Metre: The End of the Line

I'm in the middle of an old-fashioned exchange of letters (envelopes, stamps, mailboxes, everything but the pony express) with an old friend about poetic and musical metres. (It's a fascinating, if often confusing field, not least because poets and musicians tend to count things — metre, feet, stress, accent etc. — slightly differently (in particular, as a musician, I think I recognize an anacrusis — a pick-up —  more readily than most poets do. (Entertainingly fictionalized, and in his usual obsessive style, Nicholson Baker's novel The Anthologist treats this question.)))

I think we have reached some consensus that song and dance metres differ from each other in a fundamental way in that dance assumes, indeed requires (i.a. so that dancers don't fall over themselves trying to follow a stretch of music when a foot/beat too many or too few appears or doesn't) a continuity from measure to measure, a non-stop flight of music (the music always goes on, and sometimes its vamps to allow a dancer to come in on the next rhythmic cycle when one is missed), while the line-to-line continuity of poem and song often has got to be more flexible. A voice has to breath, after all, and the listener probably needs some time to catch the sense of the text.  So how is this flexibility realized in performance?  Will a series of, say, pentameter lines, admit either regular or occasional additions of a foot or two, whether for breath or sense or just a break in the texture, becoming hexameters or longer, or should the measure vamp (whether imagined or via some form of acoustical accompaniment) allowing the reader/reciter/singer wait for the next line to jump in?  (This happens a lot in South Indian music.)  Or do these insertions of time intervals at the ends of lines exist in some kind of "zero time" as in some of Christian Wolff's cuing pieces, a break in the continuity that literally "doesn't count"?  And what about texts which contain sentences that wrap themselves around the end of a line, ending somewhere in the middle of the next? (This is actually surprisingly rare in premodern verse/song.)

Is once enough?

When a piece of new/experimental/avant-garde/contemporary (etc.) music gets its first performance, chances are high that it will also be the last performance. In itself, this is neither a good or bad thing; while in some cases, the lack of repeat performances is definitely regrettable, in other — perhaps most — cases, it is no great loss, and in still others, the ephemeral nature of the event is actually a design feature.

Accepting the single performance can be a practical and economic decision. The supply of new musical works is large and the time and resources for proper audition are severely limited. But there can be an aesthetic, even metaphysical dimension to a decision to consciously limit the realization of a musical idea to a one-off occasion. The legendary ONCE Festival (in at least one version of the legend) perhaps put this idea in the air first. I think Philip Corner's score ONE NOTE ONCE found the condensed, koanic, essence of the idea. (Jean Tinguely's self-destructing sculptures are extreme examples of the idea in another medium.)

I think, however, a decision to affirm the transitory in a piece is a natural extension of the ephemeral character of the materials of music, the sounds themselves, dissipating, or as Marx and Engels had it, melting into air.

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A finished score is often only a single instance or realization of a musical idea or process, a one-off performance in the domain of composition. The decision to accept a single result over a plurality might be characterized in music-historical terms as a decision to avoid the creation of repertoire, or maybe it's just a sensible act in an age of mechanical (and electronic) reproduction. (As someone noted, the great lesson of mass reproduction is that we don't want everything to be the same, or you'd never find your own car in a parking lot.)

What interest might there be in taking a process-based piece like Steve Reich's Piano Phase, and using an alternative set of pitches to those Reich himself chose? How dependent on that diatonic-but-not-necessarily-tonal configuration chosen by Reich is the identity of that piece? Idea, instance, identity. Is it interesting or relevant that John Cage used the same methods and materials designed for Music of Changes to compose the miniatures of Seven Haiku, or (in at least one version of the story) the temporal structure of 4'33"? Are these new pieces or just left-overs? (Any composer who cooks knows the value of left-overs.)

A composer I admire very much, Andrew Culver, assisted John Cage for many years and part of his work involved writing small computer programs to answer, through chance operations (or, more precisely, effective simulations of the same) questions which Cage had assigned to such decision-making processes in his pieces. When Cage died, Culver had the tools require to generate an unlimited number of new works using Cage's own algorithms. But Culver did not do this, recognizing that Cage himself had the same possibility but had always accepted a single realization of a score. (This is not to discount the fact that Cage did, indeed, often use a lot of trial and error in adjusting his questions until they yielded the broad kinds of results which interested him. Walter Zimmermann's analysis of Quartets I-VIII in the Anarchic Harmony volume describes an example of this working process.)

Recently, when working with some young people, we spent some time with the score and realization of Cage's Williams Mix. An astonishing piece involving a plethora of source sound recordings and a hugely difficult-to-realize score requiring thousands of tape splices in wildly variable but breathtakingly precise dimensions and orientations. I don't know if there have been subsequent realizations of the piece to that made by Cage and colleagues in 1952/53, but Cage, with the publication of the score, explicitly suggests the possibility of new realizations. And now, it seems eminently realizable, in real time, as live computer music, with the computer randomly (or, more precisely, an approximation of randomly) selecting out and processing slices of sounds extracted from a stored library. An indefinite number of new realization could be made, but in doing so, are we learning or experiencing anything substantially different from that original realization?

Performance Practice

A student and I recently worked on a realization of a portion of Stockhausen's Studie II (1954), as a way of getting into the piece in a more concrete way.  Like many pioneering pieces of electronic music, it is best known in its original realization, with the then-state of the art resources of the WDR Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne.  Although I have heard that Stockhausen preferred his realization to other, later versions made by others — a thought I will come back to —, the limits of the equipment available are obvious and, if we are to take the score of the work (Universal Edition 1956) at its word that "it provides the technician with all of the information necessary for the realization of the work", then questions about the faithfulness of that first realization to the requirements of both the score and the composer's stated conceptions of the work provide some incentive for trying, with contemporary resources, to hear what, precisely, a more faithful realization might sound like.

For example, by using multi-layered recording of individual sine waves, Stockhausen was unable to synthesize his tone complexes in a way that fused as one supposes he had intended and the pitch accuracy of his plan was seriously compromised first by rounding off to the next Hertz in the score and then accepting whatever amount of resolution error the oscillators then had. Today, neither fusing of composite wave forms nor the accuracy of pitch resolution are significant issues; the score can readily be realized on a home computer, whether in recorded form, via something like CSound, or as live synthesis.  (We happened to be trying the latter, using PD, a program authored by Miller Puckette, who has admirably used PD in his teaching to re-create a number of works of "classical" electronic music.)    Despite these improvements, in trying to realize the score, issues of authenticity in performance practice were persistent.  

For example, the tuning:  without having an equipment limitation of a one Hertz resolution, should the realization use the notated frequencies, or should they be a better approximation of Stockhausen's intended 25th-root-of-five tuning scheme?  If we chose a one Hertz resolution, with digital accuracy to several decimal places, strictly speaking the piece will then be realized in a kind of expanded just intonation (without getting into an argument about the definition of just intonation, which is something for another time...) and, aside from the interval 5:1, that is not what the composer was after.  Should we realize the score with a more accurate representation of the 25th-root-of-five tuning?  It's certainly worth trying out both options.  

Or this: Stockhausen combined his sine waves by overdubbing and then played back and re-recorded the composite tones in a reverberant room to get a better fused and what might be described as a warmer tone. We can now begin with a better fused composite tone and add reverb electronically or acoustically.   (For that matter, we can realize the score directly with the specified sines and eliminate the middle step of creating a library of composites.) 

Or, how about dynamics: Stockhausen's score differentiates dynamics over a 31-step scale, in which each step represents a difference of one decibel.  Should we instead take a bit of psychoacoustics in consideration and adjust this scale to compensate for the Fletcher-Munson curve?   I suspect that such a consideration would be taken into account in the equalization of a playback of the recording, but it's nice to have the option to build this into the realization itself.  The original attack envelopes were made by hand, by raising a pot, but we can now do this with precision.  On what basis do we decide how to shape and time these envelopes?

Finally, Studie II is a monophonic piece and, arguably, all of the tones and composites in the work belong, conceptually, to a single scale/spectrum.  Is our realization limited to a single channel of sound, or might it be useful and musicial to project the sound onto multiple channels; if we do use additional channels, on what intutional or analytic basis would such a project be made? 

Stockhausen's preference for the first realization deserves some thought.  While a purely mechanical reading of the score could have been made,  I suspect that the series of musicianly interventions made necessary by the equipment produced a result which while necessarily introducing inaccuracies, ultimately created a more approachable, even endearing sound. Likewise, in the 13th hour of his final compositional project Klang, Cosmic Pulses, a work with 24 layers of looped melodies with tones connected by portamenti, the actual speed of the portamenti was done by hand, perhaps a similar expression of preference for a human intervention in the surface of an otherwise through-calculated process. 

Live and Local

Let me out myself once more: I like live music, played by warm bodies, for warm bodies, in real rooms.   I prefer live performances of music made for live performance to recordings.  I like the spontaneity and variation a live performance necessarily brings to a work and I like the way the music dissipates in a real room or out-of-doors space, as the sound waves are absorbed and reflected into both air, architecture, ear, and memory.  A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.  I prefer even a clumsy live performance by an amateur but spirited group of local musicians to the best-engineered recording by the most prestigious big city orchestra.  Recordings do have definite virtues, as tangible, portable, divisible comodifications and records of a part of that experience (and, though I harbor serious doubts, I don't discount the potential of such media to have some positive economic effects), but I find them most valuable as a medium for music made specifically for a recorded format.* 

This article, by Terry Teachout, proposes a "thought experiment" (the quotation marks are Teachout's own) in which, essentially, all but the upper tier of big-city professional orchestras are abandoned and those of us in localities without big orchestras are to be satisfied with recordings. Teachout sees the minor leagues in the orchestral world as no longer performing a function they filled in the days before recordings.  This is historically wrong, as the local orchestral life in the US developed in parallel with recordings and, in the early part of the 20th century, was closely connected to immigration from Europe.  (Before that, the US had largely been a wind band country with orchestral and operatic music largely restricted to the biggest cities.)  Further, Teachout sees other locally-produced art forms as more diverse, innovative and higher in quality in offerings and the orchestra standing in a zero-sum competition for resources with those other organizations.  I believe that this is missing something important about the nature of orchestral music-making — what other archaic performance form, aside from sport regularly puts the better part of a 100 people on stage? —  with its unique relationship to a community.  

Not all concerts are perfect environments for either those bodies or the music they make or hear — far from it — but there is always opportunity to optimize the experience and, if history is any indication, the experience will change.  There are indeed survival-level-serious questions about local orchestras, but thinking about these problems from the top-down, from the vantage point of big-league orchestras is exactly wrong and in many cases, the greatest contributor to these problems has been a fixation on commuting conductors and big music management.  Local orchestras, if they are to survive, will have to recognize and capitalize on their advantages of locality, flexibility, accessibility, cost, and diversity.  They can only profit from emphasizing that they can do things that the major orchestras don't and that their recordings cannot.   The range of living composers played by the majors, for example, has been seriously restricted to coteries of "approved" composers** and the only possible solution to this cartelization of orchestral opportunities lies in the locals.  By doing business in a town like Pasadena, or Teachout's "Podunk", you have the absolute luxury not to parrot what is being done in the big town.  And this is where I agree substantially with Teachout:  the solution is not in "schlock" (Teachout's word) entertainment concerts, no Wookies-on-ice-with-lasers-meet-Benvenuto Cellini, but in an authentic extension of what they actually can do best.   I do not wish to suggest that local orchestras are doing a particularly good job of this now, but finding common cause with local musical innovators is a real part of the solution.  If serious music is to do more than survive, if it is to thrive, then it has got to be an active presence both deep and wide, from children to seniors, from amateurs to professionals, from the living room to the school auditorium or church  to the fancy endowed concert halls on campuses and in big cities.

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* Recordings have become so cheap and ubiquitous that their main function among new musicians is not as an object of commerce but as an advertisement for concert music, for the gigs where money is actually made.  We used to hand out calling cards, now we hand out cds. 

**The worst part of this is that the effect is self-sustaining: a small group gets all of the opportunities to compose for orchestra, and the ensuing lack of experience with composing for orchestra gets used against programming or commissioning composers who are outside of the group.  This is in best (worst) evidence with the present regime at the Cabrillo Festival, which is now basically a summer satellite activity of east coast conservatory composers at the expense of Cabrillo's traditional commitment to west coast experimentalism. 

You Can't Step Into The Same Orchestra Twice

In the West, professional orchestras are the last survivors of a particularly archaic distribution of labor.* Their productive work continues to be done in a collective mass under strict hierarchical control and has benefit not in the least from any advances in technology or though more efficient means of personnel organization.  To the contrary, the very identity of the orchestra as such continues to be defined by promoters and consumers alike by its strength in numbers and the quality of the sound produced is very much dependent upon balances of forces designed in the 19th century in which the "chorus effect" of massed strings, in which all the tiniest differences among players ostensibly playing the "same" music are synthesized into a single stream, which is surprisingly distinct from the simple sum of its parts. 

One result of this archaic construction is that an orchestral performance, including all of the prerequisite rehearsals, is a preposterously expensive cultural commodity, one that in major industrialized countries cannot be produced without massive subsidies, whether private or public (or mixed, as in the case of tax breaks for private contributions).  The question of the "survival of the orchestra" as a civic institution largely depends upon how a community — or some elite subgroup of a community's leadership — values the product in relationship to its costs.  This construction often lends the orchestra an aura of prestige for these elites (and those who aspire to the elites) which is not unlike that associated with other valuable antiquarian artifacts, with the critical difference that the essential product of an orchestra is a performance, ephemeral and not concrete, so less marketable, even when commodified as audio recordings, and certainly not the object of meaningful financial speculation against future returns, for a music performance is a perishable good.

But what I really want to write about is the orchestra as an ephemeral institution and, consequently, as an ephemeral musical quality.  The personnel of an orchestra is entirely stable for only short periods of time, between the changes due to retirements and replacements, often to the practice of ringers and substitutions, and certainly due to the continuous and recombinant dynamics of a community, both within the orchestra itself, between sections (have you ever met a woodwind player really happy about sitting in front of the brass?) and within sections (what does it really mean, in terms of the psyche, to be second chair second fiddle?) and, especially, between the orchestra and its conductors.  The local radio orchestra, for example, under specialist guest conductors, plays brilliantly in late 20th and early 21st century repertoire, probably as well as any orchestra around, and the presence of the orchestra has certainly been one of the reasons for staying here in Frankfurt.  But under their principle conductor, in standard repertoire, they're a completely different and, I find, dispirited, band, one I listen to under increasing duress.  While, as an outsider, I can only guess at some of the dynamics involved — dynamics of contrasting musical styles (often following an east-west divide)  and personal demeanors — I do recognize that the personal chemistry involved is unimaginably complex (the three-body problem being famously unsolveable.)     

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*I am well aware that there is a strong argument for the institution of the opera — above and beyond its orchestral subunit — as a more dramatic holdover from a long-gone economy of scale, but I believe that opera is a beast with some very different qualities, a theatrical spectacle that continues to have a social cachet rather different to that of the orchestra.

   

On the fly

Alex Ross has a very good article on traditions of improvisation (ornamentation and cadenzas especially) in classical music.   The article is subtitled "reviving the art of classical improvision" and Ross means it literally, as in bringing back the dead.  And there really is a sense that the improvisatory tradition is not only moribund, but was murdered: Ross quotes conductor Will Crutchfield's characterization of a Caruso cadenza so widely duplicated as to have become the canonical cadenza for the aria into which it is inserted as the “death-of-tradition”  and Ross himself describes Beethoven's written-out cadenza for the Mozart d minor Concerto as helping to "kill" it.   

I'm of two minds about improvisatory elements in music.  I agree that they can make a performance more fresh, more lively and, in effect, open up the musical text, but that doesn't remove the composer's responsibility to compose a score that is, on its own terms, fresh, lively, and rewarding of repeated play and listening.  Also, the simple inclusion of improvisatory elements does not automatically make the performer an interesting or musically convincing improvisor.  Further, it is one thing to consider improvisatory practices which are part and parcel of a musical style, in which the particular turns and figures chosen will be understood rhetorically in terms of that style, and it is quite another to consider improvisatory elements in the context of new music, in which the stylistic background radiation is highly diffused.

Nevertheless, the project of re-opening the musical work to the extemporaneous has been an important part of the radical music.   The examples of music which invite or require improvisatory elements — Christian Wolff's cuing pieces, the variable forms introduced in Feldman's Intermission 6 and widely expanded upon, particularly in the European avant-garde, or the animation of small cells of music common to many pieces in the West Coast experimental tradition, or Richard Maxfield's concert works using soloists improvising against tape works based on their own recorded improvisation, for example — continue to be rich in potential for new music.  There is nothing (yet) like the thick tradition of French baroque agréments, ornaments for which a composer can appeal to a body of figures and their shorthand notation  as well as a tradition for their appropriate placement within a piece of music which will be understood by a broad community of musicians as the point of departure for improvisation, but there are still recognizeable elements of a tradition in the works in which, for example, the cues of Wolff scores from the 1950's are echoed in the game-structure works of John Zorn or in the networked improvisations of small computer-based ensembles.

The project of recovering historical examples of improvisation is musicologically interesting and musically useful if, at the very least, it brings alternative cadenzas and ornamentations into the concert hall.  But performances of these revived examples are still not a restoration of improvisation to classical music, and the repetition, from a notated transcription of a historical example of improvisation is definitely not improvisation either.  Early music performers are, in general, further along this route than mainstream classical players.  The best recorder and gamba soloists today are gifted, inventive improvisers as well and when they play a set of divisions their fidelity to style is so high that it is often very difficult to know where composition ends and improvisation begins.  One is clearly hearing "the piece", but "the piece" has also been made anew through the extemporaneous elements. 

A parallel project, of recovering, through transcription, landmarks of more recent improvised music, raises lots of questions.  Again, this is musicologically interesting and a player can learn a lot from it, but as successful as a particular improvisation may have been, the composer/improviser is fallable, and more than likely to harbor some doubts about some or all of it.  But more critically, isn't simply reproducing the transcription out of the spirit of the initial enterprise?   It would be entirely possible, for example, to play a transcription of a single performance of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, but a performance of the transcription would not be responding to the particular set and setting in which the original performance unfolded and would not be open to the possibilities for alteration that the composer always allows himself.  The better way, it seems to me, is to learn the piece as the composer prescribes, rehearsing with him directly until such a point that one has the confidence (one's own as well as that of the composer) to make one's own realization.  Even more so with works of music in which the composer's own open notation is available: while it would be possible to learn to play a Christian Wolff piano piece by transcription of a David Tudor recording, the composer's notation was specifically designed to create an indefinite number of realizations, so freezing the piece around an old Tudor recording is introducing an unwarranted restriction on the work itself, the avant-garde version of the "death of tradition."  The notational tools for a very precise, closed musical text are readily available to composers and when a composer makes a deliberate decision for a score in which elements are not all precisely or decisively described or are to be defined in real time by the performer, then it is a plain misreading of the score's notation not to reserve these elements for the improvisational domain.     

       

Presence

I just got a worried email from some performers concerned about some dynamics in a piece.  In the score, I have a flute playing at a moderate dynamic and suddenly a snare drum rolls over the flute for a measure of forte, after which the flute continues on, more or less as before.  This interruption occurs a few times.  The players were concerned that, during the drum roll, the flute would be inaudible, so they suggested upping the flute's amplitude to match the drum.  I wrote them back not to worry, as the flute, through the continuity of its line and its distinctive character, would be perfectly present, if not literally "heard" and so attempting to balance the two instruments was unnecessary. 

Standards of (Performance) Practice

Composers depend upon performers to turn marks on paper into real sounds and — when everything works out — music. When the music works, it's often far from clear which party is most responsible. On the one hand, some scores are so robust, they can survive the worst approximation and most dispirited rendition. And on the other hand, I know some musicians who can take my breath away just playing scales, so the actual notes played, or supposed to be played, are beside the point. But when the music doesn't happen, it's just as difficult to assign blame. Performers can sabotage a piece, but maybe the notes were never going to be music in the first place.

I just toured a brand new shopping center in the middle of Frankfurt. Designed by a star architect, it has a great deal of flash and some virtuoso features, and has received a lot of press attention. But almost everywhere there are small details in the construction that have gone wrong: surfaces not smoothly joined together, walls too roughly plastered, light fixtures that are not sealed properly, windows slightly out-of-line, a hinge to fire extinguisher box on crooked so the thing doesn't quite close... all of these small things gone amiss are the architectural equivalent of wrong notes. There is a clear failure in performance practice here, but I understand that the construction industry deals with such failures in terms of tolerance, legally codified as standards of practice. The assumption in the building trade is simply that some percentage of the work will not be done to spec, and the on-going negotiations between client, architect, and contractors during construction largely concern whether or not that percentage is acceptable. The ideal execution — note perfect, in musicians' terms — is just not a possibility and everyone goes into the project understanding this.

I think composers and musicians have some advantages here over architects and builders. Musicians really do come closer, and more often, to the note- and style-perfect reading of a score, than builders come to perfect realizations of ideal architectural plans. Also, the working relationship between composers and musicians is rarely loaded with the monetary considerations that a major work of architecture must have, and, in general, composers and musicians work together with considerable respect and even a mutual cultivation of talents (and even careers). At the very least, a musical error (whether of composition of performance) is ultimately a transient event. We can survive a bad piece or a bad performance and move on to something better. An error in execution of an architectural plan, on the other hand, can carry a risk to life and limb that render any smaller aesthetic considerations trivial. But the greatest advantage of all that music brings is the fact that it is entirely possible for a performance to err from the letter of a score and nevertheless capture the piece in spirit, or even go beyond it. In musical performance, the ideal is not the enemy of the real, but a means to it.

That Wobble

There's a wave of talk again about vibrato, for it, against it, and everywhere in-between. When it comes to historically-informed performance practice, it's not wild to speculate that, in any given era, the actually degree and speed of vibrato used by real performers has varied wildly, both inter- and intramurally.*

The absence of vibrato might, in some cases, indicate an aesthetic preference, in others, laziness or even a lack of training. The presence of vibrato, on the other hand, might indicate a different aesthetic preference, as well as laziness (vibrato, can, of course, cover up lazy intonation) and/or lack of training. The central issue with regard to vibrato ought, however, be control: over the depth, speed, contour and placement of vibrato as a valuable ornament. From this viewpoint, the constant application or the constant absence of vibrato — when not specifically demanded in the score** — is often a sign of lack of control, if not plain error.

That said, given the over-use of vibrato up through most of the 20th century, the historically informed players who have attempted vibrato-free performances have presented a welcome corrective and I believe that a more balanced approach to the application of vibrato will come when the point of departure is a vibrato-setting of zero rather than one of eleven.
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* During my Hungarian years, I often heard orchestras of Roma musicians among whose members there appeared a deep competition to produced the widest and fastest vibrato, and when not that, the vibrato at most wildly variant from the rest of the ensemble (these were orchestras, after all, entirely composed of musicians used to working otherwise only as soloists). Rather than dismissing this altogether, I came to the conviction that there was, in this performance style, some legitimate traces of historical high-brow practice, both good, bad, and indifferent.
** In, for example, John Cage's String Quartet in Four Parts.

pf

When future musicologists, should we survive the next century or two, turn to the reconstruction of late 20th and early 21st century art music, I reckon that dynamics are going to be something of a problem for those advocates-to-come of historically-informed performance practice.

The historical evidence is not particularly rich when it comes to dynamics, and contemporary written accounts of performance practice are rare.* While written scores may contain a large number of indications, it's far from clear what kind of range is intended, and whether dynamics apply equally to all instrumental resources. One composer is content with piano and forte, another might have 12 or more adjectives in play: are these terms to be applied only locally and/or relatively, or do they belong to some absolute scale of values? While the Italian marking remain widely used, many composers prefer a local language or an alternative lingua franca, and a small number of composers have used graphic or numerical notations for amplitude, so translation is an issue. The other important evidence, sound recordings, is, at this point in the cricket match, a source to be used with great caution, as the prevailing recording style is based upon a hot but rather compressed signal, with which dynamic differences are largely flattened. Digital recording and playback should, with increased available bandwidth, change this, but we're not quite there yet technologically and the flattened sound — identifiable with pop music — may be with us for a while, as it carries some degree of aesthetic inertia.

[Ironically, one minor source of direct information about contemporary performance practice may prove to be very useful in reconstructing the various dynamic styles of the day, and that is musicological research about historical performance practice in times earlier than our own, for the subtext of all of that research is, of course, how we do it now and how it differs from the past. The connection, for example, between the "terraced dynamics" discovered by certain twentieth century reconstructors of Baroque repertoire and a similar approach to dynamics in contemporary music, from Stravinsky to Nancarrow is real and instructive.]

All that said, I would not be surprised if future musicologists happen to look back and assign us into competing dynamic styles. There will be traditionalists, whose practice is as continuous as possible with the dynamic practice in conservatory-style 19th and 20th century music; this is the style in which the Italian terms will probably have the most stable exchange rates. There will be the amplificationists, plugged-in, usually mixed, and tending towards a loud and flat dynamic profile, sharing much with the production values of popular music genres. A subculture among the amplificationists will be that of the microphonists, whose interest in not in the loud, but in elevating the most quiet of acoustical phenomena into the world of the audible. There will be the as-soft-as-possiblers, pushing below the lower limits of traditional acoustic performance practice. ** There will probably be an all-acoustic loud-as-possible counterpart to the quietists. And finally, there will be a radical center, content with the dynamic possibilities of of a restricted set of signs, mostly soft and loud in whatever language, but never getting too close to either extreme.
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*Rare but not totally absent. The Morton Feldman discussion list, MF, has recently had some interesting threads on dynamics, for one.
**For the record, I happen to think that while Feldman was influential if not critical to the development of this style, his own music's dynamic style was relatively soft, but entirely within the framework of traditional "quality" classical performance, such that the substance of the sound produced was never sacrificed to an absolute low volume. This is also in keeping with his style of articulation, which was not excessively tender, but rather more in the tradition of the pianism associated with the Skryabinistes.

Pre-Concert Triage

So you arrive for a brief final rehearsal of your piece just before the concert and things do not go well. What are you going to do? It could have just been a bad rehearsal. It happens. It could have been the only rehearsal. It happens. It could have been your piece. It happens.

There will be time later to establish precisely what happened and try to find a permanent fix, but it doesn't matter now: you have to take responsibility for your piece and have to decide quickly whether to go on with the performance or not, and if you go on, you have to determine if there is at least something that can be corrected or improved before the performance.

If you are the composer, you are in your rights to withdraw the piece if you feel either the composition has failed or the organizers and/or performers have given insufficient rehearsal. This has to be balanced against the interests of an audience which has expanded time, energy, and perhaps some money in coming to the concert as well as against your -- always diplomatic -- relationship to the musicians and/or organizers. What, precisely, to announce publicly about a withdrawn piece is also a diplomatic matter. I have heard composers or organizers announce that a piece has been withdrawn due to insufficient rehearsal or lack of resources but, for whatever reason, I have yet to hear a composer announce the withdrawal of a piece from a concert due to unsatisfactory composition. (Composers do withdraw -- whether to revise or to bury -- pieces from our catalogs with some frequency, however).

An interesting compromise was offered once by Lou Harrison, who let an underprepared performance go on, but announced from the stage that it was a rehearsal and not a performance. The audience, players, and the composer were satisfied with this and the rehearsal, as it turns out, went splendidly.

If you do decide to let a piece go forward, my experience has been that it's very useful to choose one global feature of the piece for all of the players to focus upon, and allow the remaining aspects of the performance to hang onto the coattails of that feature. This feature could be simply establishing some landmarks or signs to make sure that no one gets lost, or taking tempi up or down a notch, or an agreement about dynamic levels, or fine-tuning initial and final chords a bit (hint: in major triads, either get the major third a bit narrower, or allow the third to fade out faster than the tonic and fifth; in ensemble with piano or other equal tempered instruments, drop the third from all but the initial attack in sustained sounds).

What I have personally found that works well is to get ensembles to play attacks and releases with greater accuracy and to play with conviction regardless of errors. A ensemble sound with a sharp beginning, a committed sustain, and a sharp ending will do wonders for an overall performance, no matter precisely which sounds are played. At least a suggestion of polish will be lent to the performance as well as your piece.

Sometimes, I've found it useful or necessary to communicate directly with individual members of a ensemble before a performance. This is often just to encourage them over some matter that has clearly been discouraging. This is best done privately and discretely and finding the right mix of praise and suggestion is a question of sensitivity and, to be honest, not all composers are all that sensitive. But rest assured, the moment directly before a concert is one for confidence building and not one for brutal critique.

Finally, you can change your piece. If you're the composer, you can change any of your pieces until the moment you, personally, start decomposing. If you are performing the piece yourself, you have license to change it during a performance, even if your "revisions" would sound like "errors" when played by anyone else. If others are performing, you can allow them to drop sections or movements that are not working or you can simplify things -- dropping notes into more comfortable octaves, for example. You can even muck things up a bit more, adding noises and notes, if that's the desired effect. As Morton Feldman would have put it, you can always add that cowbell. I am fairly brutal about my own pieces, but I can usually recognize that there is still some distance that can be taken with last-minute modifications to a score before one gives it up entirely.

Least common denominators

Here is a fascinating article, accessible to a non-specialist audience, by pianist and scholar Anatole Leikin on the evolution and institutionalization of performance styles. In this case, Leikin is describing the Russian piano tradition, but it certainly resembles the pattern found elsewhere. The kicker here is his description of the 13th Tchaikovsky Competition, in which a number of "brilliant pianists...stood out as the most fascinating and original artistic personalities" were all eliminated in the first round to leave the competition to less interesting pianists who are more closely compliant with the official style.