Orchestra's postlude concert

The case against improvisation

TOM PURDOM

Ever since I started listening to Baroque music, I’ve encountered people who are fascinated by the idea that Baroque performance practice included improvisation. Many people, for some reason, seem to think off-the-cuff improvisation is more inherently interesting than music played from a script.

Baroque musicians did, indeed, add trills and other ornaments to the notes printed in their scores. Harpsichordists even created complete accompaniments founded on the bass line the composer provided. The musicians worked within well-defined rules and conventions. But a modern performance that truly captures the spirit of the original must offer something more than the bare bones the composer put on paper.

The cadenza— the unaccompanied display of virtuosity that usually follows the first movement of a concerto— was normally improvised, too. The composer would write cadenza in the appropriate spot and hope the performer didn’t make a hash of it.

Thank the writer, not the actor

As time passed, composers grew more restrictive. They penned in their own ornaments and wrote complete cadenzas. This has been the standard practice since about 1800.

Personally, I’ve never understood why so many people think spontaneous outbursts are more artistically fulfilling than music played from carefully thought out scores. Do we think plays and movies would be better if actors improvised their lines?

I realize that movie actors often modify bits of dialogue to suit their personal styles. But that’s just minor revision and editing. Think of any bit of snappy dialogue you’ve ever admired and I can assure you a writer thought it up. The writer probably spent some time fiddling with it, too. Does anybody really think an actor could have come up with “To be or not to be” in the heat of performance? Or the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V?

Bongo drumming like you’ve never heard

Division of labor is one of civilization’s great ideas. Some people are good at doing things, some people are good at thinking things up. The bongo drum solo that Anthony Orlando played during the postlude after the latest Philadelphia Orchestra “Discovery” concert is a good example. We’ve all heard people play bongo drums on the streets of our city. But I doubt we’ve ever heard someone play anything like Roberto Sierra’s Bongo-0.

Orlando noted that it might look like he was improvising, but he wasn’t. Everything he did was prescribed by the score before him. He could hit the drums in three places— edge, front and center— and the composer had indicated the site for every touch. At one point, Orlando picked up a pair of snare drum sticks and completely altered the sound of the bongos. Then he tapped the sticks against the sides of the bongos and gave the sound still another quality.

Turning a clarinet into a flute

Clarinetist Paul Demers performed a similar stunt when he played the other piece in the postlude, Eric Mandat’s Folk Songs. At one point, he disassembled his instrument and blew into the bottom half, producing a sound that resembled a Japanese flute.

A bongo drummer might have thought of using sticks without any urging from a composer, but he probably wouldn’t have done it in mid-performance. You could probably attend thousands of improvised performances without ever seeing a clarinet player take his instrument apart.

Both performers mentioned the difficulty of their pieces. The composers pushed them further than most musicians would normally push themselves. In the world of composed music, composers think up devilish hurdles and performers assume they’re supposed to overcome them. The complexities of the performing arts stem from this division of labor.

Sweating out a sonnet

In both solos, the composer’s innovations served a purpose. The bongo piece was exciting and intensely engrossing. The trick with the clarinet added a new mood to a piece that evoked a spectrum of emotional and aesthetic responses.

Most really expressive art requires time and disciplined thought. When you write a sonnet, a poet once said, one line comes from the ceiling. The other 13 make you sweat.

That doesn’t mean performers are merely collections of trained reflexes, passively responding to the stimuli in the score. As the music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Ignat Solzhenitysn, likes to point out, you can only perform Mozart and Beethoven if you can work yourself into the mind of a “great creative genius.” Performers must bring imagination and understanding to their part of the job. But when it’s all working as it should, audiences experience wonders that no individual could create alone.



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