Less/More

From Greg Sandow's blog:

Ben Verdery, who teaches guitar at the Yale School of Music [...] Ben wants to know which guitarists auditioning for the school have real musical imagination, so he asked a Yale composer to write an audition piece for auditioners to play -- a piece with all the notes written down, but no expressive markings at all (no tempo markings, no dynamics, no articulations). The students had to decide for themselves how the piece should go. This is a brilliant idea, and Ben tells me it worked out just the way he hoped. It weeded out the students who play stunningly -- as long as someone else tells them how to play.

Things are really changing in the music world. When I was writing my first piece ever, a string quartet in high school, the pro players told me flat out that it was better to put much more information in a piece, telling a performer exactly the way it should be.

The above situation isn't exactly equivalent; those players are auditioning, not performing "for real." But the idea that a performer should be judged on something other than an ability to follow the instructions and that this is being practiced at Yale show that something is changing.

In my own music, I'm finding a pull towards more improvisation. I love doing it myself. God only knows how many good ideas I could have used in other places have floated up and away while I hacked at the keyboard. But screw what Shostakovich said (or may have said) about improvisation and composing -- it's a fun thing to do. Why shouldn't performers have the same sort of fun?