Caught in the act

Musical Times, Summer 1999 by Gritten, Anthony

Caught in the act

ANTHONY GRITTEN

Composition, performance, reception: studies in the creative process in music Edited by Wyndham Thomas

Ashgate Publishing (Aldershot, 1998); xx, 174pp; L42.50. ISBN 185928 325 X.

The picture adorning the dustjacket of this book depicts four hands, one belonging to a composer, one to a performer, and two to a listener. Each of these has been caught, mid-flow, in the musical act. As a whole the picture resembles the cover of Lydia Goehr's The imaginary museum of musical works, which is significant, for that book, too, is about the work involved in music. Here, however, the very fact that the composer holds a pen and the performer a baton, and that the listener is clapping, suggests a familiar - and entirely conventional scenario. This is underlined by the fact that the composer stands at the top of the image while the listener is tucked away at the bottom, and by the fact that their relationship is represented diagonally in terms of a one-way process of production and consumption. The subtitle colludes in emphasising the element of composition.

By itself, this is bound to seem like over-interpretation; I very much doubt that whoever designed the cover intended to convey the image that I have read into it. Whatever plausibility the reading has arises by virtue of its relationship to the horizon of expectations defined by other book-cover images, but I hope at least to have established the possibility of reading such book covers for their critical content.

The above paragraph is not mine, but paraphrases Nicholas Cook's provocative essay in this collection. Nevertheless, the cover of this interesting new volume does seem to embody the core assumption of the essays within; namely, that musical creativity is sacred and untouchable. Once conjured up by the composer, it is passed on through the transparent medium of the performer to the passive receptacle of the listener. Nowhere is creativity something actually co-created and shared. In other words, this book is about the trials and tribulations of compositional intention.

Susan Bradshaw puts the matter well, writing about 'A performer's responsibility' that `In its pristine state, the score has to be regarded as custodian of some original truth, however elusory', though there are similar examples, like the following from Raymond Warren's `The composer and opera performance': `at the apex of this [operatic] triangle is the composer, normally represented by a conductor who can be assumed to be closest to his musical intentions'. The most explicit statement of intent comes from Wyndham Thomas's editorial introduction:

Where does a composer find inspiration? How are musical ideas formulated and communicated? How does a performer know exactly what the composer intended and can the listener be sure that he is hearing what the composer wanted him to hear? How do contexts, modes of presentation and fashions affect the way that music is evaluated? In what ways do analysis and music criticism contribute to understanding? Should we believe what the history books say?

Also revealing is the title of the symposium behind the book, namely `The intention, reception and understanding of musical composition', for the interrelations between these three words and those on the book's published cover are more fluid than most of the authors assume. Indeed, the book's subtitle is a touch ironic, since `creative process' as considered here refers usually to composition, few of the essays considering performance or reception as genuinely creative in any way

Charles Rosen's is one exception; it considers the performer's freedom to interpose himself between composer and listener and to move from text to act. Rosen's `Freedom of interpretation', though, could equally be termed conviction; witness his closing sentence:

In any case, the most successful performances of contemporary works, as of the music of the past, are those that only give the illusion of remaining faithful to the text while they hide a genuine and deply rooted freedom of interpretation.

Robert Saxton's chapter, similarly considers the compositional process as a performance, `tracing a path from the intangible to the tangible'. For myself, I find this chapter more interesting as one composer's confession than as an explanation of aesthetic activity, and wish I had heard Saxton himself at the symposium, for while his essay illustrates the prosaic particularities of composition, it leaves unconsidered the moment at which a composer's cognitive relation to his musical materials becomes properly aesthetic and creative.

Turning briefly to the essays on reception (occupying more than half the book), only Adrian Beaumont's highly readable chapter, on the reaction of a real audience to a new work by Jonathan Harvey, focuses on listeners' individual aesthetic responses to music; though, unfortunately, listeners' expectations seem to be couched in terms of second-guessing the composer's intentions. Other essays tackle the residue that accrues to the musical work as it is assimilated into a broader cultural discourse, ranging from Bojan Bujic's dense essay on the relationship between perception and its object to Stephen Walsh's finelytuned survey of the press reception of Stravinsky's music by such figures as Henry Cope Colles and Ernest Newman. Only on the final page of the last chapter (Adrian Thomas on post-war Polish musical politics), however, is this larger `other Party' acknowledged, and it seems to me that it would have been valuable for these essays to consider the nature of the aesthetic act (of composition, performance, reception) and the process of its reification into cultural discourse. Only Walsh seems to have done this, and thus presents an insight into `the very heart of modernism': that, despite early attempts to marginalise his music as vivid but shallow, and despite his own position outside the mainstream (both in his life and in his music), Stravinsky went on to become not just part of, but the mainstream itself.