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The composer cult

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I’m preparing a concert of all misattributed works for my next program, and it’s been lots of fun. There are so many pieces to choose from! The BWV is full of bogus Bach works, and unscrupulous publishers in the 18th and 19th centuries claimed that all kinds of stuff was by Mozart, Pergolesi, etc., so it would sell better. Well-known fakes like "Mon coeur se recommande à vous" as well as PDQ Bach are in the program too. I got the inspiration last year after we sang a not-really-by-Buxtehude Magnificat, which we always referred to as the "pseudo-Buxtehude."
 
It’s been amazingly liberating to work on this music. A bass raises his hand and asks if that note should be a G-sharp rather than a G. Or the sopranos find the text underlay awkward and wonder if they can adjust it. The current orthodoxy is to treat composers as gods, so all questions like that always come down to determining the composer’s intent. What would Mozart have wanted? we ask, ignoring the question of what Mozart’s (or our) audience would want. The composer’s score is treated as holy writ, and any deviation treated as blasphemy.
 
With this bogus music, the will of the composer can be freely ignored. Who cares what Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (the composer of "Mon coeur") wanted? He’s not even a demi-god. Who knows what loser wrote Bach’s supposed St. Luke Passion? Whoever he was, he’s a pretender to divinity. At last, I can make decisions based on what will make the most sense to the audience, without worrying about the high priests of Historically Informed Performance breathing down my neck.
 
I like to think I went into music because I had some musical sense and good musical instincts, and I trust my instincts when making musical decisions. It always galls me to have some hierarch of authenticity tell me I’m violating the basic spirit of music when I’m determining what’s best for my audience. The cult of the composer is widespread in our era, and I think it’s led to a generation of conductors and performers whose highest aspiration is to be technicians, not musicians.

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  1. I’m having trouble understanding the currency of your argument here – the “HIP” movement has moved way beyond this all-or-nothing red herring years ago. (Read anything by Richard Taruskin or Stephen Davies in the last twenty years) Why are we American choral conductors so far behind?  Most of the rest of the musical world engaged with these issues (ie, early music specialists, European choral conductors) have already moved toward an approach that takes seriously both the original performance context and the roles of interpretation, the nature of modern choirs, singers, and audiences, etc.  
     
    What kind of approach to a concert is it to base the repertoire on a non-musical factor such as composer attribution and a conductor’s pet pieves?  Maybe a good topic for a graduate conducting seminar, but why should audiences care if the music itself isn’t compelling?  
     
    When I first saw the title of your post, I thought you were going to talk about the two or three American choral composers who seem to pop up on every ACDA auditioned choir’s program, composers re-writing the same pieces over and over again for choirs who think this is the only exciting music out there….can’t we do better than this?  

  2. I wish that were true, John, that HIP has added more choices. Instead, it’s created a legion of busybodies who tell everyone that if they’re not performing it as closely as possible to the way it was done originally, they’re doing it wrong. That fashion (and that’s all it is) is just as limiting as any fin-de-siècle overblown Romanticism.

  3. Hi, Allen.  I’m sorry you seem to be having a bad day, but you’re complaining about two totally different things, you know.
     
    Re. misatributed music, you seem to be accepting the whole “Composer-as-God” idea hook, line & sinker when you say “who cares what Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin wanted?  He’s not even a demi-god.”  So we should only pay attention to the composers’ intentions if they’ve been annointed by musicologists as Great Composers?!!!  All those other guys were working musicians whose music was enjoyed and appreciated–no one wrote for publication or for “posterity”–and they’re as entitled to our attention just as much as the Big Names.
     
    And in regard to “High Priests of Historically Informed Performance,” I have to point out that the more we know about earlier performance practices, the more actual options we have and the more choices to make.  It was being stuck irretrievably in the mud of late-19th-century performance practice that limited choices! 
     
    If performing baroque appoggiaturas or cadential trills properly–which was of course the composers’ intention–bothers you, then turn them all into 19th century ornaments.  Your priviledge.  But you should at least KNOW that you’re rewriting the composer’s music to fit a much later esthetic.  THAT’s free choice.  Ignorance ain’t!!
     
    All the best,
     
    John
     
     

  4. Hello Allen,

    Bravo for finding an interesting concert theme!

    I enjoyed your point of view, though I find it somewhat extreme.
    However, you give yourself totally away with one remark, which I’ll
    atribute to you and no one else: “and I trust my instincts when
    making musical decisions.”

    If you had not spent years learning about music, its history,
    its theory, its practice, its composition, its message, and so on,
    you would never have developed what you call ‘instincts’. All of
    these “instincts (you use) when making musical decisions” are, in
    fact, NOT instincts. They are learned responses. So do allow for
    ‘learning’ per se when you programme music, when you present music,
    and when you teach music to your questioning choristers. If you
    want to play around with composers notes you should KNOW what you
    are doing. Instinct is NOT enough.

    We atrophy when we stop learning, so we should not deny those
    who want to know more precisely what they are doing, the
    opportunity to learn. Don’t worry about the ‘gods’!

  5. I’ve never caught a whiff of overblown romanticism at Allen’s performances and have to wonder who the strawman of a hierarch is: reviewer? know-it-all chorister? period orchestra player?  Allen’s own superego? 😉   And must a choice always be made between serving the music and “determining what’s best for my audience”, who presumably trust their own musical sense and instincts?  
     
    Doubting the Magnificat’s attribution to Bouxtehoude opens a door to trying it with an appropriate French accent (I dont mean just the Latin, of course) or an Italianate interpretation if one so judges; I dont see it as a carte blanche for a cult of the conductor approach, whatever that means to you.     
     
    But who’s stopping you from adding ficta or adjusting underlay in name composers like Palestrina, or even doing, say, a big Stabat mater à la Wagner? I promise I wont sit in the front row with the WWV 79 urtext open in my lap 🙂

  6. Could you identify these “priests of authenticity”?  Do they wear white coats and show up to your concerts with treatises in hand?  My understanding of HIP is like John Howell’s, i.e. something that actually increases the number of options for a performer.  I’m inauthentic every time my big choir opens its mouth and sings Monteverdi, but who cares, it’s good music and they should know it.
     
    I would take great care, however, in changing or manipulating the work of a living composer without permission.  If I find myself changing a piece around – that is often a signal for me to find another piece of music for my ensemble.  6,000 new pieces are published each year, surely you can find a couple to fit your group, no?\
     
    Steve 

  7.  Allen, it has also led to contemporary composers who think THEY are deity, write nothing but hard-scrabble dissonances that my computer could generate, set up a blog, and gather in the sheeple. How about a concert of “music that isn’t music at all” – as defined by “sound” versus “noise”? I’m setting up my compositional software as I write to do nothing but inverted mirror canons – wait! someone’s already done that.

  8. Allen,
     
    I have been a full-time commissioned composer for something over a decade now (and part-time for several decades before that) and I can’t tell you how I’m looking forward to becoming the object of a cult. While people have treated me very nicely indeed and frequently ask questions intended to clarify my intentions, the plain fact is that I’ve never had anyone approach me like even a Lesser Deity (well, there was a guy who went down on one knee and kissed my ring, but I’m pretty sure that was intended humorously…).
     
    Indeed, I’ve always thought that if we have offered cult status to any group it is far more likely conductors than composers. They are the ones who take the majority of the bows, after all, and who often work from elevated platforms (I write in the basement) and who get to use a pointy stick as a symbol of their Exalted Authority. We composers, by contrast, are generally reduced to waving an eraser. It’s just not the same.
     
    So, as I said, I’m really looking forward to becoming a cult figure. Please let me know where to sign up.
     
     
    Dan Gawthrop

  9.  Think about jazz and pop, too. If you perform Take the A Train, it wouldn’t occur to anyone that the only legitimate way to do so is to perform it exactly as Duke Ellington did. Same with pop music covers. Those are living arts. Classical music, is, relatively speaking, dead.

  10. Allen,
     
     I was all set to violently disagree with your concept that printed music can be modified at will to suit the audience until your sagacious comment about Shakespeare. Now you’ve made me think all over again! Ouch!
     
    Bill Paisner
    Director, Southwest Womens’ Chorus

  12. So you don’t care whether your audience (“philistines”) likes your music, as long as you’re true to the law of the written page? We’ll have to agree to disagree about that.
     
    BTW, I’m not opposed to HIP; I’m only opposed to assuming it’s the only valid way to make music. There should be room for multiple approaches to performance, including the “sappily saccharine”. Philistines have a right to enjoy music too.
     
    It’s interesting that this “canonical” attitude prevails only in music among the arts. No one blinks an eye if somebody shortens a Shakespeare play, or sets it in the Wild West. There’s no outcry from purists (well, maybe some) when The Wizard of Oz movie wasn’t true to the original book.

  13. Why stop with the “pseudo-Buxtehude” or the “pseudo-Mozart” or the “atrributed to Pergolesi?”  Why not just do whatever the heck we want when we don’t like or think the audience can’t deal with what we strongly suspect, if not know, that what we have in hand is the work indeed of Mozart or Buxtehude or Pergolesi?  While it may be attractive and oh-so-typically-American to just dismiss what we have, claiming that a canonical approach constrains us “free-spirited” musicians and directors, we should remember that people took this approach not only by making arrangements and transcriptions of works by composers (one thinks of Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s works, etc.) but even more grossly self-indulgent is the approach of the nineteenth century “re-arranger” of Mozart and Beethoven and Haydn and whomever, because it wouldn’t sell to the nineteenth-century philistine sitting in the audience who couldn’t or wouldn’t make any attempt to deal with anything that wasn’t lushly written and sappily saccharine.  Have we turned the clock back to that approach?  Is that what is being offered?  While I agree that no HIP (Historically Informed Performance) academic is likely to leap to the defense of the “pseudo-” any composer, we should be VERY chary of just treating it as a blank screen on which to project our own distaste for rules and our dismissive attitude that just because the composer who in fact wrote that piece doesn’t have the same body of work as a Mozart or a Bach or a Pergolesi, it means we can do any durn thing we please.  While one does have a degree of authority for fixing the G-sharp vs. G issue in a score when it’s obvious there’s a problem, to take that mentality to the level suggested here is to say nothing cannot or OUGHT NOT be changed.  We have the opportunity as directors to address a piece of music as we wish, and while audiences may or may not like our approach, they have a vote – they can continue to come or they can stay away.  The composer in the approach suggested in the blog doesn’t get a vote – how undemocratic.  And how utterly self-indulgent such an approach is – would such an approach be accepted calmly if applied to one’s own works?  I suspect not.  How about giving the poor sod who spent his (her) time in writing something and giving it its due, as much as Mozart or Bach or Pergolesi?  Isn’t that what we performance artists owe the composer, irrespective of the grandeur or the obscurity of that composer?  It’s not a question of unquestionable “Holy Writ” – it’s a question of honesty to the text and music provided.  We can address the issue of the composer’s intent (which, unless he/she wrote it down, we won’t ever really know) by our own informed addressing of the work – but honoring the “law” of what is in fact there on the written page.
     
    Ron Duquette

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