Musical Performance and Audiences

There is no universal agreement as to what constitutes a musical performance, for the nature of music-making and listening varies greatly from culture to culture. Similarly, the parameters of good performance are equally hard to measure. Many philosophers, historians, and performers have turned their attention to this problem, exploring varied issues of musical aesthetics and historical performance practice.

The quest for perfection

No matter what impetus—improvisation or score transmission—has produced a performance of art music, audiences attending these presentations carry with them a set of aesthetic criteria, ranging from specific personal preferences to broad awareness of cultural norms. Listeners evaluate a performance on the basis of their blended personal and collective attitudes, which allows for enormous variety in the perception of a single performance as good or bad. It is impossible for a performer to anticipate and respond to all the individual standards by which his performance might be judged; as Jerrold Levinson quipped, "For a listener who wears earplugs, a very loud performance is the best" (p. 382). Nevertheless, in most instances in which performers bring "to sound" a notated score, their faithfulness to that score is often a leading measure of their success.

Philosophers and critics disagree as to how to measure that faithfulness. The relative imprecision of much early Western notation forces performers to make many basic choices: if a surviving work contains only vocal parts, but iconography from the same time period shows instruments playing alongside singers, should a contemporary conductor choose to double Figure 6. Plans for a "Musick-Roome" (1676) by Thomas Mace. BY PERMISSION OF THE HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Figure 7. Manuscript excerpt from the oratorio The Song of Moses (1777) by Thomas Linley. BY PERMISSION OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, RM.21.H.9, FOL.106V the voices with instruments, despite no written indication to do so? Is this a better—or worse—performance than a presentation limited to voices alone? There has been a growing tendency in recent years to treat the score as sacrosanct, especially in repertories in which notation is increasingly exact. Many feel that when a musician exercises too much performance freedom, the original work's integrity is at risk of being lost. The philosopher Nelson Goodman takes this attitude to an extreme when he argues, "Since complete compliance with the score is the only requirement for a genuine instance of a work, the most miserable performance without actual mistakes does count as such an instance, while the most brilliant performance with a single wrong note does not" (p. 186). Although most listeners would disagree with Goodman's position, his view is in some ways at the heart of another controversial aspect of music: the goals of performance (or performing) practice.

Performance practice.

The last half of the twentieth century witnessed an increasing desire among many musicians to reenact performances of historical works as closely as possible to the way (we think) they were first presented. No one objects to the notion that it is often pleasurable to hear Johann Sebastian Bach's preludes and fugues performed on a harpsichord; the disagreements begin when we ask if it is still pleasurable (or desirable) to perform the same Bach works on a modern piano (see figure 8)—and if we should be allowed to use the pedal while doing so. Designating the attempts at exact reenactments of the past as "authentic" or "historically informed" (or "historically aware") has added heat to the debate. The problem, as Richard Taruskin and others have pointed out, is the invidious implication that a performer who does choose to play Bach on the piano is uninformed and that his performance is inauthentic or, worse, unaware. Moreover, as Paul Henry Lang recognizes, even the most exacting and thorough historical research will leave gaps that must be filled with "our own artistic beliefs and instincts"; he adds, "Unconditional conformity to authenticity in the interpretation of old music, in depending on archival fidelity, may fail in fidelity to the composer's artistic intentions" (p. 179). The conductor James DePreist argues that even living composers who are able to supervise rehearsals are inevitably surprised by the sound of their works in actual performance—"surprised," DePreist maintains, "because the gap between the musical blueprint, that is, the score, and the interpreted sound is a universe of options and potentialities" (p. 11). Looking at the issue of authenticity from another perspective, Peter Kivy discusses the challenge of creating historically aware listeners.

"Liveness" in performance.

In the past, there has been an inherent two-fold assumption among Westerners that a performance entails live presentation of music before live listeners. The second component of this view is not universal, as J. H. Kwabena Nketia explains in his study of African music: "A physically present audience … is not always necessary … since a performance may well be for the benefit of someone who may not actually be present, or simply for the enjoyment of the performers" (p. 33). With the advent of recorded and electronic sound, however, the traditional expectation of "liveness" in the actual presentation of music has also been challenged. Recordings usher in a new host of metaphysical questions: in the case of a multilayered, overdubbed sound creation generated privately in a studio, is there no actual "performance" at all? Or is the artist performing during the process of adding each layer and effect? Or does a performance occur when the final product is transmitted to a listener? Simon Frith argues for the latter condition when he says, "I listen to records in the full knowledge that what I hear is something that never existed, that never could exist, as a 'performance,' something happening in a single time and space; nevertheless, it is now happening, in a single time and space: it is thus a performance and I hear it as one" (p. 211).

As Philip Auslander notes, a parallel "authenticity" problem exists when a presentation purports to be a live performance, yet in actuality the performers are miming their actions to a prerecorded soundtrack. In the Milli Vanilli scandal of early 1990, the pop singing-dancing duo had won a "Best New Artist" Grammy award, yet it was eventually revealed that not only did they use prerecorded vocals in their concert appearances but they had not been the actual singers on their prizewinning recording. This discovery led not only to the rescinding of their Grammy Award but to widespread American legislation that requires performers who plan to lip-synch during concerts to indicate this fact on advertising posters and on concert tickets. For some listeners, however, this caveat begs the question whether such a performance is "genuine," and if it is truly as good as a completely live presentation. It is frequently the case that touring productions of Broadway shows use "canned" (prerecorded) orchestral music, rather than sustaining the expense of traveling with a pit orchestra. Not only does such economy make union orchestral musicians unhappy, but it destroys the potential for flexibility during individual performances of the vocal numbers; singers must "keep up" with the recording, and so cannot indulge in nuanced interpretative variations from show to show. Perversely, however, it is precisely to enjoy those idiosyncratic moments that many listeners continue to attend and support live performance. At the same time, in some forms of art music, such as Milton Babbitt's Philomel (1964), composers have created electro-acoustic works in which live musicians perform in coordination with a prerecorded tape or electronic soundtrack. Is a performance "better" when the tape and live music are combined by artistic choice rather than economic motivations? This dilemma is yet another of the many puzzles confronting the assessment of good performance.

Jonathan Dunsby offers the provocative suggestion that the same technological innovations that are complicating our current valuations of performance may also be the impetus for an enormous change in human aesthetic judgment, since they will allow us to overcome the transient nature of our short lifespans. "The past," he observes, "is silent," but "it is interesting to ask whether technology, in its sound recording, then vision and sound, holography, virtual reality, and who knows what may come next, is generating a fundamental shift in this situation." He adds,

We may be witnesses, the only direct witnesses there will ever be, to the beginning of the music of the future. Is it not easy to imagine that two thousand years or five thousand years from now people will say that Western music really only got going properly during the twentieth century from which distant time there date the earliest proper sonic and visual records, following that strange 'mute' early period of music history that spanned the Greeks … to, say, Mahler … ? (pp. 15–16)

Dunsby's notion is a stimulating one, and its implications for performance have not yet been fully addressed. Certainly the ability of mass communication to shrink the globe and to link people (and their musics) has long been recognized; we are entering an age that enables us to join performances of the past to the music of the future. Any contemporary performer who has been influenced by the ideas, techniques, and artistry of long-dead twentieth-century musicians is already aware of the tremendous power of recordings; our aesthetic views now need to catch up. Mankind is not immortal, but through recorded performance we may now be able to live long beyond our time.