I guess problems will arise for anyone who rekons that text/books *are* de
facto autonomous, self-governing. (To me books have always seemed a pretty
neat idea, lo-tech and flexible, you can stuff 'em in your pocket or bag
and use 'em (almost) anywhere. They interact, they ask to be realised in
some way or other. They're open. Only a closed book is, well, closed.) No
musician could ever think of a score as self-contained in this way: it's a
starting-point, a matrix with which they work, and the range of
possibilities is almost infinite.
Only an idjit like Max Reger could come up with a theory that a musical
score is an end-product, that a skilled musician will be able to read it
so well that he/she won't need to - uh - perform it. A score's not an end,
it's one element of a realisation, and in turn "Reading in silence is the
source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust
poetry" (Bunting). This is the point I tried to make rather ineffectually
in answer to one of the questions at the symposium: you have to sound it.
In sounding it, both the text and the sounder let go of any imagined
autonomy, take choices and make something dynamic, bathwater in the
plughole. I thought that was implicit to a greater or lesser degree in so
many of the presentations at SVPS3.
RC
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