The fate of melody is the first great differential feature of classi- cal music. The melody in this music does not express its fate but meets it, has it, finds it. Grasping the fate of melody, in all its luminous detail, is not something to do while listening to classi- cal music—it is listening to classical music. The fate of melody is what the composer composes; it is what the score inscribes.
Mention of the score brings us to the second great differential, the eternal dialogue of score and performance. The fate of melody is what the performance performs as well as what the composer composes. That fate is something the performers know through their playing—they follow the score, even memorize it— but it is also more than that. It is something they get to know through their playing. The performance of a score makes the fate of melody an event to be discovered and explored, not just to be observed, and as the performers get to know it so, too, do their lis- teners. What they find out may be altered or affected by both the particular qualities of the performance and the real or fictional
circumstances in which the music is heard. This process can have profound repercussions. It not just a peculiarity of classical music but another key to why classical music still matters.
One of the defining experiences of my musical life was my first encounter with Beethoven’s String Quartet no. 12 in Eb, op. 127,
performed live by the Juilliard String Quartet. I was in college at the time; I knew something about “late Beethoven” and the magic and elevation associated with the phrase, but I did not yet know this piece. The opening bars that night touched me with the force of a revelation. The whole quartet made an over- whelming impression that has only deepened over the years, but those opening bars were incomparable. They begin with deep, full, rich chords, filling up the resonant spaces above open fifths in the cello and viola with pure consonance, making a sound at once consoling and almost intimidating in its power and majesty. They continue, with a kind of blissful shudder on solo violin, into a melodic passage entwining all four voices with extraordi- nary tenderness and sweetness.
The combination plays out over the whole quartet, and it was just what I needed that night. I had come to the concert troubled in mind, lonely, more than a little angry and defensive, beset by unresolved difficulties in romance and friendship. I left feeling reconciled with the prospects of both success and failure in resolving my problems, and I still carry with me the memory of walking slowly across a broad expanse of fresh green lawn (it was early spring) lit by a providentially full moon that seemed to do for the landscape what the music had done for me. What I had heard, in those opening bars especially, was the ability of strong, almost violent depth of feeling to change in a moment to the
most rapturous tenderness. The contrast between the two was not a gulf but a span across which one could freely move.
I heard all this in the music; I still do. But in later years, after hearing the same music often, performed by many other groups, I came to realize that I heard these things not in the music alone but in that single and singular performance of it—something I just happened to need urgently, though I did not know that until the music sounded. The Juilliard bit into those opening chords with a ferocity barely contained by the consonant harmonies; they caressed the melody afterwards with a serenity and a confi- dence that was almost a fifth voice in the ensemble. The music affected me as deeply as it did, not as an abstract work, but as something that came alive for me just one particular night in an experience that could be revisited but never repeated.
So what touched me more, the music or the performance? At the risk of posing the question with another one invoked too often, how would I form the musical answer to Yeats’s famous version: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How shall we tell the dancer from the dance”?
The question is particularly pointed when asked of classical music. As we’ve noted before, this music maps its own perfor- mance with unusual fullness. Unlike performers in popular tra- ditions, classical performers cannot partly recompose the music in the act of playing it. Some limited exceptions aside, they can- not vary the music, embellish it freely, change its melodic shape, abridge it, expand it, change its tempo or instrumentation or harmony. They have to play the notes in the score. Classical music is an art of revisitation or reanimation; it brings back elapsed works in the same way that those works, within them- selves, bring back elapsed melodies.
This state of affairs has far-reaching consequences. The pos- sibility of repeatedly performing the same score in different ways and under different circumstances approximates the feeling of living in time. It endows the music with a lifelike sense, an ani- mate aura, almost a sentience. This is one of the sources of a quality we met with in the preceding chapter. As long as we want to keep rehearing it, the classical work takes on a virtual life sim- ilar to that of a fictional character whose slightly uncanny reality is in no way compromised by mere lack of existence. The work of music, though it has no physical form, assumes a tangible per- sonality, an individual identity with which a listener can form a genuine intimacy, whether to sympathize, identify, quarrel, or share. In that sense I have been living with Beethoven’s Quartet Op. 127 for a very long time, on intimate terms with it even when it is the furthest thing from my mind. The fact that such a musical work can never be fully present even in its richest appearance means that this intimacy cannot be closed and thus gives it grounds on which to thrive. The slight elusiveness that accompanies every performance is not a flaw, not a source of frustration, but a promise, a beckoning to listen on.
Part of the problem with the culture of classical music is that it receives all this with too much solemnity. It stifles its own energy with too much ceremony. But my experience with the Beethoven quartet was anything but ceremonious; it was visceral. And in that it was anything but unique. Being overwhelmed and shaken by a live performance is basic to the experience of such music. It seems doubtful that anyone could become fully absorbed in it without that experience to call on. The truth is that the quartet, for me, has always been whatever I heard that night, from which other encounters with both the score and its
performances are greater or lesser departures. That, too, is any- thing but unique. So if we want to know why, and how, classical music still matters, we have to ask about the relationship of score and performance. We need to know what it means when the energy of performance releases the energy bound in the score. We need to know how the energy embodied in the score inspires the performer with the power to tap it and be touched, even transfigured, by it. We need to know where this energy comes from, whom it addresses, and what it has to offer us.
The search for answers will eventually lead to some deeply felt music heard, not in the concert hall, but at the movies. This won’t happen for a while yet, but since the underlying connec- tion may not be obvious, a trailer seemed a good idea. The rationale will come in due course, but, logic aside, the route is pleasant to follow. No one needs an excuse to enjoy a movie. Performance is not supposed to affect the identity of a composi- tion. It is not supposed to be able to. We can recognize a work of music whenever we encounter the notes as written in the score. We can hear it as something separate when it is transcribed, arranged, or adapted; we can hear it as somehow intact regard- less of historical changes in instrument design, performance practice, sound recording, and the understanding of what fidelity to the score involves. The qualities of the work are supposed to be distinct from those of its performances. A particular perfor- mance may be boring, mediocre, exciting, revealing, transfigur- ing, and so on, but the music remains aloof. It is what it is in itself. What would happen if we thought otherwise? If we regard the musical score not as the inscription of an unchanging work but rather as a dramatic scenario, a play- or shooting script, along
lines recently suggested by Nicholas Cook, even the highly notated works that make up the classical canon change their character. If we accept a strong form of this argument, perfor- mance does not actualize or even interpret a prior musical “work” housed in notated patterns. Instead, the ways performance artic- ulates and exceeds notation constitute what the music “is” for the occasion on which it is heard.
It therefore makes no sense to understand a score as a repre- sentation of an ideal musical work independent of the various performance styles that have been or may be applied to the score. The same is true of individual performances, which, whether because of their context or their character or some combination of both, can utterly change the meaning or even the very identity of the musical work. We have been trained not to admit this, but anyone who has ever heard a classical piece used in an advertise- ment has proof that it’s true. And even in the concert or recital hall, the supposed work may not survive a lackluster or incompe- tent performance. It may not just “die” but not even be born.
Perhaps we should celebrate this. To anyone tired of the cult of the musical masterpiece, giving priority to performance is very appealing. It transfers authority from a gang of mummified Geniuses and their authorized representatives to a community of working and collaborating musicians. By doing so it also under- cuts the tiresome claim of classical music to be timeless. What counts as a meaningful performance changes with changing times. Performance is irredeemably historical.
But then, so are scores. And it is doubtful whether perfor- mance can simply take over the authority traditionally invested in classical scores. The centrality of immutable, authoritative, notated patterns is an institutional fact about classical music, a
part of its definition as a type. Without some prior interpretation of such patterns, even when they are obscure or ambiguous, the music simply won’t come to life; it will just be a lively automaton. The history of classical music is a history of practical idealiza- tion: of giving music an ideal form by treating it as if it had one. Throughout the nineteenth century, when the opportunity to hear orchestral music was rare, symphonies and concertos circu- lated widely in transcriptions for two pianos. People played and heard them for what was essential about the music, with which they often achieved an intimacy greater than anything available from later sound recordings of the full-dress versions. Such tran- scriptions, together with arrangements, occupy a gray area in which the musical work is both itself and not itself, present to the mind but absent to the senses.
Once recording began, the mind could fill in where the senses fell short. In the 78 rpm shellac recordings of the early twentieth century, the flat, scratchy sound of those same orchestral works and their regular interruption at four-minute intervals were largely a matter of indifference. People took the medium as transparent and marveled at the lifelikeness of the sound. In Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924), listeners to a phonograph on the eve of World War I “could scarcely believe their ears at the purity and faithful reproduction of the wood- wind color. A solo violin preluded whimsically; the bowing, the pizzicato, the sweet gliding from one position to another, were all clearly audible. . . . The vivid, consummate piece of music was reproduced in all [its] richness.” Mann’s description might just as well have come from the 1924 catalog copy for the Victor Talk- ing Machine Company’s famous Victrola: “Any [model] will play your kind of music, and play it as it ought to be played. You may
hear . . . the mighty strains of the symphony orchestra, the lone call of the forest songster, the thousand voices of the oratorio, [or] . . . the tremulous plea of the violin. . . . No distortion of tone is possible.”
(My own first encounter with Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony came in the basement of my grandparents’ home, which con- tained a late-model Victrola in a tall mahogany cabinet, just my height. I liked to stick my head between the massive lid and the turntable as I wound the crank and set the heavy tone arm on the platter, as if to come as close as I could to Nipper, the Victor dog whose image adorned the body of the machine on a little plaque. The sound came out of that body at the level of my torso, mag- nified by opening a pair of doors the way one would lift a piano lid. The symphony’s opening, two detached chords rapped out with neither ceremony nor apology, was thus literally visceral in its impact. To this day I can’t hear the chords without feeling a touch of the gravelly old sound rising up from my midsection. The music may otherwise have made little conscious impression on me—I was only eight or nine—but the dropping of the plat- ters certainly did, a dozen of them for the forty-five-minute recording. I expected each one to break as it fell, though none ever did. That was symphonic drama!)
The problem with making music ideal is the danger of idoliz- ing it. Classical music lovers have no monopoly on this mistake, but the music has certainly suffered from it—precisely by com- ing to seem insufferable. That impression is perhaps the biggest noncommercial barrier to the health of classical music today. The time is long past when this music automatically commanded deference. It seems stuffy and outdated to too many people because we insist on walking on eggshells in its vicinity. We talk
about it too timidly when we talk about it at all, and we listen to it too ceremoniously. We can no longer afford to do that, much less celebrate doing it. We don’t want solemnity from music, at least outside funerals or memorials. We don’t want the buttoned- up mannerisms of a bygone time. We want life.
Life: that’s what the score and performance want from each other. The question of their relationship is not a matter of author- ity or hierarchy: Which is on top? Thinking of it that way is just a bad habit. The question, rather, is how a performance brings a score to life. And since life is changeful, unpredictable, often unfathomable, this is also the question of how a performance transforms a score by animating it. Galatea is never quite what Pygmalion imagines her to be. In turn this entails the comple- mentary question of how a score—inanimate until sounded, even if only in memory or in a snatch of a tune hummed or whistled— imagines a kind of life to which it, and we, can aspire and to which any plausible performance must in some sense be answerable.
What’s needed, in other words, is a means for understanding performance as simultaneously an act of creation and reproduc- tion, a process that animates the spirit embedded in the ideal form of the score while at the same time reshaping that spirit in the act of bringing it to life. This is easy to say (what else would one say?), but it is hard to do and challenging to think about. Of course the formula is impossibly literal. Any actual performance will lean one way or the other, leave issues unresolved, exceed the mark here or default on it there. But this is not something to be regretted. Rather, it is precisely what keeps the score from hoard- ing too much or claiming too little authority. If we adopt as a goal, both as listeners and, if we play, as performers, the ideal of consulting the score but not venerating it, interpreting its fixed
features without mystifying them, the results, though inevitably imperfect, will carry the marks of our involvement, our values, our feelings, and our understanding. And these are the marks we need to find in the music for it to find us where we live.
This search is shaped by the unexpected force of a simple fact we have met with before but by no means exhausted. The per- formance is supposed to repeat the composition in every detail— every single one. As we’ve also noted, just what this mandate means has changed over time along with performance practices, aesthetic values, and technology, but the underlying ideal has remained reasonably—indeed, remarkably—durable. The expec- tation of this all-embracing repetition is transformative. It creates the frame of reference within which the music’s details come to matter, in which they become rich with significance the way a color deepens in just the right light or a sensation of warmth or excitement or desire spreads over the surface of the body. In part the composer crafts the detail to do this; in part the expectation of repetition, plus the memory of it, plus the desire for it, elicits the latent power of detail to do this and thus guides the com- poser’s hand.
The relationship between the ideal and the actual forms of the music, between the musical score and its performances, is essen- tial to this effect. This relationship is paradoxical. It cannot be otherwise. The performances must realize the music exactly, in the sense that they are expected to comply with whatever the score explicitly requires. But they must never do so in just one way. Ideally speaking, no two performances should sound just alike. The music ideally embodied by the classical score has an identity, even a personality, but it has no location, no material form. It is—does not “express” but is—spirit, energy, impulse,
yet unlike these other impalpable, half-metaphoric entities the