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Is there something inherently boring about classical music as it’s performed nowadays? Do musicians need to break the stranglehold of the written note and embrace improvisation and spontaneity, if they want to retain their audience? The answer to both questions, according to a paper recently published by researchers at Imperial College and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, seems to be “yes”.
I say “seems to be”, because once you delve into the topic and actually read the research, things aren’t quite as simple as any “classical performance is boring” nostrums might suggest. Admittedly, that statement does have a certain plausibility. Anyone who’s attended a jazz gig or a performance of North Indian classical music will know just how thrilling it is to see musicians simply flying by the seat of their pants, with no music in from of them. Compared to that, the spectacle of an orchestra or a string quartet, where all the players simply follow the written note with obedient docility, does seem a bit dull.
But to repeat, “seems” doesn’t mean “is”. Lurking under the regimented precision of classical music is a considerable freedom. Admittedly that freedom has been eroded, since the early days of the tradition when the ability to improvise was a sine qua non of being a professional. In the opera house, singers were expected to embellish their arias with twirls and twiddles, the more virtuoso and extravagant the better. Search the lives of the great composers before the Romantic era and you find numerous stories of their improvising powers. Beethoven was known as a brilliant improviser first, a virtuoso pianist second, and a composer third.
Since those days, performer freedoms have been curtailed as the composer exerted ever-greater control through the written score. In a piece by Mahler or Berg nothing is left to chance; every nuance, every hesitation or sudden surge is specified (as well as every note). This has its downsides. I’ve often been in the company of classical musicians who look wistfully at the spectacle of jazz musicians joyfully strutting their stuff and regret how completely their training has tied them to the written note.
It’s certainly true that classical music has lost something from the withering-away of improvisation, but there are encouraging signs that it’s making a comeback. This is a good thing, but it would be deeply misguided to use improvisation as a stick to beat notation.
One of the faults of the research project is that it makes a simplistic distinction between following the score faithfully, which is held to be bad and mechanical, and being free-and-easy with the score, which is held to be excitingly creative. This is wrong-headed. The great pianist Alfred Brendel insists that trying to be faithful to the score is a genuinely creative act, because the marks on the page can never tell you everything. How fast is allegro? Does this note belong to this phrase or that one? Which line in this complex texture is the important one, and how should it be emphasised (if at all)? The score poses these questions but it doesn’t provide the answers. It’s the performer that provides them in performance, and it’s the answers that determine whether the performance is revelatory or routine, exciting or dull.
This is why the idea being bandied about in music education circles that notation is elitist and middle class, and should be banished in favour of creativity and improvisation, is so utterly misguided. Notation and improvisation are not sworn enemies, they are just end points: a continuum that runs between pre-planning and composition at one end, and total spontaneity at the other. Composition, after all, is born out of improvisation, which is then “captured’ by being written down. The truest performance style, the one that best revealed the composer’s intentions, would be the one that recovers that spontaneity. It would sound improvised.
And guess what? That’s precisely what the research paper from the Guildhall School and Imperial College demonstrates. Performers were asked to play the same piece of Schubert twice, once in a boringly literal way, following the score exactly, the second time in a deliberately free-and-easy way, not paying too much attention to the notes. It turned out that in many ways the “free” performance was actually more faithful to Schubert’s score, because it grasped the music’s fundamental trajectory without fretting about details.
So by all means let’s encourage performers to be more free, in the way they approach the vast treasury of written music that we call “classical music”. But let’s not teach our children that notation is inherently wicked and ought to be banished. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Classical music has long been jazzier than you might think