But do these examples add up to an American performing tradition?
Absolutely not. Of course not. If there's anything that sounds American about them, it's tied to entirely different schools. And even if there were something that sounds American, how would we know?
We'd know because we know what American music sounds like. America is the home of improvisatory freedom, America is the place that embraced music by oral tradition when no one else would. The presence of a recording device meant oral traditions could be passed on by anyone who cared to hear it, and in the case of every other genre of music, people cared to hear their predecessors.
But they cared to hear it because they were not educated in the old ways of music, and what they were hearing was entirely new to them. But when traditions become old, the texts which codify them become sacred: and what becomes sacred becomes banal. Art by reverence becomes art by bureaucracy, music by paperwork. We so revered tradition that we abandoned it.
The evidence of what music always was was right around us, and we willfully ignored it.
What a waste.
But the truth is a little more nuanced than that. The presence of the microphone changed the playing even of the players who carried the tradition. If you listen even to romantics like Furtwangler and Rubinstein steeped in 19th century traditions as though living them, something in their style changed utterly after the end of World War II.
Why did it change?
We'd like to think that it was the final devastating triumph of the Toscanini aesthetic, mid-century modern in the dross of classical interpretation where form became function and any ornaments which smacked of loving care were deemed unnecessary. But the truth is probably simpler: they heard themselves played back and didn't like what they heard. They may have grown more risk averse after hearing themselves, but they also realized that certain mannerisms were... well... distracting. Not everything in the gold old days was good, and not all of the old effects were as thrilling as others.
Taking massive liberty with the score is one thing in a messy romantic masterwork like the ones written by Wagner and Liszt it's another in work by Mozart or Beethoven which are already just about perfect. When the work is as ideal as Beethoven 5 or The Marriage of Figaro, nearly anything an interpreter could do gets in the way. I love opera singing the way anybody does: at least I love it when it's done well, which it too rarely is these days. But I failed to hear what was as great in Verdi as in his Viennese predecessors until I heard Toscanini do Otello and realized that every detail means something, and if you distort the details you distort a tragedy so perfectly constructed it could be Greek. I love the Panizza Otello, but I love it as opera, not art. At the end of it you could probably imagine Martinelli's guts spilling out all over the stage after a ritual seppuku gone awry.
And yet... the amount of classical music we can call 'perfect' or 'ideal' is so miniscule: is it even 5% of the repertoire? Even most of the greatest music has flaws, and if performers don't find ways to negotiate the sequential repetition, the awkward harmonic modulations, the formal wandering, the thinness of texture that you find even amid passages of the most titanic masterworks, it's going to be a more boring night than it should be.
We thought the recording cheapened what was unique classical music, and the end result is that the recording
To understand interpretation, it's always good to turn to the place interpretation matters most: the law. We all became originalists in the 20th century, turning from the Earl Warren-ness of Mahler's textural freedom to the Antonin Scalia-ness of Toscanini almost overnight before anybody realized what happened.
But even Mahler's textural freedom was commented upon at the time as being excessive. It was a revision of a previous tradition, an upending done in the name of greater vividness, greater intensity, greater quality, and most importantly, greater clarity.
Was it excessive? Well, no, because Mahler is Mahler, and he's one of the great musical minds of all time. If Mahler thought it worked, it probably worked. Is it reproducible for us? Probably not. We only know Mahler's interpretive spirit through the recordings of his assistants and associates like Bodanzky, Mengelberg, Fried and the pre-dotage Bruno Walter. But when you have Riccardo Chailly record Mahler's re-orchestrations of the Schumann symphonies but with a strict adherence to the score in spite of its changes, what's the point? You've literally turned Mahler into Toscanini.
If we had Mahler recordings of anything at all besides a few piano rolls, they would be essential to consult in whatever repertoire. But there is no more way to capture the spirit of Mahler than there is to capture the spirit of Furtwangler. You can try, but every copy will be a faded facsimile. First we had Furtwangler, then there was Jochum, then Keilberth, then Barenboim. Every successive impersonation of Furtwangler's interpretive style was a little less vivid than the one before.
Why? Because those are interpretations not meant to be imitated. They were created in the moment of performance from instincts the performer himself may not have understood, and consequently over time what was done instinctually becomes didactic.
But just as there is the originalism of Scalia and the living documents of Furtwangler, there is 'stare decisis', meaning 'to stand by things decided.' In other words, maintenance of tradition, and the realization that interpretation is ultimately a continuum which allows for a greater freedom within a binding framework.
When a judge rules by 'stare decisis' he is drawing on the wisdom of previous judges who over hundreds of years have accumulated practical wisdom by seeking out precedents for new cases. As over time there have been precedents for nearly every case, there is much practical wisdom out there in judicial rulings, much of which contradicts other wise judicial rulings.
Musicians can draw on the wisdom of previous musicians, and should. It is dangerous to try and draw lessons in tradition from Furtwangler or Cortot or Gitlis, because they were as much revolutionaries as the Toscaninis and Heifetzes with whom their aesthetic was at war.
But we can draw lessons personalities a rung or two down in strength: the Moiseiwitsches, the Francescattis, the Monteux's, the artists who were steeped in the tradition their whole lives and found an individual way forward within it. About matters of interpretation these Kubeliks and Grumiaux's and Firkusnys were neither revolutionaries nor reactionaries, they lived in the practical wisdom of precedent. Some interpreted more conservatively (Rubinstein, Oistrakh, E. Kleiber), some more liberally (Fricsay, Huberman, Hofmann), but they all were within the same continuum of tradition.
There were obvious differences in each national school, French, Russian, Italian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, maybe even Ukrainian, but each of them were responding to the same need to live the music on a level deeper than its outward manifestations, and they each lived the music of foreigners through the precedents they knew of the music they had at hand: their national composers, their folk music, the most treasured artforms and humanities of their countries, even the country's speech pattens. Through all that, these musical giants diagnosed what they took to be the challenges of this music: where are the architectural destinations of the piece, where are the harmonic pressure points that allow for freedom of tempo, does every modulation demand a new color palette, when does the music become rhetorical and demand agogics, are the inner voices independent counterpoint or mere atmosphere, how to create momentum through sequential repetition, how to clarify dense counterpoint, how to maximize harmonic tension, how to make sure phrases rise and fall regardless of the indicated dynamic, and they all had their solutions to these problems. What was shared was not their solutions, but that they understood what the interpretive questions were.
If we're not aware of the problems anymore, it's because we're not really listening on any level deeper than our ears. We're not just checking whether or not the audience is paying attention, we're not checking if we're paying attention. By putting such premium on 'the score', we have neglected 'the music.'
'The music' cannot be taught through practical solutions, it can only be elicited, inspired, drawn out through inspiration. It has to be lived on a level deeper than ear and fingers before one can even talk about any sort of practical solution to the score, and that can only happen if we feel it in what science would call the 'limbic system', and the rest of us might call our guts, our souls, our bodies.
All that lives must die, and once traditions die out, you never get them back in the sense that they once were. They come back reconstituted through the filters of a new age. One day, no longer will waltzes be played with a properly placed upbeat, just as Brahms is rarely ever played anymore with a properly un-self-conscious rubato.
Every soul has an address and we can't be old Viennese in our souls any more than we could naturally speak English as the Elizabethans did. These are things that cannot be acquired, because they would inevitably feel false.
Perhaps that falsity isn't a bad thing. Look at modern bluegrass music, or 'newgrass' as people call it. The old banjo and fiddle traditions are dying out, and bluegrass has increasingly become the purview of nice musicians with classical training: who hold the bow properly, who play properly in tune, who learned bluegrass as a foreign language that came with a culture which intoxicated them. But Bela Fleck and Mark O'Connor will never be able to play it without sounding 'too good,' The raw sound from too much bow pressure, the out of tune fingering, the slight rhythmic insecurity on banjos, that's as much part of bluegrass and old time as the tune itself. The 'proper training' always comes out, and it brings its own advantages. Many people love the 'newgrass' of Fleck and O'Connor and Edgar Meyer and the Punch Brothers and so many others, but it is a very different thing from the original and an ancilary growth from the original tradition.
But we can be as American as Johann Strauss was Viennese, and we can find an American style perfectly easily if we just played from the gut rather than the brain.
We even know exactly what the American style would sound like. It would sound like the style of every other American musical genre: impassioned, explosive, improvisatory, charismatic, even flamboyant, utterly unafraid to use the score as a departure point, more interested in adapting the music to the individuality of the performer than making the performer the servant of the music.
Will every performance be great? Of course not. Was every performance great by the great artists of other countries' schools? Would it be the deepest musicianship around? Well... are we the deepest country? Of course not. But they would be 'our' musicians, recognizably ours. They would have the same spirit within them as John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia. I'm not sure these musicians would be my favorites, but they would recognizably be our musicians because the performer becomes an equal partner in a collaborative process that never ends with the score.
Everybody around the world would accuse Americans of vulgarity. Well... look around, we ARE vulgar and everybody already accuses us of it. We showed the world how to be vulgar. We're the country whose raw energy ruined the classical tradition for ourselves, then ruined it for the rest of the world, now we can bring it back to the rest of the world with the very ignorant vulgarity that created American music in the first place.
Part of what killed the grand tradition here is good old American ignorance. Even the educated among us seem far more proud to wear our ignorance on our sleeves than our erudition. So what then would an American school do with that naivete? If I know my country, then my sense is that we would take the improvisatory freedom of the 19th century and turn it up by an exponent. Not just rubato and textual modifications, but rearranging pieces for completely different instrumental combinations, rewriting melodic lines and accompanying figures, inserting cadenzas, bowdlerizing the thing in itself which generations of 20th century musicians devoted their lives to preserving exactly as they found it into something just barely recognizable: utterly vulgar by the standards of the last 100 years, but energetic as only this country has been, and fostering creativity in the re-creative realm that will hopefully rub off in the creative realm itself.
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