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

The factors that make modern performance so effective, and the problems they bring.

Early recordings prove that 'correct' performance style changes over time. So what's 'proper' now was 'unmusical' 100 years ago, and vice versa. Are there yet other ways of making great performances?

As performance style changes, so score and composer identity change. Examples from Schubert, Boulez, Barber, and Brahms. None is who they were -- or will be.

What do these phrases really mean? What kind of work do they try to do? What weaknesses in thinking about the nature of classical music do they hide?

Beliefs about the 'proper' performance of classical scores are so deeply inculcated in musicians' training that they come to seem natural. Yet many (most?) are delusions.

You don't need musical training or knowledge to have powerful experiences listening to classical music; you simply need exposure to it. Sometimes 'knowledge' makes it harder to enjoy...

To perform one is supposed to sound the composer-god's structural plan, as revealed by music theory. But music is not like architecture: it has other ways of engaging us.

Current performance practice has to be believed to be the best possible practice, because the classical music State is (isn't it?) the best possible state.

Training musicians to think of current performance style as 'natural' musicianship is one of the most insidious processes involved in coercing musicians into musicking as they are told.

We’re trained to notice tiny differences between performances, and to imagine them as huge, because this is the only space within which -- given the ideology of performer obligations to the composer’s imagined wishes -- we are allowed to imagine these scores.

Whatever we claim, we don't believe in faithfulness to the composer's intentions when it comes to the uncomfortable truths of recorded performance styles.

As recordings prove, words are seriously insufficient to describe performance styles, and so written records alone cannot lead to substantially historical performances.

Until the 20th century no one believed that notation adequately specified performance. And they were correct!

That a score can give rise, given fine performers, to so many enriching musical experiences makes us want to imagine something lying behind them that contains all that greatness. But what could it consist of, that does not involve sound and thus already a (particular) performance?

Old recordings and modern experimental performances prove that there are many radically different persuasive readings that can start from the same score. What are the limits? It's too soon to say.

Living composers are usually keen to hear performers make new sense of their scores. Only dead composers seem to need to be copied slavishly for ever. Why is that?

Not only do we not know composers’ intentions in sound before the late nineteenth century, we cannot.

No one hears the performance style of their own era: thus, to perform normatively is to be unnoticeable, in a sense inaudible. This is supposed to be a good thing for a musician to be...

Except for those still alive, the composer is dead and usually has been for a very long time. They’re not likely to be listening to us, or minding if we do things differently.

The composer is not a god, but a musician on a par with the performer; both are creative, though only the performer is essential.

Can music exist? Or can it only happen? Is speaking of musical 'works' a category error? Who benefits? Only those who want something (some thing) to sell.

Rather than a work, music is one’s experience of a performance: each individual experience in itself, each one unique.

All these delusions limit decision-making for the performer. In some ways that's an advantage. It certainly makes music cheaper for the employer. But it doesn't help performers to be healthy and happy, as we shall see in Part 2 of this book, from chapter 7.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson introduces the third in a series of podcasts based on his book, Classical Performance Norms and How to Escape Them, which is free online at https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/. In this episode David Dolan speaks about his improvisation practice, and we hear how an improvisational attitude can improve performances of scores for audiences and players.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson introduces the second in a series of podcasts based on his book, Classical Performance Norms and How to Escape Them, which is free online at https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/