Expression marks

One of my jobs is to transcribe music onto Sibelius so that I can then shift the piece up or down a key or two. (In the old days, when music was still transcribed by hand, with a pen, this was a frustrating job, where you had to not only transcribe but also transpose at the same time.)

I've just done a three-page song which has only four expression marks for the pianist in it, and only one for the singer. There's an fp at the beginning, a couple of mfs and a crescendo mark for the pianist, and a crescendo mark for the singer. I suppose you could count a few odd staccatos and emphases marks as well, but they're fairly minor and hardly to be worried about.

Some songs I've transcribed have almost as many marks as this per bar, which makes the work of transcribing very tedious. It also means that the composer doesn't trust the singer and pianist to work out how to perform the song satisfactorily for themselves. Most experienced musicians and singers have a feel for how things should go, and don't need all this additional instruction. Most of it will be done instinctively, so for the composer to write it all out is just a bit pointless. Better for him or her to stick to the vital things, the changes of expression that aren't obvious from the music itself. 

It's a bit like a scriptwriter telling the actors in every line how they should say the words. Actors will ignore these things, unless, again, it's something that you wouldn't expect from the words themselves. Shakespeare never writes such stage directions, and actors manage perfectly well to interpret his lines. The very few directions he does give are exits and entrances, and the occasional curious one that you'd never gauge from the rest of the script. In fact a lot of his stage directions are written into the dialogue, as it were, and can be worked out from there. 

Compositions are similar to scripts for plays, I feel. While there are purists that claim to know how every note should be played, it's really up to the performer in the end, and the majority of composers will give performers plenty of leeway on this. A very few don't seem to feel that performers have the first idea about how music should be 'done', and clutter up the page with more instructions than any performer will pay attention to in a lifetime of performing the work.

Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus

Went to see the Zirka Circus with some members of my family today. Very noisy, music-wise, but the music itself was good and very suitable for what was going on. Quite a small troupe – I counted around twenty at the end, almost equally men and women. A youngish man and woman took the lead in practically everything; he was on for around twenty minutes solid at the beginning, and she turned up in every one of the women’s acts (except the cycle riding at the end, I think) and often appeared when the two of them came in as a romantic couple – there wasn’t any story as such, although it started off seeming as though there might be.

No ringmaster – they seem to have gone the way of the dodo – and very little vocal stuff from the cast, except to shout ‘Hoi’ or some such when they’d performed a trick. The two clowns (both white, as opposed to an otherwise Asian company) didn’t speak words, but used whistles to ‘speak’ (adding to the general piercing noise when they both got going). There was at least one child in the troupe: a boy who couldn’t have been much more than twelve, if that. He was very small, certainly. He did some remarkable balancing on his right hand – including ‘climbing’ down and up the stairs on it.

Most of the standard (Asian) acts were there: the swinging around on silken material; nine women on a single bike; balancing plates on sticks; swinging those things consisting of two ‘weights’ (for want of a better word) held together by a rope; the women doing the string held on two sticks (one in each hand) thing where they toss a round item with a ridge in it so that it stays on the string; the men on large metal double-sided wheels that they begin by wobbling around at speed and gradually building up until they’re balancing on one edge or such; the main woman doing the balancing on chairs thing where she gradually adds another chair; three women doing juggling with large balls while lying on the backs – and eventually doing it while up above each other; most of the men playing with Mexican style bowler hats and juggling with them (in that way that makes it look as though one of them is always suspended in mid-air), and then of course standing on each other and tossing them around; tumbling through hoops. You can see examples of all these in the gallery on the Zirka website.

Their TV ad is there too - it gives an idea of the energy levels, but is over very quickly (the double-wheel is momentarily visible).

The end of the first half consisted of a double wheel (similar to what I’ve just attempted to describe) held together in the centre by various metal struts, and slung in the air by solid cables. I’m not sure how it all worked, but it was a bit like two of those endless wheels that mice are sometimes given to race around in joined together. One of the white males got in one of them and got the whole thing swinging around so that he would go from floor level right up and around to the ceiling and back down again. The other wheel of course was like a counterbalance to this, and one of the Asian guys got into the other side and began doing daredevil stuff such as going upside down and finally walking on the outside of the wheel as it hit its highest point, slipping through the metal structure in the middle and going up over the other wheel as it reached the peak – then doing juggling while he was up there, and then putting on a blindfold and doing it. That was certainly the most breathtaking act in the circus.

There was a bit of a magic section in which a woman was put in a box and fiery brands passed through it – then she wasn’t there when they opened it, and then three women climbed out of the top. Even if they do do it with mirrors it was pretty impressive.

The whole thing had heaps of energy, one act sliding into the next with little hiatus. Lots of dry ice to give atmosphere. And several members of the cast selling stuff before the show and during the interval – including the little boy. No star-glamour here!

Photo of the Zirka Circus Tent by Cafe Cecil

Interpreting

The serious artist is one who is up to the elbows in the stuff of God's world. (pg 68: Performer as Priest and Prophet).

I've mentioned this book on more than one occasion in this blog, and may well do again before I've finished reading it. In the chapter I've just read the authors talk about Schoenberg's unfinished opera, Moses and Aaron, in which the composer sees Moses as the creative artist, and Aaron as the interpreter - for good or bad. (In Aaron's case, quite often bad.)

It's an interesting approach to the story, and possibly not one with which everyone will agree. Composers need performers - unless, of course, like Stockhausen and some others, they cut out the performing 'middlemen' and do everything themselves. Some composers are performers - yours truly, for one - and can be counted on to interpret their own music according to the composer's wishes. Except that I find I play my own pieces differently every time I touch them. Does that make me a 'good' interpreter or not? I'm always hearing that such and such an artist was a consummate interpreter of Mozart, Bach or Brahms (as the case might be); but what does that actually mean? That they played the pieces so wonderfully that everybody thinks that's how they should be played?

For a time Wanda Landowska was considered to be the epitome in terms of interpreting Bach. Then along came Glenn Gould, and everybody thought he was the epitome in terms of interpreting Bach. And, of course, he's now been supplanted by someone else.

So were those earlier interpreters interpreting wrongly? Don't think so. To me a piece of music is like the script of a play. Yes, there are certain things you must do: play all the notes, aim to be consistent with the composer's intentions in terms of dynamics, make sure that you have a good idea of what style such a piece might be played in. But that's pretty much where it all ends. After that, you're the performer (rather than the 'interpreter') and you present to the listeners the piece of music. You're a conduit between the composer and the audience, but you're not a conduit that brings nothing of yourself to the piece. If you can keep yourself out of the way you'll be doing extraordinarily well, I think.