Performer's role

The relationship between composer and performer is quite simple, really.

It is the composer who invents, creates, the music. The content, the meaning, the imagination, the expression, in short: its multiple imaginary worlds of emotional experience is his achievement. Not the performer's.

The performer is the gifted person whose deep understanding of the music brings the cool score with merely signals to life, and fills the abstract structure with the warmth of his/her real subjectivity. The performer's task is to present the work to the best of his/her understanding in its real nature to the listener and assumes the role of the dedicated servant, or midwife, it is a representative and mediating role, not the role of the initial creator. The midwife is not the child which is the heart of the matter.

Both composer and performer are entirely dependent on each other, but it should be clear that the gifts of the composer are of a much more important nature than the gifts of the performer who, after all, does not create something, but interprets the created work, hence his/her role as servant of the music, not the creator.

Without the composer, the performer is nothing. Without the performer, the composer is still entirely a composer, and his works will rest for better times when there are again capable performers.

For audiences, the performer is the only living presence, hence the cult around some of them. The composer has mostly withdrawn into imaginary space and in case he is still alive, often is a rather disappointing figure. Performers who consider the music - any music - as mere stuff for THEM to express THEMSELVES, are prostitutes, damaging the art form. That attitude merely reflects their ignorance and arrogance, and their looking-down upon the creative act without which they would never have existed, is one of the greatest embarrassments of our time.

The performer however who is capable of his/her great gifts to bring great music to life, is the greatest when he/she is able to use his/her own subjective personalty and ego entirely as a vehicle in the service of the music. The truly great performers are the ones who achieve this magical 'marriages' of souls and thereby both enhance themselves and the music.

Young forever

Interesting thought bubbling-up: the 'old composers' whose works make-up the bulk of concert life programs, are not old, but young, simply because they came earlier. On the level of musical language and its possibilities, so much could still be discovered since Monteverdi, and how wise that he kept the 'prima pratica' - the then usual polyphonic style - as a language next to, and as important as, the 'seconda pratica' which he helped develop himself, with monody and expressive harmonic underpinning. And of course these two styles could be combined or used as alternation within a single work.

The youthfulness of Monteverdi's music, in either pratica, is due to the composer's enormous musical talent, but also to the feeling underneath of exploring new territory and making discoveries all the time.

Nowadays it seems that all possibilites in terms of musical language have been exhausted: everything is possible, anything goes, and entirely distinct from any question of meaning, value or aestheticism. This situation looks similar to the 'state of the art' in the contemporary visual arts. But there, it is in the field of new figurative or realist art, that a youthful freshness sometimes can be felt. Similarly, 'new classical architecture' shows fresh invention, although often still quite hesitatingly. In music, exploring the treasure trove of the past, which is in fact very young, seems to offer new ways out of the stalemate that new music in the last century has created, which may revive the creative spirit that is still enlightening so many listening souls through works from the eternally young past, and which may regain as contemporary music the interest and the status in concert life it once had.

What is originality in music?

 I was tidying-up some old papers, and came across a couple of assessments that had been submitted during the court case I had initiated in 2012 against the Netherlands national funding foundation which had consistently refused to fund commissions I got from music life, on the grounds that my music lacked all forms of originality and was mere pastiche and thus, irrelevant and thus, should not be paid for, even if orchestras or ensembles had chosen to commission me. Assessments of the music at the foundation were done by comitees of experts, drawn from the circles of the new music network: composers and performers active in the ensemble circuit of the country, who themselves were clients of the foundation (grants, commission fees) and thus knew exactly into which direction state subsidies for new music had to go.

Rereading these assessments from international professionals, which were held back by the court and thus could not support my case, reveals the impossibility to convey meaning on an intellectual and professional level completely absent at the foundation and also at the court. In the end, I won the case when it could be demonstrated by my lawyer that the foundation had not taken even the most basic care to assess the contested grant application, it had been treated as something like a doormat. But I lost as well, because the court decided, without any clear ground, that I did not need to be paid at all.

It was clear to me that the exclusion of documents which were a very strong support for my position, was due to the wish to protect the foundation as a state institution. In fact, the mentioned documents were devastating as to the question of competence of the foundation. Since concepts like 'originality' are not objective in the sense mathematics are objective, the opinion of international experts of great reputation does have weight. I quote here from the assessment by the late philosopher and musicologist Sir Roger Scruton, author of the standard work on musical aesthetics 'The Aesthetics of Music' (Oxford University Press 1999):

"It is not relevant that Borstlap's music is tonal, or that he uses harmonies that might have been used by Richard Strauss. Beethoven's harmonies show little departure from the idiom of Haydn and Mozart, yet Beethoven was probably the most original composer who ever lived - original because every note in his works is bent to the task of presenting a distinct musical personality, and one whose integrity cannot be questioned. Nothing in Beethoven is predictable, despite the fact - and because of the fact - that his musical language obeys the rules of a shared and established syntax. In that sense I would say that Borstlap has certainly satisfied the requirement of originality. What he takes from the late romantic tradition he uses with a voice of his own. The melodic line of Psyche, for instance, is entirely Borstlapian, avoids the Straussian cadences and leaps, and opens a soundscape that reaches into emotional regions that are entirely modern. This, it seems to me, is Borstlap's great virtue as a composer, that he has found the way to revitalise a tradition that links the modern sensibility to the enduring vision of our culture."

Western serious concert music up till 20C modernism, has two layers of meaning: the musical language (as described by Scruton), and the layer of expression: that which is being conveyed in terms of musical meaning. This concept has been pushed to the margins or even completely out of sight when modernism in the last century became some kind of 'standard view' of new music: the language as such is the only thing that counts because there is nothing else. And in a culturally-provincial country like the Netherlands, deviations from what is considered by circles of ignorant people as 'the norm', are not tolerated. So, of course since 2012 I have focussed on the world outside the country where I have no place. Therefore I am very grateful to Jaap van Zweden who commissioned and premiered my music with his orchestras in Dallas and Hong Kong and thereby proved, by its audience success and enthusiastic press, how miserable the 'new music establishment' in the Netherlands was, and still is, thinking of the fragments I occasionally hear of what is currently being produced.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-aesthetics-of-music-9780198167273?cc=nl&lang=en&#

New book

 New book published 20 December 2023:

ABSTRACT

This short book explores the psychological nature of classical music as a genre in relation to modernity, along the axis interiority/exteriority, describing the genre’s nature as increasingly contrasting with the way Western civilization has developed since the Enlightenment. The central argument is, that classical music – with its core repertoire as a product of the past – has become something like a therapeutic cure in terms of emotional experience relating to universal human needs. Various themes are approached from this central idea, including the need to reformulate man’s relationship with the natural environment, and human nature.

Published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing UK:

https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-5314-9

Paperback version published in September 2024. 

Cambridge Scholars Publishing do not supply eBooks directly, however copies can be purchased through one of their various aggregators listed below:

 

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