Spontaneity? It's just not cricket

I've just come back from a couple of days teaching at the Cadenza! summer music course which is organised (in a wonderfully chaotic manner) by John Thwaites of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. The highlight of this was an amazing evening of chamber-music by staff and students, whose tone was set by a sight-read performance of Tchaikovsky's piano trio by John, Daniel Rowland and Alexander Baillie. Some people would have felt inhibited by the lack of preparation but these players created the most vivid performance of anything I've heard for a very long time, diving with abandon into this most passionate of music, all three alive to each other's spontaneity. It resulted in a performance which was intensely engaging, touching, at times outrageous, and even genuinely funny (quite an achievement with this piece).

Alexander said to me afterwards, "Why don't we play like this all the time?" and I thought it was a great question. My thoughts on this involve sweeping generalisations for which I apologise in advance; I'm well aware this is only really a sketch of an argument. Nevertheless, I wonder if the answer lies, at least partly, in the erstwhile British preoccupation with decorum and politeness (all three Tchaikovsky performers were British, by the way). While such gentility might not be a conspicious part of our current social scene, it still holds a powerful sway over our instincts, I believe. We don't say to someone at the dinner-table 'Pass the salt' but rather 'Could you pass the salt?'. Why the latter? Because the directness of the former seems rude. Even as I write this I am thinking to myself, 'But surely it IS rude'. And yet such directness is commonplace in Russian conversation. Russians aren't very interested in the superficial veneer of civility Brits cultivate. I think sometimes British musicians (and others) are afraid of seeming rude, and prefer to keep musical style within tasteful, polite limits.

What that evening of chamber music really got me thinking about was the relationship between humility and egotism in performance. I have always seen egotism as a great fault and humility a virtue, but I realised that in performance the two need to be held in a dynamic balance. A performer has to be both humble and egotistical, to both respect the musical score and also to impose him/herself on it. This may sound like a contradiction, but I don't think it need be: as you become deeply immersed in a piece of music your instincts gradually start conforming to the musical world you are investigating. I have an instinct to be repelled by performers who put themselves before the music, and yet am relatively comfortable with tasteful but boring playing. I think the truth is both faults are as bad as each other and that to abdicate responsibility for creating a performance of great individuality by hiding behind the thought, 'My job is simply to serve the composer', is as bad as the egotist who doesn't care for the details of what the composer wrote and simply remakes every piece in his own image. This is a complicated area and there's much more that could be written about it. One thing that's for sure, though, is that the idea a performance can simply serve the composer is a fantasy. We cannot help but recreate a piece of music according to our own individual emotional make-up. To hear what music sounds like without a performer's emotional world intervening, listen to this. Awesome. I'll be giving out prizes to anyone who listens to the end.

So how does a performer actually create this balance of humility and ego in performance? I've no idea. Ask me next year.

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One of the problems I have with listening to chamber music is that any 'sense of spontaneity' is in fact just the opposite - the product of hours of painstaking rehearsal to arrive at a unified vision of a piece. I feel rather the same about un-conducted orchestras - rubato, special effects, extremes of dynamic etc all rehearsed in advance - nothing left to chance for the performance. Unrehearsed chamber music is incredibly exciting - it's a real test of musicianship to see if the participants can agree on things, make decisions etc without speaking, but purely by watching, moving, playing and listening. Just a thought. Have you ever done concertos un-conducted?

Posted by Ben Palmer on 08 August 2008