But seriously, isn't the consciousness of the performer (including all that has played a part in shaping that) equally intrinsic within the chain?

(There's a further question of the role of the existing discourse around the music in informing the listener's interpretive faculties and 'spirit', but maybe that should be left to one side for now )

I haven't read Motz's book, no (have heard of it), but certainly will do after your recommendation - thanks for that!

The questions concerning the role of the performer (especially, but not exclusively, in the context of contemporary music) I think could be discussed in terms of specifics in another thread - shall we have one?

Well, those aren't the only two possibilities! Rather than extrapolating outwards from an example, we could on the other hand consider in general the extent to which a performer's role is creative rather than merely recreative, especially in new music, the role they play if forming common perceptions about the music, how these things might differ from composer to composer, how performers working with living composers might have a different attitude to the whole process than those who only play dead ones, whether the performer's role is necessarily constricted with music that has highly detailed notation, whether there is such a thing as merely 'playing what's there' and so on and so forth, then move into more detailed examples? Starting synthetically rather than merely analytically?

Composers can also admonish performers for ignoring them, of course! And listeners can admonish either if they feel the need to do so.....

That was (mildly) amusing, by the way, Ian, but I'm not quite sure what Michael is getting at. After all, people tend not to use titles like Symphony No 3 'Eroica' any more either, and most music 'locate[s it]self in a period' one way or another (despite the current critical vogue for the word 'timeless', which I always find as meaningless as you claim to find 'spiritual').

Incidentally, I didn't bring the quote back up for this reason, but it's just occurred to me to ask: would you argue against the sort of discussion of titles that Finnissy is engaging in on the basis that he doesn't explain how this relates to the music as can be heard? And what do you make of his assertion that Stockhausen's love life is 'part of the material' of Momente?

Well (with the undeniably specialist knowledge of having sifted through the earlier drafts of the interviews as it went through extensive editing on the part of both subject and interviewees), I'm quite sure Michael is speaking about the tendency through titles to present something as dealing with entirely abstract concerns rather than human factors.

Certainly it is - the point I think is being made is that 'abstract' titles can end up being just as allusional and historically-grounded as any other. Abstraction can sometimes imply something that stands outside of history. So he seems to suggest that the use of a title like Carré says as much about what was seen as an elevated thing for a composer at that time to be seen to be dealing with, as the piece does about that thing itself.

This was a brief comment in an interview in relation to questions about Finnissy's own use of titles. Fox's earlier question included: 'There's quite a strong tradition within twentieth-century English music of pieces that belong explicitly to special circumstances, whereas German, French and Italian composers cover their tracks more carefully...', to which Finnissy responded 'Why should one have to 'cover up' tracks? To make the arrival seeem more miraculous? Surely most composers are located, or locatable in a particular culture. Maybe many don't make it explicit but have grander scenarios to enact. I'm becoming defensive. Stockhausen's Mikrophonie or Gruppen.....'. This is of course an interview, not a piece of analysis - if such a claim were made in the latter then I would expect it to be substantiated through discussion of the sounds, yes.

As far as the comment about Stockhausen's love-life is concerned, Finnissy is skipping several stages of a process of reasoning. You could say that various events in Stockhausen's love and other life impacted upon the type of music he wrote - to make that argument convincingly one would have to look at works from that period and other periods and trace a discernable shift which seems to parallel the biographical events (though I doubt there's much music one could merely reduce to that aspect). But it doesn't really make sense to say 'it is part of the material' (a piece doesn't literally have a life or love life in that sense), rather that the trajectory of Stockhausen's composition is not unrelated to other events in his life. People of course have done that for a long time with many other composers (think of Beethoven or Schubert, to give two obvious examples). That isn't the only way to relate it to something other than abstract concerns, though; one can look at the reception history of the work, how it was perceived when it was new and afterwards (that's one thing I'm starting to look at, but it's too early for me to start writing on that in detail here), or look at the types of music that were composed and performed predominantly during certain periods of time (by Stockhausen and others) and consider whether major shifts in emphasis relate to other changes in the society and culture (which, to do in detail, can also be looked at in terms of reception history, also in terms of the decision-making on the part of those with administrative power concerning who was to be commissioned and promoted, how they and their work were presented in the media, and so on - again that's part of my own current research; very little has been written on this subject in either English or German). Overall I suppose I find that more interesting, as it's focused upon the work in a wider context rather than 'reading back' from the work to find out about the composer. Stockhausen's love-life (or, as some recent writers have started to dwell upon, the love-life, mutually of Bussotti and Metzger for a while) may be of interest to some, may even tell about why the composer wrote in certain ways, but doesn't necessarily say much else about the work as an entity that could be of interest whether or not one cares about Stockhausen's private life. Gay musicology in particular seems extremely focused on trying to reduce a work to autobiography, but generally its practitioners seem more interested in composers than music. Personally, I don't really see why Stockhausen's love-life, or Bussotti's, or Metzger's (or Schubert's) are of that much more consequence, in themselves, than those of anyone else. If somehow the music can communicate something about romance, desire (and/or oppression on the basis of particular preferences in terms of desire) that have a wider meaning, that may be a different matter - to assert that this is the case in Stockhausen's Momente would take some doing (though it may not be impossible).

opilec posted something about *actual* performances of Stockhausens *actual* music a while back, but he seems to have deleted it on account of the fact that it appears that this thread is about a composer, not about a composer.

opilec, sorry if it came across as 'cold-shouldering'. I was actually very happy to read your post, and I only didn't reply because I didn't have anything to add. I didn't notice you'd deleted it and I would certainly have asked why if I had noticed.