Classical Stiffs

When did classical music become so stodgy?

Back in the day (aka the middle ages), every musician was also a composer. Or, to put it another way, there were no composers. Musicians improvised a lot of their own stuff, or they learned melodies by listening to other musicians, and then in their own performances, they improvised around them. At the time, there was no really accurate way of notating music, anyway, so they had no real choice.

As time went on, music notation became more and more exact. In the Baroque, music was written down and the composer became more important, but there was still a lot, from ornamentation to instrumentation of operatic accompaniments, left up to the performer or conductor. By the time you get to the romantic era, composers dictate pretty much everything, and even the cadenza, that moment in a concerto when the soloist is supposed to show what he or she can improvise, becomes something either dictated by the composer or copied from some other musician who wrote it down in the past.

In the 20th century, certain composers rebelled against this idea and wrote aleatoric music. That means, music where some element(s) are left up to chance or up to the performer. But, let's face it, who actually likes to perform or listen to aleatoric music? Very few people.

Whereas in the Middle Ages, music was something that only existed while you were actually performing it or hearing it, now it has become something to be archived, catalogued, saved, and copied. Over and over and over again. A good performer is considered to be someone who can achieve the same result every time they play a piece of music. Add to that the fact that we all now have recordings of the greatest artists in all their studio-generated perfection, one performance captured forever by the miracles of modern technology.

As musicians, we're crushed under the weight of our own musical history.

What I mean is, that as a violinist, I'm SUPPOSED to play Bach, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Mendelssohn: their concertos, their unaccompanied works, their symphonies, their string quartets...and all of this to the level of a CD performance. We end up spending our entire lives striving for technical perfection and trying to cram one more 150-year-old piece of music into our fingers and our brain and we forget how to create.

We don't learn to improvise, we don't learn to compose, we forget that the goal of all of this is to express and communicate. In Paris, I had a student who is an art teacher. She once said that she was surprised by how being a musician was so different from being an artist. She said that, as an artist, she sometimes would copy other people's work as a sort of study, to perfect a certain technique, but that no one would consider that to be an end in itself. Whereas that's mostly what a musician does. Render someone else's music audible.

What if we still didn't have the ability to record music, either on paper or as sound waves? What if we were forced to learn it only with our ears? What if it was acceptable, even expected, that each and every musician would create their own music at every performance?

Now, don't get me wrong. Humanity would be the poorer if Beethoven's symphonies had been lost at the time of Beethoven's death. It's amazing that we can still play his symphonies today. But how do we get back that spark of spontaneity?

How do I get back that spark of spontaneity?

There are other traditions, jazz and folk music specifically, where some of this sort of practice has survived. I guess the only answer I have right now is to turn to these other musics and try and learn from them.

Sometimes this all seems very exciting to me, and sometimes it frustrates and discourages me. It's all part of the adventure, right?