Identity of a Musical Work

[Baron Scarpia]

You say that the score can safely be ignored or contradicted at the whims of a given interpreter, so what reason is there to prefer an urtext?

The obvious reason is that you should be aware that you are deviating from the urtext. How do you know you like your way of doing it better than the specified way if you don't know the specified way?

[Mahlerian]

I think music is a sequence of sound which is perceived as beautiful or meaningful, however it is produced. Beethoven had music unfolding in his head, he had the technical skill to notate it so that when the notations were followed others could hear what Beethoven imagined. He produced a prescription for concrete music to match the music in his imagination. If there is a composer who can produce musical notations entirely through theoretical considerations, without "hearing it in his or her head" then I would say music is produced when (and if) it is performed and perceived as music.

So, let's say an algorithm is programmed on a computer in the year 2018 that produces a score.  The person who programmed the algorithm could not have imagined the results in any meaningful detail, and she doesn't look at the score at all.  It gets filed away for three centuries.

In that time, the program for the algorithm is completely lost and can no longer be reconstructed, but the score remains.  It is discovered in a filing cabinet in the basement of a university somewhere and a performance is organized by a top-flight string quartet.  Everyone present agrees that it wasn't really that good, but no one disputes that it is music.

Your model seems to imply that in this situation, the computer produced something which did not exist as a piece of music until hundreds of years after it ceased to be.  In what sense can you say that the computer produced a piece of music?

[Mahlerian]

The obvious reason is that you should be aware that you are deviating from the urtext. How do you know you like your way of doing it better than the specified way if you don't know the specified way?

Why should that matter, though?  According to Roasted Swan, the specified way is irrelevant to both the identity of the work and to the quality of the interpretation.

[Baron Scarpia]

Your model seems to imply that in this situation, the computer produced something which did not exist as a piece of music until hundreds of years after it ceased to be.  In what sense can you say that the computer produced a piece of music?

I don't see any paradox. The computer produced a prescription for producing music, and when it prescription was played, the music was heard.

Someone made a land mine and put it in the ground. 100 years later someone steps on that mine and gets blown up. Did the person who laid the land mine kill someone. Yes. Is this a paradox worth pondering? I would say no.

[Baron Scarpia]

Why should that matter, though?  According to Roasted Swan, the specified way is irrelevant to both the identity of the work and to the quality of the interpretation.

I don't think it matters as a matter of principal, but it matters practically. The person who wrote the music wasn't an idiot, if it is worth the effort to perform the music, it is worth the effort to think about what the composer was expecting it to sound like.

[Mahlerian]

I don't see any paradox. The computer produced a prescription for producing music, and when it prescription was played, the music was heard.

But it could not have been music until after the computer ceased to exist, in your view, so you cannot say that the computer produced music.

Personally, I disagree.  I think that the existence of a score means the existence of some music, even though they cannot be considered identical to each other.  To me, the idea that a composer produces instructions rather than music is nonsensical.

Someone made a land mine and put it in the ground. 100 years later someone steps on that mine and gets blown up. Did the person who laid the land mine kill someone. Yes. Is this a paradox worth pondering? I would say no.

Your view seems to imply that what was in the ground wasn't a mine until it exploded, but merely a latent possibility for a mine.

[Baron Scarpia]

But it could not have been music until after the computer ceased to exist, in your view, so you cannot say that the computer produced music.

I would not say the computer produced music, the computer produced a score which might or might not produce music when performed.

Your view seems to imply that what was in the ground wasn't a mine until it exploded, but merely a latent possibility for a mine.

The score is a mine, the music is an explosion. Not all mines explode, some are duds, and some are never stepped on.

[Mahlerian]

I would not say the computer produced music, the computer produced a score which might or might not produce music when performed.

How does a score produce music?  How is it that the same piece of music can retain its identity across thousands or tens of thousands of different interpretations, if it is not implied by the score?

The score is a mine, the music is an explosion. Not all mines explode, some are duds, and some are never stepped on.

I think that the mine is the music, and the explosion is a performance.  Not every piece of music is performed.  Some are never heard at all by anyone.

[Baron Scarpia]

I think that the mine is the music, and the explosion is a performance.  Not every piece of music is performed.  Some are never heard at all by anyone.

There we differ. I think of the term "music" as the unfolding of the piece in time. There are musical scores that are never performed, but not music. Well, maybe there is music that unfolded in the composers mind but never got performed.

This is degenerating into semantics.

[Mahlerian]

There we differ. I think of the term "music" as the unfolding of the piece in time. There are musical scores that are never performed, but not music. Well, maybe there is music that unfolded in the composers mind but never got performed.

The idea that you can have a piece of music that doesn't exist as music until many years after it was created still strikes me as absurd.

I can't make sense of any conception of music that would agree with that view, because as far as I can understand, a piece of music consists in relationships, both temporal and in terms of frequency/pitch/timbre.  Which relationships are part of the piece's identity and which are not depends on the individual work.  Obviously, those relationships can be completely independent of any given performance, though, and exist prior to and after a performance.

This is degenerating into semantics.

Discussions about definitions and meaning usually do...

[Baron Scarpia]

The idea that you can have a piece of music that doesn't exist as music until many years after it was created still strikes me as absurd.

Your use of language creates the impression of a contradiction where I find none. The composer creates music in his or her imagination, he or she makes a score, a performer creates music in observance of the score which reproduces what was imagined (hopefully). If you discover a score in some library archive and perform it for the first time, music which presumably existed in the composers imagination is re-created.

[Mahlerian]

Your use of language creates the impression of a contradiction where I find none.

My use of language reflects, to the best of my ability, my conception of the relationship between score and work.  The contradiction is the one that I see in your conception of music.  You do not see any contradiction, and I understand that.

The composer creates music in his or her imagination, he or she makes a score, a performer creates music in observance of the score which reproduces what was imagined (hopefully). If you discover a score in some library archive and perform it for the first time, music which presumably existed in the composers imagination is re-created.

The problem I have with this is the equivocation between music in the first clause and subsequent uses.  I don't see music (the piece created by the composer) and music (the realization of a piece by a performer) as being identical in kind.  A piece of music as created is not something that exists fully in a single performance, but is rather instantiated across any and every possible performance.

[Mirror Image]

Who cares really? The performer is left in good faith to deliver what is, hopefully, a faithful reproduction of the score at hand. There are many times where liberties are taken, but everyone interprets what is written differently. This isn't a to end all ideal and the composer, no matter how much bellyaching he/she does, should be eternally grateful that musicians want to perform their music.

[Baron Scarpia]

For me, music is sound, not a score in any form or even the work as it exists in the composer's mind.  So, while I would admit that a musical work exists outside of a performance, the music occurs when it is performed.

That more or less lines up with my view, although I tend to think of music as an experience rather than as the physical sound, so imagined music and music heard to be closely related, although not identical, obviously.

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

What you mean to say is, I assume, that there are no specific elements that are intrinsic to a given composition.  One may change this or that element without changing its identity.  It's the paradox of the heap, in that some undefined number of changes would have to be made to the text to make it no longer the text.

Extreme changes to one element or another can vastly distort the whole, however.

How faithfully can we say this replicates Beethoven's work, for example?

https://www.youtube.com/v/hoINrtIWpTA


In a different sense, how about this?

https://www.youtube.com/v/6z4KK7RWjmk

Both of these sound almost shockingly bad, but of course I can recognise the source text. The source text is recognisable if we personally recognise it. The identity of the composition is the recognition we have of it. That doesn't say whether the interpretation is convincing or not and usually the ones that are more convincing use the score/text (or perhaps a combination of different texts) to create a well informed interpretation. Cobra's performance is informed, but it's informed by a complete misunderstanding of tempo and how we hear it (being brought up in a culture where recordings and performances of Beethoven symphonies are abundant) ....and to my ears he doesn't even justify it in the performance of the work no matter how much he tries to justify it in his writings.

Whether something is 'faithful' to Beethoven's score is not really the argument I am interested in, as Beethoven's score is merely a text that performers can get a lot of information out of with presupposed knowledge or with other texts to aid interpretation. The abundance of texts that are actually out there, and the already existing associations of Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies can allow for interesting performances that are largely but faithful to other sources or even completely new performance contexts altogether. The one thing that unifies them is that they each reference some aspect of the same source—the score—no matter how wildly different the outcomes might be.

Beethoven's 5th pops up in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in a context which wildly differs from the score, however it is very interesting that those familiar with Beethoven's 5th certainly recognise the piece when Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect are about to be thrown off a Vogon constructor ship into the vacuum of space...........

[Mahlerian]

Both of these sound almost shockingly bad, but of course I can recognise the source text.

Indeed.  The difference is, I think, that the latter one is bad not because of any intent contrary to the work so much as sheer incompetence of execution (and yet on YouTube it's the single most popular version...).

Whether something is 'faithful' to Beethoven's score is not really the argument I am interested in, as Beethoven's score is merely a text that performers can get a lot of information out of with presupposed knowledge or with other texts to aid interpretation. The abundance of texts that are actually out there, and the already existing associations of Beethoven's 5th and 9th symphonies can allow for interesting performances that are largely but faithful to other sources or even completely new performance contexts altogether. The one thing that unifies them is that they each reference some aspect of the same source—the score—no matter how wildly different the outcomes might be.

My question was about how faithful these were to the work, rather than the score.  The score does not encompass everything of the work, as you say, and neither does any one interpretation.

It is certainly true that perceptions of a given work change over time with associations and contexts.

[aukhawk]

Who cares really? The performer is left in good faith to deliver what is, hopefully, a faithful reproduction of the score at hand.

I think (without quoting examples) that the balance of recent evidence is that composers like hearing what others make of their music.

So, let's say an algorithm is programmed on a computer in the year 2018 that produces a score.

This made me think of bell-ringing - change-ringing that is, England-style.  You have (typically) 8 bells, all tuned differently.  The biggest bell, being the most sonorous, automatically provides the Tonic, the rest could in theory be tuned any old how.  They are rung in sequence according to an algorithm ('method' - and there are several to choose from, dating from about 1650) such that every possible tone row is played once - which for 8 bells would apparently take 22 hours!  Some tone rows are more euphonic than others but it helps that they co-exist with a rich Tonic-led drone.

Anyone who lives near a bell-tower will cry "this is not music" but, by any reasonable definition I'd say it is.  (I am perhaps fortunate to live within earshot of a bell-tower, but not too close!)

[Monsieur Croche]

....what reason is there to prefer an urtext?

I realize the following is not addressing the context to which you were responding, but....

The best reason for an urtext edition is there are no other directives by any other editors; any and everything therein is from the composer and no one else. 

One can ignore anything or any part of directives of a score (ignoring the composer's directives is at the performer's peril), but there is always a subliminal effect of seeing those other edits that are not the composer's, or if nothing else, they are more clutter to ignore, lol.

[Karl Henning]

I realize the following is not addressing the context to which you were responding, but....

The best reason for an urtext edition is there are no other directives by any other editors; any and everything therein is from the composer and no one else. 

One can ignore anything or any part of directives of a score (ignoring the composer's directives is at the performer's peril), but there is always a subliminal effect of seeing those other edits that are not the composer's, or if nothing else, they are more clutter to ignore, lol.

Why, cheers, y'all!

[Mahlerian]

I realize the following is not addressing the context to which you were responding, but....

The best reason for an urtext edition is there are no other directives by any other editors; any and everything therein is from the composer and no one else. 

One can ignore anything or any part of directives of a score (ignoring the composer's directives is at the performer's peril), but there is always a subliminal effect of seeing those other edits that are not the composer's, or if nothing else, they are more clutter to ignore, lol.

I downloaded a version of the Well-Tempered Clavier to learn to stumble through some of the pieces, and it's a 19th century edition loaded with dynamics (even swells) and fingerings, etc.  I have to admit that even seeing it there on the page is enough to affect the way I play.