Definitions

I'm feeling the most comfortable I've ever felt being a college music professor this semester. It seems like it can take quite a while to feel really settled in one's calling, particularly when there have been so many voices trying to define who and what one should be without reference to, or awareness/understanding of, that calling. I have sensed this most strongly in the area of performing. How much performing should I be doing? Where should I be doing it? How should I relate that performing to the rest of my work and life? What should I be performing? With whom should I be performing? . . . These are serious questions regarding how to conduct my professional life, how to spend my time, and what my identity is. After all, the performing part of my life existed before the college professor part and will probably be with me long after the college professor part. (I hope to have a long and productive academic career and a long and productive time of retirement afterwards during which I continue to make music!)


What is a performance?

Here's my current definition:

A performance is a committed effort that explores one’s capabilities, and in so doing, becomes a valuable human achievement.


There are all sorts of ways in which a rendering can be a committed effort. I like the idea that a committed effort involves a balance of the thinking, feeling, and acting parts of us. It seems like commitment falls apart when these are not in balance.

This definition is about exploring what one can do, not comparing it with what someone else can do. Perhaps competition makes us work harder at times, but the opposite can also be true. If we compare our efforts to the efforts of those around us, sometimes we'll think "what I'm doing is good enough" but we might be falling short of our actual potential by letting our context define what is good enough. We might also be diminishing the value of our human achievement.

Finally, these efforts are valuable as human events because they apply commitment to exploring our capabilities. These efforts can happen at many stages and levels from a child learning to clap a rhythm to the greatest actors performing Shakespeare on film for posterity. There is something pure in this pursuit that distinguishes the human race each time it happens.


Another definition - music theory:

Music theory is the activity of making valid statements about the experience of a piece of music.


Sometimes theory seems really abstract to students and other musicians, but it's not really. To some extent, any endeavor involving words will be a bit of an abstraction since words are abstracts. But music theory is about using words and other means to describe and discuss the experience of music.

I call it an activity, but the word "discipline" could replace that word since it is a discipline. But I have chosen "activity" since all sorts of people do it who aren't intentional about it being a discipline. Anyone who listens and processes what they are hearing is doing theory, not just the student in school or the professional musician.

There are at least two types of knowledge that need to inform our more specifically "theoretical" statements about music to bolster their validity: knowledge of history and knowledge of performance. Since the score only conveys what would not have been assumed (as Robert Levin says) we need to know the context to intelligently deal with the score. And hearing lots of music performed live helps us develop a sense of what details can be clearly heard in performance and which move more into the background.

Finally, Theory is about the experience of a piece of music. As Dr. Falby taught us, good theory is about what we hear, not about circling notes on a page. Theory deals with the organization of the sounds within a given work. That organization is what we are experiencing if we are experiencing that work.