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Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

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Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them King’s Research Portal Link to publication record in King's Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Leech-Wilkinson, D. (2020). Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them. https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/ Citing this paper Please note that where the full-text provided on King's Research Portal is the Author Accepted Manuscript or Post-Print version this may differ from the final Published version. If citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version for pagination, volume/issue, and date of publication details. And where the final published version is provided on the Research Portal, if citing you are again advised to check the publisher's website for any subsequent corrections. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Research Portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognize and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. •Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. •You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain •You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 23. Sep. 2021 Perf Challenging Mus Performance: e and H to E ape Classical ic ormanc Norms D owLe sc Them by aniel ech-Wilkinson version 2.04 (30.iv.21) 2 Preface This is an eBook, a PDF (the version you're reading now), a website, and a set of podcasts. It’s addressed to performers of western classical music and it’s about freeing performance from unnecessary rules and constraints and from much of the anxiety that comes with classical training and practice. The aim is to encourage performers to find many more ways (old and new) in which classical scores can make musical sense. If you’re a passionate believer in the status quo you may hate it. But it might still be worth reading because the questions it asks are reasonable ones and need much better answers. Having someone ask them may enable you (rather than me) to see what those better answers might be, enabling you to place normative performance practice on a more reasoned footing. There’s also the possibility that you’ll end up agreeing with much that’s in here, but in either case a world of new possibilities for performing your repertoire may open up. Be aware that this is a polemical piece rather than a scholarly tome. It’s expressed strongly. It may annoy and unsettle, though I hope it will also reward. I’ve written it and published it online, and it’s free to use, because I want to reach performers, especially young professionals and conservatoire students. And also because it’s good to be able to improve the text in response to reader suggestions and as better ways of thinking become clear. This PDF fixes the text in one form, but I may try to keep it updated. For the latest version I recommend you read the book online if you can. Please let me know what you think, either using the feedback boxes beneath each page of the eBook (which are moderated) or by emailing me at [email protected]. Please let others know at @ChalPerformance and anywhere that classical musicians follow. Use the Contents to find out what’s covered. Use the bullet-point Summary as an index to find exactly what you’re seeking. Continue to 1 Introduction and examples Or start with the podcast summarising Chapter 1 and then continue reading from 2 The fabulous status quoif you enjoy it. Acknowledgements (online) About the author (online) 3 To cite the book: Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel (2020). Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them. Version N.N (DATE). At https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/. Provide a more specific chapter address (e.g. https://challengingperformance.com/the- book-9-2) if you need to. Cite the version number that applied when you chose the text to cite. “Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them” by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This is version 2.04 (30.iv.21) 4 CPrefaceontents PART 1: Performance style and what follows 1 Introduction and examples 2 The fabulous status quo 3 Performance changes over time 4 Performing identity 5 The (actual) music, the music itself, musical 6 Further Western Classical Music delusions 6.1 Introduction: naturalised beliefs 6.2 You need to know about music to appreciate it 6.3 You must play structure 6.4 Current performances offer the best solutions 6.5 Learning to perform is learning natural musicianship 6.6 Performers and performances today are very unalike 6.7 Music makes better sense performed ‘historically’ 6.8 Texts document sounds 6.9 Everything is in the score 6.10 A work is greater than any performance of it 6.11 Scores have limited interpretative possibilities 6.12 The composer knows best 6.13 Composers’ intentions are (can be) known 6.14 The performer should be inaudible 6.15 Composers are alive and listening 6.16 Composers are gods 6.17 Works 6.18 So music is…. What is it? 6.19 Conclusion: Why do we maintain these delusions? PART 2: The Policing of Performance 7 Teaching 7.1 Introduction: the place of teachers in the WCM State 7.2 Childhood lessons 7.3 Exam boards and the space for creativity 7.4 Conservatoire and creativity: Juniper Hill’s Becoming Creative 7.5 Conservatoire and conformity 7.6 Izabela Wagner on the training of virtuosi 7.7 Micro schools and their discontents 7.8 Competitions 7.9 Alternatives 8 Musicology and editions 5 9 Criticism 9.1 Introduction: u and non-u 9.2 The metaphorical language of record reviews 9.3 The value of record reviewing 9.4 Performance criticism in social media 9.5 The risk performers take in the face of criticism 9.6 The lack of intellectual debate about WCM 10 Normativities 11 Obligations to the dead 11.1 Piety and the dead composer 11.2 Philosophical obligations 11.3 Ethical obligations 12 Policing and self-policing 12.1 Policing 12.2 Seeking Utopia 12.3 Self-policing 13 Lack of agency 14 The damage to musicians’ health 14a Musical Creativity and Performance as Relational Practices: Mandy Burvill in Conversation with Monia Brizzi 15 The legal constraints on performers PART 3: Allowing Creativity 18 Creativity 18.1 Recapitulatory introduction after Juniper Hill 18.2 Comparison with theatre 19 The Ethics of Musical Performance 19.1 Ethical recapitulation 19.2 Ethical coda 20: Why and How? 20.1 Why? 20.2 How? 21 Historical examples on record 22 Making Music Work 22.1 What makes a performance work? 22.2 Musical dynamics and musical shape 6 22.3 Expression is dangerous 22.4 Music as social action 22.5 Assessing non-standard performances 23 Examples from challengingperformance.com 23.1 Exchanging the Moonlight and Erlkönig 23.2 Schubert/Gilchrist/Katz: Ave Maria 23.3 Further transgressive performances 23.4 Using Anxiety Creatively 24 Reinterpreting opera: ‘Dido & Belinda’ 24.1 Regieoper 24.2 How we made ‘Dido & Belinda’ 24.3 ‘Dido & Belinda’: what the performers thought 24.4 ‘Dido & Belinda’: what the audience thought 25 Speaking of contemporary concerns 26 Speaking of others 27 Finally: The right to be different 7 1: e e and w PART1 Performancion and styl hat follows Do an online search for performances of the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah Introductand listen to a few (try to avoid the onesexamples you expect to like). There are performances with a semi-virtual choir of 2360; or with four soloists (accompanied by mandolins); performances by organ and brass; community choir, steel band and dancers; gospel choir; electronic organ and flash mob; and even some with small choirs and baroque orchestras that claim to be like Handel’s own. All of these, the full range (to judge by the comments added by listeners on sites like YouTube), inspire and move people intensely. And yet, in conservatoire and in the classical music business, only the tip of one end of this very broad spectrum is cultivated. For students of classical music, the only proper performance of this score is one that sounds just as Handel’s first performances are supposed to have sounded. According to this ideology, the job for which the classical musician is being prepared is to do history in sound. Anything else is wrong. How musicians, critics and other ‘gatekeepers’—and knowledgeable listeners—respond to classical music performances depends to a large extent on beliefs about their propriety. If a performance is improper, in the sense that it is wrong as judged by history or tradition, then however lively, committed, engaging, fluent or technically brilliant the performance may be, the knowledgeable tend, at best, to disapprove, more often to dislike it strongly. An aim of this book, however, is to show the danger of beliefs about what is ‘proper’ in classical music. While I do not address the huge field of current practices illustrated by this Handel example, I do want to broaden thinking around that tip of the spectrum currently occupied by respectable classical performance.
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