... And Each Harmonical Has a Point of Its Own...

Abstract

I am most intrigued by the conception of as translation. Transcription was Busoni's word, but I prefer Walter Benjamin's and its duties, especially those that can be applied to the interpretation of latter-day music. For Benjamin, a work of art is not essentially a repository of information, and does not communicate by statement. For him, a translation of a work which attains primarily to a banausic transmission of information communicates something inessential, the essential substance of a work residing in the inexplicable and the poetic-areas a translator can reproduce if he is also a poet.1 One aspect of musical as translation is of course different from its literary analogue. We do not translate within one medium (written language), but from one mode (notation) to another (sound). And the only evidence of our work is the temporal performance, not essentially a reflective experience, but a vital process of interaction, or correspondence, between these two functionally distinct modes. This traversal of modes by contemporary performers is achieved before traditional frameworks of stylistic perspective can be established. The freshness this immediacy lends our performances is tempered by Benjamin's observation that original, seemingly fixed, meanings undergo processes of transformation; that, by extension, the gestures represented through the mode of notation themselves mature. Legitimate implications of this assertion on the future history of performance practice are labyrinthine. For some composers musical language as a subject itself seems to