I See a Poverty in Classical Music Performance. Do I See Clearly?
I was at a chamber concert last Friday lunchtime of contemporary classical music. That evening, I saw the contemporary jazz trio [em] play a gig. The two of them together helped me see something that's been nagging me at the back of my mind for a while now. Over the last week or so, I've talked to a few people about it, and thought about it, and have come up with something I think is worth posting here.

I think there is a huge poverty in classical music performance these days. I think that it is far too academic; and performers are not given (by themselves, and by the culture) the freedom to embellish music, and to get into the music and dance around a bit. Last Friday's lunchtime concert featured a piece (Mississippi Hornpipes) by a British composer (Michael Finnissy) which was meant to recreate the energy and frenzy of American trad musicians pushing it to the edge (I think that's his phrase). So the violin (it was a piano duo) played snippets of fast American trad songs, mixed and mashed together, and the piano played the approximations of the violin's music, in the same register, but just with lots of wrong (or different) notes.

It was a hell of a piece, but the performance was quite simply crap. The performers, I'm sure, played every note absolutely perfectly (they were undoubtedly virtuosos), with perfect expression, articulation, and all the rest. In fact, the performance was perfect, except that the duo didn't move a muscle more than they had to. They sat and stood stock still for the whole concert. For a piece as frantic as this one, with the quirky, jarring rhythms, fast pace, and relentless energy, how they could stand still is beyond me. But they did, and so it was a crap, lifeless performance. I can't stress enough how terrible it was. I had to close my eyes, bear in mind the programme notes telling me that frenzy was what the music was trying to get across, and imagine the performers giving it some before I could even appreciate the energy in the music. Looking at the performers, it just sounded like some of Schoenberg's piano music (with the short note-values, but slow tempo, so that it sounds very still).

You might say that seeing as the music was perfect, I shouldn't give out about the visual aspect. But when one is actually there, looking at the performers (from less than 10ft away, in fact), the visual element is inescapable. Performers should engage with the audience, get into the music they're playing, and play it like they mean it. When you're playing music in such a way that you fail to get across the fundamental message - in this case, energy - then no matter how technically accurate your performance, you have failed the music.

It could well be the case that if they didn't focus on the music as much as they did, then they would have made mistakes. But though that may well be a problem for some music, where every note is significant, it is certainly not the case with Mississippi Hornpipes. Mistakes and improv is almost built into trad music, and it's certainly built into this piece. I almost feel that to play it exactly as the music says is to do an injustice to the piece. Certainly it is if it's at the cost of projecting excitement and (dammit!) having fun.

My thoughts cemented when I saw [em] play that night. I suppose it's true of nearly all jazz that the players really go for it when they play, but it was exceptionally true with this world-class band. And with the amount of improv in jazz, and the importance of communication, it's much more resistent to the poverty of over-academication(?).

It was brought home even more yesterday lunchtime, when Ensemble Madrid played some fantastic pieces (I recommend Jose Luis Turina to anyone), and played them fantastically. The difference, I am sure, is that they got into it. If the pianist was playing a fortissimo chord, he raised his hands and slammed them down. I was so into the music, I didn't realise for quite some time why it was so much better than the previous week's. I didn't realise anything, in fact - I was just listening to the music fully.

I also think it's very sad (this is related!) that improvisation is so alien to classical performers. This summer, I went to a composition summer course, and asked the ensemble in residence (a professional string quartet, specialising in new music) how were they at improvising, if I were to include some in the score. They unanimously said that they wouldn't feel comfortable with it, and asked very earnestly that I not include any improvisation. Furthermore, they metaphysically advised against including improvisation: "do you want this to be your music or the quartet's?"!!

It's never going to be my music, not completely. And what's so fantastic about the notes I put on the page that makes them better choices than any others? Again, I don't include music in which every note is crucial to the piece as a whole, but most music is at least partly arbitrary. I might write an Fmaj7 in one of my pieces, but I could've written an F6, and the music would still leave the same taste in your mouth - I just happened to choose the former chord. It's even worse when performers play passages that were deliberately written improvisitarily as set in stone.

Again, I think jazz has a qualitatively better grasp of music here. Even rock music has a better grasp.

Incidentally, I have some hypotheses for why performance has gotten this way. I think it's to do with our materialist society: improvisation is intangible, hard to set value to, whereas notes are concrete. I think it's because there's no element of improvisation in any formal grade exams, and because teachers teach students to pass exams far more than they should (they should teach students to make music: exams should be done on the side and mentioned only in CVs). I think it's because people are too busy, and don't know how to really relax, stop working for a good four or five hours, do some meditation, light some incense and then play. I think it's because people (especially orchestras) don't have enough time to practice the pieces before they play live, so they are often not familiar with their part, let alone the piece as a whole. I think people are still getting over all the new discoveries in musicology; we're lost in the infinite sea of information at our dipsosal. I think we believe too much in the true-false dichotomy, and that there is nothing meaningful that is not one of those two poles. And I think that there's a universally-held intuition that the composer's word is sacrosanct that, though sometimes true, is often nonsense.

Thank you very much for reading. I hope you see the sense and cohesion in it that I do (I hope it's there!).

-James