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From: peter@soph.UUCP (Peter Torvik)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Re: Music Majors Attention - Question For You
Message-ID: <151@soph.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-Feb-85 16:29:27 EST
Article-I.D.: soph.151
Posted: Tue Feb 26 16:29:27 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 4-Mar-85 06:44:13 EST
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Organization: Enmasse Computer Corp., Acton, Mass.
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(about a music major friend who was taught to eschew records for live
performance)
> My question is (music majors please note), do they still teach that
> sort of s*it in music schools today?
> 

This idea, although I suspect that you have just a *little* bit 
exxagerated it, is not "s*it". Live music performance is important and
irreplaceable and I am glad that your friend had a teacher who cared
about the subject at all.
Here is the reason why I believe that it is very important that serious
music students, particularly, avoid leaning on phonographs. A significant
influence of most of my thought which follows, besides my own teachers at
the New England Conservatory of Music, was Eric Leinsdorf, who wrote a
magnificent and readable book called "The Composer's Advocate" which you
might look at.

If a musician learns music from recordings, he/she is learning by imitation
of some other interpreter. It is conceivable that that musician could come
up with a performance as close to the intention of the composer as the
one being imitated. It won't be any closer. The composer didn't make that
record (and in the few cases where he did, like the recordings by Stravinsky,
that is no guarantee that that composer was such a consummate performer that
he himself did not mean for others who are better (and mere)
performers to do EXACTLY what he called for in his composing; Stravinsky was
a much better composer than he was a conductor and when we listen to
composers doing their own work we know that we are hearing someone who
understands what is in the music better than anyone else, whether or not
he/she can perform it better or not). What the composer did was carefully
and painstakingly create a written score which contains EVERYTHING which
he/she wanted the performer to know. Look at that written score, add the
best that you have to offer in intelligence, knowledge of the composer and
the time, the style and the practices of the time (reading between the lines)
and you will be doing exactly what you should be doing. Learn the piece from
someone else's record and you will, first of all, not understand what is going
on because you have not done the thinking, feeling and learning the composer
expected of you (which will give us a performance without conviction or
feeling) and, second of all, be completely at the mercy of whoever made that
record (and "virtuosi" are permitted to perpetrate incredible amounts of
garbage on the record buying public because we don't buy artists, we buy
brand name recognized performers the same as we buy toothpaste).

I am glad that music students somewhere are hearing these ideas. What
about just listeners?, you might ask. It is FINE for lovers of music
to listen to records as much as they want. But, they should still know
and think about these things, and they ought to go to live concerts, too.
Von Karajan didn't write the symphonies, Beethoven did. Etc., etc., etc.
You owe it to yourself to hear lots of interpretations and not just the
brand name ones that are sanctioned for you by the big record labels.
Record companies are big money, conservative beasts and they should not
be dictating your taste. Think for yourself, please.

Music is an art for thinking, sensitive people, not chimpanzees.

These thoughts were contributed by a conductor and composer.