colored markers to mark my charts. Other than a yellow = male, red = female color code on the top of the vocal parts, I try to forbid this practice. But, some of the boys persist in doing this, in particular two older trombone players.

On your chart, I have no problem with what you do - it's your property, after all. But, slapping colored markers all over the music to pick up the sign, or to alert people to a key signature change, isn't how it's supposed to be done. Black, erasable pencil marking have been the standard for at least the last hundred years (encompassing my and my professional musician grandfather's life span). Pencil allows for marks to be changed or removed, and it is easily erased with modern vinyl erasers.

Hell, I even provide my guys with pencils - we buy the things in huge lots. But, I still find the occasional marker stashed in a music box. I'm thinking of taking the NKVD approach, but shooting folks in the back of the head with a pistol is rather messy. So, I'll just keep ditching the markers when I find them instead.
 
Uh...guilty as charged.

I too colour-code my sheets, but they are my copies, and we are - officially - allowed to do with them whatever we want.

Volta brackets, segnos, codas etc. get red, sharps get green and flats get blue. What doesn't have any colour on gets played as written. Never missed a key change or a repetition. Colouring is just one part of familiarising myself with a piece.

Oh yes, articulation and dynamic markups are written with - guess - pencil. :)
 
back when Mozart was alive who conducted his concerts?
He did .... thus he provided the interpretation to the music (just guessing)

I've seen some images of the original scores (way before computers, copying, etc) and truthfully, i think only they can sometimes read the stuff !!

I'll take your Mazzeo selmer and raise you a Buffet half-boehm/albert for traditional playing.
 
It has been my experience that except for a few modern pieces, most tempo style and expression markings in music are of a general nature and leave room for individual interpretation and stylistic taste.

I was taught that the markings in the music are just general guidelines, and that the musicianship of the performer/conductor adds all of the nuances that if written in the music would clutter the page to the point of being illegible.

The bottom line is that music like other arts is very subjective which means that there are no right or wrong interpretations of a piece of music. The fact that each recording of a major work has its own individual personality depending upon the conductor and/or soloist is evidence that there is a wide latitude in the aural presentation of what the composer has put to paper.
 
SteveSklar said:
back when Mozart was alive who conducted his concerts?
He did .... thus he provided the interpretation to the music (just guessing)
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However, he's currently decomposing and I don't think he left much instruction on how to play his pieces. At least, nothing that's survived until today.

It's really interesting in the musical field. The composer is an artist that hands his work to a player -- who is another artist. I can't really think of that happening in any other field that's generally termed "art" (you could argue about dance, I think). Can you imagine, say, Michelangelo handing a painting to daVinci to complete?
 
pete said:
It's really interesting in the musical field. The composer is an artist that hands his work to a player -- who is another artist. I can't really think of that happening in any other field that's generally termed "art" (you could argue about dance, I think). Can you imagine, say, Michelangelo handing a painting to daVinci to complete?
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Sculpture - scuptor makes a miniature and it's reproduced at full size by another sculptor...
Photography - AD has ideas for a shoot, execution is by the photographer, who usually does it different..

And a lot of the great painters in the past had their students do some of the donkey work on the big canvases.
 
kevgermany, I was thinking that someone would make that point. Thanks for doing so :D.

In those instances, the designer of the work is overseeing and managing what the assistants are doing. Really easy for the artist to say, "You're doing it wrong!" While I assume it's possible that Michelangelo or someone came across someone doing "donkey work" and said, "You're doing it wro ... just beautifully. Not what I had in mind, but please continue." Of course, there will also be a random art critic or dozens, hundreds of years later, that will say something like, "See this bit here? Obviously not done by Michelangelo."
 
I believe that there is quite a bit of evidence to the effect that some of the "old masters" directed work of lesser artists. Don't recall where I saw it, but the discussion was quite extensive.

And then there is the whole movie making world. Director takes someone else's story treatment, frames out a basic storyline, and then oversees the cameraman as he photographs the actors, all of whom could be considered artists. That's a five layer cake all by itself.
 
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re movies

And, for the last 75+ years or so, has added music as an often under-appreciated "background" ... even more layers then what with composers, musicians, sound editors, and all those electronic guys in the mix.

(sorry, I just finished auditing a course, "Sound in Cinema," at the local University and had an irresistible urge to display my half-vast newly found knowledge)
 
Guess I'm just the fall guy... :rolleyes:


What about theatre/opera/ballet? Playwright/composer writes the play/score, may be involved in early productions, but eventually passes away and the future productions are left entirely to the later teams to produce, sets, costumes, movements, music.
 
Potato, potahto...

Well, you also have to consider the other side of the coin here. While artists may interpret what other artists have created, there is a strong current of "This is how it's supposed to be; why are you changing it?" from what are effectively the "end users" of the product.

This comes from varying sources - the public at large, critics, other artists - but it most certainly does exist. Only with the visual arts (where the painting remains as the original artist created it, and the photograph remains as taken) does a new work become set and not subject to revision.

In music, a novel interpretation of a "work" is going to draw a firestorm of criticism, even though the interpretation may stand. The greatest example of that can be found in one-off interpretations of "The Star Spangled Banner", but there are many others.

So, between the two pulls of innovation and acceptance, you get the synthesis of two (or many more, in the case of collaborative efforts like television and film) forces. One pulls for innovation, change, whatever; the other for what hoi polloi accepts.
 
Well...

...I was thinking Rose Ann Barr, but Hendrix's take also irritated more than a few people.

The idea that a 18th Century drinking song adapted to our patriotic purposes is somehow sacred seems odd to me at the very least. It's not like it's religious music or anything like that - it was originally sung by party-hearty Englishmen in taverns and the like.

It's also odd in that it's a waltz - unique amongst such tunes, at least as far as I've been told by former military bandsmen stationed in "our nation's capital".
 
SOTSDO said:
...It's also odd in that it's a waltz - unique amongst such tunes, at least as far as I've been told by former military bandsmen stationed in "our nation's capital".
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They're having you on. Our (British) national anthem is a waltz too.
 
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