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I’ve been reading an old scholarly book that (while certainly passed its prime) is giving me some interesting things to think about in relation to music. I’m fascinated at the moment by the effect musical literacy (both learning music from scores, and the culture surrounding notated music) has on our conception of music, how we listen to it, how we learn it, and how we remember it.

Walter Ong’s Orality and LIteracy: The Technology of the Word, is a classic text that summarizes the developments orality studies made in the 20th century (published in 1982, most of his sources were written from 1960 on after significant field research occurred in the first half of the century). Ong cites research of Yugoslavian epic poets who very purposefully avoided learning to read because they instinctively knew that it would diminish their memory and ability to perform their poems.

According to Ong though, large-scale epic poetry is decidedly not memorized verbatim at scale. The oral poet is employing a very different process than the English school boy compelled to recite Lord Byron line by line. The oral poets internalize the shape of the story, and employ a vast library of tropes and set pieces to convey it, in effect making the story in each telling. The set pieces are in the correct meter, and they have collections of phrases that will complete a line when needed to maintain the metrical feel. That is to say, they have a functional library of poetic devices and phrases that are extemporized in each new telling.

When asked, the poets themselves say that they tell the stories “the same way” each time, though comparing recordings of different events shows there are often significant differences. The concept or a “verbatim” retelling is foreign to a mind that does not interact with texts in their rigid fixity. They do indeed use the same lines to tell the same story, which is what they mean when they insist that each performance is the same, but the particular order and combination of lines varies from performance to performance. Oral recitation is a social interaction between audience and speaker. The environment and give-and-take shape how the story is told in each instance.

That is to say, the poets are playing jazz.

A tune from the real book has a given melody, chord progression, and structure. Each realization of it, however, is unique because solos are improvised, and comping is a subtle art of reacting to the soloist. In my (very limited) experience of playing standards, the better I know the song, the more differently I will play it each time. If I know the changes well enough to inhabit them there is greater freedom of exploration and creativity rather than just trying to remember what comes next. Add an audience to the mix, and there is a matrix of influences that combine to create that one moment of musical time, never to be repeated. But of course it was just Autumn Leaves. Saying we played Autumn Leaves though is such a different thing than saying I performed the D Minor Partita by Bach. This is why “music” is such a difficult thing to talk about, it comes in so many forms and practices.

This experience of spontaneous creativity is the most compelling aspect of improvisation. Christopher Berg (my wonderful undergrad teacher) spoke of classical performance as a “rehearsed improvisation.” He loved the experience of being on stage and being able to incorporate fresh ideas into the performance. A good concert hall filled with an attentive audience is an inspiring thing. The ability to respond to that can breathe life into a performance. And it should! The connection with the audience is the point of the whole thing.

Improvisation has been systematically eliminated from the education of classical musicians. Until somewhat recently every musician was also an improviser. It was just part of their training. Philip Glass describes one of Nadia Boulanger’s part-writing exercises in Words Without Music. Three students would participate. M. Boulanger would play a melody. The first student would sing a bass line that followed all part-writing rules against the melody. The second would sing a tenor line that accompanied both soprano and bass. The third would have to remember each line and supply an alto line that would not conflict with any of the extemporized parts. This is striking (and a story worth telling in a memoir) because it is so unusual in 20th century theory pedagogy.

Concerto cadenzas were a fermata left by the composer to indicate that is where the soloist would improvise (or compose) their own cadenza. Now in those concertos without composer supplied cadenzas there are “traditional” cadenzas written by someone else and codified into the score (that is to say added to what Nicholas Cook calls the “musical museum”).

I think the cult of genius is at least partly to blame here. Since Beethoven and the Romantic era there has been an elevation of the few “geniuses” whose muse could break through everyday composition and give us these special musical revelations that deserve being enshrined in the canon forever. (Despite the fact that there is significant unevenness of quality in that canon). Why would I piddle around with improvising (much less composing) when I could be learning Beethoven instead?

The performer in this framework is essentially a messenger, delivering intact the vision of someone else. To borrow from Nicholas Cook again, classical musicians don’t give us their own music, it is a “performance of” tradition. Did you hear Barenboim’s performance of the Beethoven Sonatas? Barenboim has nothing to say, except as an authoritative channel for Beethoven’s genius.

For orchestral players (highly trained, sensitive artists in their own right) the situation is even worse. Not only are they serfs to the great composers, they must deliver them according to the desires of the conductor who, if he is established enough (and it is generally he), is heralded a sub-genius who has seen through the fog to the true inspiration within the music handed down from the first-level genius whose golden pen delivered these notes to us.

This is why so much of our individual musical training is spent ensuring accuracy of execution of the written score. Now, I appreciate a nice clean performance as much as the next person, but if that is all you do it really stunts your creativity. The thing is, the closely controlled structures of classical music provide a wonderful framework for creativity. When you know your way through a piece the interpretive decisions made in a compelling performance can be bracing. To do this though, you must get past the realm of notes and into the world of sound. This is what I want my students to do, see through the score to a world of imaginative hearing and listening where we can find “what the sound wants to do,” to quote my other great teacher (Julian Gray).

If there is a genius to works in the canon (skeptical though I am of the concept, I am fairly dedicated to much of the canonical repertoire), it is in how they can be interpreted and delivered in a meaningful way. This role of interpretation must be held up as the highest form of musical achievement for classical musicians, much like the great masters of jazz are the improvisers.