Re: composers playing their own concertos

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

Juozas asked:

>I thought the composer's own interpretation (provided he is competent
>enough with an instrument!) is always perfect, even if he changes it
>drastically in every performance. He is the only one who knows exactly
>how the music should sound at that particular moment. Can anyone else
>know it better?


Emphatically, yes, a performer can know the music better than the
composer!  *Any* excellent performer knows exactly how the music should
sound at any particular moment, to make an appropriate effect for the
occasion, whether that performer is the composer or not.  That's the art
of performance.  The composer has no monopoly on this.  The composer's
interpretation is not "perfect."  The performer has the difficult task of
bringing the music to life, and of considering many things the composer
may not have thought of or cared about.

I've heard some of my own compositions played or sung by other people, and
almost always they bring out things that delight me, that I hadn't noticed
in the music myself.  It's wonderful to hear other people's ideas reacting
to the work.  The composer doesn't know "the" way to perform something any
more than any other equally competent performer does.  Composers have
habits and "blind spots" like anybody else.

Read my essay at
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/performance-preparation.htm

The composer may have some headstart on understanding the music, sure.
Obviously.  But if the work of art is good, it has more things in it than
even the composer himself/herself understands or realizes!  There is
always more to learn.

Just yesterday I heard my wife singing (to herself) one of my compositions
from 1985...she half-learned it with "wrong notes" and other changes,
never really sat down and memorized it from the page, was just going on
her impression of something she'd heard sometime.  So what?  She was
humming it for her own enjoyment, and I'd be a jerk if I had piped up and
"corrected" her.  I *liked* the things she added to it.  And I liked the
fact that she was having a good time with something I had made.


I like a phrase from Peter Schickele's "biography" of PDQ Bach: "the
composer's intentions, if he had any, ...."


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot