Not all "special" is created equal

Yeah ... I keep thinking of what people will listen to when they want to get into our minds, and the minds of our great composers, when music students and people want to examine life in the mid-to-late 20th century. What will people in the future listen to who want to get into our minds?

They'll have to go outside classical music, because classical performers are too busy getting into the minds of the people who came before them. I'm crazy about a lot of good classical performers, but ... in two hundred years, how will someone get into Itzak Perlman's mind when he was so busy getting into Bruch's? People of the future who want to learn about us will have to give what we call "classical" music a pass, which is a real shame.

I do get what you mean and I've known actors who have said exactly what you said about how they get into a person and let that person into them, but that's more the actor's own internal process for doing their job. It's not really supposed to be perceived by the audience. It's the technical means by which the actor does what they do ... and that's sort of "under the hood" for the people observing, like a singer doing scales and vocal exercises. That's vital to how they do what they do, but it's not what the performance consists of. It's very different from, say, watching an extremely personal singer-songwriter (like Carly Simon, Steve Perry, or Annie Lennox) showing you exactly what's in their guts at any one time.

There's got to be room for both ... especially given that classical music is public domain, for pete's sake. How we ever arrived at the idea that this music should be hands-off when it's precisely the stuff we can all play with as freely as we want escapes me ... :-(

Again, I feel divided... I'd like to believe in the metaphor of the vessel, but it leaves me wanting. It seems to imply – the performer as “transparent” soul, disappearing in order to allow the music to reveal itself – that there is something such as “the work in itself”, floating beyond all interpretation, waiting to be revealed. It is not, in my mind at least, how we experience music. It is not only that the performer’s feelings come into it, it is that this is precisely what we are searching and hoping for: an interpretation. And this is by no means a re-creation (of, supposedly, the “work in itself”): on the contrary, I want to be conscious that what I am listing to is an individual’s interpretation, an individual telling me (so to speak) “This is how I read of the world as text if the text of the world was a musical score.” And there are certainly times when knowing something about the performer will guide me into reading what he or she is reading in the text. I know, for example, that when I became aware of Brendel’s thoughts about humour and read some of his witty and humorous poetry, I understood his Beethoven much better and listened with renewed insights to his interpretation of the Diabelli Variations – certainly different than if interpreted by a humourless performer…

Granted, there are degrees of knowledge: I can’t see how knowing that such performer likes flying kites and collects miniature trains would give me much insight into his interpretation of Berg’s Piano Sonata. But still, I do think audiences would gain a lot if efforts were made to reveal pertinent facts about a performer’s personality, as anecdotal as they may at times seem.

I receive year after year biographies of performers for insertion in program booklets, and, with their endless list of orchestras, conductors, concert and opera houses, they have become irrelevant (as well as perfectly interchangeable…). Surely – and here my question is more for Amanda – one could find a way here to put forward aspects of the performer’s personality that would help guide the listener through his vision of music in general, if not of the music he or she is performing on that particular concert?

Alex Benjamin
Artistic Director
Festival de Lanaudiere

Alex, hopefully I've addressed this somewhat in my response below. It's a big topic, which I'll revisit either here or on my own blog. But you certainly identified the gray area which I deliberately skated over in my post. But I think the Brendel example falls squarely on the "fleshing out the performer's relationship with the music" side of things. I've often been asked to talk about things that by no stretch fit that description, and that's when I get uneasy. But I, too, would like to hear Amanda weigh in on this. -JB

Here from Greg Sandow's blog:

I'm of two minds on this: sometimes I want to hear the music of a well-known composer interpreted well, and the "vessel" idea is a good one.

But sometimes I want to hear what YOU have to say as a musician, or any "rhetorical-you."

Actors are people who are paid to become someone else on stage ... but sometimes we want to see who someone IS on stage, too. So ideally, we would have both -- maybe in the same person. Montero's like that; I have a bunch of her stuff, and I love listening to her whipping out Rachmaninoff, but I really love listening to her improvisations, because then I'm getting a look into her.

That's what's so fun about a lot of the best popular music; it's a direct look straight into the very person singing or playing, especially if they wrote the song they are playing. I loved to hear the LACO do Mendelssohn's Italian when I went to their premiere this year, but I also ADORE watching Tina Turner's old concerts, not because she's being someone else but because I'm watching her having a blast being Tina Turner.

I just wish it weren't so polarized, where you get a look into the performers only in popular music, whereas the classical performers are always "vessels." If classical performers are just vessels all the time, then there will never be any more classical music.

Janis - You're getting at an issue which I think is one of the principal problems in classical music: the separation of the composer and the performer. We would be better off for so many reasons if these roles re-merged. But in the "vessel" analogy, it's not that the audience doesn't get to hear what the performer has to say: rather, the performer tries to access a place where his/her personality merges with the music. Not unlike acting, I imagine - surely an actor can't give a good characterization without feeling empathy/sympathy for the character. -JB