How do you identify spontaneity in a performance?

[imperfection]

Many aficionados prefer live recordings of a work because they have that priceless "spontaneity" which studio recordings simply don't have (at least those that were done in multiple sessions instead of a single take). I have always wondered, what is spontaneity? What makes it so special that some enthusiasts choose it over a safer, better-edited studio version?...and most importantly of all, how can you tell that there is spontaneity in a performance?

Now, to my understanding, spontaneity can be the part of a performance where things happen on the spur of the moment - like a pianist's decision to play through an already virtuosic piece even faster, to push the mood of an ecstatic audience to total frenzy, as a great way to end a recital. Or, it can also be the part of a performance where things that just aren't intended by the artists happen by accident, like a pianist's slip of finger or a violinist's breaking of strings. But besides the two obvious examples above, how can you identify spontaneity? Isn't it difficult to tell whether an artist is playing what he or she had in his/her mind, the way they had practiced it countless times over before a performance, or what just came out of his or her mind at that very moment on the stage?

Please enlighten me  

[Dana]

      As someone who's been performing for more than 15 years, I can tell you that spontaneity has as much to do with the audience as it does with the performer. You can go over something in a practice room thousands of times, but it all means nothing if your audience isn't excited. I truly believe that my audiences contribute just as much to my performances as I do - if they're not willing to show as much interest and commitment to the music and my performance as I am, why on Earth would I bother playing for them? It would be like trying to have a conversation with someone who's reading a book while you're talking.
      At the end of this academic year, my college orchestra put on Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Our director was all excited about it - he's the most brilliant scholar of the Mahler cannon I've ever known - and he sent out an e-mail to the staff of the entire school requesting their collective presence, so that they could appreciate the effort that we were putting out. His e-mail (in conjunction with a big university wide publicity campaign) worked - our audience was at least twice as big as it had been all year long. You could hear the excited buzz out of the audience while they were taking their seats. When an audience is that excited, you feel obligated to deliver, and both sides did. We played the hell out of that symphony, and the audience responded in kind - even contributing some spontaneous applause at the end of the development of the first movement. You won't get that kind of reaction out of a set of microphones!

      Point being, there's a relationship between an audience and a performer/ensemble that is completely inimitable. In a lot of ways, the invention of the musical record was the worst thing that could have happened to music, for all of the virtues it has.

[secondwind]

When I attend chamber music concerts, I like the watch the interaction between members of the ensemble.  Some groups have very visible nonverbal communication throughout the performance, and it is possible to "see" spontaneity--a quick look of surprise on the cellist's face, a wicked gleam in the eye of the first violinist, a big grin on the face of violist. . . and sometimes a moment of eye contact between two members that seems to say "okay, top THIS."  I don't have any idea how much of this I could "hear" on a recording--that's probably one of the reasons I like live performances! I like to see the process of the interaction between the players in real time, and I like to be part of the process of the interaction of the ensemble and the audience. 

[imperfection]

Thanks for both of your input. I still think spontaneity is easier to spot in live performances since as secondwind noted, you sometimes see it. But in live recordings, how can people tell there is spontaneity in it, and that there is so much of it that makes itself a better contender than a studio version of the same work?

[Franco]

In a lot of ways, the invention of the musical record was the worst thing that could have happened to music, for all of the virtues it has.

I've had exactly this thought before; but quickly gathered my wits and bought another set of Beethoven Piano sonatas.

[mikkeljs]

I honestly don´t find the spontanity of any interrest. We could also discuss how to define the random, as one who write random notes, produces something very personally and special, that after a split second would have its own strict rules. I haven´t studied philosofy, but if Im not wrong, randomness covers everything, like natural or even beautyful, and one can expand the meaning of spontanity by changing attitude.  Just like the perception of random music.

As a composer and pianist I only care about what is written in the score, but when that is said, I should mention, that I always project any kind of language like notation of music, since language is primitive and must always be read in a primitive and "senceful" way. From that we can conclude, that even the strictest mathematical instructions in music only work through a spontanous intuition, because a given information or object will not longer be the same at two different points of time. When I play a piece, that I have studied perfectly, in front of an audience, I let my mind experience the music as if I didn´t know the piece already, with the result, that I play extremely exact the same every time, since the difference is unhearable. Only the difference of the piano can change something entirely. But I wouldn´t call it spontanity, since that word can be interpreted wrong. In my opinion a score should always be followed strictly no matter what it will cost and a concert shouldn´t be influenced by the audience or errors, since errors shouldn´t appear and audiences shouldn´t be welcome at the concert, if the composer didn´t wanted them to come.

If you record a concert that has, what one considered as spontanity, it would be reflected clearly in the recording, I would say.  

[mikkeljs]

    In a lot of ways, the invention of the musical record was the worst thing that could have happened to music, for all of the virtues it has.

So you don´t like electronic music? Well, I understand if you don´t.   But the music that Im fascinated with and works with, is developed in such a way, that it is almost taken out of time, with the limitation of human as main reason for this, and that the way human are limited can be argued to be all about time. With the time you can do anything you want. If we had time enought we could build anything, work out greater work precision, become better pianists and learn whatever piece we wanted to a perfect level. It also takes time to meditate!
As a composer you can improvise...or you can sit down with a paper and a cup of coffee and take a huge mind travel and write down the most complex and strangest things. What does it matter if you used a computer instead of your paper and pen?
Taking the music out of time also means, that the nature of classical music is like wormholes in time, from the composer explore it, to the first performance, second performance etc. After 50 years people starts to analyse the piece and make often better performances after a dusin of impulses. The main idea stays almost as a constant. So is it repetition? No it´s music beyond time. Especially electronic music, which is not flexible in the musical expression, and not an attempt to do it even more perfect than any performances before. Anyway, I think it is a funny and very wierd experience to go to an electronic concert. People are sitting and starring at nothing but a loudspeaker that produces abstract constallations of sound waves. But I have often thought, that it was the greatest invention of human, and I have planned to write a 4th piano concerto entirely for electronics (not even with samples of a piano).

[jochanaan]

...But I wouldn´t call it spontanity, since that word can be interpreted wrong. In my opinion a score should always be followed strictly no matter what it will cost and a concert shouldn´t be influenced by the audience or errors, since errors shouldn´t appear and audiences shouldn´t be welcome at the concert, if the composer didn´t wanted them to come...

The more I perform, the more I realize that the score is only a rough guide, even, say, Mahler's extremely detailed scores.  There are any number of nuances that cannot be written in the score but in practice are absolutely essential.  For example, when you see sf, is it only one level louder than the prevailing dynamic, or two, or five?  Are the staccato notes clipped as short as possible, or only slightly detached?  Is the ff a sonorous or brilliant one?  And even if you could work these things and many others out in rehearsal, any number of things may happen to change them in concert, or even when recording in a studio.  Mahler himself said, "What is best in the music is not written in the notes."

What I hear in live performances or recordings that's so often missing in studio recordings is a slightly higher contrast; a greater flexibility in tempo; an extra "ring" or depth in tone; maybe a vibrato that, instead of staying at one speed and intensity, waxes and wanes with the dynamics...  In theory, you could do these things in a studio recording, and many performers are able to, but in practice, the "feedback" we performers get from an audience draws out this extra excitement, force, delicacy, warmth, whatever you call it, more than we could do without it.

[mikkeljs]

The more I perform, the more I realize that the score is only a rough guide, even, say, Mahler's extremely detailed scores.  There are any number of nuances that cannot be written in the score but in practice are absolutely essential.  

I absolutely agree. The score will always be primitively done, since all language is primitive and the way to read it should always be an interpretation which takes ones knowledge about the composer into account as well as the circumstances of the performance, the instruments and a random decision of wich musical path to go, if you see more than only one. I see thiese factors as something coming from the score on a later state, as the composer tried at his best to express the music, so that others are able to project the informations rightly together.

The way I think it works can be compared to a section in the newspaper. If you take a random sentence, then read every word literally and makes an arrow from the word for every possible meaning it can have (also in other languages), afterwards you combine all the arrows with eachother and see how many possible surreal things it can mean. Propably around thousand pr sentence, but I havent tried this myself.  
The newspaper still express something clearly enought that all kinds of readers are able to project the text almost identically, and that happens because of selection of possible meanings that express the same, and what we feel we can use. Which makes me wonder, if a savant is able to understand any newspaper articles at all, since they don´t select from informations! The more details, the closer it gets, and you can even use two different expressions, which have a conflict with eachother, so that there only remain one way to project them together, from thousands of possible.

I always write the music in such a way, that any small nessecity of nuances are forced out. It can be tricky at times, but not much. Also when I write mp somewhere and f somewhere else, I expect the musicians to project it alltogether with the text and character of the phrases, not like blocks of decibels taken out of their context. The difference is, that one can project every element in the score seperately and put them together at random, but one can also project every thing together, which is the right one, because all language should be projected.

A theoretical thought about probability of sounds told me, that since there are most irrational numbers in the world compared to rational numbers, music should consist of mostly irrational numbers. This is only a theory [=a complete solution to an incomplete problem]. No human being can write down an irrational number with math. But in my opinion it is possible, to build up a bottom of commonly projected language, which makes you able to ignore that it is a language, and you can build theise simple common symbols or words together and express very complex things. I think this technique is called arithmetic. Just like spontanous communication! I believe that one can observe an irrational number for himself, and then try to describe it untill he feels that he has expressed himself absolutely. Fx, it´s between 2.5 and 2.50000001, it stays somewhere between, so that it´s relation to 2.5 is transcending both 3, 4 twice, 17 and 98. Well, this is an extreme case, but often you develope as an artist the skills of expression, and of cause no one is perfect.

In short, perhabs I see the spontanity as a part of the score, and that the score should be followed strictly.  

[jochanaan]

...all language is primitive...

Hmmm...Do you not realize that many "primitive" languages are considerably more complex than most European languages?  Linguists have said that the older a language is, the more complex it is.  That's why WWII air pilots in the Pacific field used Navajos to talk to each other in their own language; no way were the Japanese going to break that "code"!  Perhaps our "primitive" forefathers were closer to the well of Meaning than we with our mountainous accumulations of facts and theories...

...In short, perhabs I see the spontanity as a part of the score, and that the score should be followed strictly.  

A nicely symmetrical thought, but I'm not sure I agree with it.  What I've found is that spontaneity is precisely what's lost in writing the score, and it has to be re-added to make it music again.

[Dana]

What I've found is that spontaneity is precisely what's lost in writing the score, and it has to be re-added to make it music again.

      I concur - what I said earlier about CDs goes doubly for written music. While the score may lead you to a truth about the music, the score is not in and of itself the truth. When people talk about Mahler being longwinded, for example, they say it's because he uses the same material over and over again, with a new orchestration each time. This misses the point entirely! When Mahler writes a particular line for trombone, it's not just because it's the trombone's turn. Mahler understood not that different instruments produce different sounds (duh), but that these sounds could imitate extramusical sounds, and thereby affect a powerful emotional change. How often do you actually see words like "frightened," or "regal," outside of the scores of Mahler?