The falseness of music

Sometimes my decoagulating mind undoes a bit much. In this case, I look at the main historical art forms – painting, music, poetry, dance, sculpture – and I feel certain that musical art has always been uniquely, preposterously misconstrued. Every artist makes a product that stands on its own. We appreciate a van Gogh or an Edward Hopper, or Rodin’s The Thinker. Each of us has personal feelings about a work; we have different views of its meaning. But it would never occur to us that a second tier of artists or performers, hundreds of thousands of them, should each re-paint The Starry Night, re-sculpt Michelangelo’s David, re-write Arnold’s Dover Beach according to their individual aesthetic, to produce valid interpretations for themselves and for audiences. Imagine if some virtuoso “repoet” performed this rendition of “The Road Not Taken”:

One road forked in the yellowing woods.

Sorry, so sorry I could not walk each path,

I stood long, and gazed down one tine to the end

Where it curved into the undergrowth;

Yet I took the other, just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim:

It was green and new like birth.

Though in fine, nature was nature

With one meaning.

Only the falsest or most saintly listener would tolerate such a bastardization, represented as Frost’s work. What right does the performer have to “interpret,” to give us his understanding of the work or of the artist’s mind? But this is what musicians do every day, have done for centuries, to where our minds necessarily define music as phenomenology, existing largely in each individual’s presentation.

The sole reason this mirage of art has become truth is that until recently, composers did not have the technology, the tools as the other arts had, to create their one product from their unique inspiration, for others to accept or reject. They didn’t have their slab of granite or palette of colors. They could only leave instructions – notes, speed, rhythm, volume, cues to expressiveness, instrumentation – for others to follow, to bring their “selective recreation of reality”* to the ear. I have to wonder if there was some narrow window in early history when the troubadour or balladeer had no ego and simply assumed he was playing a pavane or singing a motet the one way it could be played or sung. And if some early tunesmiths were outraged if a musician took it upon himself to alter or add his two cents to the piece.

We cherish great pianists for their interpretive idiosyncrasies: Glenn Gould with his mesmerizing vitality, luminescent intellectually informed fingers, his singular mezzo staccato note-iness without sentimental drag or flaw. Gould’s J.S. Bach bounces like a joyous superball (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qory4Jp2y7Y) to the stars and back. We feel Bach has come alive in the right way, or in a new way, or in a controversial way. We appreciate without understanding Gould’s performance of a Brahms concerto, so “broad” in tempo, so dynamically oppositional-defiant that it can make no sense. But the august Leonard Bernstein caused himself to appreciate it, and asked his audience to do the same: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvWPM783TOE.

We respect great performers for their adherence to composer’s intent (as they perceive it!). Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska’s famous retort to Pablo Casals: “You play Bach your way, and I’ll play him his way,” her finger pointed upward to heaven. Romantic period debates on the “insistence on absolute fidelity to the printed note”** versus individual interpretation; the “authenticity debate.”*** I can’t help but think that music as an art derailed its nature too early, became like the lupins in Monty Python’s Highwayman skit. As the dapper brigand misconceived the time-honored objective of stealing gold and jewels and erroneously demanded colorful flowers of his victims, so the meaning of music mistakenly, stupidly, became the making of it not the being of it. If Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474) and Josquin des Prez (1450-1521), or the creators of Gregorian Chant had had tape recorders, we would now have a conception of music that was parallel universe-different from the historical one. We would all be listening to the one recording of Bach’s Mass in B minor and Chopin’s Barcarolle, produced by those geniuses themselves; buying or hearing in museums facsimiles of the one rare masterpiece. Pianists and flutists and clarinetists and conductors would be rid of their pretensions and off their cushioned butts, happy to be composing and teaching. In the privacy of their rooms they would play the great music, knowing they were just copiers, dabblers.

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* Ayn Rand’s definition of art – https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/what-is-objectivism/.

** Wikipedia article on Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Rubinstein.

*** https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/arts/music/07modern.html – New York Times article: “Composer’s Intent? Get Over It”.