The Interpreter as Co-Author: Pianists and the Practice of Interactive Re-Working

Abstract

Whilst recent musicological scholarship in the field of WAM performance studies has recognised the creative role of the interpreter, notions that equate work-interpretation with Werktreue have remained almost entirely uncontested, resulting in an apparent presupposition that the composer’s role in determining pitch material is inviolable. However, since the advent of the piano recital, a significant tradition has existed wherein pianists assume what amounts to an authorial role in performing their own reworked versions of composers’ scores. Largely ignored by scholarship, such ‘interactive re-workings’ (IRWs) present challenges to a number of musicological debates. This thesis argues that current philosophies surrounding WAM work-interpretation are inadequate for a coherent understanding of IRW and that, as a result, discourses surrounding the act of interpretation and the concept of a work’s ‘after-life’ require rethinking. Consequently, a new framework is developed which, tested against extant examples, results in the definition and circumscription of an original and distinct category of work-interpretation. Applied to two case studies, the accompanying analytical methodology is then shown to offer a robust and felicitous new means of approaching and modelling performance history and of framing and appreciating the art of these interpreters. Thereafter, the potential for IRW to be adopted as a work-interpretative strategy by contemporary pianists is investigated through ethnographic and autoethnographic studies. Thus, this research challenges and furthers understandings of the history of work-interpretation and the remit of the interpreter’s creative agency, particularly as it pertains to the ecology of the concert hall. Furthermore, it demonstrates the possibility that co-authorship with a composer in absentia is a valid interpretative strategy that furthers a work in its ‘after-life’, and it also considers the implications of such a construct. Consequently, this thesis challenges notions of the ubiquity of the composer-performer binary in the age of the piano recital, and responds to Jonathan Dunsby’s call for scholarship where ‘there is serious attention to the creativity of the performer’.