Introduction
The education of a classical violinist – or mine at least, and I see scant evidence that anything else holds today – begins based on a mainstream Romantic ideal consisting of works, geniuses, and concepts of musical authenticity. This is quite useful as a tool to cajole the young violinist into learning the essentials of tone production and playing styles but is at odds with a questioning attitude towards normative traditions that might allow the musician greater interpretive freedom after gaining that technique. While the historically informed performance (HIP) movement was an early, important manifestation of this sort of questioning attitude, the experimental/avantgarde tradition, which has run parallel to these others from the early twentieth century, has not often been applied to the interpretation of historical music.
The experimental tradition does not assume conventional tone production or historical authenticity: instead it is asking the musician to interpret the symbols on the page according to their own artistically informed predilections and contexts to produce new performances emanating from the artwork, thereby transferring more responsibility for the performance from the composer to the musician. To what extent might the experience of the performer be allowed to contribute to the performance of a historical work?
As part of a three-year artistic research project in Stockholm, I have been looking into ways of using interpretive techniques gleaned from the study of new music and applying these to historical works. This article describes some existing research that questions the traditional interpretive paradigm, along with the ontology of a musical work and its interpretation, and concludes with a case study, “The Labyrinth,” showing one way that these sorts of attitudes can be put into practice for a genre of music to which they seldom, if ever, have been applied.
Background: How Did I Get Here? The Why, Part 1
When I was a violin student in the mid-1980s I had the opportunity to spend two weeks at a master class with the famed violinist Henri Temianka (1906–1997). He was then around 80 years old and had been labelled a wunderkind in the early part of the twentieth century, performing and recording classic salon repertoire by composers such as Pablo Sarasate (1844–1908) and Henryk Wieniawski (1835–1880). One common feature in the works of these composers is the coda, which the violinist traditionally plays almost impossibly fast.
After I attempted to perform one of these for him, he told me I was playing too fast, and related a story about when he recorded a similar piece. The 78 rpm records of the time had very limited lengths, and they were recorded in one take directly onto the master. So, when he came to the coda, the recording engineer would note how much time was left on the record and start waving his arms for Temianka to play faster so that the piece would fit in one take. Otherwise, they would have to do it all over again. Temianka himself, if he were to choose what he felt was the most musical tempo, preferred to play the pieces more slowly.
This story, and the idea of an extramusical reason being the basis for an interpretive decision, contradicted all the violin teachers I had ever had, who had taken recordings such as Temianka's as proof of the proper way to perform pieces from this tradition. I had, and still have, enormous respect for all these teachers, who took what their time and circumstances gave them and fashioned lives communicating music to a great many people. For more than ten years, ever since I began studying the violin, I had also believed absolutely everything they ever said to me. This might sound strange to a layperson, but you need to understand that a violinist schooled in the classical tradition must begin learning the instrument at an age (for me, at six years old, although many start even earlier) that is far too young for anything resembling critical thought. What usually happens is that we follow our teacher’s instructions to the letter, since we really have no idea what we are doing. And as we progress, we continue practicing because we are reinforced by compliments from our teachers, and other figures of authority.
To be honest, if I hadn’t done exactly what they said in the beginning, I would never have been able to gain the necessary technique to become a violinist at all. But there is a difference between technical and artistic instruction. And there comes a point when the impetus for your continuing to practice the instrument needs to become something more than teachers telling you that you are doing well. After hearing Teminaka’s story, I was forced to wonder if absolutely everything my teachers had told me had always been correct.
For me, this realization was as earth-shattering as that fundamental step in growing up – discovering that my parents were not infallible. Temianka himself did not seem to think it possible (or even desirable) to change this interpretive paradigm since it had become, no matter the reason, the accepted way of playing works like this. The paradigm also obviously served him quite well in his own musical mission, so why would he question it? Still, this realization begged the question as to whether other aspects of a musical interpretation might be based on possibly faulty information, or whether it could be worthwhile for me to wonder if I would want to play in this manner. Why was there seemingly only one paradigm that was accepted as the “proper” way of approaching these works? Who or what benefited from a piece being performed in a way that was not necessarily the most musically relevant for the performer? Is the composer the only true interpreter of their own music?
Mainstream Schooling
It was soon apparent that these questions could be applied to the interpretation of everything that a violinist learned in the mainstream Western classical music repertoire, if the composer had been deceased for some time. There was a tradition of performance praxis handed down from teacher to teacher, but when I asked my teachers for the origin of this knowledge, these traditions usually began either with a recording made long after the work was composed or simply because it had worked for the teachers themselves.
Learning to play this music in a normative manner is important for the assimilation of the technique necessary to making the instrument sound the way the player wants. A young classical violinist, no matter what part of the world they come from, has a surprisingly similar path of studies and etudes that they follow in their quest to be able to play the instrument: from Henry Schradieck (1846–1918) to Hans Sitt (1850–1922) to Federigo Fiorillo (1755–1823) to Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766.1831) to Jakob Dont (1815–1888) to Pierre Rode (1774–1830) to Niccoló Paganini (1782–1840). The concert pieces that follow these studies are steeped in the same playing techniques and all are taken, as you can see by looking at the dates of birth, from a very narrow period of music history.
But then, this considerable amount of technique was not used as a means for freeing the musician to make informed choices about interpretation. Instead, it served as an end in itself, to propagate a tradition that primarily benefited those who had already achieved positions of prominence within the artistic and/or academic community – those who John Cage calls the “priests” (Sinker, 1997, p. 210), and who Daniel Leech-Wilkinson calls “gatekeepers” (Leech-Wilkinson, 2020, p. 82), as opposed to what Cage called the “Protestant” questioners within the realm of experimental music (Kostelanetz & Cage, 1987; Sinker, 1997, p. 210). Cage identified himself with the latter group, whose experiments questioned the prevailing musical dogma of the time. The concept of “authenticity” was used by the priests/gatekeepers as a positivistic cudgel whose meaning could be boiled down to “following the mainstream.”
Swimming With and Against the Mainstream
There are many reasons why students are not encouraged to abandon “mainstream” interpretation (see, e.g., Dreyfus, 1983, p. 305). Though “mainstream” is the adjective I use here to describe Western classical music performance styles, I might prefer Leech-Wilkinson’s use of the word “normative” (Leech-Wilkinson, 2020), with its connotations of power structures that exist apart from simple economic considerations.
One of the more important reasons for following norms is to give the student the capacity to find gainful employment after graduation, which must be seen as one of the main goals of an instrumental teacher, though perhaps not the goal of all students. Although questioning these norms was not encouraged during my own musical schooling, I could not help but notice that there was quite a difference in the attitudes to music taught within other genres at the conservatory. Certain forms of jazz and HIP, which by the 1980s was accepted as part of the curriculum at the conservatory to a much greater extent than, say, experimental music, all asked different questions from those I was brought up with.
One might say that both Early Music and early modernism occupy nearly analogous positions with regard to the Mainstream. Whereas the avantgarde strode forward in advancing the cause of historical time, Early Music took an equidistant leap in the opposite direction (Dreyfus, 1983, p. 305).
Reflecting on the journey travelled from that beginning within HIP, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson wrote in 1984:
One of the many promising developments in attitudes towards the performance of early music is that an increasing number of scholar-performers are prepared to admit that most of what they do in constructing a performance style is – of necessity – of their own invention (Leech-Wilkinson, 1984, p. 13).
Both modernism and HIP were seen as supplying an alternative to the “mainstream,” but modernism’s preoccupation with the concept of an immutable musical work hindered its development towards giving the performer more agency in the performance of a work.
I did in fact end up spending a few years performing in some early music contexts after graduation (and noted that several of my colleagues there also performed new music, reinforcing the idea that these were styles that appealed to those who questioned the mainstream). I was attracted by these attempts at freedom from convention without ignorance of tradition, which corresponded well with the field to which I eventually devoted my career, that of newly written notated art music. It is however fair to ask why I ended up abandoning the early music scene for that of experimental music? Was it the concert situations? The audience? The repertoire? The occasional wearing of wigs? I had no problems with any of that (save perhaps for the wigs), so it may have had to do with this:
But what is “Early Music?” Certainly not only the set of musical objects comprising the older repertories of European music. For this definition would gloss all too neatly over the first question of a theoretical inquiry: namely, why has a sector of “serious” music culture devoted itself to the recovery of forgotten repertories, instruments, and practices? It is therefore more useful to define Early Music as a late twentieth-century ensemble of social practices instead of restricting it to the works which occasion the interest. To be blunt: Early Music signifies first of all people and only secondarily things. (Dreyfus, p. 298.)
In-Groups
Where did I go when I wanted to hear music? What kind of music did I listen to? Who did I hang out with when I wasn’t working? I think in retrospect it should have been obvious to me that I had always wanted to be a part of an experimental music scene. I had more composer friends than musician friends, and I preferred alternative concert venues such as the new music society Fylkingen to churches and concert halls. Even now, when I conceive of a project, it is the four walls of the black box of Fylkingen that I see in my mind’s eye as I wonder how to present something in an interesting way. Derrida (1987) writes about the “Parergon,” or the frame around the artwork that defines where the artwork is situated. For me, experimental music spaces and audiences are the framework within which I decide if something is worth doing at all.
So perhaps this is why I ended up working with new music. We are all part of our own “ensemble of social practices.” HIP has one set of interests concerning historicity, authenticity, and a certain kind of music chosen for performance, with an audience to match it. Experimental music has one that questions in effect everything, and results in concerts that cannot easily be categorized, as well as an audience who prefers this uncertainty to the reinforcement of cultural norms. And mainstream music, whether the repertoire is old or new, has its own (much larger) in-group and set of social practices, consisting of institutions creating concerts designed to draw the largest subsection of the art music audience while keeping divergent opinions to a minimum: a secure space for the reinforcement of norms.
I was drawn to music created and performed by people I enjoyed being around, who I found interesting, and with whom I could engage in what I felt were honest conversations about the questions that concerned me most. From the moment I discovered that this world existed, this pull put me squarely in the avantgarde experimental camp. Which is not to say that some well-crafted examples from any one of these practices cannot be appreciated by others outside the in-group, but that an authentic interpretation seems to begin with honest work that searches for authenticity within one’s own experience and social practice.
Back to the Future!
Fast forward 35 years and all of this led to my starting ““Back to the Future!”, a three-year research project financed by the Swedish Research Council and housed at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm that includes four researchers (myself, the pianist Rei Nakamura, and the composer/performers Mattias Petersson and Ida Lundén). We are all classically trained musicians who have in different ways chosen lives within new music – in other words, our own little in-group. We have been looking for alternatives to the way historical music has traditionally been interpreted based on what we know as musicians in new music. And what do we know?
Well, I have noticed that the way I go about interpreting a piece of new music is very different from what I did when I played the mainstream repertoire. Work with new music for me involves using what I know about life, art, philosophy, tone production and technique to figure out what kind of content I might be able to communicate, and then being given the responsibility to assimilate this into a performance. Work with mainstream music for me usually involved trying to sound like something or someone else, either a recording or another musician or a teacher. As stated, this was very important for my technique, but I feel now that I was learning that technique so I could apply it to other kinds of music.
But as our group began to research, we started to realize that we were getting into ontological territory. “What is an original?” “What is a piece of music?” “What are we supposed to do today with the information found on the pages of these works written a few hundred years ago?” “How can we be, well, authentic?”
There is that term again, “authenticity.” As part of HIP’s attempts to break free of the mainstream, researchers such as Peter Kivy attempted to define authenticity in a way that differed from the vague assurances about musical truth I got from my teachers when he formulated four ”notions of authenticity”:
- faithfulness to the composer’s performance intentions;
- faithfulness to the performance practice of the composer’s lifetime;
- faithfulness to the sound of a performance during the composer’s lifetime;
- faithfulness to the performer’s own self, original, not derivative or an aping of someone else’s way of playing (Kivy, 1995, pp. 6–7).
Note the shift in terms from “authenticity” to “faithfulness.” Although Kivy usefully sees authenticity as connected with performance, the first three of these notions appear to refer to the conservation of some sort of idea of an objective “work.” In fact, very similar notions exist within the realm of art history when discussing the restoration and conservation of historical objects (Ex, 1993, p. 94, as cited in van Saaze, 2013, pp. 50–51): “Choosing an ‘ahistorical’ or anachronistic treatment is considered opposite to a treatment that has as its aim to keep the historical authenticity intact” (van Saaze, p. 51). But is keeping historical authenticity intact what a performer should always be expected to do? And how does this resonate with Kivy’s fourth notion, being faithful to oneself, for example if one happens to be an experimental musician? When Richard Taruskin writes that “music has to be imaginatively recreated in order to be retrieved, and here is where conflicts are likely to arise between the performer's imagination and the scholar's conscience” (Taruskin, 1982, p. 343), he puts his finger on the friction between these two competing truths: that of the historical scholar, whose interest understandably lies in the researchable object, and that of the performer, whose interests lie in the objectless and contemporary act of performance. Brian Ferneyhough went so far as to proclaim that in an interpretation of new music “[t]he performer recreates the work in his own image, not according to some arbitrary process of homogenization via the academy” (Ferneyhough, pp. 318–319). So in order to continue looking at the limits of what recreation could look like, our group had to begin by looking into the concept of the “work” itself.
Ontology of a Work
We took our cue from Lydia Goehr, who began a discussion of the work concept in “The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works” (2007), where she posited that the concept of a “work” emerged around 1800; before this, music was not seen in terms of a work, but more as a process (Goehr, 2007, Preface, p. v). This corresponds well to Christopher Small’s famous coining of the word “musicking” (Small, 1998), which involves the entire situation around performance as being part of the musical process. This is corroborated from an entirely different direction by another seminal work, the economist Jacques Attali’s “Noise” (1985), which also posits that the concept of the musical work began around 1800. He however traces its motive to something extramusical: as being a harbinger of capitalist thinking, the bourgeoisie, and the monetization of music through the creation of a hitherto non-existent product that could be bought and sold. Capitalist thinking still affects musicking in all sorts of ways, and to my mind still seems to be the primary driving force behind the prevalence of mainstream interpretations in the music world, no matter the school or genre.
After this preliminary stage, we began to investigate the ontology of interpretation itself. What I see as the most extreme post-interpretation position to date comes from an essay by Paolo de Assis, “Virtual Works – Actual Things” (2018). Here, he parses Deleuze to explore more deeply what an original "work" (he draws a line through the word “work” in this essay) may have for affordances. He ends up describing these affordances as “a multiplicity made of virtual topological singularities” (de Assis, p. 62), in which the performance is not external to the composition but part of what the work affords in a continual process over time. Simply put, I read this as meaning that anything connected to a historical work becomes part of a network of associations that has the capacity to inform future performances (which become in turn part of this network).
De Assis uses this reasoning to perform works that take in several aspects of what went into a work, such as texts and other musical works that may have informed it, as well as reflections on the work after the fact. This associates to Taruskin’s idea that a historical work performed today has been “mediated by all that has been thought and said about it since opening night, and is therefore incomparably richer than it was” (Taruskin, 1996, p 267). But is there anything more we can do with all the time that has elapsed from the composition of a piece of music to its performance?
Transposition
While de Assis adds to the amount of information that can be seen as part of the “work,” Lucia d’Errico introduces another perspective on how a musician might contribute their own knowledge to a work of historical music. In the essay “Aberrant Likenesses” (d’Errico, 2018), she traces a process also inspired by Deleuze that she calls “transposition,” in which she takes a piece of historical music and creates a performance that is intimately connected with the purported “original” but includes electronic music and improvisation. Here, the musician herself takes more of the initiative in creating the source material for a performance using historical music.
The key point for me in this essay is her characterization of an “executant” as one who “removes him- or herself from the here and now in order to encounter an experience external to their own, disconnected from it both in time and in space” (d’Errico, 2018, p. 69). This is contrasted with her process of “transposition,” which gives the performer another sort of responsibility for the performance, one “underlining the impossibility of an objective approach to written music and positing faithfulness towards such a work as ultimately unattainable” (d’Errico, 2018, p. 71).
In my reading, de Assis and d’Errico’s two essays are interrelated: the former is attempting to expand the available information connected to the piece, while the latter is attempting to expand the possible information available to the performer, but they both are looking towards informed alternatives to the mainstream.
These immensely important steps open a line of inquiry: can the same sorts of affordances be applied to the interpreter themself as an equal part of the musicking process? This could then mean that anything an interpreter can hear or envision while studying the information in and around a score could be part of an interpretation of the work, and all of that interpreter’s personal and musical experiences would be as acceptable a material for the interpretation as research into the work itself. This would allow for almost anything to be performed as a musician’s interpretation, if it is the result of grounded work that can be traced to an honest process. Which is not that far off from a traditional definition of interpretation, even though it rarely seems to happen that way, since the range of information that is deemed suitable for this purpose is so narrow.
Role Playing vs. Subjectivity
My own attempts at mainstream interpretation when I was young usually connected to a mental picture of something previously created and external to myself, which I was unconsciously trying to copy. I would use my technique to make minute changes to what in effect was an image of a previously recorded version of a piece. It is a bit like role playing, using one’s abilities to mirror an ideal that comes from preconceptions around what music symbolizes, to fit into a particular market or “social practice.” This is totally understandable, and for those of us who are comfortable with reinforcing existing structures, this is also the most usual path towards a career in music.
New music interpretation, instead, often consists of performing pieces that have not yet been recorded and have less of an established market. Collaboration between composers and performers is often encouraged during the process of creation. These performances are also directed towards a set of social practices entirely different from those of the mainstream. So, when working on a piece of new music, I look at the symbols on the page and try to find a way to interpret them in a manner that allows me to take responsibility for presenting a certain kind of content for a certain kind of audience.
When I was performing that Sarasate piece for Temianka almost 40 years ago, I was in effect trying to play the role of a young Temianka, a person far removed from my own experience, and doing it badly. I was “disconnected … both in time and in space” (d’Errico, 2018, p. 69). New music gave me an opportunity to leave some of those codes and distances behind so that I could present something in a way that I felt was more honest (to myself).
A “blank slate” is impossible to attain, since decisions about the information on a page of music always involve considerations about venues, audiences, fellow musicians, and a relationship to a composer, but in many kinds of experimental music the musician is entrusted with such considerations to a far greater degree than in mainstream interpretation. The concept of the blank slate is mostly useful for me as an invitation to interpret the symbols on a page as a starting point to conceive of something that I might want to perform. This invitation is almost never extended to a performer in mainstream Western classical music because so much is taken for granted in mainstream performance, not least the reinforcement of cultural hierarchies to aid the marketing of tickets to a particular audience; role playing seems to be expected of the performer in a mainstream context. (Of course, it is also eminently possible to play new music in a manner that reinforces cultural hierarchies and extramusical expectations by playing the role of the “new music performer” as executor of the composer’s avantgarde “genius.”
Straight vs. Crooked
I personally believe that there are two main target audiences for musical content. One is happiest when hearing a reinforcement of what it already knows, and the other (smaller) one is happiest when finding out that there are still things it still has not thought of yet. The content a musician prepares is generally directed towards one or the other kind of listener, and the differences in these attitudes towards musicking are for me a more fruitful categorization than the genre, supplying another “parergon” to aid interpretation and listening.
Taruskin calls these two performance styles “straight” and “crooked,” where straight is desirable “if what you want out of music is something to sit back and relax to,” while crooked consists of “highly specific, unclassifiable, personal and intensely subjective imaginings” (Taruskin, 1996, p. 317). When I as a human and musician listen to any works of music, historical or otherwise, I definitely hear something other than the “straight” version in my head, no matter how the piece is being performed. It is this “something” that I attempt to communicate when I perform, and the standard that I set for any interpretation I choose to make.
Left unsaid in Taruskin is how far one might be able to go before he would no longer define a performance as an honest interpretation. However, if a musician wants to play music in a manner that avoids showcasing “an experience external to their own” as d’Errico has written above, it follows that it should then be possible for a musician to use their experience as a new music musician, it being part of their embedded knowledge, as a tool to try and prepare scores for performance. This may involve different levels of technologies and changes to the score, but the basic idea is the same: to play something that feels relevant to the musician and context, i.e., not to play a role but to be (faithful to) oneself. To be “authentic.”
Some of the works we are creating as part of our research project take quite a few liberties with the information provided by the score. For example, the electronic composer Mattias Petersson is using a technique he calls “rePatching” to isolate the four strings of the violin as a sort of analogue synthesiser patch in order to recreate Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. Rei Nakamura is creating a menu concept where the audience may “order” different playing techniques and interpretive aspects for a piece by Bach, outsourcing musical choices to the listener. Rei and I are performing a version of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata that consists of the artefacts remaining from three different broken vinyl records as a reassembled collage.
To isolate one simple strategy for interpretation along these lines and how that might progress, I take as a case study a solo piece for violin, in which I use my experience as a musician in new music to inspire an interpretation that diverges from the presumed “original” without actually changing any notes.
Case study: The Labyrinth
I have a memory of being very taken with a concerto of Pietro Locatelli (1695–1764) performed by Susanne Lautenbacher that I heard on the radio when I was about twenty years old, and I still remember the experience as special. The recording was most likely with the Mainz Chamber Orchestra and Günter Kehr, although I have no idea if what I heard then was that exact recording. So I looked through his music for the first time in a long while and was reminded that he had written a group of 25 caprices called “The Art of the Violin,” most of which double as the cadenzas in his twelve concertos. These cadenzas were used as bow etudes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but were not seen as much more than that musically, when taken by themselves. I began going through them all and landed on Number 23, subtitled “The Harmonic Labyrinth.” It has an introductory text saying “Easy to enter, difficult to leave,” which I found poetic on many levels. I also looked up the word “caprice” and found this from an old French dictionary:
“CAPRICE, is also said of pieces of Poetry, Music, & Painting, which succeed rather by the force of genius, than by the observation of the rules of the art.”
(Furetière, “Dictionnaire universel” 1690; loosely translated from the French by Google.)
This was a helpful piece of information. Especially if we agree to replace the word “genius” with, say, “invention,” so that we can avoid an unfortunate paradigm. It is in many ways “the rules of the art” that I set out to question here, so “caprice” fits well. Now, was there anything about the life of the composer that could aid me?
Unfortunately, not much is known about Locatelli’s life, but most sources agree that he was a prototype for what later became the mythical Paganini, a soloist who travelled the world and had a legendary technique (Berg, 1922, p. 186). Born in 1695 in Bergamo, Locatelli was perhaps (but not certainly) a student of Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) for a time. He then toured extensively in Italy and Germany before moving to Amsterdam in 1729. At the time Amsterdam was the main city for music publishing in Europe and this appears to have been part of his reasoning for settling there (Dunning & Koole, 1964, pp. 54–59). After moving to Amsterdam, he only held soirees for rich people and amateurs in his own home and did not invite other professional violinists to listen to him (Dunning & Koole, 1964, pp. 54–59). His technique was described as superb, but most listeners thought his tone was scratchy and not as sweet as the slower French violinists (Heartz, 1998, p. 123). So, I liked him immediately, and I decided to embark on a collaborative project with this long-dead composer in the same way that I do with living composers.
Collaborations With Composers Living and Dead
Many of the hundreds of pieces that I have commissioned over the past 25 years contain collaborative aspects, but in my most recent projects I have gravitated more towards entirely collaborative work. Of these, no other project is more collaborative than the duo I have with the electronic musician (and co-researcher) Mattias Petersson. Since 2004 we have performed as a duo for violin and live electronics called “there are no more four seasons” (www.nomoremusic.se) in which we share the responsibilities for creation and performance equally by taking existing material and communicating back and forth both conceptually and musically before actually beginning the rehearsal process. In short, our work consists of working and reworking existing materials, usually but not exclusively taken from the annals of historical music, until we feel that we can present a result for an audience as something authentically ours.
We decide first upon a foundational material, a “found object” if you like, and then we send both conceptual and musical suggestions to one another over a period of months, reacting to the resulting sound from each other and finding new ways of creating and playing material that we feel “fits” what each wants to do. This fit involves our own predilections and embedded likes and dislikes, the kinds of music we ourselves listen to, what we feel about the context of art music performance – basically, who we are as people, not as representatives of anything else.
I thought it might be interesting to use some of the questions and processes that we employ as a duo within the context of a solo (re)interpretation. To make this happen I would simply have to treat the composer as a partner, using my conscience to guide me. Not about what the composer may or may not have preferred, since then we get back into the whole ontology of a “work” again, but about the ideas I use on the piece being strong enough to bear the weight of the material and create an authentic performance emanating from it.
Editors and Gatekeepers
So, I began by looking for material, which in this case was as many different versions of the score to Caprice 23 as I could find. There turned out to be four or five that were all somewhat different. The most common version was edited by Édouard Nadaud (1900, p. 46). Moderato is the tempo, mf cantando, and he wants the first tone to be lengthened. This was a bow exercise, most likely not meant for public consumption.
Then there is an earlier version by Jean-Delphin Alard (Alard, 1868, p. 2) from 1868. Allegro moderato, tempo 116 beats per minute, and the motto is shown: “Facilis aditus, difficilis exitus.” The same sequence of notes, but here he tells us to “keep the 4th finger down,” so this is a combined bow and left-hand exercise. No dynamics, but a line showing the original notes, which is a nice touch.
There is yet another version by Romeo Franzoni printed in 1917 that supplies two alternatives (Franzoni, 1917, pp. 62, 66). Still Allegro moderato, mf, same sequence, but the beats per minute is down to 108.
Then the second version is at 120 beats per minute, with the notes in a somewhat different order. I would think the tempo is chosen to fit the pattern that the editor chose, which is a little different from the earlier one: 16th triplets spiccato with no open strings, and then another variant using open strings with no spiccato.
It seems obvious that these tempi were chosen according to what would be comfortable for the editor himself (always a him) to play the bowings. Of course, this differs from violinist to violinist and bow to bow; it has nothing to do with any musical choices. A violinist who learns this piece, in order to be “correct,” is taught to play a tempo that might not be best for their own body but was chosen for the body and bow of another violinist, in other words, for something other than immutable musical reasons.
Then there is a version by Ferdinand David in an edition from 1903 (David & Petri, 1903, p. 50) with one of the same patterns used in Franzoni but spiccato this time, no beats per minute marking, simply moderato again, and this time forte.
After listening to these versions, you might agree with me that they all ended up sounding more like bow exercises than pieces for performance. While some mainstream violinists might be able to pull off playing this way for their target group, I just could not envision performing this for mine. I had trouble figuring out what to do with Caprice 23 without feeling like I was an executant, moving away from our time, and from myself. Had this been a collaboration with Mattias Petersson I would have sent all these samples back, and he would have agreed with me that they were not fit for performance.
But then I found a facsimile of Locatelli’s handwritten score (Locatelli, 1733, p. 89) and realized that I did not need to look at anything else.
A minor epiphany
This was all the information I needed to play a piece. Interestingly, there is nothing here really in the way of musical instruction besides the words “arpeggio” and “caprice.” The lack of information is itself a tacit suggestion that the musician take more responsibility for the sound than they would in any of the later editions, and the shape of the notes was much more suggestive to me than the stern typefaces of the nineteenth century, redolent with power structures remembered from my childhood violin lessons. But you know how when you stare at something long enough, its original meaning can shift and easily turn into something else? Well, I stared at it, as is usual when I work on a piece, and eventually saw this in my mind:
Of all the possible associations I could have made to other pieces, by Locatelli or Vivaldi or Corelli or whomever, I ended up seeing notes from 1964, well over two centuries later. These are the first two measures of Terry Riley’s “In C” (Riley, 1964), widely regarded as the first example of what would become known as the American Minimalist tradition. Since I am a musician in new music I have performed, conducted, and studied the piece. My personal experience made this association possible when I looked at Locatelli’s handwritten notation.
If I had never heard or studied anything outside of the period in which Locatelli wrote his work, I would probably not have had this idea, perhaps instead working with tempi, intonation, or tone colour (maybe honouring Locatelli’s scratchy tone in some way). But since I have studied the sorts of music that I have, a particular set of possibilities opened themselves up to me, most obvious perhaps being that of repetition. After that, it was impossible to unthink it. It suddenly seemed possible to conceive of a performance where the textures became more important than the harmonic progressions, in much the same way that “In C” (and much new music) works. If I began by repeating the measures enough times, I might be able to find a version that could shift the emphasis from bow technique and turn the piece into something that I could play for an audience as a piece of new music.
Practical Application of Alternative Strategies
So, I started working with what could be accomplished simply by repeating measures. Just playing the measures twice each accomplished nothing worthwhile, but when I started playing them more, like eight times each, something started happening with the music, and it became somewhat more recognizable as something I could perform. Repeating measures enough times took more of the emphasis away from the rather pedestrian technical and harmonic qualities of the piece and shifted focus more towards the texture, which allowed me to do what I usually do when I work with non-tonal music: to work with tone colour and dynamics as a kind of motor. It also gave me the opportunity to highlight some of the stranger aspects of the facsimile, like the sections in the middle when the piece sits on the same almost impossible chord for far too long:
But then the question became how many times to repeat each measure? Repeating each bar four or eight times was too regular, so the process became trivial. Fewer than that caused the performance to become too predictable. Repeating a ridiculous number of times, say, 25, 30, or 100, could have been interesting, but it might well lose all resemblance to a piece of performative music, moving towards a sound installation. And besides, there might well be a physical limit to how long I could continue bowing the piece. I tried playing four and five measures alternating and it resulted in about a ten-minute performance, but it was still a predictable enough pattern to foreground the sense of harmonic progression, instead of shifting focus towards what was actually happening in the moment. Then I thought of Cage’s randomizing procedures and that it might be possible to decide on a random number of measures to play each time. But the question remained, what would the span of measures be to choose between?
Well, I could have used the I Ching I suppose, but it turns out that the piece had 143 measures. If I played each measure between once and 143 times it might be cool, but the median would then be 72 measures and the work would take about 280 minutes, so it would likely also be the last piece I ever performed using my bow arm.
But 143 is also eleven times thirteen. So, if I were to distribute the repeats between one and thirteen an equal number of times at a tempo of 120 bpm it would mean that I would play each of these amounts of repeats eleven times spread throughout the piece, and it would turn into a crisp 25-minute performance – long enough to lose one’s bearings in but short enough to keep my arm from falling off. And if I were to distribute those measures randomly throughout, many things could conceivably happen: for example, those identical middle measures I just showed could be repeated as many as 39 times or as few as three, which would definitely make for a different experience each time. One solution would then be to play the measures randomly and try to keep the rules regarding repeats in my head. The problem if I chose myself would be that the number of times I repeated something might be affected by how I felt in that moment, or what was easier to play, which would defeat part of what I wanted to accomplish.
I could perhaps construct a randomized sequence according to these principles and write them down:
But in this case, I would be deciding on a single version that is just as static as the versions I wanted to leave behind. It would then also be possible to practice the piece and prepare, which may become too comfortable, and still runs the risk that I consciously or unconsciously decide to perform the more difficult measures fewer times. So, it would be nice if the pattern were different each time I performed. So I would not be able prepare that exact version, it would also be nice if the number of repeats of each measure was generated in real time. It would supply a certain nerve to the performance and accomplish something dear to me, which is to create the feeling that a performance is happening for the first and only time. After deciding this, I remembered an event in the piece “Conceptio” by Peter Ablinger (1959–) for snare drum and radio that must have been a sort of inspiration.
The piece has six movements, and the drummer primarily plays a quiet drum roll every now and then while the radio plays static. But then, at one point during any one of the movements, the drummer is instructed to whack the rim extremely loudly. The instructions say that once the drummer plays that sound, they may not play it again for the rest of the piece, and that they may never again play the note in that same movement if they ever perform the piece again. (There is also the option of not performing the note at all in a performance.) This knowledge gives each performance the feeling of being the only time it might ever happen, and the rim sound is given a whole new meaning.
Why not only allow each possible pattern to be played once? And why not ensure that I do not know which pattern will be performed that day? I spoke with the composer and programmer Fredrik Olofsson, who created an app that scrolls through the score both for myself and on a screen for the audience as I perform. The number of measures to be played is generated randomly, and only a few measures are shown at a time, so I find out the number of times I am to play each measure in real time. The distribution of the repeats is new for each new iteration; any measure may be played one to thirteen times, eleven times over, creating a 25-minute version that is never the same. It might conceivably be the same, but since there are over 600 million permutations of the 13 x 11 measures, the chances are quite slim.
The tempo can be adjusted for each performance: a red line follows the course of each measure as I perform, and the number of repeats is shown in red underneath each measure, as shown below. A web app containing a recording of this project also plays a different version each time one presses “play,” making even that less of a static object than what is usually thought of as a “recording.”
Other Possible Alternative Strategies
There are many other paths I could have taken. One composer I met had the extremely interesting suggestion of repeating other units than the measure, for example, one beat at a time, or two beats at a time, in order to create more unpredictable outcomes. I could organize tone colors or playing styles according to the same sort of repetitive system, or work with a systematized rubato according to the 11 x 13 system. I could borrow a page from Steve Reich and play the repetitions as a phase shift, where prerecorded loops slowly phase in and out of the material. Also, apart from being a live project, the recordings that I made can be processed in different ways to create almost infinitely long sound installations. But in the end I ended up with this performance concept, if for no other reason than that it felt like something I wanted to perform for someone. After all, as Taruskin stated back in 1982, ”Authenticity stems from conviction. Conviction in turn stems as much from belief as it does from knowledge” (Taruskin, 1982, P 344). So in a sense, all this preparation was just to find a concept I could believe in so that I could go all in.
So, aside from the decision to do anything at all with the expectations built into the existing score, which was based on the theories mentioned in the discussion of the mainstream above, what were the musical inspirations for this conceptualization? The most obvious ones relate to the early American minimalists (of course); some of the British experimental composers of the late 1960s, from Gavin Bryars’ Portsmouth Sinfonia to Hugh Shrapnel’s “One Minute Drills”; Cage’s randomizing techniques; and Peter Ablinger’s “Conceptio.”
The idea for showing the audience the notes and repetitions does not come from a piece, but rather from the algorave genre, where the coding used by the performer is shown live as the music is performed. My interpretation of each iteration depends on using my experience to deal with a situation not entirely of my own choosing in the moment, by working with tone colour, feel, and dynamics to make each measure function as part of a coherent whole. After the performance had a form, I could then adapt my playing styles to the situation: if for example one measure is repeated thirteen times, I could slowly change the tone colour, volume, aggressiveness, etc., just as I do when performing another composer’s piece for an audience. It may not observe “the rules of the art,” but we remember the above definition of a “caprice,” right?
I have noticed that these performances have the feeling of a shared experience: since I and the listeners can see the task in front of me and ruminate simultaneously on the choices made to adapt to the situations that arise, or any small mistakes that are made, or the clock ticking down the time of the piece, then the process feels more like a shared task than a performance. Whenever a new measure is shown, the audience and I are in it together. The lines of communication between me and the audience are clearer, out in the open, yet another aspect of what I would define as authentic.
Afterword: The Why, Part 2
“Authenticity... is knowing what you mean and whence comes that knowledge. And more than that, even, authenticity is knowing what you are, and acting in accordance with that knowledge” (Taruskin, 1996, p. 67). The problematizations of the concept of the work that have been a part of artistic research in music for some time now, and the more recent problematizations of interpretation typified by de Assis and d’Errico, do not necessarily mean that works and interpretations have ceased to exist. It is more a question of what we should do with them.
There will continue to be instances where sound is performed for others to listen to, no matter what we choose to call it. Perhaps it is as simple as equating the musical content with performance. What is interesting to me about these artistic research questions is their capacity for expanding the field of what is possible for a musician to perform. I personally am interested in finding alternatives to improvisation that can come from just as personal a source and hope that this could lead to new possibilities for expression.
If we can expand the definition of what is relevant to a work of historical music to include any personal experiences that the performer deems relevant to a performance, this could allow for a much broader exploration of what performances and shared heritage can mean for those of us who happen to live today. Adding this sort of agency to the performer would perhaps be confusing if one primarily wanted to communicate exactly what an audience could expect to hear on a certain evening out at the concert hall, but it would also make for a more varied and living concert experience for those who show up.
Although this is a solo piece, there is no reason that similar processes could not be applied to chamber music performances, even if the difficulties are cubed when one takes another person into the process. Besides the extremely close collaborative project with Mattias Petersson, I am currently also working with the pianist Rei Nakamura on a version of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata; together we are trying to peel away as many layers of unconscious choices as we can identify.
We are looking for solutions where we both feel authentic, first to ourselves and then to each other. Sometimes these interpretations play with, and question, embedded notions of musical tradition or societal hierarchies. Sometimes they relate to the purely musical information. It takes time to isolate what we really feel from what we have been conditioned to do, but whether this results in a performance or not, it feels like a worthwhile process for us since it reinforces the point that “there is no ‘the music’ to which we should be doing justice. What ‘the’ music is depends on what we do with the score” (Leech-Wilkinson, 2020, p. 198).
Just as much as the recording I heard all those years ago on the radio, and the notes on a page of music, which are starting points for gaining knowledge about the content of a performance, all these other pieces and concepts were part of my embedded performing and listening knowledge when I first began working on Locatelli’s Caprice 23. I would argue that they are as relevant to my performance as any other source, including the score. Taken together, they conspired to give me a chance to perform a piece that has the capacity – though by different means and in a different time – to communicate the same wonder I felt when I first heard that version on the radio. By allowing the performer agency to work with all available information as they see fit, no matter which genre or style they end up feeling comfortable in and pursuing, the field of what is possible, relevant, and ultimately worthwhile in performance can only grow.