Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.11 : Delusions -- Scores have limited interpretative possibilities
Old recordings and modern experimental performances prove that there are many radically different persuasive readings that can start from the same score. What are the limits? It's too soon to say.
10 Dec 20247min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.12 : Delusions -- The composer knows best
Living composers are usually keen to hear performers make new sense of their scores. Only dead composers seem to need to be copied slavishly for ever. Why is that?
10 Dec 20248min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.13 : Delusions -- Composers’ intentions are known
Not only do we not know composers’ intentions in sound before the late nineteenth century, we cannot.
10 Dec 20248min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.14 : Delusions -- The performer should be inaudible
No one hears the performance style of their own era: thus, to perform normatively is to be unnoticeable, in a sense inaudible. This is supposed to be a good thing for a musician to be...
10 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.15 : Delusions -- Composers are alive and listening
Except for those still alive, the composer is dead and usually has been for a very long time. They’re not likely to be listening to us, or minding if we do things differently.
10 Dec 20243min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.16 : Delusions -- Composers are gods
The composer is not a god, but a musician on a par with the performer; both are creative, though only the performer is essential.
10 Dec 20248min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.17 : Delusions -- 'Works'
Can music exist? Or can it only happen? Is speaking of musical 'works' a category error? Who benefits? Only those who want something (some thing) to sell.
10 Dec 202413min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 6.18 : Delusions -- So music is…. What is it?
Rather than a work, music is one’s experience of a performance: each individual experience in itself, each one unique.
10 Dec 20242min
