The double nature of the musical work and the interpretative procedures

Sonia Albano – [email protected]
  Universidade Estadual Paulista

In the year 2005, my book under the title of A methodology of musical interpretation [Uma metodologia de interpretação musical] was published with the purpose of transmitting to the performance students the methodology of musical interpretation practiced and taught by the deceased oboist Walter Bianchi. Living with this good friend and professor for some years, I was able to have the benefit of his valuable teachings and of understanding how ambiguous the interpretative processes are, a fact that impairs a pacific acceptance of this scientific production before the bodies of promotion to research.

The action of this professor while an oboist leading several Brazilian orchestras, as well as his pedagogic action, always directed to the teaching of performance in several schools of music, guided his career and prevented him from producing texts approaching this theme. A single brochure was written by him containing part of his teachings, a fact that motivated me to disclose his practice. It is interesting to report that Professor Bianchi ministered courses of musical interpretation in several foreign countries, being acknowledged as an excellent performance professor for all the instrumentalists, and not just for the oboists; however, he did not get the deserved acknowledgement in our country. His intellectual simplicity and his love for teaching prevented him from disclosing his work in the higher instances of performance teaching. I would say that during all of his professional route he was what we name an outstanding practical teacher.

I express my immense satisfaction while realizing that up to today the book containing his methodology has been consulted by several undergraduate and graduate students, was published in a second edition, and still keeps arousing the interest of the performance students. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I do not get away from the themes involving questions linked to the performance and to the musical interpretation, even if I act in a graduation program in the area of musical education. Themes on the subjectivity present in the interpretative processes, the interpreter’s action during the musical performance, the transcendence living in the musical signs, the laws that rule this action and the multiple procedures that surround this practice, have motivated me to develop new publications and to continuously examine how creative and innovative the act of interpreting a musical work is. As if it was not enough, I have realized that a performance professor’s actuation, no matter how praxiologic it can be, must be reminded in texts to be conveyed in conferences, graduation courses, periodicals and books of the area. In this bias, we have found scholars who reported the performance work of consecrated instrument players, such as Alfred Cortot and Pablo Casals, among others, in addition to the testimony of the performers themselves approaching significant issues linked to the performance, among whom we can mention Daniel Baremboim. The documentaries and digital recordings of important interpreters, conductors and musicologists discussing and pointing out relevant aspects of the performance and the musical interpretation are also mentioned.

I further inform that in the supervisions I carry out at the head of the Music Graduation Program of IA-UNESP I have been favoring some research which discusses and assesses interpretative problems in different situations and investigates how certain interpreters work their performances.

One of the great problems that this sub-area meets in the acknowledgement of its investigations concentrates in the fact that the same musical production can include several interpretations, a situation that hinders the validation of a single and definite performance. The performance of a musical work is always liable to revision, integration, deepening, and it can continuously bring new data to intervene in a previous performance, modifying it and limiting its pertinence. Therefore, the musical interpretation does not present itself as a closed finished process; it reopens every time when the musical work is performed and this data has been making it difficult to convey its investigations.

If Science is consecrated as a systematized and organized body of knowledge achieved by means of a method that incorporates a set of rules that are common to all areas of knowledge, and another set of fixed foundations and specific rules in each of them, it is difficult to consider the musical performance and the interpretative processes as modalities of knowledge validated and duly acknowledged as scientific, as their production is not founded in the objectivity, generalization, regularity, persistence, frequency, repetition and quantification. In addition to that, in the analysis of performance processes and artistic creation, the historical, cultural and subjective variables are always present. Gil (1999) reports that the scientific knowledge usually discerns a universal truth and data which have been experimented, justified and validated.

The same does not occur in the production of knowledge in the area of Arts, as they hold quite a differentiated analysis. One of the first procedures that must be respected and used in this field is concentrated in the use of an analogical thinking in substitution for the analytical thinking perpetuated by the sciences named exact.

Abdounur (1999, p. XI) reveals that the analogical thinking not only (re)constructs meanings but also interacts and integrates the cognitive domains to the affective ones and inseminates the mind with structures which are complementary to those ones, subjacent to the logical-mathematical reasoning, propitiating continuous reconfigurations in mankind’s way of thinking.

Most of the times, the artistic activities hold mental attitudes and actions which favor much more the intuition, the human subjectivity and the unconscious language. This way, research in Arts is eternally manifested as paradoxical while experiencing the unsuitableness of finding an analytical thinking as a “cognitive referential” in order to express the product of its investigation. As Zamboni (1998, p. 58-9) reports, the conclusion of a research in Arts takes very differentiated features. The results are not always verbalized, the interpretation of these results does not converge to the univocity but to the multi-vocity, once each interlocutor can expose a personal interpretation and a subjective reading of the investigated artistic product.

Differently from the hard sciences, the Arts have a personal character of interpretation, assured by the pluri-signification of the artistic sign, by the subjectivity, and by the expressive wealthy, therefore holding a modality of investigation which is differentiated from the other ones produced in other areas of knowledge. This reality brings countless problems. The first one is centered in the musical production representation itself.

It is correct to state that the interpretative processes are not duly traced in a musical score, as the notation used does not contemplate the performance movement necessary for a musical work to be accurately performed. Signs of dynamic, ways of articulating the sound, even the guidance of tempos, are not enough to determine the way a musical piece should be interpreted. Sometimes even the rhythmic punctuation used in the score demands an aesthetic performance different from the one which is expressed. This is a type of behavior which is quite recurrent in the baroque music. Paulo Couto e Silva portraits this reality:

The baroque interpreters frequently altered the value of the written notes, performing the composition in rhythms that were diverse from the ones assigned in the original. As time went by, this practice became even conventional, mainly in the French and German music, and Quantz thus lucidly reports the ways it took place: “Every time it is possible, the main notes must be stressed more than the passage ones. According to this rule, the fastest notes in pieces of moderato tempo and in adagio, must be played as in an uneven way, although they seem to have the same value. Over these notes, namely the first, third, fifth, and seventh ones, it is advisable to take longer than in the other ones, that are the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth, but this delay will be less than the value those notes would have in case they were punctuated” (IN: COUTO E SILVA, 1960, p. 53-4).

Several interpretative procedures follow a stylistic conduction based in aesthetic behaviors which are not foreseen in the score. Would the musical interpretation then be a relative approximation to what is manifested in the musical production? Would the performance be subdued to each interpreter’s musical knowledge? Would the performer’s interpretative decisions have a subjective connotation superposed to the compositional idea expressed in the musical text itself?

Such interpretative questionings and practices externalize the double nature of the musical work: the physical and the spiritual one. The physical one expresses the sound materiality of a composition by means of the insertion of musical signs validated by tradition or by the composers themselves in the scores to be interpreted. This materiality is also present in the transmission of a non-written musical creation or even in the momentary improvisation of a musical idea. The spiritual nature, on its turn, takes into consideration the subjectivity of the interpreter, of the musical sign, of the work itself, of its historical moment, of its culture, of its territoriality. A good interpretation must shelter these two worlds in equal proportion and in an integrated way.

In face of this reality, it is the performer’s task to formulate the following questioning: How to conciliate these two natures and transmit to the listener what the musical work really wants to manifest? In a publication dated in 1989, L. Pareyson makes the importance of the performer or interpreter in any work of art clear while stating that:

The performer studies the work in all its aspects and intends to deliver it as it wants to be, and in order to achieve that he experiments and re-experiments the performance itself; and, when it seems to him that the work has reached its aim, it is not anything different from the work to him, but it is the work itself in its full sensitive spiritual reality [...] between the work and its performance there is identity and transcendence at the same time: the performance is the work itself and at the same time it is nothing but its performance, but it is also its judge and rule (PAREYSON, 1989, p. 163-4).

It is in the multiplicity of performances and interpretations that the work of art acquires new meanings and ascertains itself as valuable artistic expression. L. Pareyson accurately describes this reality:

[...] the interpretation is always a revelation of the work and the interpreter’s expression at the same time, and for this reason it is objective and personal at one time, as much as faithful as it is free and as much as original as it is true. [...] Far from being abandoned to its own subjectivity, without law or criteria, the interpretation has a very steady law and a very safe criteria: its law is the work itself, seen in its irreducible Independence and, precisely because of that, likely to be interrogated and listened; and its criteria is the congenialility, the only guarantee of truth and condition of penetration (PAREYSON, 1980, P. 173-4)

This positioning demands from the performers and interpreters the fulfillment of some aims which are capable of valuing and attributing diversified aesthetical meanings both to the already created artistic productions and to those which are still being produced. This way, it is our task to ask: When and how an artistic production acquires aesthetical validity, taking into consideration the infinite number of interpretations for the same work?

L. Pareyson considers this reality as being ambiguous by nature, but also congenial, as it is present both in the art appraiser’s personal taste and in the universal judgment which gives meaning to the work: “[...] the fact is that historical and personal taste and sole universal judgment are not two opposite ways of conceiving and theorizing the aesthetical valuation, [...] but are in fact two non-disposable aspects of the Art reading and criticism” (PAREYSON, 1980, p. 178).

Even if taste is much more inter-related to the multiplicity of possible interpretations of the same artistic production, the universality of the judgment of value does not concentrate either in the personal taste or in the historical taste, but it is present in the work confrontation with itself. The universal judgment indicates the work’s artistic value in what the work itself brings while being represented. As Pareyson argues, in the taste mutability and in the diversity of the interpretations, little by little an even more unanimous agreement is being carried out on the value of certain works, that is, the universality, the objectivity and the unicity of judgment of any artistic production is imposed (Ibid, p. 180).

If we refer to the musical productions, the same reflections are admissible. Differently from the visual arts which are capable of representing the objects of the world, Music is not manifested as a representative art. The range of sounds that compose a musical work usually does not represent anything. Certain musical works, rhythms and melodies may even suggest the representation of something, but this representation is still very debatable. However, as an artistic manifestation it is also translated in one of the ways of representing the world as from a symbolic code linked to our sensitiveness, our intuition and our imaginary.

In a recent publication, Professor Yara Caznok presents several musical examples that set up a certain relationship of the vision with the hearing of a musical production. However, the author also points at the existence of two quite opposite aesthetical-philosophical trends, even if they are not exclusive: the referential and the absolutist one.

The first one believes that Music has its meaning based on the possibility of the sound world leading the listener to another content which is not the musical one; it becomes a means to reach something beyond it. Expressing, describing, symbolizing or imitating these extra-musical references — cosmological or meteorological relationships, the nature phenomena, narrative and affective contents, among other possibilities — would be the raison d’être of a musical discourse [...] The absolutist trend, primarily linked to the instrumental music, conceives Music as an autonomous language in relation to any other contents, considering it self-sufficient in the construction and in the setting up of purely sound relationships, intra-musical ones. Imitations, descriptions and references to other contents that are not the sound ones are considered interferences to an alleged “true hearing” and decrease a work’s value (CAZNOK, 2003, p. 23-4).

In all the history of Music there are recurrent compositions which relate sound to color, to nature and to images. Moreover, descriptive musical works are present in the most varied aesthetic movements. The birds’ singing, the horses’ trotting, the streams, the tides, the wind, the mechanic sounds, among others, come from the Ancient Times to our days. Even so, this does not grant to Music the condition of a representative art.

It must be also said that so that the musical work can have full life it has to be performed; more than in the other arts, to give it life it needs a mediator, in this case the interpreter. It can even exist while creation, but it is in the performance that the musical work acquires full life. This existential condition is just possible by means of an interpreter intercession.

When taking to himself the task of measuring the work, the interpreter reveals both the formal and stylistic values contained in a composition and his own values as a performer. He does not only decipher the musical signs contained in the score, the historical moment when the work was created, the stylistic procedures guiding a certain historical period, and a dominant kind of aesthetics, a certain culture, a certain territory, but also its interpretative subjectivity.

We cannot ignore Cortot’s lessons included in a publication that was collected and written by Jeanne Thieffry who offers a summary of what was dealt with in the interpretation courses by this renowned interpreter (1934):

[...] “la lengua musical dispone de una elocuencia bastante precisa para evitar que un verdadero contrasentido pueda establecerse”..., etc., que constantemente recuerda a los artistas el deber que tienen de indagar todo lo que pueda informarlos sobre las intenciones de los autores, a fin de reducir al mínimo las posibilidades de error, y que para obligar a sus discípulos a acostumbrarse a esas indagaciones, exige de cada uno de ellos, so pena de negarse a escucharlos, una reseña de naturaleza tal como por impedir que ele trabajo consciente y fecundo en resultados que él preconiza, sea sustituído por cualquier labor rutinaria (CORTOT, 1934, P. 16).

Always aiming at a good performance, Cortot demanded from his students a written script presenting an explanation on the author of the work life (name, date of birth, nationality, place, date of death, etc), as well as the work’s title, opus, date when it was accomplished, to whom it was dedicated, the circumstances that guided its creation, the work’s plan (form, movements, tonality), its particularities (harmonic analysis, influences, deriving analogies, compositional affiliations), its character and sense according to the performer’s perspective, and finally, the comments and aesthetical and technical advice applicable to the musical text, this way promoting in the interpreters a bond among the feeling, the musical form, the analytical work and the emotion.

Another great performer, Casals, also elected the interpreter’s respect to the Music double nature as the first principle for a good performance. According to him, the feeling and the interpretation arose from the same source and flowed united. The phrases that did not follow this perspective sounded cold and meaningless. Casals did not get away from this rule, not even in the performance of classical works. While reporting to Casals’s conduction in Mozart’s n. 40 Symphony, Blum states that the atmosphere of passionate agitation contained in the score, under his conduction immediately reached the listener:

“No devemos tener miedo a ser expresivos”, exclamaba Casalas. ” Hay muy pocas indicaciones, desde luego. Mozart sabía todo lo que había en la obra. Él era el compositor, era él quiem sufría” Cuando el segundo tema aparece em sol menor (ej. 8), Casals daba voz al sentimento inherente a la frase con una solo palavra: ” Dolor!”, indicando con la batuta que la primera nota debía sentirse como una herida en el corazón. A las notas cromaticamente descendentes se les daba tempo para expressar su tristeza. Con el quinto compás llegaba una nueva ola de expresividad, más intensa que la primera. Al final de cada una de las frases surgian olas menores de angustia no acallada ( BLUM, 2000, p. 24)

The pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (2008), on his turn, admits that the art of interpreting concentrates in the action of realizing the relationships and associations exposed in the sequence of inter-linked notes that form the phrases (relationships of space and time, sound and silence, life and death, sound speed and volume, among others). These purely musical relationships are the ones which must be combined and inter-linked to the human thinking. It is in the score itself that the interpreter finds the ways of musically expressing himself in the world:

¿Cómo hacer la conexión entre nuestro cerebro y nuestro corazón? En música expresamos la emoción ralentizando o acelerando el tempo, variando el volumen, la calidad del sonido y la articulación, lo que significa alargar o acortar determinadas notas. Si la música puede definirse como sonido unido al pensamiento, ninguno de estos mecanismos pude aplicarse caprichosamente; toda técnica debe servir el propósito más alto de la expresión de la música, y el intérprete debe ser el maestro que coordina estos elementos, conectándolos contantemente, impidiendo que ningún elemento sea independiente del otro (BAREMBOIM, 2008, p. 26).

While discussing and analyzing the aesthetical issues present in the musical discourse, the conductor Sérgio Magnani (1996) preliminarily discusses the abstract autonomy of the musical language. In his opinion, Music is in need of any type of bond with the physical reality phenomena or with the concepts of Logics which are not the ones of time and space. He presents a long discourse countersigning Music not only as an art of time, but also as a spatial art. For him, Music is defined as the art of sound movements in the space-time peculiar to them. It is in this sound space that the course of human feelings and emotions is moved, under a pluri-dimensional perspective:

Let us analyze a musical structure and in the first place we will find the antimony sound-silence represented either in the longitudinal dimension (melodic design) or in the vertical one (relation of the polyphonic lines and the harmonic parts) and yet in the perspective sense (the timbres and the intensities). [..] The condensation and rarefaction of the sound mass are supported by the silences spatial consistence. The intensity of the highest points is finally valued by the progressively filled silences [...] while listening a Webern or Boulez work, it is possible to realize that the silence acquires some consistence of real sound space, where the composer builds his works (MAGNANI, 1999, p. 47-8)

In order to demonstrate the spatiality which is present in the musical language, Magnani provides the example of a sixth interval that presents a height slope which is quite greater than a third interval. The psychological effect resulting from this opening will be more acceptable if thought in terms of space and related to the basic parameter of the human scale:

[...] in Music, the interval does not have an absolute character, and its imagined effects are no more than a psychological illusion or suggestion. On the contrary, in the level of feelings, the phrase syntax is basic; in it a regular sequence of well spatially distributed intervals will transmit us the feeling of order, quietness, and the intervals amplitude will mainly have the value of an architectonic scale, while a sequence of open intervals, different and unpredictable, will place our conscience before a spatial drama, made of shocking surprises. From the spatial syntax the rhythm of tensions and relaxations, the order of the natural or exceptional resolutions are born, with the deriving emotional effects. The same interval may take the shape of a normal space, in case it is inserted in another structure (MAGNANI, 199, p. 48).

While reporting to the counterpoint, this conductor also thinks of each of the voices as a structural band separated from the others by internal spaces. The existing empty and vertical spaces are filled with the vibrations of the harmonic sounds of all the real notes in the different plans, creating the plans of depth of the sound perspective. Exposed this way, it is concluded that the spatial concept in Music is defined by the concept of movements in the sound space and are completed with the time fraction pre-established by the composer and that is fixed by the interpreter. Anyhow, regardless of the proved space-time parameters, Magnani states that Music is essentially symbolic, structured in pure forms, bearer of abstract meanings, translated in the listener conscience in category of aesthetical emotions, suggestion or impression of feelings considered in the lyrical sublimation. (ibd. P. 51). In his opinion, the abstract autonomy of Music is a vehicle of communication with the inexpressible and the eternal, and this is the reason for many misunderstandings and incomprehension from the ones who do not know either how to evade from the immediate reality or to ascend from Arithmetic to Mathematics, or surpass the frontiers between the contingent and the transcendent, or to place themselves in a supra real world where someone can love, suffer of die singing (Ibid, p. 51- 4)

Although starting from different opinions, the statements formulated so far point at the same reality, the Music double nature, and were not away from Walter Bianchi’s discourse, who in a simplistic way so expressed his ideas on musical interpretation:

For this reason, the musical interpretation is not absolute. If it were absolute, the interpreter would not exist. Music is a present object that is modified every moment according to each person’s personality and sensitivity. This justifies the countless recordings of the same score. [...] In relation to Music no one is owner of the truth. Of course one must not admit musical absurdity, but everything which is well-grounded must be respected. (LIMA, 2015, p. 101-2).

As much as the composers express interest in controlling the ways of enjoying their works in the score, the musical symbols allow for an internal language that can be exploited both by the interpreter and by the listener, allowing for the multiplicity of interpretations. The musical interpretation acts in the hybrid zone of the rational and of the intuitive, and does not exclude any of them. It goes on giving shape to itself while doing it, and in this action of working in the interpretation it keeps constantly interacting with the interpreter’s sensitivity.

The Master of Arts dissertation of the professor and pianist Margarida T. Fukuda outlines a study of the representation process existing in a musical score as well as its decoding by the interpreter-instrumentalist, based on the work of investigation carried out by the German pianist, pedagogue and musicologist Jürgen Uhde, in partnership with the philosopher and pianist Renate Wieland. After the reading of the publication that describes Professor W. Bianchi’s methodology, Margarida Fukuda listed several similarities between a research and the other one, which are described in a joint text to be soon presented by the authors. One of the first similarities pointed by the performer lies in the interaction of the interpreter’s creative freedom and the faithfulness to the musical text. This reference to the dual nature of the musical text is present in almost all the performance methodologies and teachings.

Not even Eduard Hanslick’s intransigent discourse was capable of moving away the semantic sense of the musical language:

We conceive the activity of composing as an activity of “forming”; as such, it is completely objective. The composer forms an independent beauty. The infinitely expressive and spiritual material of the sounds allows for the subjectivity of the one who builds to be manifested in what is being created. As a characteristic expression is pertinent to the musical singular elements, then the predominant features of the composer’s character, that is: sentimentalism, energy, joy, etc. — will certainly be expressed in the general moments when Music is capable of translating, by means of the consequent preference by certain tonalities, rhythms and passages (HANSLICK, 1992, p. 94-5).

In this argumentation, the acknowledgment on the part of the author of a subjective element in the sound material he many times tried to ignore can be observed. E. Fubini quite appropriately expressed Hanslick’s position in relation to the existence of an emotional effect in the interpretative processes:

Hanslick liberó la música de todo su contenido emocional, sentimental, descriptivo o literario, pero dejó abierto el problema de cómo el espíritu “si plasma” en las “formas animadas sonoramente” y tambíén el de como se configura en la experiencia humana esta “actividad objetiva y moldeadora”, problemas ambos eludidos por Hanslick, al estar totalmente absorbido por su polémica contra toda estética del sentimiento (FUBINI, 1999, p. 333).

There would be much more to be said in relation to this theme; however, what seems more significant to me is to demonstrate how important the research which assesses and dialogues with the interpretative practices and the musical performance is. The recording of the interpretative processes and practice seems to be fundamental to this sub-area. It would not be inappropriate to state that the transcription of Professor Bianchi’s musical interpretation offered to the performance students’ knowledge which would certainly have vanished throughout the years if unbound from a written support.