Classical music notes: Close the score and listen to the music

By Jacob Stockinger

I hear a lot of classical music on the campus of a major university (University of Wisconsin-Madison) where there is a major School of Music (ranked in the top 5 percent of public schools of music,  according to UW officials) that offers some 300 concerts a year.

So fairly often I see people listening with a score, either a regular size music score or one of those smaller study scores that seem to be getting harder to find these days.

I have heard other members of the audience talk with reverence about those who really want to know the music intimately that they bring a score. (And I saw quite a few score-listeners during the Beethoven piano sonata cycle performed last season by UW pianist Christopher Taylor.)

I beg to differ, to disagree.

I think that, except in unusual circumstances, a score gets in the way of appreciating the music – and in the way of others appreciating the music.

True, you may be listening to a piece because you yourself are studying or even learning it.

True, you may be a professional critic or a student studying the piece and have a special reason to see if the performer is following the dynamic or tempo indications or even playing the right notes.

But for the most part, reading a score is too often a kind of pompous exercise, a way of showing off that you are a special or sophisticated listener. It’s like the way The New York Times critic Harold Schonberg used to listen with a stop watch to compare tempi. But psychological time (philosopher Henri Bergson’s “duree” or duration)  and clock time are quite different matters. A slower playing can sound faster and vice-versa. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz was a master of that.

You actually learn much more about the music simply by concentrating on the listening experience (and, as the composer Igor Stravinsky pointed out, on the visual experience, since so much of making music involves hand-eye coordination.)

But overall, I find the scores to be a distraction — not only to me and to the music, but to the people who are sitting near me and who cannot avoid watching me turn pages or, worse, hear me turning them, no matter how careful I am.

If you are there for the experience of music, then get into that experience and kept yourself be convinced or unconvinced by what the performer or performers do with the music – not with what the written notation, an approximation at best, of the music happens to be.

Do you use a score at concerts?

What do you think of people who do?

The Ear wants to hear.

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Posted in Classical music