Making A Case For Interpretive Freedom

In an unfortunately titled piece for yesterday's Wall Street Journal ("In Praise of Infidelity"), concert pianist Byron Janis makes the case for the taking of interpretative liberties in the performance of a score as opposed to those who insist that the score is an inviolable "sacred document" that a performer must obey rigorously.

Although we understand Mr. Janis's point and agree with much of it, we don't at all like the way he argued the case as he seems to be saying that if composers themselves can change their minds about how their scores should be performed, that's license enough for performers to take any interpretive liberties that seem appropriate to them to take, which manner of thinking is, of course, abject and utter nonsense as the two cases are in no way equivalent.

While we're on record here on S&F as declaring that the score is the ultimate authority which must be obeyed, that does not mean we're of the school of the score as "sacred document"; a document that must be understood and obeyed in fundamentalist fashion. This was made particularly clear by us in a 2007 S&F post titled, "On Reading A Score Between The Staves" wherein we pointed out the importance of a performer not adhering slavishly to the printed markings on the page as if they were the be-all and end-all of what the score has to tell us. As we summed-up the content of that post (which content must be read in order to understand fully the summing-up):

Although not visible because impossible to notate, a score contains more than [the] printed markings on the page, and in order to realize the music intended by those markings that not-visible more must be understood and paid due attention in performance, for absent that understanding and attention what will be produced is the mere mechanical realization of the printed markings absent the music intended.

Pace Mr. Janis, in making a case for interpretive freedom, we much prefer our argument as put forward in our above linked S&F post over Mr. Janis's which latter seems to us to border on the anarchic.