Listening to a Webern score without being able to read it must be rather like studying a great architectural mastepiece without having access to a ground plan. ... The new [music], when it eschews any links with the past, can be absorbed only by those who are able to hear the music and read the score (the aural equivalent of the architect's blueprint).
ERICH
LEINSDORF [1]
_____________________________
Why
should listening to a piece of art
music be like studying a piece of
architecture (or anything else)? Why shouldn’t it be instead like taking a tour
of a palace (castle, cathedral)?
Does one have to study the shooting script
and the production designer’s storyboard in order to “absorb” a film of
Eisenstein, Godard, or Tarkovsky? Or
read the source code of computer programs used to produce some of the art works
at MOMA in order to “absorb” such works?
What
exactly does the ability to read a score amount to?
When in 1854 the conductor Hans von Bülow
sent Richard Wagner some scores to review, Wagner responded with a letter in
which he admitted his borderline incompetence (if not impotence) as a score
reader:
...[H]ow
am I to get any clear idea of these [scores]? You know how abominably I play
the piano, and that I cannot master anything by that means unless I can get a
clear conception [of the music] beforehand.
What I get from a simple reading [of the score] is not enough ... to
arrive at an idea of a composition.[2]
Did Wagner have the ability to read a
score?
