What is a piece of music?

I don’t mean, “What is music, as opposed to just noise?” I mean, “Given that there is music—in fact, concert music—what, exactly, is the piece?”

Since producing the most recent San Francisco Contemporary Music Players concert, I’ve found myself puzzling over this question.

Let’s start with Stockhausen’s famous work, Kontakte, written in 1959 and 1960. Although the published score of the piece, sold by the composer’s own company, is still the essential starting point for musicians to learn and play the work, it no longer fully defines Kontakte as the composer grew to conceive it. I learned this from Stockhausen’s closest associates and representatives at a time when the composer was still very much alive. After nearly fifty years of performances, they said, an unwritten “performance practice” has sprung up around the work that must be studied, and to get an authentic performance the musicians must also factor in a panoply of specifications and refinements which Stockhausen could not possibly have written into the original score because they arose—accreted—in his mind through hearing different musicians play the work over time.

Another piece that our ensemble performed in the same concert, Oria by Georgia Spiropoulos, also seemed to exist in a virtual space apart from its written score, although for somewhat different reasons. In this case, the piece is very new—ours was only the second performance—and the composer is stretching to draw completely new sounds from the instruments, sounds which she has imagined and could validate in rehearsals, but which have not yet been recorded and would be difficult or even impossible, at this point, to notate clearly. Like Kontakte, what the piece is only starts on the page. The rest is lurking in the mind and ears of the composer. It can be realized only through the direct interaction of the musicians with the holder of the vision.

For the performance of Kontakte, we could not work with the composer himself. Even when he was living, it was out of the question that Stockhausen would come to San Francisco for this one performance. Instead, his company recommended that we bring to America a man who knows the piece, and the composer’s intentions for it, as well or better than anyone: the sound projectionist Bryan Wolf.

Nervous at the idea of entrusting a measure of artistic control to an unknown person outside of our group, I imagined this Herr Wolf at first as a Prussian army officer: fierce eyes and a thin mustache topping a wan, dangerous smile. Instead, he turned out to be a terribly nice fellow, and an American expatriate to boot. As William Winant and Julie Steinberg have attested, Wolf’s acquaintance with Stockhausen’s piece is more than intimate. In fact, he knows it better than most composers know their own music.

Wolf’s copy of the score, he told me when we first spoke, is something like a cross between a palimpsest and an illuminated manuscript: each page thickly penciled over with comments and instructions hissed to Wolf in the dark by Stockhausen in the course of countless rehearsals and performances.

Working in six-hour increments over a period of days, Wolf helped Steinberg and Winant find and hone splendid effects. They shaped, together, many theatrical moments in the piece, events that they say would not have entirely coalesced without his input, even though they had already been practicing and rehearsing the piece for months.

Doubtless, Stockhausen is an extreme case in promulgating a personally transmitted performance practice. One can go to Germany this summer and take a nineteen-day course on how to perform a certain few of his pieces, taught by musicians that the composer must have trained himself.

In our March 17 concert, Rand Steiger’s piece, Dreamscape, seemed to be crystallized more fully than the other two in its well-notated score. In the concert, Steiger sat at the sound console and mixed the piece himself. His hands-on investment in our performance certainly added to the ensemble’s sense of security and authority. Would the performance have been equally authentic if a different person, also very musical, had taken the engineer’s role? I suspect, but can’t be sure, that Steiger would say yes.

Let’s stipulate that if composers are taking more personal control of their performances, it may be because their work has sometimes suffered unforgivable injuries in performance when the composer sent the score and kept away from the rehearsals. For most of our musicians, having the chance to interact directly with composers—or in the case of Bryan Wolf, with the composer’s chosen representative—is one of the reasons they enjoy playing new music. How often they must wish they could ask Beethoven which bowing or what type of accent he would prefer in a specific passage of his music!

But for me, I have to confess that I would be disappointed if music moved too much in the direction of requiring hands-on coaching by composers or by the designated heirs to their artistic vision. The idea that the essence of something as alive and powerful as a piece of music can be conveyed on a piece of paper thrills me. I don’t want to give it up, any more than I would want to give up reading novels by turning to what we called, a few years ago, ‘books on tape.’ Printed music is magical—the strange symbols, the foreign words, the arcane arithmetic of notated rhythm—and the ability to translate it at sight, either at an instrument or in the mind, into sound and feeling, is, to me, all but godlike.

One side of me wants to tell all composers: Lock yourself in a room and write down, in words or notation, everything you want to communicate about your piece. And don’t come out until you’re sure it’s clear where you want it clear, and poetic—elastic—where you want the players to exercise their own choices. Then sit back and trust the musicians.

On the other side is this: printed music may hold the promise of magic, but composers, I have found, turn out, in person, to be people just like anybody else. I never met a composer—even the very impressive John Cage—who was more than human. To engage with the ordinariness of artists is to come closer to understanding the creative process. Observe a composer, even a very gifted one, fumbling to express—or just plain unable to decide—how he or she wants a section of the music to sound—that’s to feel with your own hands the material that the piece is woven from.

I guess if composers want to come and speak about the piece to the musicians, rather than relying on paper and ink, there are probably good reasons. Maybe it even has something to do with establishing community. Anyway, that’s what has been on my mind this week. I welcome readers’ thoughts and reactions.