Faithful to the Score?

A bit of a rant. I have been promising to "have a go" at Schuller’s “The Compleat Conductor” and I’m trying to get a few things up before he speaks at the Conductor’s Guild meeting in Boston this week: ----

Gunther Schuller is not alone in considering the highest role of the conductor to be that of faithful guardian of the score. He declares the score to be a “sacred document” (please see my earlier complaint about sacred texts.)

I beg to differ, not because I think we should not be faithful to the score, but because the aspiration is trivial. That’s no more than the starting point. Of course we must be faithful to the score, because, usually, that is all that we have. We have, for the most part, no further information, so while we are performing a work like, say, a Beethoven Symphony, that is what we are doing – enacting the score. Our goal is to realize the piece that Beethoven wrote down in the score, and to start messing with it and changing or ignoring details is to be doing something else entirely, and probably something that most people will not be very interested in.

Pointing this out, and complaining about conductors who do not do it, is hardly a deep and profound insight, anymore than it would be to suggest that people who crash their cars are not good drivers. So I reiterate, even though being faithful to the score may be difficult beyond human capability, and none of us may ever fully achieve it, the elevation of this as a holy goal is trivial. The danger comes from using this as a cloak to silence dissent and justify exhortations that are entirely a matter of Schuller's personal opinion. I am not knocking Schuller's personal opinions. He must use these when he performs. We all must. We have no option.

Yes, we must be faithful to the score. But there is no logical path that leads from this to the assumption that the composer would not want to change things if he were here, that the composer felt he had solved all his problems perfectly, that the composer was not dissatisfied by some passages and embarrassed by others, that, after listening even to our performance, he might not change his mind both about notational details, and maybe about major things like tempo and even structure.

As long as the composer is still alive, (consider the habits of Rachmaninoff and Mahler) constant revisions and tinkering seem to be the norm. The ontological nature of composition and the score do not change just because the composer happens to snuff it. The practical situation changes totally and irrevocably, because you can no longer ask the composer questions, and get feedback. We are not justified, after the composer dies, in thereafter pretending to be the composer and starting to rant along the lines of “If Bach were alive today, he would be writing for Britney Spears.”

But neither is there any point in pretending that, just because the composer is dead, all of a sudden the score has become like a Papal Pronouncement Ex Cathedra, guaranteed free of error and worthy of self-abasing idolatry, suppressing not just our critical faculties, but also our artistic instincts, without which we have no right to be on stage at all.

It’s a pity we cannot go back to the source, consult, and keep the music part of an evolving, inventive, musical tradition, but we can’t, and we just have to get over it. When there is a better way of finding out what really happened, we should take it. You don’t look at sheet music to learn about the music of Charlie Parker, you listen to the recordings, as we also do with Stravinsky, Elgar, Britten, Strauss. What a terrible shame that recording and penicillin were not developed just a few years earlier, so that we could actually hear Mahler conducting his 13th Symphony, and his 6th Symphony with the Andante as the second movement. How many doubts and opinions would disappear! To have an actual acoustic record of this most famed and idiosyncratic of conductors and composers! Ah me!

Who would not want to hear how Beethoven sounded in performance? We are not entitled to pretend that we know what it would have sounded like, but neither should we adopt the bizarre doctrine of maintaining that the score contains complete information, everything we would wish to know, faultlessly, (except for misprints) to an infinite degree of detail. This is simply silly, a case of over-reading (post on that coming up), and an unjustified defensive posture adopted so that conductors, with only the score to go by and therefore profoundly ignorant about a great deal, can nonetheless take charge of an orchestra with an air of wisdom and hieratic authority, - their implied job description nothing less than to inspire highly skilled yet subservient musicians to follow their tiniest requests with an enthusiasm amounting to awe.

This does not happen, as is so often asserted, because conductors are egomaniacal narcissistic megalomaniacs wearing plastic humility cloaks. The reason is much more mundane. Somebody has to take charge and accept the responsibility for the emotional integration of all the notes. Accept that situation, add normal psychology and human frailty, and all the rest follows: conductors who believe in their own special inspiration, resentful players, and the idolization of the score as a miracle-working sacred relic. It is all perfectly normal, and perfect nonsense.

Unfortunately, when we try to correct these problems as if they had something to do with reality, as is so fashionable at the moment, terrible pitfalls open before us. Sure, many conductors are arrogant and conceited, but that does not mean you get an inspired result when no one is in charge. Sure, players are oppressed and frustrated, but that doesn’t mean asking them to make administrative decisions will automatically tap a gusher of wisdom. The score, product of unfathomable skill and magnificent testament that it may be, does not protect us from the fact that there are very few flawless masterpieces, and huge amounts of distinctly OK-only music, about which soloists interviewed on FM radio will say “Every time I perform this truly astonishingly inspired work, I always find new things in it to explore.” because they think that that will help to sell tickets.

My point is simply this. Elevating the score as a sacred document will not do. It doesn’t help and leads to nonsense. We have to accept the provisional, conjectural nature of our performances. It is inescapable. And then we have to take responsibility for them. More about how in a later posting.

©2005 AJM

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