I'm not entirely sure but am nevertheless pretty sure I was also told by the same unnamed critic of eminence in a separate video that I wouldn't know good orchestral playing if it bit me in the ass....
I can assure anybody but me who made the 2+2 connection (probably no one...) that I very much do, I just don't give a shit. The culture of making orchestras into precision drills was... ruinous. It fetishized a culture of performance and ossified the repertoire into schism between conductors who could exploit the conservatism of wealthy patrons into lazily doing the same pieces from year to year, and hundreds of new composers who never had a chance to learn how to write for mass appeal. Conductors became known as servants of composers simply because they gave basically the same safe performances of a few pieces every year and called it 'score fidelity,' and meanwhile they accrued rewards for their 'service' to great music which even the most prosperous composers could never dream of in their often very difficult lives. Toscanini did not serve music, music so clearly served him.
If you hear every detail of many composers with crystalline clarity, you've completely missed the point. The details are always there for a purpose. A conductor who secures complete precision and accuracy in a Wagner opera or Mahler symphony has simply not done enough to challenge the musicians. The purpose is the music, not the score, and they're not the same thing. MH Abrams wrote a book called 'the fourth dimension of a poem' in which he writes of what happens when we speak poetry out loud, and how the meaning completely changes when released into the air. How much moreso is that true in music?
The point of art is not accuracy or even detail, the point is meaning. Music only exists in the ear of the listener and meaning only in the mind. Music is a humanity, it is subjective, and any attempt to measure it with objectivity is pseudo-science. Those of us who know the pieces well can hear the score in our heads and perfection needn't be present anywhere else.
What matters is context. The context in which the music is played matters. The extra-musical possibilities which the music suggests matters. Individuality matters so much more than execution. The challenges to traditional performance cliches matter and there is no objective truth about which practices are objective and which are simply cliches. Eventually, they're all cliches. The meaning of art, even performing art, evolves from generation to generation, or it dies. Nothing at this point is more cliche than unindividuated performances that represent the score like a schematic that is often not even followed by the people who claim to follow it most closely. And even if they're following it perfectly, nobody cares. Without individuality, something classical music is in dire need of more, players will be playing to an empty hall because nobody cares once they're told what they already know.
Music, real music, is discovery, not confirmation. It happens not when we hear what we already know, but when we discover new perspectives. Those revelations can happen in newly discovered music, or in different interpretations of music we already know. But the revelation of perfect playing can only happen once. And once you've heard it, it becomes just another set of toy soldiers that you march out as though you fancy yourself a general leading a wax army of miniature martinets - and the real soldiers on whom these reproductions are based had their individuality crushed to learn how to be soldiers. Generals don't make armies like that to create beautiful things, generals make armies like that to destroy them.
No comments:
Post a Comment