Performing by the Book? Musical Negotiations Between Text and Act

The popularity of graphic and instructional scores, and the resurgence of interest in “early music” since the mid-twentieth century, brought about a reconfiguring of composer/performer relationships within Western art music. Historically informed performance (and its acronym, HIP) is referenced throughout this collection of essays that explore the “constraints of repertoire, repetition, reproduction, and reputation” that occur between the score and the musical act. This contribution to musicology is mostly written from a musician’s perspective, making this primarily a guide for musicians dealing with the interpretation of scores. Chapters are organized chronologically, the first dealing with the performance of medieval scores, the last with Stockhausen and Cage.Some Performing by the Book contributors move beyond the specialism of interpreting musical notation, with findings that are of interest to other kinds of readers and performers of other kinds of texts. Pianist Xiangning Lin, in “Relocating Ravel’s ‘Sad Birds’ in Alternative Forests of Place and Time,” discusses her interest in the decolonization of Western art music through enriching her performance of Ravel’s “Oiseaux Triestes” by bringing in other artforms—such as the influence on Ravel of Edgar Allen Poe, and a collaboration with an animator, with her process summarized in a beautiful diagram (p. 175).Another chapter of interest to a nonmusical readership is Bjorn Schmelzer’s “Performing by the Book (next to the Book You Were Looking For),” which starts with other (non-musical) texts then demonstrates its relevance to musicology. The image of Jesus in the winepress with angels squeezing out his essence, as an analogy for squeezing out the essence of a text, could be applied to other kinds of texts and other performers beyond music. Claire Lesser’s closing chapter, in which Derrida’s ideas of reproduction, replication, and play are applied to performances of aleatoric scores, is again of wider interest beyond musicology.Many of the remaining chapters dig deeply into the experience of historically informed performance and interpretation from a musician’s perspective, illustrated with extracts of scores. Niels Berentsen’s “Mind the Gap” uses the example of Fabri’s Eyn Cleyn Parabel, of which a partial manuscript remains, and the problems of reconstructing a performable version, the score of which ends the chapter. In “Pluralising the Musical Text,” Jonathan Ayerst reports on his own change from “an interpretative musician to an improvising one” in the context of performing works by Baroque composers, in particular J. S. Bach.In “A la recherche du chant perdu,” Elizabeth Dobbin unpicks the relationships between printing houses and salon performances in late-seventeenth-century Paris. Covering 1,000 years of Western art music history, this volume on lacunae necessarily has many lacunae of its own, as each chapter takes a narrow, specialist focus on music of a particular place and time. This means that some chapters are of niche interest for specialists, but taken as a whole they provide an overview of the problems of historically informed performance. Camilla Kohnken’s “From Beethoven Performance to Beethoven Interpretation,” George Kennaway’s “Nineteenth-Century Texts in the Twenty-First Century,” Kate Bennett Wadsworth’s “The Flexible Text,” and Nir Cohen-Schalit’s “The Romantic Conductor Scholar” all place their focus on the nineteenth century, with only Clare Lesser’s chapter, “The Virgin Act,” moving the discussion to John Cage. This results in a concentration of studies of an era not particularly noted for improvisation and flexibility. More chapters with a contemporary focus would have made for a more rounded discussion.Whether by improvisation, emphasizing different qualities, or expanding musical sensing through other artforms, the potential for music to be reborn each time it is performed has particular relevance for composers, musicians, and audiences since the rise in aleatoric music of the 1960s and the dominance of recorded music over live performance. As Ayerst writes, “A thread that runs through this volume is how to overcome the tyranny of the historical ‘text’ in classical music by instead creating new relationships, new ways of perceiving canonic works” (p. 63).