“But won’t the music just speak for itself?” asked my student, as we discussed his current progress and the pressing need for him to plunge deeper into the emotional world of the pieces he is studying. Behind his question lay a certain frustration, given that I had just put him through the wringer for about forty-five minutes, obliging him to continue replaying a single passage in a search of characterization and shape. It hadn’t gone all that well and I can only guess how frazzled he was feeling, not to mention resentful towards me for having put him through this brief sojourn in purgatory. Mais je ne regrette rien. He needed it.
But no matter how much he might wish it otherwise, music does not speak for itself. Music can’t do anything for itself. A paramecium can act on its own behalf better than a musical composition can. That’s because a piece of music is not an actual concrete thing that exists in a concrete sense. It is a series of ideas, mental notions, a process if you will. It neither sows nor reaps. When you get right down to it, just where precisely does a piece of music reside? Think about it: where is the Beethoven Ninth Symphony? If you answer that it is located in Beethoven’s original manuscript, then please explain why Beethoven’s Ninth will continue to exist should we burn the original manuscript. If you answer that it is located in all of the published copies of the piece, then we have a big problem here because those published copies aren’t all exact clones; there are differences both subtle and blatant. Some might be arranged for kazoo band, after all. Some might be dumbed-down versions meant for elementary school choirs. But they all say Beethoven Symphony No. 9 on the cover.
Besides, you could destroy every known published copy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and it would still exist.
You could destroy every known recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and it would still exist. Lots of people have the entire score committed to memory, remember—conductors, for example, or Beethoven specialists who have been studying the piece for decades.
And for every person who is walking around with a pristine mental conception of the Ninth in memory, there are uncounted thousands who have a general idea of the thing, from being able to fake it through by memory on the piano all the way down to somebody who can hum a few bars of the Ode to Joy.
In short: the only way to eradicate Beethoven’s Ninth is to destroy the entire human race and its cultural artifacts.
But even then: what about radio broadcasts of the Ninth? They’re still percolating out into the great beyond. A radio broadcast of the Ninth from 1945 (think Toscanini and the NBC Symphony) would have spread out from Earth in a sphere with a radius of 75 light years. That’s not very far, all things considered. The Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light years. The radio waves are bound to be awfully weak by the time they have travelled that far, but with sufficient gathering power…well, you get the point.
In other words, you can’t destroy Beethoven’s Ninth because you can destroy only something that is there, and in the case of a piece of music there is no there there.
And I’ll be damned if I know how something that has no there there can “speak for itself.” Hell, I don’t even know what “itself” means in that context.
I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars, in which an eternal city is kept in absolute pristine condition via a computer network that controls the position of every single molecule—including the molecules making up the computers themselves. It has stood unchanged for over a billion years. The citizens of Diaspar are drawn from a fixed stock of stored beings. A person comes pffffft into existence, fully grown physically and with basic mental abilities intact. For his or her first twenty years life is learning, playing, gathering experience. Then around age 20 a flood of memories arises, as a person’s myriad of past lives enters consciousness. Each person lives for 1000 years; at the end of that time he or she is dissipated back into memory, now with a millennium of new experiences added, and then at some distant future time, the person is brought back to life and the cycle begins again. Clarke wasn’t fascinated by Buddhism for nothing.
But between lives, an individual person has no real existence save as a matrix stored somewhere in a computer memory bank. The person in question has absolutely no memory of that period, whether it be five hundred years of five million. As far as the citizens of Diaspar are concerned, their consciousness is more or less constant.
One can draw a rough analogy between those Diaspar immortals and the life of a piece of music. Its “lives” are its performances—fleeting though they may be, competent or incompetent though they may be, complete or incomplete though they may be, faithful to the score or wildly divergent though they may be. But during those times when a piece is being played, maybe live but also via a recording, via mental playback only, by singing, by silently studying the score, the piece of music achieves a certain spurious life, although it still has no guiding consciousness or ability of its own. All that it is comes courtesy of its performer(s). Only with performance can the music have life.
And no performance will ever be the same twice. That includes recordings, by the way. After all, a recording has to be played. And anybody who has experienced the same recording on multiple playback systems knows just how dramatically different a recording can sound. Not only the audio equipment, but the room and the overall surroundings play a part. Air pressure, outside noise, inside noise. Everything comes and goes, everything changes. So recordings are no more changeless and eternal than any other aspect of a piece of music. They don’t have a there there, either.
So only through performance can music speak. And then it isn’t the music that is speaking, but the performer. We make the music happen. That is utterly right and proper, after all: no piece of music came into existence (however spurious and ephemeral that existence may be) all by itself. Somebody had to create it, or maybe a whole bunch of somebodies. Beethoven’s Ninth doesn’t have a single creator, after all. There’s the poetry of the last movement—mostly by Schiller but the opening stanza is by Beethoven, and Beethoven selected the parts of the Ode to Joy he wanted. Various printed editions, including the first, have had editors who have made decisions about what goes where. Recordings have producers and engineers. And so forth.
Only we can speak for ourselves. Music may be the vehicle through which we speak, but that’s as far as it goes.
All these words of mine, sheesh. Oscar Hammerstein did it better in a single sentence: a song is no song ’till you sing it.