Page 17 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

musical interpretation: between the artistic and the scientific
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the role of the previously autonomous creation of the composer. This the-
atrically based approach to performance, which with its self-referential,
frequently narcissistic characteristics is founded less on musical postulates
than on the principle of performance, is mainly typical of popular music
(U-Musik). In what way this approach has affected the image of classical
music can be seen in extreme form at concerts by performers such as Va-
nessa-Mae, André Rieu and many other “interpreters” existing in a kind of
grey area between U-Musik and E-Musik. That one of the principal factors
motivating such “entertainers” is commercial surely goes without saying.
With the denial of the musically autonomous and the gradual perme-
ation of capital into every pore of cultural and social life, aesthetic and oth-
er interpretative criteria are often entirely subordinated to the criterion of
popularity, which unfortunately is increasingly becoming the only truly
relevant criterion. Yet as the American music theorist Wallace Berry, the
founding vice president and later president of the Society for Music Theory,
shows in his book Musical Structure and Performance, the structural and
technical complexity of classical repertoire is still able to limit such appe-
tites to a certain extent. 6
Another, less commercial interpretative approach, one that is largely
focused on musical principles, is essentially centred on the specific charac-
teristics of the musical idea. According to Nicholas Cook, this approach is
based on a Platonic/positivist dualism. If the Platonic concept is based on
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exploring symbolic, philosophical and metaphysical meanings, the positiv-
ist concept focuses above all on analysis of structural and also interpreta-
tive circumstances. In the foreground of both is the aesthetics of Werktreue,
in other words faithfulness to the composer’s idea or to the music itself.
Stravinsky talks about the great principle of “submission” of performer to
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composer. As an example of the latter, so called “Toscanini’s interpretive
approach,” in which there is supposedly no space for individuality, should
be mentioned. In Adorno’s opinion Toscanini’s performances, structurally
5 Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth Century Music, transl. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), 137–42.
6 Wallace Berry, “Questions Arising in the Relations of Analysis to Performance,” in:
Wallace Berry, Musical Structure and Performance (New Haven, London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1989), 7–44.
7 Nicholas Cook, “Between Art and Science: Music as Performance,” Journal of the
British Academy 2 (2014): 1–25.
8 Igor Stravinsky, “The Performance of Music,” in Poetics of Music in the Form of Six
Lessons, transl. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1947), 127.

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