mathis, perhaps you would enlighten me:

what is performance, and what is composition?

I do both - apparently - but unlike you I don't know the difference.

Just to confuse matters more:

My Java applet generates music (a midi file) from any picture in a few seconds. Just drop this midi file on the sequencer and the instrumentalist can mute his own part and play it from the screen and the sequencer will play the other parts. The instrumentalist can works as a composer and as a conductor and asa a soloist...

Lauri Gröhn
metacomposer
http://www.synestesia.com">http://www.synestesia.com

@William said:

mathis, perhaps you would enlighten me:

what is performance, and what is composition?

I do both - apparently - but unlike you I don't know the difference.

[*-)]: [*-)]: [*-)]: [*-)]: [*-)]:
It was you who started the differenciation, right? Composing is formulating an idea while performance is the transmitting of an idea, right?
Obviously borders might be very blurry, especially when thinking of improvised music, but even there you can distinguish the two. And in your case there´s no doubt about it at all, I would say.

But I´d like to add some more to the communication model. No communication without perception. So it´s not only the formulation of an idea and the transfer of it, it´s also and especially the cognition of the idea. And in my experience it´s there where most 'mistakes' occur.
Even if your performance is as pure as possible (realized by the composer, for example) you have no control over what your listener makes out of it.

There´s a certain magic of performers on stage, something you don´t have on a recording and even less on a sample realization.

That's what I was thinking but you put it better. I was trying to suggest that ultimately performance is composition, like Jimi Hendrix doing The Star Spangled Banner. Also, what are people hearing when they like a performer? - what that performer creates, not necessarily the composer's ideas.

I don't agree though that a recording does not have any "magic" - it is not just a mechanical thing devoid of life, if it is a good recording. Though obviously it is not the same "magic" as live. Which is why live theater will always continue to exist, even though movies also do.

Another thing - the worst recording or performance of Rite of Spring I ever heard was conducted by Stravinsky.

A performance is always a performance of something. that "something" can be performed as many times as you want and is what you call "an idea" isnt it? That idea is what all the performances of the same work are sharing and comunicating. So yes, there is something that you reach when hearing music that is beyond the performance elements.
But there is a good reason to avoid the understanding of music as something which is all about ideas in that sense: the fact that there is no idea without performance. What you hear is always a performance of an idea, not an idea in itself (How could be that? you cannot hear ideas in the same way that you cannot smell colours) The only way to "reach the idea" is through the perfomance, which obviously involves the (re)production of sounds.
Imo, thinking in music in such idealistic way is reducing its essence to the aspects of harmmony, leit motiv and structure. But the richness of the music is also in relation with the beauty of certain sounds in themselves, and also with that mix of musical inteligence and technical excelence that is always present in every good performance and cannot be written in the score.

In a way I agree with you, but also disagree. You say that there is an "idea" and also a separate entity a "performance" - but ultimately, if analyzed, that idea will disappear into the performance, and is merely an assumption on the part of the audience. At least potentially this can happen, especially in my example of Jimi Hendrix. What is the idea there? It is formed by the performance, instantaneously. Of course jamming is often based on preconceived riffs and phrases, but to me it is overly "idealistic" (i.e. simplistic) to say "Right here we have an idea" and "Over here is the performance."

@William said:

that idea will disappear into the performance,

I think that´s the ultimate goal, right.

I didn´t say, there is NO magic in a recording, only that there´s a certain magic in a live performance which is missing in a recording. We totally agree here.

William,

Here's my question: What is your take on the opening 4 notes of Beethoven's fifth? Here we have the quintessential "idea." I have never heard this disappear in any performance but of course heard myriad different performances of it. Through the many variables (such as tempo) it has been presented in countless ways. How do you apply what you're saying to this work?

Honest question my friend.

Dave

Well, those 4 notes are a performance - an imagined one. The performance was originally in Beethoven's mind. That is what I meant by the idea disappearing into a performance. There is no "idea" divorced from a performance, since Beethoven had to imagine the performance of those notes - their pitch and duration - prior to them being actually played.

Though I apologize for going deconstructionist here. I won't let it happen again.

I've often wondered whether the ideas that come to a composer in an auralization can really be considered "music". Sometimes it strikes me that they're not really music at all, but only metaphors for music. Metaphors of metaphors -- an entirely abstract form a thought. I sometimes have these "visitations" and feel incredibly frustrated by their lack of concrete presence... actually, I should rephrase that. I'm not frustrated by the ideas, since they often seem to be what I'm truly interested in creating, but rather in the slipperiness they exhibit when trying to bring them to life. It's almost as though they are just phantoms -- shells of ideas without any genuine existence, beyond the mental realm... That sounds flakey, I guess. But that's how I experience them. The whole challenge, to me, is in finding a way of capturing them in sound -- REAL sound. Maybe this is just a shortcoming in my training... not being able to pinpoint the notes, chords, colours, and so on. I honestly don't know. But I can't really say this is "music" until it's realized, either in performance, or at the very least, in score.

Don't know if that adds anything to the discussion...

J.

I guess what Dave is after that the compositional idea of Beethoven is so strong that hardly any performance can destroy or cover it

An idea disappearing into the performance is not something negative, it´s perfect amalgamation. If the listeners mind also disappears into the performance the situation of magic might be given.

William,

Okay I now understand what you are saying more thoroughly and don't disagree in an ultimate sense. You would agree as well that Beethoven may have heard his brilliant idea performed rather badly (even though he may have concieved it in the manner you suggest: as a performance.)

My point is that there doesn't seem to be any harm or error in making a distinction between the two even if in a higher sense your point is more essentially true.


Dave

Dave, I agree with what you said anyway, and was originally only referring to something like jazz that in a way has no idea until it is performed (at least jamming type jazz as opposed to charts). Though something made me think about how a so-called "musical idea" is actually a mental projection of a performance.

Though I have the same experience as jbm - I wonder about that, isn't it a function of time in the composition process? In other words, when you first have an "idea" - what is it? Actual notes or sounds? Sometimes not - it is more a feeling that there is something that can be developed.

Yeah, that's the idea I'm getting at, William. Sometimes it seems there's something fairly concrete there, at least concrete enough that I THINK it can become a piece... but the problem is that there isn't necessarily any temporal element. Or rather, it doesn't take place in real time. It's like there's an IDEA of time, without the idea actually occupying musical time. This is getting pretty abstract. I probably need to sleep!
That said, however, I've decided to go back and do some heavy ear training. Maybe that will drag these ideas out of the mental ether -- kicking and screaming!

J.

Witold Lutoslawski once said (though he was speaking in polish and I was never positive that i fully understood him) that every piece of music has a "key idea". And he claimed that it COULD be but NEED NOT be a fragment of musical material, a melody or set of chords or rhythm. But that (presumably for good, successful works only) the whole composition had to conform to this idea for it to be successful. I think he felt both his Livres and his 'Cello concerto succeeded in this way.

(sorry Polish speakers, I can't do the funny L that his name requires.)

That's an interesting conversational tidbit, but unfortunately - having heard Lutoslawski - I'm not sure he had any ideas that anyone in this dimension can understand. (Does anyone know how to transfer fingernails being scraped across a blackboard into MIDI? A fingernail controller probably. Get one to do Lutoslawski properly with VSL, please.) Though I'm sure on a higher dimensional plane that I will never ever get to, being an ordinary human, Lutoslawski's ideas are absolutely FASCINATING (probably to the advanced Krell civilization which vaporized in one night after a million years of shining sanity).

William -- not sure if you've heard Lutoslawski, not the composer whose music I'd describe as you did -- but anyway, if it's not in your frame of reference, maybe you'd not find it provocative or even interesting. He was a good thinker about music, more than most, so came to mind with regard to this discussion. Forgive the quote, then!

getting further off-topic, it occurs to me to wonder how far we are away from some of the composers of the past ... how many 'degrees of relationship', knowing someone who knew someone? I knew Lutoslawski, when he was a famous composer and I a student; wonder if he knew anyone who knew Wagner? Can anybody claim two or three degrees away from Debussy? Brahms? Surely Richard Strauss can't be too far away from us. Beethoven?

Well I wasn't serious about that anyway. But another example of what you're talking about is Schoenberg being a friend of Mahler, which is quite a huge range of music history in two people. Or the people who knew Richard Strauss late in his very long life.

The man I studied conducting with Fritz Zweig was a close personal of almost anyone of importance you can think of: Shoenberg, Stravinsky, Strauss, Hindimith, Puccini, Korngold, Walter, Furtwangler, Klemperer, Zell and on and on. Can you imagine hearing personal references to Stravinsky or Hindimith? (Which I did.)

Dave Connor

Is this OT OK? or should this thread keep going here?

@William said:

Well I wasn't serious about that anyway. But another example of what you're talking about is Schoenberg being a friend of Mahler, which is quite a huge range of music history in two people.

I wouldn´t say so. Schönberg, and especially the later Schönberg, is a deeply romantic composer. Though not a monstrous one...