The Changing Composer-Performer Relationship: A Monologue and a Dialogue

Abstract

Progress in the arts: a series of gifted mistakes perhaps. We owe our greatest musical achievements to an unmusical idea: the division of what is an indivisible whole, music, into two separate processes: composition (the making of the music) and performance (the making of music), a division as nonsensical as the division of form and content. The history of music is a series of violations, untenable positions, each opening doors, as it were: the well-tempered scale, Wagner's music drama, Stravinsky's neoclassicism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, to name but a few. (My method does not quite work . . . that makes it interesting, Arnold Schoenberg to Gustave Arlt, U.C. L.A.). The methodical division of labor (I write it, you play it) served us well, until composer and performer became like two halves of a worm separated by a knife, each proceeding obliviously on its course.

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