Conducting the Wind Orchestra: Meaning, Gesture, and Expressive Potential
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Conducting the Wind Orchestra: Meaning, Gesture, and Expressive P ...

Chapter 1:  Conducting in Theory and Practice
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The Nature of Interpretation

The nature of interpretation is inherently ambiguous. How loud is forte? How should a passage marked dolce actually be played? How fast is allegretto vivo, sempre scherzando? These questions of interpretation are difficult to answer with absolute certainty. The answers depend upon a great many factors—not least being the interpreter’s convictions with regard to his/her approach to the score.

Many theorists and musicologists have viewed the act of interpretation as a reproduction of the composer’s score in performance. Gunther Schuller states the following:

For if conductors arrogate to themselves the notion that they are going to interpret the masterworks of the past and the present, then they had better realise that that is not only a staggering task, but one that imposes a profound responsibility to what Beethoven and Wagner so aptly called “die heilige Kunst” (“the sacred art”). And that responsibility—that moral and aesthetic obligation—in turn demands that conductors achieve their so-called interpretations through, i.e. from within, the work of art, in boundless respect and reverence for it; and that they not, in reverse order, wilfully or inadvertently impose some self-indulgent, over-personalised “interpretation” on that work of art.1

Schuller further argues that any interpretation that does not evolve from the score and from all of its prescriptive details is fundamentally invalid. This view comes dangerously close to the notion of the Werkkonzept, which implies that the work is fully predetermined and knowable from its score.