Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

In performance one seeks to accomplish many things as well as moving and engaging listeners: these include creating benefits of various kinds, practical, social, financial, psychological, health-related, even in a broad sense political.

In the much more varied performance culture envisaged here, evaluation of performance need be no harder than it has always been: performances are made to engage, to stimulate, to excite, to fascinate, to challenge, to move, as ever.

Two striking examples of challenging performances that 'shouldn't' work but do.

Wondering how many different performances a classical musician could give of the same score, I asked friends and colleagues what they thought might be possible...

An overview of the wide variety of creatively transgressive performances available on the Challenging Performance website, challengingperformance.com.

In current opera productions the stage and music directors work alongside each other using completely different and incompatible belief systems. As we’ve seen, there is no good reason not to reread the score just as radically as the text, opening up the intriguing option of performing the score in such a way as to tell the same story as the staging...

Ella Marchment (Helios Collective, director), Leo Geyer (conductor, composer) and I (as dramaturg) developed a reading of Purcell's 'Dido & Aeneas' score which made new, coherent sense of the text and the music, addressing themes of our time. Watch THE VIDEO at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h38DMVBi9IM&t=475s

The results of a questionnaire among the performers of 'Dido & Belinda' finds most happy with both the process and the outcome, some to their great surprise.

The 'Dido & Belinda' audiences' questionnaire suggests that the audiences we can already see emerging with new venues and new forms of presentation are likely to be sympathetic to much more creative interactions with texts from the past. There are real possibilities here for generating new work and new audiences for adventurous young musicians.

Why does classical music figure so infrequently in media that regularly discuss art and theatre at a sophisticated level? GIven a working environment supportive of creative, topical interpretation, performers can readily enable scores to speak of contemporary concerns, attracting more diverse audiences eager for insight.

Like all music, classical music creates virtual others, usually others with whom we are already quite familiar. With goodwill and a determination to be inclusive and welcoming of difference, non-normative performance could allow us to make many very different others from the scores we know and love

The UN Human Rights Council advocates ‘the right ... to freely ... contribute to artistic expressions and creations'. This the classical music business does not currently permit. There’s no excuse for such a high-profile, high-status embodiment of Western cultural values not to be in conformity with its (now) foundational statement of ethical and political values. And no need either.

Accepting that, as a classical musician, one has little agency (freedom to choose and the authority to act) makes the job less dispiriting. But that lack of agency is still (and quite rightly) felt as oppressive by many musicians, including many of those quoted here.

Empirical research shows, again and again, that damage to musicians' physical and mental health is integral to classical music ideology and practice, and appears to be considered by many as a necessary price for professional performance. No profession should do this to its workers; no society should be content with it or celebrate hearing its results.

Despite it being evidently untrue, the law suppose that the composer is the only creator, the performer merely a reproducer. Consequently, performers receive no royalty for their creative part in music-making and can be sued for a performance that a composer or their heirs dislike. Why is this? What are the consequences?

A brief introduction to Part 3 of Challenging Performance (chapters 18–27), which looks at how creative and transgressive performances can be made, and at how people respond to them.

Most of the skills required for greater creativity in classical performance are in use already (albeit to a smaller degree) in normative performance. What creativity requires is simply that one takes, and—crucially—feels empowered to take them further.

We have only to imagine how dreary theatre would be if every performance of ‘Hamlet’ used the same gestures and the same intonations—all enforced by an ideologically-contrained community of actors and gatekeepers claiming to be faithful—to see how disastrously classical music has backed itself into a corner.

Ignoring or transforming indications from the composer may allow us, ethically as well as practically, to learn much about how relationships can change, or be radically other, and still be profoundly satisfying.

As performers we have ethical responsibilities, not to ‘the music itself’, nor to the long-dead composer, but rather to others whom our performances may influence. We cannot allow listeners to feel entitled not to be challenged by a performance; but taking responsibility for it in ethical as well as artistic respects only accepts artistic agency restored to its rightful place, the performer.

A reminder of the overwhelming reasons to be innovative in classical music performance. Then, how are we to get these scores to work differently and variously? Ten approaches are suggested to get us started.

Early recordings provide many revelatory examples of musicalities are quite unfamiliar to us now. They are excellent sources of models if we want to experiment with performing scores differently, for they present styles that we know were outstandingly successful in their time, however strange they may seem to us.

A performance that works dynamically (the essential requirement) is one in which the performer moves from note to note—modelling feeling-shapes we know or can imagine from life—in a way that carries us along, occupies our attention, fills us with desire to hear what happens next.

The sense that music moves, is lifelike, and is like other kinds of changing feeling states and other everyday experiences, may be rooted in more basic experiences and responses to the world around us.

If how music feels matters more to our biology and psychology than how obedient it is—to traditions, rules and norms—then this only adds to its danger for those who feel entitled to rule on how it should sound.