George Crumb’s score for the “Spiral Galaxy” movement of his “Makrokosmos” suite. Image: Edition Peters Group, New York.
In Tuesday’s (8/19) New York Times, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim writes, “Musicians routinely wrestle with interpreting oblique, ambiguous and outright surreal markings as they try to bring a composer’s idea to life. The most famous example is Satie, whose performance indications skirt the boundary between mysticism and Dada … Others are more poetic, such as the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who offers this image in the preface to some of her scores: ‘When you see a long sustained pitch, think of it as a fragile flower that you need to carry in your hands and walk the distance on a thin rope …’ Jan Grüning, the Ariel Quartet’s violist, said that linguistic cues are often more concerned with instilling an attitude in the performer than with specific musical gestures … ‘The words don’t tell you what to do,’ he said. ‘They tell you how to be.’ On its own, musical notation is most efficient at representing pitch, duration and rhythm. Early composers relied on the instincts of performers who came from the same cultural ambit, because more elusive qualities like mood, character and gesture were hard to capture in ink. As music printing disseminated scores beyond the reach of their creators, the need for more complex performance instructions grew…. Expanding notation beyond musical symbols activates the full intelligence of performers … [Playing] a composition requires not only skill, but also imagination, empathy and a willingness to breathe the whole of human experience to life into sound.”
