Music lives in a context
I remember once taking a hostel-mate for a sung mass at the Catholic Westminster Cathedral. He was Northern Irish Protestant but pretty much a music lover and was looking forward to listening to a free musical experience. It turned out to be a little disappointing for him because there was a lot of distractions from people moving around. I explained that it was a mass and people do move around during mass find their seats, as part of the standing & sitting of the rituals and the queueing up for communion. He remained disappointed.
I find his reaction interesting because he was finally getting to hear the mass in a setting for which it was written but that was not how he imagined it. He expected a concert where he probably has been hearing sung masses all along. In a concert setting though, he was listening to a museum piece in a sterile setting. Sung masses were written for the multisensory experience of a Catholic worship in a Catholic church. An authentic sung mass is always overwhelm the senses, beyond just the aural.
Putting aside the faith context, the mass was composed to be performed in a particular architectural setting that had stained-glass and probably a dark Gothic interior. If it was written in the baroque or classical period, there would have been flickering lights of candles that illuminated the church and a play of shadows behind it. There would be smells of incense, rising against streams of sunlight piercing through sanctuary windows. And there would be sounds other than the choir and organ. There would be sounds of bells, deacons chanting, people finding their seats and parents trying to keep their children quiet. If you sterilise the mass by removing it from that reality for which it was written, you may even be able enjoy it as a series of notes on a page. But you will never fully understand the sung mass and the life it inhabits; any more than one can understand an animal by observing it in a zoo.
Don't get me wrong. I sometimes do enjoy bringing a music score into a concert hall as I often see music I didn't realise was there. The miniature score was most useful though I realised that reading the music on the phone was ill-advised because it was distracting to your neighbours. Still, the score only helped me understand the music. Understanding the meaning and message of the music still required understanding the context of the composer at the time of writing and linking it up to my own experiences and context.
What is an authentic performance
I told the story to an ex-school mate whom I met during a school reunion. He has made quite a name for himself as early music baroque musicologist playing on a period harpsicord. I actually made a bit of a difficult life for him, partly because of my hang-ups over what people called authentic style of playing. I argued that to be authentic in baroque and classical times would mean underpaid and under trained musicians. I guess to me an authentic experience of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony would be to listen to it in the freezing cold hall as part of overly long program played by an orchestra and choir who had only one day rehearsal for four premieres.
I understand today that the debate today is moving away from the term authentic performance: they now seek to musically inform interpretations of music. As my ex-school mate explained to me, they are looking to understand the intentions of the composer in the composition that is written. It is hard for me to pinpoint exactly what the original intentions of the composer, though.
Intentions of the composer
If you think of the process of writing anything, the author or composer first conceptualise what they want to write about. At this point, it is very much about the objectives of the writer and sometimes the message that they wish to get across. At one point they will begin writing to translate these objectives into actual notes on paper. We could talk, therefore, about the intention at a macro level or the intention at writing musical notes level, both of which could be rather different.
I suspect most musicians and musicologists prefer deal with the more micro level intention because it is more clearly defined, more technical and so deploy the musical training they had and possibly more definitive in its conclusions – and in that sense, a lot safer. To me, the broader macro intentions of the writer is far more interesting because it deals with the broader context of the writer’s life and environment, the subject is as open as you would like it to be, and it is possible we will never be able to agree on its conclusions. It also calls for understanding in fields other than music, like social-politics and psychology.
With Beethoven, there is also the complication of writing in a period when instruments were still being developed and instruments have not yet matured into a form that we are familiar with today. How would he have written his third and fourth piano concertos if he had the grand piano that existed when he wrote the fifth. And in fact, how would he had written the fifth piano concerto if he had that grand piano much earlier. You see, Beethoven went deaf before he wrote the fifth piano concerto: he essentially wrote for an instrument he never heard: the instrument he eventually wrote for was much more powerful than the one he played at the beginning of his career.
Would he have written his third and fourth piano concertos differently if he had the modern grand piano. These concertos, especially the fourth, always felt to me to have another piece of music underneath struggling to get out, but couldn’t because it was constrained by the pianos of the day. And how would his fifth piano concerto turn out had he been able to explore further colours and timbers of the more powerful piano while he still had the hearing to do so. The questions of intentions was what Beethoven intended to do with the piano and the music, as opposed to what he wanted to do with the music notes. I hope the musicology fraternity is ready to move on beyond the comfort zone of music debate into the broader discussion of a person’s life.
4' 33"
I was in Foyles bookstore in Charing Cross London one day, when I came across a score for 4:33. It was a novelty item sitting at the checkout desk. Basically, you would buy it as an empty notebook for a friend. And an empty notebook is basically what the score for 4'33" is. I laughed and asked the man on the counter if this was for real. He replied chuckling that it is actually one of their best sellers. He asked if I wanted to buy one and, and being right next door to London Chinatown, I had the confidence to reply that I’m a Chinese and we Chinese are a very practical people.
Now, how do you do are an authentic performance of 4'33". For those who do not know it, 4'33" is a composition by an American composer John Cage, which involves the performer coming onto stage and sitting down at the piano and not playing at all for four minutes 33 seconds. The genesis of the piece was when Cage entered an anechoic chamber, which is supposed the quietest room possible. To his surprise, though, he could actually hear sounds: his own breathing, heartbeat and the blood coursing through his veins. The intention of the piece, therefore, is for a person to be aware of the sounds around them in the world, in nature and in the human world.
Now, being one who’s used to going on silence retreats, the need to pay to listen to silence in the concert hall somehow escapes me. In any case, I am not sure whether it will work in a modern concert hall where any period of silence is punctured by coughing, shuffling of feet and rustling as dresses are being smoothened. This is somewhat akin to my experience in a Catholic mass: we have been taught that the responses to the first and second reading at Sunday mass is not the Responsorial Psalm or the Gospel exclamation, but rather a short period of reflection on the reading itself. Choir leaders never ever achieve this, and the mass advertently rush to move onto the next part. Silence it seems, abhor a vacuum.
One priest I knew once told me about a time when he was in a supermarket when the sound system has broken down and the muzak was off. There was a silence in the entire shopping experience that became so disconcerting for one woman that she shouted out why is it so quiet in here. It is a sad reflection of the world that we cannot conceive of an oasis of silence in a noisy world. Silence frightens people because it confronts them with what they would rather not do: think and reflect alone with their own thoughts.
I think we need more 4'33" every day but unfortunately, I do not expect many people to even attempt it. We are far too busy trying to fill our entire day with mindless activities so that we look busy and we can tell ourselves we have done a lot of work when we retire to bed at night. Rather than to spend the time on reflections where we may encounter the last person that you would want to meet: ourselves. An authentic performance of can bring us to very strange places.
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