Research at Trinity Laban

Research at Trinity Laban ‘What's My Line?' Performing Meaning in Mozart's Chamber Music John Irving Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 143/1 Document Version: Accepted Manuscript Version number: 1.00 Acceptance date: 11/08/2017 Published date: 25/03/2018 Deposit date of initial version: 13/04/2018 1 Review Article – smaller typesize 2 Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2018 3 Vol. 143, No. 1, 000–000, http://dx.doi.org/ [Routledge logo] 4 5 running heads: 6 verso: REVIEW ARTICLES 7 recto: REVIEW ARTICLES 8 9 set at foot of first page: 10 © 2018 The Royal Musical Association 11 12 16 footnotes – copy on fos. 20–21 13 no music examples, no tables, no figures 14 15 ‘What’s my Line?’ Performing Meaning in Mozart’s Chamber Music 16 17 JOHN IRVING 18 19 20 Edward Klorman, Mozart’s Music of Friends: Social Interplay in the Chamber Works. 21 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xxxii + 325 pp. ISBN 978 1 107 09365 22 2. Companion website at <www.mozartsmusicoffriends.com>. 23 24 EDWARD Klorman’s excellent study Mozart’s Music of Friends is a wide-ranging 25 interpretation of Mozart’s chamber music that draws together many strands of 26 scholarship primarily in order to nuance our understanding of these works as they 27 may exist in performance. Klorman offers much food for thought here, to both 28 scholars and performers. I hope his contribution will be digested and applied 29 especially by those who enact and appreciate Mozart’s chamber music primarily 30 within the sphere of performance. Indeed, in what follows, I write from the 31 perspective of a performer: one who has migrated from the world of academic 32 scholarship on Mozart specifically into the world of historically informed 1 1 performance (and for whom a book such as this is of immense value), though my 2 contextual reflections on Klorman’s book are not to be read as the pursuit of a 3 specifically HIP agenda for Mozart. 4 Klorman’s fundamental contention is that Mozart’s chamber music, like much 5 chamber music of its time, existed at least in part as an act of sociability: music as 6 music-making among friends. His work sensitively bridges the gap between music 7 conceived as a representation (visually, in a score) and music as lived experience in 8 performance – or in the act of listening – in real time. He offers numerous detailed 9 applications of a principle that music enacts. In this respect, he draws upon writing by 10 Nicholas Cook, who has repeatedly visited the capacity of music to be simultaneously 11 both artefact and behaviour. A recurrent theme in Cook’s writing has been the notion 12 of the musical score as a script (rather than a prescription). The dust jacket of one of 13 his most recent books puts it as follows: ‘Cook supplants the traditional musicological 14 notion of music as writing, asserting instead that it is as performance that music is 15 loved, understood, and consumed. This book reconceives music as an activity through 16 which meaning is generated in real time.’1 Some years earlier, Cook had argued that 17 performance could be viewed as a generator of social meaning, drawing in his thesis 18 upon interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly theatre studies, poetry reading 19 and ethnomusicology). Thus: 20 21 Whereas to think of a Mozart quartet as a ‘text’ is to construe it as a half-sonic, 22 half-ideal object reproduced in performance, to think of it as a ‘script’ is to see it 23 as choreographing a series of real-time, social interactions between players: a 24 series of mutual acts of listening and communal gestures that enact a particular 25 vision of human society, the communication of which to the audience is one of the 26 special characteristics of chamber music.2 2 1 2 Later he contextualizes this thought more broadly: 3 4 Instead of seeing musical works as texts within which social structures are 5 encoded we see them as scripts in response to which social relationships are 6 enacted: the object of analysis is now present and self-evident in the interactions 7 between performers, and in the acoustic trace that they leave. To call music a 8 performing art, then, is not just to say that we perform it; it is to say that music 9 performs meaning.3 10 11 The recognition that ‘music performs meaning’ is (or should be) of no small 12 consequence to a performer of this repertory. After all, performers communicate. If 13 what we communicate is meaningless, then we are clearly failing on some level: 14 either we fail to understand the music or we fail to enact it with a vitality that 15 responds to the narratives that unfold within it. What we communicate of those 16 narratives is not necessarily what we believe the composer’s ‘intention’ to have been, 17 but rather what we believe we can see within the music’s encoding on the page. This 18 follows careful study of scores, frequently in relation to other contextual information, 19 such as the understanding of form, harmony and counterpoint; of notational systems 20 and what they may have meant at a particular time and in a particular place; and also 21 of instruments of the period in which the work was composed (and of the settings in 22 which those instruments were played) for what they might tell us about the nature of 23 the music’s expressive potential. Somewhat serendipitously, our understanding of 24 what we see in and through the musical text builds into something that may be likened 25 to a picture that we form in our imagination (and which subtly alters over time, when 26 we return to the performance of a particular piece again and again). Likewise 3 1 serendipitous is any given rendition of that picture in performance, which may change 2 according to circumstance (for us, at least – and perhaps for the audience). For 3 performers, the idea that the doing of all these things (whether in our rehearsal 4 preparations or in concert) is actually the performing of our performer identities – in 5 other words, one kind of ‘meaning’ that music performs through our behaviours – is a 6 natural one and something to celebrate. 7 An attempt to get ‘under the skin’ of the kind of relationship that we 8 performers have with Mozart’s chamber music, one that reflects the kind of 9 discussions and debates that we have with the music and with ourselves in the 10 forming of that picture and – perhaps – the creation of meaning, is therefore welcome: 11 all the more so when it comes from the pen of an academic who understands Mozart’s 12 music both as a theorist and as a player. Klorman requires of us a substantial leap 13 beyond the signifying musical text: not so much what the music is, as where it might 14 be. For performers, it is the where that normally counts for most: music exists in the 15 making of it (Cook’s ‘choreographing a series of real-time, social interactions 16 between players’). This implies a central place for sociability within music-making, a 17 concept that dominates Klorman’s approach to Mozart’s chamber music, whether 18 from the historical or the analytical perspective. 19 20 21 <A>Exploring ‘the music of friends’ 22 23 Part 1 of Klorman’s exploration addresses the historical dimension of musical 24 sociability, seen through three important historical perspectives: ‘the music of 25 friends’, ‘chamber music and the metaphor of conversation’ and ‘private, public, and 4 1 playing in the present tense’. Klorman reveals a great deal about the nature of a 2 concert experience for Mozart and his listeners. On some occasions, it was a less 3 formal kind of event than today’s public rituals, freely flowing between different 4 musical genres, between professionals and amateur players (sometimes side by side), 5 and between musical performances and other forms of social activity. While such a 6 context for the music-making was rather different from the more reverential 7 expectations of present-day concert halls, it should be noted (as Klorman does) that 8 respectful silence of the auditors was frequently expected within these settings, for 9 instance in the salons of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, which Klorman references (p. 10 11 n. 15); indeed, Mozart, according to Michael Kelly, insisted on silence while he 11 played, breaking off if it was disturbed.4 Each of these early contextual chapters is 12 richly grounded in literature from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as 13 well as a host of recent literature – all sensitively applied. While Klorman’s prefatory 14 note to the reader advises that his (extensive) footnotes are not necessary to a 15 satisfactory appreciation of the main narrative text on the page, they repay close study 16 on several levels – most notably, perhaps, for the reader who is keen to approach the 17 writings of Sulzer, Koch, Reicha, Baillot, Momigny and a host of others in the 18 original languages. Nuanced discussions of terminology also appear here, along with 19 some of the nitty-gritty of interpretative action, for instance on the tendency within 20 the Franco-Italian tradition between c.1770 and c.1830 to evaluate music primarily in 21 melodic terms (p. 46 n. 54 records Berlioz’s somewhat dismissive report of his 22 father’s evaluation of one of his early flute quartets).

Load more