Musicosophy 17. Interpretation

What does it mean to interpret a musical work, between improvisation, execution and the restitution of the composer's thought?

Dominique Pagani starts from the polarity between improvisation and interpretation: the interpreter presupposes a composer external to himself and a written text, and is distinct from a mere performer. He recalls that most of humanity's musical history is made of improvisation, from prehistoric instruments to Sahel shepherds, and that classical musicians themselves improvised until the mid-nineteenth century. The notion of interpretation comes with the individualization of bourgeois civil society, which he illustrates at length through the biography of Clara Haskil. He then contrasts Furtwängler and Stravinsky, and reports Glenn Gould's testimony about Richter playing Schubert, to show that a universal communicates itself through the interpreter. He concludes on modernity as a crisis that opens possibilities of individuation, on the concrete universal which only exists realized in a determinate manner, and on jazz as a synthesis of improvisation and arrangement.

Conceptsinterpretationexecutionimprovisationindividuationconcrete universalmodernitypraxisprejudiceclassintersubjectivityessenceinvariant