Composers and performers: joined at the hip, mutually and co-dependant, partners and rivals, friends and enemies. It’s a powerful, sometimes strange, even disturbing, relationship. Unless a composer is one of those increasingly rare breed who is competent to give his or her music a fair hearing without recourse to a second party, performers are an absolute, unconditional professional requirement.
Performers, on the other hand, are less compelled to work with living composers. After all, they can resort to collaborators stretching back centuries, collaborators who make up for their lack of physical presence by a mute inability to talk back, carp, or criticize. A pianist playing a Beethoven sonata never need worry about a phone call at 2:00 AM, one week before the concert, declaring that 2/3 of the last movement isn’t any good and that a complete rewrite will be forthcoming…oh, in time for the concert of course. Limiting one’s compositional relationships to the dearly departed has its advantages, no doubt about it.
But there’s a lot to be said for having the composer around: problematic passages, misunderstood markings, insecurity about tempi, really almost any imbroglio can be settled by a quick conversation, telephone call, or e-mail. Or at least one hopes so. And there’s the fun of playing music that’s entirely your own, written just for you, almost like a secret treasure between you and your composer. Who knows? You might even be giving the premiere of a work destined to enter the standard repertory.
Oh, it’s worth it all right. But there are situations in which the advantages are nearly drowned in a sea of unpleasantness. I’d like to offer a bit of advice to both composers and performers (in particular, soloists) for traversing the potential minefield of the composer-performer relationship. Handled right, it’s one of the most artistically nourishing partnerships on the planet; handled improperly, the mutual scars may require years to heal.
Composers
- Keep your end of the bargain. If you and your performer have agreed that you will be providing a substantial sonata as a kingpin for an important recital, don’t wimp out with 25-measure throwaway. Or vice-versa: don’t throw a monstrously difficult 45-minute fantasia at somebody who was expecting a three-minute prelude.
- Deliver the product on time. Establish a mutally-satisfactory deadline, and deliver the piece when promised, even if you have to move mountains to do it. (The entire piece, and not just a bit of it.) Always remember that your performer needs sufficient time to learn the work properly, and that includes a substantial period of settling and maturation. Never, ever force a musician to give a half-baked performance because of your dilatory habits.
- Don’t rely on your notation software for feedback. Applications like Finale and Sibelius are glorious tools; having rendered hand-scribbled manuscript obsolete, they deserve a place in everybody’s heart. But they have a sinister side, in that they are capable of playing anything you write, even if what you write isn’t humanly possible or feasible. You must, at all times, avoid letting your software handle all your playback chores for you: play the stuff yourself, and make sure that you’re writing in a playable manner. That’s especially true when writing for physically complex, idiomatic instruments such as the piano, but really it’s true no matter what.
- Don’t make the performer look bad. Writing passagework that is deliberately unplayable—and claiming that the performer’s attendant struggle is an integral part of your creative vision—is a lamentable practice, popular amongst academic composers who answer only to tenure committees. Musicians may very well withdraw abruptly from such projects, or even if they don’t, resentment is sure to linger. A different but no less serious offence is to write in such a way as to make your performer appear incompetent. For example, I was once invited to play a two-piano work that included a putatively whimsical passage that sounded as though the pianists couldn’t play properly together. I declined.
- Listen to your performer’s concerns. Don’t assume that performers who gripe are just whiners. That isn’t to say that you are subject to a musician’s every whim. But listen to objections with an open mind, and be prepared to make changes, even fundamental ones.
- Try to think like a performer sometimes. Composers tend to think primarily in the first person—i.e., this is my piece. But your player is probably thinking: this is my performance. Good performers have a strong emotional investment in their work; their passion may be more powerful than your own, in fact.
Performers
- Keep your end of the bargain. If you and a composer have agreed on a piece for a recital, don’t you dare reject it unless "right of first refusal" has been part of your initial agreement. Even then, tread lightly.
- Treat your new piece like an important project. Performers have a tendency to discount new music, especially if the work in question is targetted for a new-music-ensemble concert or a composer-studio recital or the like. Glorified sight-reading is sadly the norm for many such affairs. This one failing accounts for the lion’s share of the resentment composers tend to bear towards players, and it’s fully justified. Give the new piece the same attention and care you would lavish on a Chopin ballade or a Beethoven sonata. Never fall prey to the "oh, I’ll learn the notes during the rehearsals" syndrome.
- Don’t be a whore. Performers who are willing to play new pieces and/or work closely with composers represent a smallish subset of the general musical population. As a result, those performers tend to overbook. The word gets out that pianist ‘A’ is willing to play new music and can do so admirably; before you know it, pianist ‘A’ has agreed to play a half-dozen challenging new pieces over the next month. The subsequent performances are bound to suffer as a result. The moral: never agree to play pieces out of a feeling of duty or obligation. Play only pieces you really, truly want to play and decline all others—you’ll be doing the composer a favor, although it may not seem as such at the time.
- Don’t blame the composer for writing new music. Players have been known to become resentful because a composer didn’t write easily-understood material. Get over it, and give the piece a chance before deciding willy-nilly that the composer is a stupid schmuck who can’t write his/her way out of a paper bag. All the more reason to avoid overloading yourself.
- Try to think like a composer sometimes. Put yourself in the position of hearing somebody play your music; every note, every gesture, even little jot and tittle came from your imagination and may have been the end result of some gawdawful amount of heartbreaking work. Remember that, and treat the music accordingly.