On Music
GOODMAN, HAL
On Music THE ROLE OF THE MAESTRO BY HAL GOODMAN Be truthful, now. Have you ever stood in your living room blissfully conducting your stereo system in Beetho-ven's Ninth? Well then, have you ever...
...They go to hear the music he did write performed the way he conceived it...
...The 20th century American composer Roger Sessions hedged: "Without fidelity, a performance is false...
...The second dilemma is a good deal more troublesome...
...DECIDE 20 times, always selecting the same line...
...Playing, say, the allegro of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony by itself is like staging Act II of Hamlet...
...In one auditorium, a woodwind section playing forte may blend in nicely with the rest of the orchestra...
...With one correct version, every fresh release of a piece must be a search for the perfection that has eluded the previous efforts????a depressing point of view...
...The performers are forced to interpret????and this entails many choices beyond those the composer has specified...
...In many modern compositions, an additional problem arises: The composer wants to maximize the ensemble's freedom...
...Leinsdorf skillfully skirts this disunity, but a little research turned up a wide range of opinion...
...Saxophones in the Toccata andFugueinDMinor...
...That the opening shouldn't drag so...
...Tempos are slightly less ambiguous, thanks to the metronome...
...Well then, have you ever felt that given an orchestra and a pointed stick you could do better than Leonard Bernstein or Otto Klemperer, or whoever made the recording...
...To set up standards by which all interpreters should proceed is the raison d'etre of this book," he declares...
...In part of a piece I once performed, we musicians were given no instructions besides the number of seconds to play...
...The potential for cacophony in such a work is obviously immense...
...your part would still have to vary constantly in response to the other musicians' changes...
...Richard Strauss, on the other hand, felt that "The purely personal and strongly artistic conviction of the instrumental conductor alone must decide what is right or wrong...
...Yet suppose only composers of Wagner's stature were allowed a free hand with the compositions of others, and even that were granted to satisfy the purely academic interest of "hearing one great composer say of another great composer's work, 'This is the way I would have done it.'" Music in general, and especially the record industry, would be in sad shape...
...Although readers unfamiliar with the terminology may want to keep a musical dictionary close at hand, it is well worth the extra page-turning...
...That the second movement ought to be taken more softly...
...Every command must be considered in the light of all the other dynamics in the score, which can range from pianissississississimo (pppppp) to fortissississimo (ffff...
...Surely not...
...I want only one single creator, and I shall be quite satisfied if [conductors] perform simply and exactly what he has written...
...It may be argued, of course, that anything the audience enjoys is justified...
...Something's missing...
...First, a direction in the score may not be what the composer wrote...
...A somewhat similar process takes place in performing more conventional music...
...Perhaps "interpreters" is the wrongword, for as the title implies, Leinsdorf s idea of the conductor's function is conservative: "Unless a Wagner is on the podium, serious music lovers do not attend concerts to learn the conductor's notion of how Beethoven should have written music...
...You may be right...
...Leinsdorf reports becoming curious about this oddity and tracing it back to the composer's autograph score, where he found that Wagner had made the loop of one note a fraction of an inch too high...
...As Leinsdorf takes pains to point out, a conductor's sense of musical history must be as solid as his technique...
...You could play IN SEC...
...A slip of Wagner's pen in DieMeistersingerled to acopyist's error that was transferred from edition to edition, even though the chord thus formed was obviously out of place in the music...
...Until composers gauge their dynamics in decibels and conductors carry decibel meters, volume will remain an inexact science...
...Forte means "loud" and piano means "soft," but what do loud and soft mean...
...Giving a flute solo to a tuba is an example...
...Nevertheless, there is plenty of room for confusion...
...But the maestro who decides that his job is to present as faithful a performance as possible faces further problems, for two reasons...
...is a principle which inevitably leads to the baroque and untrue...
...Some types of tinkering clearly change the flavor of a piece...
...Between the composer's final draft of a piece and its performance wait many middlemen: copyists, publishers, editors, scholars...
...without conviction, it is lifeless...
...But the line is fuzzy, and many a conductor has stepped????or tripped?over it...
...Yet Bach was definitely pushing for all the power he could get when he wrote the Toccata and Fugue, and for sheer power no organ can matchafull symphonic band...
...I own recordings of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony by four different conductors, and I like each of them for a different reason...
...The conductor must soften the woodwinds no matter what it says in the score...
...In short, being a faithful conductoris not easy, no matter how sincere one's desire...
...He might have added: Without a consensus even among composers, neither Leinsdorf nor anyone else is likely to conclusively define the conductor's role any time soon...
...And many of our listeners felt we fulfilled it...
...Knowing what the com-poserwroteis not enough...
...Theconductor has to understand why he wrote it, and what he wanted...
...The most precise musical instructions are far from precise...
...Leinsdorf is at his most entertaining when proferring his pet peeves...
...In between the conductor is on his own, and some ritards span several pages...
...A more common unfortunate practice is excerpting...
...Giuseppe Verdi "wrote: "Creative activity in every performance...
...Concert halls differ acoustically, each favoring a particular group of instruments...
...The word ritard tells the orchestra to slow down, and metronome markings are sometimes (hardly always) provided at the beginning and end of a ritard...
...Then there is the matter of what we actually mean when we speak of being true or untrue to a composer's intentions...
...The full title: IN SEC...
...Play the passage the same way elsewhere and nothing except woodwinds will be audible...
...Inasense, then, the London Band's conductor was carrying out the composer's wishes...
...By Leinsdorf s logic, at least three and probably all four are fatally flawed...
...DECIDE...
...These curmudgeonly opinions, however, are merely offshoots of the author's real purpose????teaching a conductor what to do with a piece...
...It all depends on your view of the conductor's and orchestra's role...
...Genius cannot be created by quantity") and conductors who fill their scores with pencil markings to aid them in performance ("The diverse symbols added to the printed text of scores remind me of phonetic spellings intended to ease the reading of a Hebrew text for bar mitz-vah candidates who are not conversant with the old language but want to make their parents proud...
...The second half of the piece, headed DECIDE, had the music written out normally but each player could pick one of three lines to follow...
...aided and abetted by 'folk' music ensembles: accordions, banjos, guitars, Indian chiefs who slap their thighs, bullhorns, and electrical amplification...
...Does being loyal to a composer require playing what he wrote without worrying about how it sounds...
...And the fact that composers themselves are divided on the conductor's proper place doesn't help...
...On whether you think it is to render the piece as the composer intended, or to bring their own talents to bear and develop a new interpretation...
...Several years ago, the London Symphonic Band recorded an album of 12 works by Bach transcribed for three flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, 14 clarinets, four saxophones, four horns, five trumpets, three trombones, euphonium, three tubas, three percussion, string bass, and harp (Bach for Band, Columbia M 31126...
...This is strong talk...
...the demands of certain modern composers ("dozens of percussion instruments...
...the section was labeled IN SEC...
...Blasphemy to any purist...
...These include popular notions of the creative process ("The real Schubert did not dash to a linden tree and carve an immortal song into the bark so that an accidentally present chorus could sing it while an enthralled, blond-braided maiden dropped the steins of beer she was serving in order to embrace the darling composer...
...The legitimacy of wholesale changes is one issue, and ultimately each conductor must settle it for himself...
...Many orchestras, usually for reasons of time, regularly perform one movement of a full-length work, although the key, tempo, placement, theme????the entire mood????was carefully fitted into the larger whole...
...Leinsdorf, himself a conductor of distinction, meant the book as a guide for his colleagues, yet it is also a brightly written travelogue of the journey from composer's pen to listener's ear...
...Surely there is some truth in the dig at conductors who step before their orchestras thinking, as Leinsdorf puts it, "Now they will play this work for the first time as it should be played...
...The issue is addressed at length in Erich Leinsdorf s The Composer's Advocate: A Radical Orthodoxy for Musicians, just released in paperback (Yale, 226 pp., $7.95...
...Some balance of the two is probably best...
Vol. 65 • September 1982 • No. 17
