I enjoyed talking with Molly Sheridan recently for this interview which has been published on New Music USA’s NewMusicBox. For more than 15 years, I’ve turned to New Music USA in order to research music, seek out grants and learn about the music community around me. So I’m very touched to have been asked to do this interview, and I appreciate the article that goes with it.
About the performer’s role, I want to say further that the interpreter can drastically affect the impression a piece of music makes. A listener might attribute their response to a piece’s own characteristics, but they may actually be reacting to the *way* the piece was performed – whether the emotions or mood conveyed or aspects like pacing, phrasing, sound color, and bringing across rhythmic meaning or clarity. This is crucial for new compositions but it also holds for older music. Playing lots of nicely-shaped phrases and harmonic progressions, with the same tone, might please someone who thinks classical music is only pretty and soothing, but it will not convey the moment-to-moment meanings and metamorphoses with which a fine work of music can rivet, excite, and move you. It can be revelatory to listen to a composition you’d thought was dull or unappealing and then to discover, through someone’s performance, how wonderful it is, or by studying and playing the piece yourself. Conversely, it can be disappointing or even upsetting to hear a work, which you know has expressive depth and possibilities, performed in a way that makes it tedious to sit through.
This can be discussed in detail and of course involves subjectivity, but also actual matters of conveying musical meaning in time. There are pieces that were crafted in such a way they’re usually effective in concert, but frequently the performer’s role in communicating musical expression can make an enormous difference.
Of course, performance and interpretation are not just about delivering on a composition’s strengths. They’re about imbuing the music with one’s imagination, vision, personality, sound, intention, and emotion, and about that alchemical fusion of artists’ creativity, as I said in the interview.