These old dogs picked up a new trick a while back. We started going to the symphony an hour before the performance to hear the principal soloist and the guest conductor discuss the day’s music. It’s like an advanced Music Appreciation course in twenty minutes.
One such conversation preceded a program featuring the principal harpist of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra who was be the soloist for Handel’s Concerto in B-flat for Harp, Op. 4, No. 6. She first explained her instrument.
Who knew that there were seven pedals to be manipulated on a harp for sharps and flats, and that there were more than 2000 moving parts? I thought a harp was just strings of various sizes strung to varying degrees of tautness in a frame that looked very—well—harpish. (I clearly need those Music Appreciation sessions!)
She went on to explain that the harp was not included in orchestras for much of the early period of classical music because it was not possible to be played in all keys. Through various adaptations, the harp evolved. By 1810, it was versatile enough for all keys and was incorporated into many more orchestras as a result.
Why was this relevant to the piece she would play? Because Handel wrote his Concerto for Harp before the harp had evolved to its current state.
This observation prompted the day’s guest conductor to discuss a challenge inherent in playing music written long ago. On the one hand, he said, you want to understand and respect the way the composer meant the piece to be played. On the other hand, you cannot ignore the changes in the world that have happened between the time the composer wrote and today. This includes lived experience, differences in technology, advances in particular instruments, and so on.
William Shakespeare took an old theme, star-crossed lovers, and fashioned Romeo and Juliet, setting the love story in the context of a family feud. Scores of directors and actors have produced the play, with myriad settings and costumes. A couple of fellows in New York took the story, changed the Montagues and Capulets to the Sharks and the Jets, wrote some great music and staged West Side Story.
Driving home one day, I listened to NPR’s program, Exploring Music, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin. The theme McGlaughlin had chosen for the week’s shows involved the metronome and how different conductors had adopted different numbers of beats per minute for each note. The featured piece was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony.
The piece premiered in the USSR in 1937, the year in which Stalin’s massacre of Soviet citizens for the political purpose of spreading terror reached its peak. The pacing of the Fifth Symphony in a 1937 performance McGlauglin played was slow enough to reveal the critique of the existing political scene the composer meant it to be. McGlaughlin described the final movement as “forced joy:” you WILL celebrate because Stalin says you will.
A 1959 performance of the symphony was conducted by Leonard Bernstein in the USSR with the composer in attendance. As measured by a metronome, the tempo of the final movement in the Bernstein performance was nearly twice that of performance in 1937. As a result, the sense of celebration in the music sounds real, unforced, quite different than in 1937.
Shostakovich came up to the stage at the conclusion of the symphony and embraced Bernstein.
I think Shakespeare would have hailed West Side Story as a masterwork. I think Handel would have led the “bravas” for the performance of our harpist using an instrument that did not exist when he wrote the music.
Artists such as these know what other creators and founders and originators also know; once out in the world, if one’s work survives over time, it will be changed by the times and by the life experiences of those who appreciate the creation.
People of a Certain Age, if you had children, you know this; your child will find happiness in his or her own way, whether or not that way is yours.
There are orchestras that use only the instruments available at the time of composition and follow the written instructions of the composer. These performances are quaint and, to some degree, a mild rebuke of the composer. Don’t artists who become famous over generations want and expect their works to adapt to whatever is the current context and still be considered great works?
We can understand the contexts in which great literature was written but truly great literature transcends its contexts to retain freshness in succeeding generations. Ditto great paintings.
I have been privileged to be part of founding programs and institutions. My expectation is that people in those programs and institutions will be true to the founding values and willing to adapt to current realities. I suspect you parents harbor similar hopes about your children.
Quaint is no compliment. Like Shostakovich, I feel the urge to rush to embrace those who have taken my “creations” as theirs to adapt, to play notes I have written with their instruments, to keep the composition fresh, even if that requires speeding up the notes.
Daniel E. White
December 11, 2017