Some time ago I came across an old music textbook from my school days and leafed through it. By way of introduction to the explanation of score notation, it said, in essence: “Since the beginning of human culture, the highest aim of musicians has been to make their pieces repeatable and so to preserve them for posterity. In simple folk music this is achieved by learning by heart; European classical music, as the highest stage of culture, has developed a precise system of notes and signs in order to make complex compositions in many parts repeatable, and thereby to rescue them from transience.” Fittingly, the book was called “Klang und Zeichen” (Sound and Sign).
Rarely have I seen the whole ignorance towards forms of music built on improvisation, the intensity of the groove and individual sound summed up so briefly and so clearly as in this short passage. Time and again, in conversations with students, I have found that in the 25 years since my own schooldays this attitude has hardly changed at all. It is precisely the interested young people, those with a discerning and unusual taste in music or who make music creatively themselves in their own bands, who have to experience official musical aesthetics declaring their music worthless and simply ignoring the principles of form on which it rests. I have had the same experience in my disputes with GEMA (the German performing-rights society), in many discussions about music and in reading newspaper articles. A real engagement with this way of looking at music must therefore start from some fundamental questions: How do compositions come about, and what is their significance? Is it possible to repeat a piece of music at all?
Music arouses emotions and draws us into an intense physical and mental experience. Many people who know music only from the listener’s point of view therefore believe that the composer must have felt these emotions himself while composing. When composing a sad piece, the composer was sad; when composing a cheerful one, cheerful and relaxed; and so on.
This view, however, completely misses the reality of the creative process. Above all, composers need a focused working atmosphere, just as with any other intellectual activity. The scores of great composers clearly reflect this working atmosphere. They may be clearly laid out and structured, or they may bear the traces of countless revisions. But nowhere do they bear the marks of the emotional state the piece expresses. The whole process of composing a score is too complex for that, and too closely bound up with precise theoretical and practical craft. The concentration needed to write scores in many parts, which with polyphonic part-writing in particular can at times resemble solving an intricate puzzle, simply does not allow a purely emotional approach.
Composing is about inventing musical material, structuring it and giving it shape. The emotional quality of the expression depends on various musical parameters such as tempo, rhythm, harmony and melodic line. Emotional expression is not the basis of the creative process but its result. Composers of earlier ages knew this too and used particular means of expression deliberately. Baroque music had the so-called “doctrine of the affections” (Affektenlehre), a finely worked-out system explaining which stylistic devices evoke which feelings (“affects”).
But what about the birth of the first basic idea of a piece, its theme? Is there not at least here a direct link between a feeling and its musical realisation? Romantic thinking about music has the theory of the so-called “inspiration” (Einfall). The first musical idea is supposed to follow a spontaneous feeling; more than that, it is supposed to be a gift from higher powers. But here, too, reality looks different. Of course there are spontaneous musical thoughts, sometimes tied to a feeling of the moment. Essentially this is an improvisational process that takes shape in the imagination or on an instrument. These improvised melodic shapes, however, spring from the store of musical experience already gathered, and repeat, in altered form, music the composer already knows. Every composer knows the experience of arriving at a musical idea out of a spontaneous feeling, only to discover that this idea, this “inspiration”, actually comes from a piece of music that already exists.
A good theme comes about through a long process of work and condensation, in which the first idea is turned this way and that a hundred times, expanded and varied. Only in this process does the composer’s artistic identity come into play. He has to decide which of these countless variations comes closest to his physical and melodic sense and to what he personally wants to express. And of course he has to be able to judge whether the theme can make possible and sustain the further development of the piece. This holds regardless of whether that further development takes place through improvisation, as in jazz, or through composition, as in classical music.
We find this precedence of shaping, of structuring the material, over the spontaneous first idea even in the great works of the Romantic era, which ought, after all, to be most committed to the theory of “higher inspiration”. The drama, the tension and the emotional power of the great works of Brahms, Mahler or Bruckner arise from the way the material is shaped and developed, and not so much from the themes themselves, which are very often modelled on the melodies of folk songs.
But if composing is not about putting spontaneous feelings into notes; if shaping, structure and, not least, mastery of a complicated compositional craft play such a large part; where, then, does the emotion in a performance of composed music come from? The answer is really quite simple and obvious: from the musicians performing it. With his notated rhythms, melodies and sounds, the composer offers a framework, a basic structure within which the music moves and which also gives the musician certain expressive directions. But the energy and expressive power of the music come about through the performance and come from the musicians themselves. The unity of the human being that arises from listening to music, embracing body, soul and mind, presupposes experiencing the piece as it unfolds in time. Music is the artistic shaping of sounds in time; it is unthinkable apart from performance. Music as something purely spiritual and timeless does not exist, or rather, it is then no longer music. In this sense the work of art that actually comes into being is never the work of the composer alone. It is always the work of everyone involved, in which the composer plays a particular role.
Classical concert life acknowledges this too: both in concert announcements and in reviews, the performing musicians often matter more than the composers of the pieces. Already here, the passage from the school textbook quoted at the beginning turns out to be an ideological construct, designed to disparage other forms of music, improvised music in particular, as inferior.
The piece of music, as a work of art that comes into being in time, is thus decisively shaped not only by the composer but by the performing musicians. Besides these, however, other factors play an important part: the room in which the music is made; the listening audience; the occasion on which the piece is played; and finally the piece’s relation to the rest of music, its place in the artistic discourse. The performing musicians give the composition not only feeling and energy; they also contribute decisively to its stylistic shaping. How you phrase, what ideal of sound you strive for on your instrument, how you read tempo and dynamic markings: all of this is part of a collective performance practice developed by musicians, without which the notes of the composition would be practically indecipherable. The composer knows this performance practice and takes his bearings from it as he writes, consciously or intuitively. A jazz composer will write different things for a jazz trumpeter than a classical composer will for a classical trumpeter. Nor are the musicians then simply interchangeable. When a classical trumpeter tries to play a jazz piece, the result is usually pitiful. (The other way round generally works better, since most jazz musicians have mastered the classical way of playing to a certain degree; it is an unavoidable part of musical training.)
These collective traditions of performance also change. In his own time Bach was played quite differently from the way he was played in the Romantic era or in the 20th century. The historically informed performance movement of recent decades has sharpened our awareness of how differently a composition can be interpreted. With the classical solo instruments, outstanding individual personalities play an important part, because they shape styles of interpretation that other musicians follow. And in jazz the improviser stands alongside the composer anyway, as a creator of melodic shapes, and is often far more important to the overall statement of the piece.
How music sounds, however, is determined not only by the composer and the musicians but by the whole setting of the performance. First of all there is the room in which the music is made. Is it large or small, does it have a lot of reverberation or little, where do the musicians sit? All of this is essential to the sound of the music and also influences things like tempo and volume.
Even more important, though, is the significance of the audience and of the occasion on which the music is made. An interested audience that understands the music being presented gives back a great deal of energy, which has a positive effect on the performers. An audience that is bored because it has no interest in the music can ruin even the best-prepared concert. The music itself also changes with the occasion on which it is played. It is something quite different whether a Mozart string quartet is performed in a concentrated concert setting or serves as background music to a festive dinner. And it is not necessarily clear from the outset which of the two situations suits the piece better. There is no reason to reject music in functional settings on principle. Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik” was certainly written for exactly such functional occasions, and a performance in such a setting does full justice to the intention of the piece. Much the same can be said of playing jazz standards, which, depending on how the improvisation is shaped, can span a wide range from functional music to highly demanding concert music. For all music, the overall setting of the performance helps to shape the meaning, and with it the message, of a piece. As a particularly clear example, let me mention once more the history of the hymn “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (O Sacred Head, Now Wounded). Before Bach incorporated the melody, with the chorale text, into his St Matthew Passion, making it one of the most moving Passion chorales of all, it was in fact a secular dance song, as far removed as could be from grief and thoughts of the Passion.
We should also bear in mind that a composition changes over time. It ages. Beginning with the special, unrepeatable character of a premiere, it is at first an active and living part of the current music scene. It is compared with the other pieces written at the same time; it finds its place within the stylistic spectrum of its day. As the distance from the time of its creation grows, general musical taste changes. Most “old-fashioned” pieces fall into oblivion. Only the best works of that period are still performed and heard, those able to speak to people of other periods and cultures as well. In the process, however, these compositions lose the many connections they had with the cultural life of their time, and with them much of their original power. They no longer provoke and no longer intervene in the current discourse. They are revered as “classics”, but they are also rendered harmless.
Everything I have said about the relativity of a performance and its dependence on the situation applies, of course, to recorded and technically reproduced music as well. For one thing, the recording process intervenes deeply in the sound of the music. A recording is always an artificial product, made by miking, mixing and sound processing. The vibrations no longer come from the instruments but from the membrane of a loudspeaker. The finished record is always a work of art in its own right, detached from the actual performance of the piece.
For another, with CDs or records too, the piece of music changes depending on the situation in which I hear it. I can listen to it alone and with concentration, with others during a conversation, or collectively, dancing at a party. This last situation has even produced an entirely new type of musical artist: the disc jockey. The DJ creates arcs of tension, musical structures and energy solely through the order in which he puts recordings one after another. Since the 1990s, sampling technology has enabled DJs to mix grooves of their own making with older recordings by other musicians, and so to create music whose author can no longer be clearly determined. Composer, musicians, producer, sound engineer, DJ: whodunnit?
From all this it follows that it is fundamentally impossible to repeat a piece of music. The musical work of art is simply not contained in the score. Music comes into being only through performance, and really only through the whole cultural and social context in which the performance is embedded. This performance depends on so many different circumstances and is shaped by so many different people that the composition plays only a relative part. If you truly take this fact on board, there is no reason to distinguish between composed music, improvised music and music not worked out in writing. The musical parameters of tone production, rhythmic intensity and communicative interplay are then just as important as the parameters of melodic, harmonic and formal structure laid down in the score.
Besides the demand that non-written forms of music be given equal standing, this is also about freeing the great works of the classical composers from their museum existence and bringing them into the whole spectrum of contemporary music, in which the different stylistic approaches complement and enrich one another.