The Compleat Academic?
by
Arthur Butterworth
In 1653 was published that most celebrated book on the art of
fishing: Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler”. The quaint antiquarian
spelling has been retained in a very contemporary account indeed
of the art of orchestral conducting: Gunther Schuller’s “The
Compleat Conductor”. Although aware of its then recent publication
in the late 1990s, it is only within the past few weeks that,
belatedly, have I at last acquired a copy and got down to studying
it with the attention it deserves. This was brought about largely
because I had begun to have some self-questioning concerning
the tempi I had adopted when conducting. Listening to
recordings - not commercial CDs - I had made thirty years ago
or more, compared with more recent performances of my own, it
seems that as I have grown older the overall tempi have
shown signs of getting that bit slower. Probably this is evidence
of a natural slowing of the pulse experienced by all of us.
It is well-known, for example, that Klemperer’s last years as
a conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra were highly acclaimed
on account of the insight his performances of the classics demonstrated;
yet these legendary performances were also noted for being on
the slow side compared with his much earlier ones, of - say
- the 1920s and 1930s. An acknowledged fact of modern “rehearse-record”
practice is that the very nature of the process, where a recording
engineer, directing the conductor as it were, from behind, asks
for numerous re-takes of a passage just played in order to achieve
flawless perfection with regard to dynamics, minutely heard
wrong notes, inaccurate ensembles and so on in order to achieve
the perfection which will be - literally - on record for all
time. This is so different from the live and once heard, gone
for ever, performance where minor flaws and even big ones, eventually
are forgotten, leaving perhaps but a pleasant if hazy memory
of an otherwise satisfying performance. Under such modern recording
conditions it seems that there just might be an inclination
to play things more carefully, and, especially on the part of
conductors, maybe to adopt tempi that can be a bit slower
than they would otherwise take in a live concert performance
with all the frisson of the presence of an audience and
the awareness that there can be no stopping for a re-take if
things seems a bit less than perfect. Listening to one or two
recordings - some of which I have conducted myself - and other
conductors’ performances of music (for instance Brahms and other
familiar classics) there is this ever so faint suspicion that
many of us are inclined to be a bit wary and take things rather
carefully.
How then should we perform any kind of music of which we have
the score in front of us? How literally should we take the composer’s
written or printed symbols? Gunther Schuller is exceedingly
critical of almost all the great conductors of the past century
and even those of the nineteenth century. His general thesis
is that virtually none of them ever perform in the way that
the composer has actually indicated. Since there are no recordings
before about 1890 we shall never really know just how performances
were before this time. Those legendary artists - Bach’s organ
playing, Mozart or Liszt at the piano, Mendelssohn or Berlioz
conducting - all we have to go by are observers’ - critics -
of the time and their written accounts of how they found such
performances, but we shall never really know whether
they were too fast, too slow, too loud, too soft, or whether
they truly represented what the composer intended. The metronome
was unknown before Beethoven’s time so that tempo must, by comparison
with today, have been a somewhat hazy affair; lacking the computer-like
precision which we expect from everything.
Do composers - did they ever - expect this kind of nano-technology,
this kind of exactitude in the way their music is actually performed
and thus heard? Is it possible for notation and thus its resulting
performance in sound, to be absolutely and exactly as the composer
ideally seems to demand? Schuller gives the impression that
this is how it ought to be. It leaves little or no room at all
for interpretation; that indefinable quality with which we accept
that every musician who undertakes to bring to life the no more
than dead, lifeless, and utterly silent, written symbols printed
on paper. The very charm and fascination of real, live sounding
music is that we are captivated by each performer’s personal
way of bringing the otherwise dead printed symbols to life in
a way that tries - even if it often appears not to succeed -
in re-creating what the composer appears to have intended.
Much of what Schuller expounds is indeed true: for example the
way that orchestral players, worldwide tend to view conductors,
the nature of common experience in the making of music, but
he tends to adopt an incredibly arrogant, self-opinionated stance
that only he really knows how a composer’s musical symbols ought
to be brought to life, and that virtually all the conductors
of the past - from Bülow to Bernstein, from
Furtwängler to Toscanini, have somehow got things wrong.
He appears to give little credit for the notion of the validity
of different temperaments’ interpretations and that only his
(Schuller’s) unyielding computer-like reading of the score being
truly admissible.
Like this writer - who, (perish the thought!) is two years older
and therefore of just as much, if not even more experience than
Schuller, we have both been experienced professional orchestral
players before becoming composer/conductors. Schuller, however
makes no bones about his claims, for he says in the preface
to his book: “Since I am a composer of some reputation…” Oh
? we tend to think (at least in Britain, but perhaps not so
in the USA) that “self praise is no honour”, this statement
seems unduly arrogant.
While undoubtedly there are some very searching and relevant
points that he makes, the overall tone and manner of this book
is maddeningly irritating. The literary style itself is bogged
down by a constant profusion of un-necessary parentheses, italics,
distracting footnotes which side-track the main argument of
the sentence, and a mannerism reminiscent of two other one-time
well known books on music: Constant Lambert’s “Music Ho!” and
C.S. Terry’s “Bach’s Orchestra” in which the authors constantly
use a foreign language: Lambert’s obsession with quotations
in French (when the point has already been made clearly enough
in English) and Terry’s insistence in quoting long passages
or even single words, in German after he has already - like
Lambert - expressed the notion in plain English.
In almost exactly the same way Schuller quotes from earlier
German writings such as Carl Junker (1782): ‘the politics of
conducting’ (“Von der Politik des Kapellmeisters”). This kind
of academic pedantry goes on time and time again, as if we really
needed to know what the original German expression was. This
seems merely an intellectual showing off and is quite superfluous.
The whole book must have been an irritation to the compositors
who had to set it all in print. There are copious music examples
of how Schuller thinks the phrasing should be. These are interesting,
but seem to be of little or no practical application when it
comes down to actually playing the passages in a live
performance. Orchestral players, and conductors no less, are
more concerned with performing the notes in front of them as
seems most natural and indeed obvious at the very moment rather
than being obsessed by the dry academic theorising of just how
a phrase “ought” to be played. Practical rehearsal and performance
cannot be pedantically bogged down by such theoretical niceties;
there is never time to do this; far better that there should
be a spontaneous and compelling interpretation, even though
this might vary considerably from one occasion to the next,
and certainly between one conductor and another; we do not perform
like computerised robots producing faceless, identical sounds
from one year to the next.
One might expect an illuminating and painstaking account of
how orchestral conductors ought to go about their profession,
but in practice hardly can or even need to. It is more a kind
of dry-as-dust academic’s pedantic view of how music should
be approached. Despite its earnestness; in the end I found this
book utterly tedious and boring.
Arthur Butterworth
Summer 2011
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