Comments on: Divine Sheet Music http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/02/04/divine-sheet-music/ A First Things Blog Fri, 24 May 2013 01:35:19 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Jim Pauwels http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/02/04/divine-sheet-music/comment-page-1/#comment-89317 Jim Pauwels Mon, 04 Feb 2013 22:53:01 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/?p=56810#comment-89317 In the heyday of sheet music distribution, when sheet music sales rather than downloads or album sales were an important index of composers’ and lyricists’ popularity, the author (who composed the work) in most cases was not the same as the performer (who actually performed it for consumers). And so there were two levels of authority at work: the authority of the author, and the authority of the interpreter/performer. (I’m using past tense to describe this dynamic, but in fact it lives on in classical music, in church music, in quite a bit of jazz, and to some degree in pop music). Even with the advent of the phonograph, this separation between author and interpreter continued.

The dynamic between these two levels of authority is an important one. In many cases, a supremely talented composer is not a supremely talented performer/interpreter, even of her own works (I’ve read that an Irving Berlin song never sounded so unpromising as when Berlin played his new compositions for his film or theater bosses). A gifted interpreter is able to bring the artistry latent in the score to life – in some cases, finding threads that the composer didn’t intentionally write in, or embellishing the score in ingenious ways.

This Beck project seems somewhat different, in that it is the consumers, rather than a caste of interpretive experts, being asked to interpret his compositions. Interesting stuff.

]]> By: SB http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/02/04/divine-sheet-music/comment-page-1/#comment-89291 SB Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:03:01 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/?p=56810#comment-89291 Us living composers, of course, find the breathlessness of commentary about Beck’s release a bit on the silly side. Hi, there! We’ve been doing exactly this kind of thing for, oh, hundreds of years! Unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t get bent out of shape about Beck’s project–after all, anything that increases amateur music-making is a good thing. Even so, the only thing about it that differs substantially from what living composers have been doing all along is the width of distribution. On that count, Beck has pretty much all of us beat.

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