Music. What to Do about It

Abstract

Here's a wayward question: Are performers necessary to music? Put it another way: Is the performer-interpreter, the specialist musician, the instrumentalist, merely a contingent component in the art form music? Is it merely a contingent fact that music is a performing art, at least as has been understood for some 1000-plus years? Is it just an accident of technology that for some centuries certain manually skilled specialists were needed to intervene, as it were, between music inventors and their audience? Herewith a rambling preamble just to phrase the relevant questions and to get a feel for the issues. For, what exactly could we mean by entertaining such contingency? No one denies that we enjoy and revere performers. But are they eternal parts of the team? Suppose we argue that the emphasis upon vocal and instrumental training has less to do with anything intrinsically musical than with something extrinsically pragmatic or, worse, decorative. Crudely, musicians are trained as they are in instrumental technique just because we've not yet figured out a more efficient way to avoid the trouble and cost incurred in getting the musical invention to the ear or, worse, just because enough listeners savor the visual spectacle to keep players on the payroll. But once such means are available, instrumental music, familiar as special skilled dexterity, will become as quaintly old-fashioned as boiling water on a wood fire rather than using a microwave, tying shoelaces rather than using velcro, using a hand plane rather than a thickness planer, and so on. Construction offers an analogy with this pragmatism. In the past, no great building was possible without squadrons of highly skilled artisans. No mere architect would presume to possess the intricate manual skills

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