Towards a Practice of Musical Performance Creativity

Abstract

Western classical music has changed less, since Adorno's time, than most of white western culture's artistic practices.Perhaps that is why, for most westerners, classical music has fallen entirely off the cultural map.Symptomatically, it is now rare to encounter a critic of theatre or the visual or media arts who knows or cares much about it.It has lost the ability it once had to speak of the current concerns of the cultural commentariat for whom it used to be -certainly in Adorno's Frankfurt and Vienna -a matter of regular, informed debate (Jäger 2004).This may be partly a problem of composition, which for the first half of the past century discouraged many amateurs of classical music.But composition has become more user-friendly over the last half century and yet there is little sign of classical music regaining its public role.The problem, I think, is with more than composition; it is also a problem of ideology and (they belong together) of performance.Performances are now so similar, save to experts, that no one imagines that a performance could have any function other than to reaffirm the identity of the score, 1 the sanctity of the dead composer, and, as Christopher Small put it, to say for those (predominantly the white, middle-class, educated, elderly) who still attend concerts, 'this is who we are' (Small 1998: 43, 134).Relatively few seem still to think, with Adorno, that 'art' music can and should do more than that.When it came to performance, though, Adorno's position was also quite narrow.I think it is clear, in so far as anything is clear from his incomplete theory of reproduction (Adorno 2001), that emotionally he preferred what Richard Taruskin (1995: 108-111) has called 'vitalist' and Nicholas Cook (2011: 302) has called 'rhetorical' performance, 2 essentially the norm with which he grew up in the first decades of the twentieth century.I have suggested previously that this preference was a factor in his inability to complete the book (Leech-Wilkinson 2012: § 4.4). 3This vitalist or rhetorical style focuses attention on the musical surface, not on whatever you believe is the musical structure.This is not to say that it pays no attention to structure, but its performance of that is much less obvious than ours.Christopher Terepin, for example, has 1 Adorno was making a slightly different though related point, in his critique of Toscanini, that, in its technical perfection and discipline, 'The performance sounds like its own phonograph record' (Adorno 2002a: 301). 2Adorno's preference, repeatedly evident, is encapsulated in his observation (from 1956 or 1957) that 'the nuance determines the entire sense ' (2006: 139).3 Drawing on work from music psychology.From music philosophy see Levinson 1997.'No pre-stabilized harmony between composition and the historically available means of interpretation' (Adorno 2006: 23).

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