Classical Music Practice, Contemporary Music, and the Work Concept
The past weeks I have been digesting the texts of Lydia Goehr and others regarding the ‘work concept’ - its origins and affect on classical music performance and practice. In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Goehr explains through ontological and philosophical approaches the development of Werktreue in classical music around 1800. Though most scholars conceptualize Werktreue as both the canonization of dead composers and the relationship between performing artist and notated score, I think it can be thought of as more than the relationship between performer and notation. Defining classical music in terms of ‘works’ is something I always considered inherent, but the reality is that the work-concept did not exist in classical music thinking before the nineteenth century. Its adoption and application to musics pre-1800, as well as to modern day composition, has persisted regardless of whether the fundamental aesthetics of the concept still apply.
WERKTREUE
Prior to 1800, classical music centered around the function of performance. Compositions were considered and understood based on their extra-musical function or purpose framed around performance. Most compositions were not intended to last more than a couple performance (Goehr 2007: 186). And musical scores were, for the most part, incomplete, due to both time (composers were composing many pieces, quickly) and the inclusion of improvisation, basso realization, etc., in the performance practice. Goehr’s (and others’) argument is that around 1800, this system of thinking changed. The composer became more independent and compositions became central to the conceptualization and theorizing about classical music, over performances. Compositions became defined by their ‘musical ideals’, rather than by their function or performance practices like realized bass and improvisation (Goehr 2007: 122). Aesthetically, in order to understand classical musical as a fine art, rather than a popular or practical one, it was necessary (according to Goehr and others) to redefine classical music in terms of the work instead of performance. The humanist origins were minimized, the compositions and composers were placed central to the art form over the act of performance, and the compositions, rather than performers or performances, were to be preserved a la a piece of fine art.
NOTATION
Werktreue refers to both the centrality of the ‘work’ in understanding classical must post-1800, and to the effect this had on classical music performance and practice- a focus on faithfulness to the composers’ intent via the musical score. Composers were now expected to create original works from scratch, in order to comply with newly established copyright laws. Transcriptions and arrangements were not considered ‘original’ musical works that were publishable. Further, notation changed, whereby in order to be copyrighted and published, the musical score had to be complete (not unfinished) and specific, not only notes and rhythms but instrumentation as well. So not only were composers more artistically independent and scores treated as fixed artistic entities, but improvisatory performative aspects that were central to music in the classical period and earlier were abandoned. The composer was positioned as more central to the generation of classical music than the performer, who was expected to adhere closer and closer to the written score.
As a musician, Werktreue has shaped much of my development, education, and performance, until my focus began to shift to contemporary music in my doctoral project. As the notated score changed from a ‘medium’ for use to a correct method of performance, so changed the role of the musician and judgment of their role in the creative music-making process. While I think that there has been a return, or refocus, on the performer’s role as “translator” of the score in current thinking, especially with regards to contemporary music, the centrality of notation remains. Ian Pace, for example, has argued that the score can tells the performer more what not to do, rather than prescribing exactly what to do, yielding more freedom for the performer and more possibilities of interpretation/translation. Mieko Kanno has written about ‘descriptive’ and ‘prescriptive’ notation. I myself gave a recital lecture last year about the role of ‘accuracy’ (i.e., accuracy in relation to the notation) wholly unaware that I was enacting and inflicting the work concept on myself and my performance.
PERFORMANCE AND PRACTICE
Shifting from notation to performance practice, there were two very important conceptual effects that resulted from Werktreue / the work concept - the idea of untouchability and the notion of unplayability. The musical score, which was previously subservient to performance, was now an entity of its own. Musicians were expected to adhere their performances to the notated score. As Goehr wrote, “the demand that one’s works be left alone was rationalized according to the romantic belief that the internal form and content of each such work was inextricably unified, or by the belief that works were specified in toto according to an underlying or transcendent truth” (Goehr 2007: 222). It was the composition that held the artistic soul of the music, not the performer or performance. The removal of the performer, or subservience of performer to score, has stayed central to the performance of classical music until present day.
Similarly, the notion of unplayability, or a work being ‘unplayable’ was never before realized because all compositions were made to perform. The focus on composer and his/her product, the musical score, meant a work could now exist as art independently and without need of a performance. Until present day, this idea has impacted compositional choices made by composers as well as the performance practices of musicians. It has also effected instrumental education and performance, where twentieth- and twenty-first century scores that extend technical limits of playing are valued pedagogically only for these technical aspects. The notion of unplayability continued to separate the composer and the musical score from the performer and performance.
In A Quest for Voice, Goehr distinguishes between the perfect performance of music [of a work] and the perfect musical performance. For her, “the performance conception referred to by the phrase ‘the perfect performance of music’ is most closely bound up with the solemn, sacred, serious and sublime aesthetic of the concert hall and with the Werktreue ideal central to the development of music as a fine art”, whereas the perfect musical performance is removed from these romantic ideals (Goehr 1992: 140). I would even add that the notion of a perfect musical performance could offer a model for including the performer. Fidelity to the score greatly inhibited the desire and demand for interpretation (or translation). The idea of a perfect musical performance acknowledges somehow that Werktreue, in addition to being an impossible ideal, is also an undesired one. The reality is that despite ‘adherence’ to a score, no two performances of a work, even by the same performer, are ever identical. Therefore “perfection”, or aspiration to something “perfect” in performance could/should have more to do with the performer and the sounding art than it does with the written score.
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
The question I was left with finishing the works by Goehr was whether, or to what extent, contemporary music and contemporary music practices today still embody the work-concept and Werktreue. Goehr acknowledges that while some composers have attempted to break from the work-concept tradition (the composers of the Fluxus movement come to mind, as well as many of the American experimentalists in the second half of the twentieth century), contemporary music today is still conceptualized in the work-concept, even if composers themselves might not think that way (Goehr 2007: 268). The ‘conceptual imperialism’ of the work concept has reframed and redefined classical music as a whole, and is so inherent in the thinking of composers, audiences, and musicians that alternatives seem impossible (Goehr 2007: 245). Even the idea of aspiring for timelessness in classical music - works that are meant to last ‘forever’ or ‘withstand the test of time’ is a uniquely romantic/work-concept notion. Just a few weeks ago, in one of my courses, we discussed a contemporary composer who aspired to this aesthetic in his music today. I posited that all composers must aspire to this idea, but really it is only one way of understanding classical music.
In my study of contemporary music programming (and programming in general) amongst large Northern European and American orchestras, it is apparent that not all orchestras, internationally, adhere totally to the work-concept and the canonization of existing repertoire by dead composers. In the United States, the orchestras of Cleveland and Chicago remain the most committed to the work-concept ideology, whereas orchestras elsewhere either include much more contemporary music, or rotate a greater variety of older repertoire. Similarly, the work-concept-generated hierarchy that placed performer inferior to composer (or less visible than composer) has persisted in some places. But in Finland, in my experience, the relationship is more mutual, with performer and composer contributing to the musical product more equally.
For the individual musician, quite many theorists and philosophers maintain that the classical musician is still merely an ‘automaton’ or ‘happy slave’, whose duty it remains to faithfully execute the notated score. Even Goehr writes, “no modern musicians have brought about effective change in the work-based practice…thus, it is not uncommon to hear of a tension existing between what musicians claim they want to do with music and what they actually do…” (Goehr 2007: 261). There is a gap, thus, between what musicians think they do, and what others (composers, audience, historians, etc), assess that they do. Ignoring for a second what others might theorize as breaking from or adhering to a work-concept, on a personal level, the musician’s self-assessed goal of musical performance can very a great deal depending on where they live and what kind of classical (or non-classical Western) music they perform. The hierarchy between orchestra musician, conductor and composer that generated from the work-concept and Werktreue mentality varies depending on country, region, or even orchestra. While I do not deny the ‘imperialism’ of the work-concept, its dominance in classical music, and its widespread effects in performance and pedagogy, the level of its enactment varies greatly depending on the classical music culture of a given place.
SOURCES
Goehr, Lydia. 2007. The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. Revised edition. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0907/2008270938-t.html.
———. 1998. The Quest for Voice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pace, I. (2014). Beyond Werktreue: Ideologies of New Music Performance and Performers. Paper presented at the Lecture, 14-01-2014, Royal College of Music.