The Performer's Point of View

Abstract

A STRIKING phenomenon in our time is the wealth of emerging experimental techniques which, in the arts particularly, have tended to foster widespread misunderstanding of the contemporary idiom. This confusion becomes even more apparent when one deals with the communication, always tenuous at best, between composer and performer. New methods of notation have had to be devised by composers in order to define new modes of thought and traditional notation has in some cases had to be amplified by other, often very unusual, symbols, which themselves require further verbal explanation. The search for definitive notations has become a major preoccupation of nearly every significant contemporary composer, since it now may happen that each of his works will possess its own morphology. Little wonder, then, that when first faced with a new score of great apparent ambiguity the performer's reactions to the music may be seriously inhibited, and he may be discouraged from playing it at all. Although he no longer thinks of interpreting a work in the willful manner of an older style, he must still convey with some facility of technique and a degree of personal conviction an identification with the work at hand, based, first of all, on a faithful adherence to the directives, as he understands them, of the composer. I believe that it was Busoni who, in his Entwurf einer neuen Asthetik der Tonkunst (1907), pointed out that the act of notating music is actually one of transcription: that the performer's interpretation of this notation is yet one step further removed from the source of original inspiration, and that this compounds the difficulty of transliterating a system of symbols transcribed from the mind of the composer to that of the performer who, in turn, has to transmute what he sees into action and then into sound. In addition, it is only as a result of measuring the meanings of these symbols in any given period against their previous meanings that the performer arrives at a comprehensible and convincing performance. The conveyance of the composer's intentions by means of his notational system, according to what we know of his music in general-his choice of vocabulary, structural syntax, instrumental treatment, expressive nuances, etc.-produces what we call his sense of style. In past epochs this style was usually