All Fingers and Thumbs. Can We 'Interpret' Contemporary Music, or Do We Just Perform it?

Susan Bradshaw Investigates Author(s): Susan Bradshaw Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 135, No. 1811 (Jan., 1994), pp. 20-24 Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1002827 . Accessed: 12/01/2011 18:51
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Interpretation in 20th-century music

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Can of we a new

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perform piano it? In the first modernist tradition

Ex.1

WEBERN: VARIATIONS FORPIANOOP.27

he sheer complexity of some 20th-century piano music seems not only to demand a quite unprecedented, even slavish, attention to detail, but to deprive the performerof any opportunity to leave a more personal stamp on its interpretation. Before going further,it may be as well to ask when and why performers ceased to regardthemselves first and foremost as interpreters of a quasi-sacred musical text; we should also question whetherpresent- day attitudesto interpretation are not to some degree coloured by what is even now imagined to be the role of the virtuoso specialist performer who, towards the end of the 19th century, ousted the erstwhile composer/performer in favour of the 'star' personality- whose identity was not only quite separatefrom but often

notably at odds with that of the composer and his music. It could be that the detailed demandsof the mid-20th-century composer have forced performers not only to heed every last instructionas partof the contemporary learningprocess, but perhapsto jettison a whole host of regrettablycavalier approaches to the music of the past. Once upon a time, in the far-off days of the early 18th century, it was enough for the great Johann Sebastian Bach to communicate the details of his unsurpassedly lucid musical structures simply in terms of pitch and of rhythmic durations. The motivic purpose of his music is such as to make it uniquely self-sufficient; dependent neither on speed nor on dynamic contrast, it can be weakened only (as if that 'only' were not crucial) by absence of detail - by an under-punctuated approach that fails to take account of the quite extraordinarysignificance of each intervallic step, of every change of direction within the overall melodic curve, and of the pulse of a rhythmic emphasis expressed in terms of the length of the bar, the division of the beat. Better by far to emulate the late Pablo Casals, and to approachthe works of Bach (of all music) 'like a jeweller, aware of the smallest details'. Without a similarly positive awareness, the more fragile motivic writing of Anton Webern can all too easily fall to pieces beneath the fingers; it takes the patience of a latter-day Casals to focus on each tiny motif in turn, to trace each to its rightful conclusion, often across rests, and at the same time to let nothing interfere with either the balance of the two-part writing or the cross-rhythmic emphasis suggested by the 3/2 time signature of ex.l. Even in 1936, Webern rejected all but two dynamic levels (piano and forte) and three main types of articulation (the staccato dot, the tenuto line, and the slur) to delineate both the fragile character and the skeleton-like rhythmic

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framework at the start of the third movement of his op.27 Variations for piano. Webern's generally up-beat, always across-beat, phrasing is, like that of Bach, inseparable from the motivic processes it aims to reflect. But because in Bach's case (and, it could be argued, in Webern's) these processes are themselves so fluidly generated, all attemptsto pin them to the printed page have proved not only to mislead by actually to blind would-be performersto the kind of observational responsibility upon which a properly articulate interpretation depends. Despite their best intentions, a whole string of would-be helpful editors have succeeded only in replacing the notion of responsible phrasing as a speech-like articulation of motivic structure with an all-embracing legato (promoted by the introductionof the so-called 'phrasing slur') at the one extreme, the paired slurringsof the pseudo-baroqueat the other. Meanwhile, as counterpointgave way to tune and accompaniment, to predominantlyharmonic structuresanimatedby ostinatos and the Alberti bass, each of these periods of serene motivic balance and metrical good order (Webern's as well as Bach's) was in turnovertakenby a seemingly urgentneed to focus on a kind of imbalance that aimed to counter musical expectations more often than to fulfill them. It was duringthe first of these periods that the early Viennese composers had cause to develop a system of musical punctuation whose motivic reasoning was no longer always or necessarily self-evident; in other words, to expand notation to take account of such aspects of musical expression as may at least partiallybe controlledby prescribingdynamics and articulative phrasing. Editorial attempts to iron out the supposed inconsistencies in Beethoven's wholly explicit texts has done damage to his intentions that can only be described as incalculable. Even in his own lifetime he seemed always to be fighting a losing battle against ignorance and approximation- as revealed in a heartfeltletter of 1825 on the subject of his op.132 string quartet. Had his various editors known of Beethoven's anguished plea to 'For God's sake please impress on Rampel to copy everything exactly as it stands', they could have avoided not only obfuscatingthe text by depriving performers of any meaningful contact with the composer's own until the arrivalof the urtextedition some structural interpretations one hundredand fifty years on. In such confusing circumstancesit is perhaps hardly surprising that performers seem generally to have mislaid the knack of knowing what questions to ask of the texts confrontingthem - to have lost touch with analytical purpose somewhere along the historical line between Bach's trust in the self-revealing motivic structureof his unpunctuatedcontrapuntallines and Beethoven's despairinginsistence that his own carefullydevised harmonicarticulation was no descriptive window-dressing but structurally obbligatissimo. For reasons by no means dissimilar to those of Beethoven, European composers of the early 20th century determined further to refine notation - to an extent that would, they of hoped, for ever insure against the grosser misinterpretations the the self-seeking, or the merely lazy. To this end, manipulative, both Schoenberg and Weber soon dispensed with the ubiquitous 19th-centuryphrasing slur, finding new and much less ambiguous and ways to indicate departure arrivalpoints.

From this point on, it quickly becomes clear that if the medium is the message, so the notationalcontext is the music - most obviously, if to an eventually ludicrous extent, when that context for a time became a purely graphic one. But that was much later. Meanwhile, the thoroughlygarbled subtext of a so-called 'performance tradition'had, like some kind of creeping infection, killed of off any notion of personalresponsibilityfor the interpretation an original text, replacing it with a damaging dependenceborn of the copycat recordingera. Then, just as composers like Debussy and his Austro-German counterpartswere beginning to forge ahead, performers seemed suddenly to unite in calling a halt - drawing an invisible line between 'music' and 'new music', as between traditionalistsand iconoclasts among composers. Performing repertoires shrank as pianists in particularfailed signally to keep pace with the times, and even the outstandingly gifted Busoni, himself a composer/performer,was more interested in transcribing pieces (including one of Schoenberg's) to suit his own visionary pianism than in using his talents to search out the characteristic detail from an original text. Unlike his Viennese contemporaries, Debussy the Frenchman had no particularmoulds to break. Startingthe second decade of the 20th centurywith a slate wiped clean of any remainingstylistic influences, he had every right to hope that his instructionswould be heeded as to the letter - particularlysince the painstakingcare with which he drew attention to the placing, colour and relative importance of every tiny motivic element remains unsurpassed. But although he restrictedhimself to the same set of articulation marks that had served composers well enough for a century or more (legato slurs, staccato dots, tenuto lines, accents), he extended the expressive range by pairing them to introduce an intermediate set of new and more subtle variants (legato slurs + staccato dots, staccato dots + tenuto lines, tenuto lines + accents, and so on). Like that of the French avant-gardecomposers yet to come, Debussy's music depends on beginnings, and with slurs often stopping short of the barline- or indeed the beat - his quasiWebemian insistence on the importanceof interval as the basis of his non-diatonic and essentially downbeat harmonies should not have been in doubt.
Sehr rasch (J) FIVE PIANOPIECESOP.23, NO.2 EX.2A SCHOENBERG:

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EX.3A BOULEZ:FIRST PIANOSONATA

Alas for Debussy, the seductive sound of his piano music very nearly proved its downfall, allowing those who favoureda handeddown, all-purpose 'classical style' of performance to ride roughshod over every articulativenuance in their haste to snatch one last opportunity to indulge in a rhythmically inaccurate wallow. And it really was the last opportunity,for the neo-contrapuntalism of the postwar generation was all too soon to stop the wallowers dead in their tracks- forcing them either to back off or to mend their ways. In any case, approximationcould have no place in a musical future where composers would increasingly need to go their separateways and, as the composers themselves were soon to make abundantly clear, henceforth to define their stylistic startingpoints in ever more specific detail. But the virtuoso performer,once so sure of his role, was by this time left high that and dry - strandedalongside a distortedview of interpretation for left him totally unprepared music whose ultimatesense depended on everything (not just the notes) being exactly as written, obbligatissimo. ike Beethoven, Debussy and Schoenberg showed a punctilious concern to punctuatetheir music so as to make every last element fulfil a properly articulate,almost word-like purpose in defining the characterof the whole. Racing ahead of his time, Schoenbergnot only extendedthe suggested dynamicrange at both ends of the scale (fromfftojff, frompp to ppp and even, in extremis, pppp) but, once he hadjettisoned the infamousphrasingslur, he used dynamics to indicate take-off and arrivalpoints - as with the crescendo used to markthe directionalflow of the fiercely separated semiquaverswhich begin the second of his Five Piano Pieces, as op.23 (ex. 2a). He also initiated a kind of phrasing-by-rhythm, when he grouped a succession of regular quavers so as to give a syncopated, cross-beat emphasis to the staid surroundingsof an ongoing minim pulse in the Gigue from his Suite, op.25 (ex.2b), some 20 years before the appearance of a directly comparable passage in the first Piano Sonata of the young Pierre Boulez (ex.3a). But while Schoenberg's rhythmic groupings must be heard to unfold against the metricalbackgroundof a 2/2 time signature, Boulez's argument is evidently a contrapuntal one that demandsto be countedonly in termsof its quaverpulse groups.

itself (softly, lightly, and without undue emphasis except .sfz where marked) with a few bars of four-part counterpoint from the last movement of his Second Piano Sonata (ex.3b). There is no way to discover the gist of such a passage without first being preparedto unravel its surface complexity from the inside. It is not only that the wide-ranging lines of its four-partcounterpoint present a seemingly unruly tangle in themselves, but that the Debussyan articulation of the various fragments is being used methodically to add an intricate and quasi motivic dimension all its own: for instance, the fact that the heavy staccato daggers are always attachedto a recurringfive-note group gives these particular semiquavers a motivic profile quite separate from the more or less tenuto placing of the twin groups expressed as 3+1 (whether as a triplet or as three semiquavers plus a quaver). Once spotted, the clarity of this type of motivic definition is such as to make some intrusive phrasing slurs seem like wholly superfluous encumbrances. h5 h5 ne of Stockhausen's early attempts (in Piano Piece IV, ex.4a) to delineate upper and lower voices by means of their attachmentto extended beams also indicates some kind of contrapuntalintent; but since there is little overlap between the wide-ranging lines, the effect here is monodic, even pointillistic; the more so since silence (pace Webern) is clearly an important considerationin relationto note endings. Later,in the much more characteristic gestural surroundings of Piano Piece X (ex.4b), silence (not includedin this example) is used both more negatively, as absence (or near absence) of sound,but also more positively - to reflect periods of stasis after hectic movement. In other words, it of functions as one of the possible interpretations a durationscale that Stockhausenuses to evoke a kind of periodic phrasing,changing one or more of the texturalingredients(dynamics, sostenutoor staccatoattacks,wide or narrowclusters- whethersimultaneousor extended as palm glissandos - and so on) at the start of, or as anacrusis to, each succeeding duration period. But such phrase lengths have also to contain and to control an ongoing rubatosuggested by the directionalslant of the centralbeams, so that, despite the apparentexigencies of the notionally measureddurationscale, outcome will of necessity be extremelyvariable. the interpretative To look back at the Webern of the op.27 Variations (ex.1) is to realise just how influential a model they were to become. Taking

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over from where Webern left off, Stockhausen's wide-ranging lines interspersed with rests and Boulez's idea of characterising rhythmic motifs in terms of their articulationwere themselves to prove prophetic. In consolidating the basis of a contrapuntal rhythm which could develop independently of theme or melodic contour,they coincidentally introduceda range of texture-creating possibilities that were to push open the hitherto closed doors of musical style to admit all sorts of previously suppresseddemons. Nevertheless, performersas a breed have yet to be persuadedthat

these demons are largely benign, their contributionboth positive and informative when it comes to recognising the underlying purpose of a notational style as intricate and rhythmically complex as that of the first of Brian Ferneyhough's Three Pieces for Piano (1966-67). Since this is relatively unknownterritory,it will perhaps be interesting to end by asking not only what the opening bars of such a piece (ex.5) ought to sound like but what kind of exploratoryapproachwould be most likely to produce an even halfway useful answer.

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in the contrapuntal weave. Nevertheless, Ferneyhough's scrupulous attention to linear balance means that his dynamics are gauged to precisely this end, as well as (taking his cue form # J pI, wPMPo ? Schoenberg) to reinforce the continuity and point the direction taken by each of the separate :" i$^"i PP/ strands as they cross back and P- A p i , forthbetween the staves. ---ALeaving aside the actual rvchende Taslen p metronome speeds (which, like 1 o those of early Boulez, are strictly s . for the birds), there is obviously a 7 _ f- D- 5,.<;. 5 |- ! composed rubato at work here; m J1 -ELPTmf obvious, too, that this rubato must P1 f 1$J eventually override all sense of , , metre and even of pulse - not just p f fbecbecause the tempo is scarcely ever $'* Ij ~ _ i ~ ?* ~-.v , 1|lt{j I s -. ^ I .^^ 8 9>: ItU 3tUl ?/ l ' 1 l
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fractional divisions of a notional quaver have nothing to do with marking beats or aligning voices. As with any contrapuntal music, the distinguishingfeatures of each voice must of course be absorbed separately, one line at a time; but while it is simple enough to imagine plotting the course of a single voice, even (eventually) to combining the two outer ones, it
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Ex.5

FERNEYHOUGH: THREE PIECESFORPIANO,NO.1

The first thing to note is that it is cast mostly, though not uniformly, in three parts;then that its careful 'voicing' (as shown by the directionof the note stems) may suggest a remote contrapuntal ancestryin the Bach Three-PartInventions, and that any continuing line of influence may thereafterlead from Bach to Webern, Webern to Boulez, and from Boulez to Stockhausen to Ferneyhoughhimself. But althoughthe structureis quite clearly a linear one, the fact that each of the three strandsmay as well comprise chords as single notes introduces a harmonic element that both colours and tends to threatenthe independenceof each voice

formers to reassess interpretative priorities, to accept new chal7b 1G Jl t wf-t-} lenges, and above all to break free .t-y ?, . ' from the sticky web of cloying ~ legato which received tradition has tended uniformly, if unwit7 tingly, to impose. In any case, with attitudes to interpretation even now beginning to focus less on the performer,more on the composer and the score, the goal of a cleaner, more perceptive, and above all more articulateapproach to all music is perhapsat last within reach.

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Ex.1, 2b, 4a and 4b are ? Universal Edition, Vienna and reproducedby kindpermission of UniversalEdition, London. Ex.2b is ? Edition Wilhelm Hansen and reproduced by kind permission of Chester Music, London. Ex.3 is ? Heugel et Cie and reproducedby kindpermission of UMP. Ex.5 is ? Peters Edition,Londonand reproducedby kindpermission.

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