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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He believes that the work exists in the conductor’s mind in a perfect state, a form of perfection that belongs to the conductor who conceives it and a form that he/she communicates to the orchestra. Lydia Goehr would describe this “ideal conception” as the “perfect performance of music” where the work is favoured over the human action required to express it, a concept that she contrasts with the performer’s parallel desire for the “perfect musical performance”.4 Whilst Scherchen’s view is freeing for the conductor, giving his/her own expression a voice in interpretation, it is a fallacy to suppose that the “ideal conception” would ever be perfectly realised in performance.

Peter Walls would not consider a performance conducted by Scherchen to be a valid interpretation of a given work. He makes a distinction between the terms interpretation and appropriation. He writes,

Thinking about the ambiguity of the term “interpret” is quite a useful way of distinguishing between performances which are true to the music being performed and those in which something else (showmanship, for instance) gets in the way. We could, in fact, call this first kind of performance “interpretation” (anchoring that word to its primary meaning) and the second kind “appropriation” (since the musical work has, in a sense, become a vehicle for the performer’s personal agenda). Interpretation, then, might become synonymous with trying to determine and to realize the composer’s intentions.5

Here, Walls presents two extreme views of interpretation: one in which the composer’s intentions are carefully preserved and the other in which the interpreter uses the score to satisfy his/her own creative need. Like Schuller, Walls proceeds from the assumption that the work is completely knowable from the score.