Composer v. Performer What's the Difference?
- Gabriel Rodenborn
- Jun 7, 2016
- 2 min read
"I described the composer as first of all a listener, and I emphasized that the intuitive component of the listening experience is also a component of the composing experience. In this respect I don't think there is any real difference between a good composer and a good performer."
--George Perle, The Listening Composer
I had a conversation with a colleague a few years ago in which I arrived accidentally at the conclusion that a good performer, just like a good composer, must have grand ideas about music, strong opinions, deep thoughts, and the like. It's not acceptable to merely be a good technician--there are many good technicians--it's imperative that a performer deeply understands the music he or she is playing, has made conscious interpretive decisions, and communicates these grand thoughts with the audience. These are not different from compositional thought processes.
Music in higher education tends, I believe, to foster ever increasing departmentalization. So much so, in fact, that though I have always performed and composed, as I begin my task of applying to doctoral programs in composition, I'm compelled to make the argument, "but I'm a composer too!" and must do so from a position of addressing how my performance background informs my compositional process. Shouldn't that be obvious? Shouldn't every composer understand what it's like to sightread some new work devoid of context? Shouldn't every performer have thoughts about musical structure and design? Why should these inextricably linked endeavors be so quarantined?
Indeed, as the level of virtuosity demanded by composers in the 20th century increased to stunningly high levels, some division of labor became necessary. Of course, if you're spending 8 hours a day working out the fingers in the third movement of the Ibert concerto, you won't have time to have grand musical thoughts about anything other than... the third movement of the Ibert concerto. But that's fine and may actually enable the concerto to stand alone as its own musical universe.
I think the more important point to be made in reference to Perle's quote, though, is that the composer and performer alike must make an effort to listen as an audience member. One of my biggest compositional challenges has been to listen naïvely. So many times after painstakingly working on a passage to get it just right, I play through it or come back to it the next day and find that my grand musical accomplishment is 3 measly, awkward seconds. This can only be solved by discovering your own piece the way an audience member would discover it, letting each new part of the idea unfold in playful succession. Many musical ideas occur fully formed, but what fun is that? It's up to the composer to, then, work backwards and find inventive ways to lead the audience to arrive at this fully formed idea. The joy of arrival will only work if the composer or the performer is listening intuitively--the way an audience member would. The composer and performer must share in that joy and that organic, human sense of discovery.
Comments