The Human Factor

Once, a well known piano professor in Germany commented on his student's struggles to interpret a composition of the classical music's repertoire: "Just let the music play itself.." What a sentence. The composed music must be able to play itself. It doesn't need to much interpretation because its melodies and rhythms, its harmonies and sound textures are strong enough to sound perfectly, without some added marks of interpretation? Well, the aesthetic approach of this professor surely was, to prevent to much alteration by inadequate efforts to interpret a music, which is, in its notated form, an interpretation itself. I. E.  it is the composer's talent to comment on musical art's traditions in his own notated musical thoughts. Being a notated form of art, composed music possibly just needs a kind of transformation or translation into real sounds, which shall reach the audience in a concert. In this respect, the musical virtuoso is not so much an interpreter, but a highly skilled wizard of the genius of the (mostly already deceased) composer. So the composer is the interpret, not the pianist or violinist. Could we say so? No. The pride and the vanity (may it be  justified or not..) of famous classical interpreters would be insulted by such a degradation, no matter if a modest and special-intelligent musician perhaps could agree with that view.

In the eighties and the early ninties, sound producers and composers of popular music often desperately tried to make their drum beats (or other digital instruments) sound more "human". And they had to grab deeply into their bag of tricks to prevent sounds from sounding to clinical. There was the so called "human factor", meaning they had to program slight mistakes into the digital soundmap which should bring a human effect of flexibility and richness in variation to the artificial sound-world of samples and synthesizers. They were obviously situated at the other end of the range of influences determining the effects of human intervention on a "prepared" (meaning not improvised) music. Interventions which are meant to bring this "prepared" music to its best results.

This is very interesting! Whereas classical musicians try to "reduce"to much impact by over-interpretation or unwanted mistakes, this modern species of sound composers seem to rack themselves to create an impression of "romantic" human influence. That may be the clear result of the circumstance in classical music, that brings a"hidden" co-player to the stage, which is the composer of the adored traditional music itself. Whereas in popular music only the interpreter, no matter if it is the producer in a studio or the musician on a stage, brings the music's authenticity to the audience. There is no hidden coplayer and nowadays the methods of arranging and producing a perfectly "human" sound out of the digital wonderbox have been developed to a point of genuineness, which can't be denied even by a hater of these styles of music. But is there something like a positive "human factor" in classical music's interpretation? A factor beyond efforts to avoid mistakes or to prevent too much interpretation? A factor which could lead to a kind of musicality which goes far beyond the composer's dreams of its own music? This will be the issue of my next blog!

Stay tuned...