What is performance?

and both that morning equally laying an egg

Photo by Y M on Unsplash

There is an long standing question in literary theory: can a poem be summarized? You read, Robert Frost’s “Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood” and then take out a piece of paper and write, “This poem is about the choices that we make in life and how they affect our existence.” After which, you have to start asking some things about the nature of art. If that’s what Frost “really meant,” why didn’t he just say, “Sometimes we have to make choices, and those choices make a difference in the life we live.” You could have saved a lot of time by just saying what you meant instead of using all that imagery about woods and yellowishness. For that matter, Frost could have saved us all a lot of tedium with high school graduation speeches with “both that morning equally laying” metaphors. Valedictorians across these United States could be stepping up to the mic and saying, “In the immortal words of Robert Frost, ‘Friends, we’ve got some choices to make.’”

The question for literary theory is: what exactly is a summary of a poem? Is it the content of the poem said in a different way? Is it the hard kernel that remains when all the slag and dross is washed away? If it is that, then what is the poem itself? Is it an expansion and elaboration of some Democritean literary atom?

I would suggest that the answer is: no. Form and content cannot be separated in a poem. The specific word choices on the surface are the thing itself, and there are no depths to be plunged separate from the formal elements. Well, there are depths to be plunged apart from the poem, to be sure, but then you aren’t talking about the poem — or, at least your talking isn’t the poem. A poem can’t be summarized. Maybe a better way of saying it would be that any summary of a poem is some kind of diremption.

Occasionally in music, we will get a similarly minded argument from that most obtuse of musical minds: the dogmatic Schenkerian analyst. After plunging into the murky depths of the wine-dark musical sea, they emerge at the surface holding two identical Urlinie pearls. That’s not so problematic in itself. It’s only when they start talking as if the Ursatz is the “content” of the piece that it gets weird. To suggest that Bach’s C major prelude is the same as Chopin’s C major prelude in content but just worked out differently is something like someone saying (to quote David Bentley Hart) that they have seen Romeo and Juliet after they walked out of a performance of West Side Story.

If form and content can’t be separated in a poem, it also presents a problem for translation. Gadamer is very helpful here.

“No translation of a lyric poem ever conveys the original work. The best we can hope for is that one poet should come across another and put a new poetic work, as it were, in place of the original by creating an equivalent with the materials of a different language.”

Curiously though, it doesn’t apply universally to all literature in Gadamer’s thought.

“There are of course levels of untranslatability. A novel is certainly translatable, and we must ask ourselves why this is, why we are able to see Dostoevsky’s staircase in front of us so vividly that I could almost argue with someone about the direction in which it turns, although I know no Russian? How does language achieve this?”

He’ll allow that a novel can be translated in a way that a poem can’t. I would suggest that this is true in a general sense, but probably not in specific cases. Robert Frost can likely be translated more easily than Mallarmé. Emily Dickinson translates better than T.S. Eliot. Karamozov can move between languages in a way that Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow might not. As the language gets more distilled and concentrated, it gets more difficult to uproot and re-sod in a new vocabulary and grammar.

The big question for me, of course, is what all this might mean for music and musical performance. In a very real sense, what we are doing in the performing arts is translating something into the present moment. To whatever degree of success, we uproot pieces Bach wrote for the harpsichord and re-plant them on the piano. We deracinate Schubert Lieder and arrange them for chorus. Does this mean that — like Gadamer’s argument above about translating lyric poetry — that the best we can hope for is “a new poetic musical work, as it were, in place of the original by creating an equivalent with the materials of a different language.”

I picked some obvious examples where things were changed from their original context, but I don’t think any of the issues change if we confront any piece we play — even if it is close to the original context. What we are doing is creating a new work “in place of the original.”

In my mind, this is what we are doing as performers, and the sooner we come to terms with it and stop pretending we are doing something else the better. I’ve said it before, but the business of pretending we are doing something different than creating something new has resulted in the flattening of our musical universe. Instead of distinguishing between Furtwängler and Walter and saying, “I like this one. I don’t like that one.” We get ten different recordings of the same piece that are virtually identical because performers are trained to play a piece of music in the “proper style.”

It’s all quite tedious, really. I go to the symphony to hear another Mahler performance that sounds exactly the same as all the recordings that I’ve heard because of musical training and economic factors. It is much more affordable to just do it the same way as everyone else given the limited rehearsal time. I don’t know how to fix it. I am reminded of one thing though. Robert Frost once said, “We’ve got some choices to make.”