”What gives us the right to assume that in the work of art we must receive a direct communication with historic attitudes of another period? What makes us think that the work of art should preserve an open line between ourselves and the man (sic) who wrote it? And, moreover, what makes us assume that the situation of the man (sic) who wrote it accurately or faithfully reflects the situation of his time… What if the composer, as historian, is faulty?” (Glenn Gould, 1963)
When I was a violin student in the mid-1980s I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at a master class with the famed violinist Henri Temianka. He was then 80 years old and had been labeled a wunderkind in the early part of the 20th century, performing and recording classic salon repertoire by composers such as Sarasate and Saint-Saëns. One of the common facets of these works is the coda, which the violinist plays almost impossibly fast and which is of course quite impressive for audiences. After I attempted to perform one of these for him, he told me I was playing too fast, and related a story about when he recorded a similar piece. Since the 78 rpm records of the time had very limited lengths, when he came to the coda, the recording engineer started waving his arms for him to play faster so that the piece would fit in one take. Temianka himself preferred to play the pieces more slowly.
This contradicted all the violin teachers I had ever had, who had taken these recordings as proof of the proper way to perform these pieces. Temianka himself did not seem to think it possible (or even desirable) to change this paradigm since this had become, no matter the reason, the accepted way of playing these kinds of works. This begged the question of whether other aspects of a musical interpretation might be based on such possibly faulty information. Why was there one paradigm that was accepted as the ”proper” way of approaching works of older music? Who or what benefited from a piece being performed in a way that was not necessarily the most musically relevant for the performer? Is the composer the only true interpreter of her own music?
It was soon apparent that these questions could be applied to the interpretation of everything that a violinist learned in the classical repertoire, as long as the composer had been deceased for some time. There was of course a tradition of performance praxis handed down from teacher to teacher, but on closer inspection these traditions usually began either with a recording made long after the work was composed or with purely anecdotal evidence, not, as was assumed, from any form of positivistic knowledge-gathering. Learning to play this music in a conventional manner is of course important for the assimilation of the technique necessary to making the instrument sound the way the player wants, but instead of this technique then being used as a means towards making informed choices about interpretation it served as an end in itself, in order to propagate a tradition that primarily benefited those who had already achieved positions of prominence within the artistic and/or academic community– those who John Cage calls the ”priests” (Cage, 1968) as opposed to the ”Protestant” questioners found by him within the realm of new music. The concept of ”authenticity” was used as a positivistic cudgel without careful reflection on the wide variety of meanings it could possess.
While questioning along these lines was not encouraged during my musical schooling, at the time there were several theories developing within subsets of the art music field that could reasonably be applied to musical interpretation. The burgeoning field of historical performance in music purported to perform pieces in accordance with the way they sounded at the time they were written, which, however impossible it might have been to know exactly how something could have sounded before recordings of the instruments were possible, at least served to free the musician from the expectation to mirror unreflected conventional interpretations. These attempts at freedom from convention without ignorance of tradition corresponded well with the field to which I eventually devoted my career, that of newly written notated art music, where interpretation has a somewhat different meaning from that attached to historical music. Brian Ferneyhough went so far as to proclaim that in an interpretation of new music, ”The performer recreates the work in his own image, not according to some arbitrary process of homogenization via the academy” (Ferneyhough, 1995).
There are of course many forms of new art music, some of which rely on taking existing historical practice as a given while interpreting, still others based on free improvisation. There is a sliding scale of available information between these poles in modern scores, from the suggestive instructions in Cage and the more or less nonexistent instructions in Cardewe to the exceedingly detailed information in Ferneyhough. However, those forms of new notated music that are not primarily based on historical interpretive norms take as their starting point an attitude in which each individual piece of information is weighed and acted upon in the context of the piece itself, and the requisite techniques that are used arise from the necessities of the piece as a whole. This attitude stands in stark contrast to a more general dependence on a vaguely defined and sometimes arbitrary historical tradition supplying the basis for interpretation. This project applies the techniques and interpretive philosophies used in new music towards historical music, shedding light on what exactly the musician is expected to take as given when approaching both.