The Tyranny of The Work

Western classical music is a really strange thing when one takes a broad enough view of it. There is no other musical tradition that I am aware of that insists upon fidelity to a strict written score, and eschews improvisation in the whole. A couple days I ran across an English musicologist named Daniel Leech-Wilkinson who has battled the implications of this strangeness. He has recently put together an open-access ebook entitled Challenging Performance that lays out his contentions. To quote from him

Why is it so important now to start to perform classical scores differently? In sum:

Because to believe that there is broadly one correct way to perform a classical score is mistaken ethically, historically, and factually.

Because the policing of conformity by gatekeepers that is required to enforce this mistake—to prevent it being noticed, exposed and challenged—denies performers full credit for their arguably equal contribution (with composers) and a just financial reward for their contribution; and denies them the right and ability to be innovative or even significantly creative.

Leech-Wilkinson has a background in studying medieval music, where one by necessity has to be creative with interpretations — there is extremely little information to rely upon in the musical notations we do have from the medieval period. I noticed that he wrote a book published in 2002 entitled The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship, Ideology, Performance and immediately wanted to read it. Happily, I have access to an efficient interlibrary loan service and a copy of the book arrived for me via ILL late this afternoon!