# Can classical music be a re-creative art form?



## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Can classical music be a "re-creative art form?" Learning piano in the late 1960's and 1970's I was taught that it can. When playing a piece you were to bring it into being again, combining respect for the composer's intentions with your own interpretation. 

The reason for my question is that I haven't heard talk of music being a re-creative art form for decades. Does a performer's "re-creation" mean the same thing as "interpretation?" Is there another idea at work?


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I think I've had one too many Glenlivets tonight. I don't even understand the question.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Roger Knox said:


> Can classical music be a "re-creative art form?" Learning piano in the late 1960's and 1970's I was taught that it can. When playing a piece you were to bring it into being again, combining respect for the composer's intentions with your own interpretation.
> 
> The reason for my question is that I haven't heard talk of music being a re-creative art form for decades. Does a performer's "re-creation" mean the same thing as "interpretation?" Is there another idea at work?


The first performance, and only the first performance, of a composition, is its creation. Subsequent performances are its recreation. This seems an uninteresting point about language.


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## Dan Ante (May 4, 2016)

Roger Knox said:


> Can classical music be a "re-creative art form?" Learning piano in the late 1960's and 1970's I was taught that it can. When playing a piece you were to bring it into being again, combining respect for the composer's intentions with your own interpretation.
> 
> The reason for my question is that I haven't heard talk of music being a re-creative art form for decades. Does a performer's "re-creation" mean the same thing as "interpretation?" Is there another idea at work?


I have never heard the word 're creative' used and unless I am completely on the wrong track it is the performers "interpretation" of the particular work. As all musicians know the written score can only give a certain amount of information the way a performer plays this is up to her/him/them and today is called interpretation.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

I agree with Dan. I looked up the word "re-creative" to check I wasn't missing something subtle. Roger, I'm sure you mean something more profound than playing for enjoyment and no dosh. Maybe you are looking philosophically at what is in essence a simple exchange of very flexible information to be acted upon by the receiver, is it any more than that? With all of the pieces I've learnt over the years, I never once felt as though I had a stake in the actual composing whilst playing.

Music lives and breathes via interpretation of course and the art would be dead and dull without the myriad varied approaches to performance.
I see where Mandryka is coming from, but the true point of creation is the step before a performance, i.e. on the composer's manuscript or in their head


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

I agree with mbhaub on this one — minus the Glenlivit.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I've heard the term reinterpretation, and I think that's similar to what Roger is saying. A performer's interpretation is what he/she thinks the composer's intent was, while a reinterpretation has a certain awareness of doing something different or beyond what they believe the composers original intent is. But it could be argued that a reinterpretation is just an interpretation.

An example of a reinterpretation or recreation I can think of off-hand is the Piano Guys version of Rondo Alla Turca, where they change notes and stuff around (can't find a link, but I heard it on Classical FM a few times). Or this:


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## Nawdry (Dec 27, 2020)

Dan Ante said:


> I have never heard the word 're creative' used and unless I am completely on the wrong track it is the performers "interpretation" of the particular work. As all musicians know the written score can only give a certain amount of information the way a performer plays this is up to her/him/them and today is called interpretation.


I concur. I surmise that Roger's piano instructor was essentially describing interpretation but was trying to convey a more intensive aspect - "re-creating", the work, making it become part of you, so you could imbue life from yourself into it, "creating" it anew.


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## chipia (Apr 22, 2021)

I guess anybody who plays Bach on the piano is "recreating" his music, in the sense that Bach probably didn't intend most of his music to be played on a Piano.

Other than that, I think an interpretation can only be called a "recreation" if the musician deliberately interprets the piece in an original way that wasn't intended by the composer. Maybe some things by Glenn Gould would count.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

chipia said:


> I guess anybody who plays Bach on the piano is "recreating" his music, in the sense that Bach probably didn't intend most of his music to be played on a Piano.
> 
> Other than that, I think an interpretation can only be called a "recreation" if the musician deliberately interprets the piece in an original way that wasn't intended by the composer. Maybe some things by Glenn Gould would count.


Yes, I think that is what Gould was trying to do.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

Performing someone else's creation is recreative art; the differences in the recreation are interpretive. In music those differences tend to be technical -- speed, pulse or meter, rubato, volume, things like that. A performance that does nothing other than read and play the notes is not an interpretation; it is the same as reading a book and not visualizing anything other than the words.


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## Ariasexta (Jul 3, 2010)

Seemingly easy questions like this are the most difficult to answer, I believe since people take classical music performance as a kind of revival, it is re-creating it, according to most performers, we can have not st models of authenticity, so, pretty much, we are re-creating it whenever we try to perform them in historically informed ways.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Even a composer playing his own work, re-creates it every time he plays it.


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## FrankinUsa (Aug 3, 2021)

I would give the OP some credence on using the word “re-create” as in creating anew beyond the original creation-from the composer.


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## FrankinUsa (Aug 3, 2021)

I would add that music has always been “re-creative.” Using the word “interpretive” might be more of a mainstream use of words.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

MarkW said:


> Even a composer playing his own work, re-creates it every time he plays it.


Yes, but let's not forget that there's already a word in universal usage that will save us from the clumsy and semantically ambiguous "re-creation." That word is performance. One might also use "realization" for works in the performing arts when one is striving to bring to life the author's or composer's artistic intentions. So let's not recreate the language when there are pre-created terms already in use.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> ...One might also use "realization" for works in the performing arts when one is striving to bring to life the author's or composer's artistic intentions. So lets not recreate the language when there are pre-created terms already in use.


Some of us play professionally, and get paid for it. The remainder of us likely play recreationally, which we gladly do for no pay at all.

The word "recreation" itself provides insight into human behavior. Work apparently changes us from what we were or are supposed to be, while our pastime enjoyments (recreation) allow us to re-create ourselves, hopefully neutralizing the subversive changes brought about by paid-for-hire toil. I suspect.

In any case, I tend to think of the "creation" of a work of art as the primary artist's endeavor, whether he or she produces a fully formed piece (poem, novel, painting) or a blueprint (a musical score, a play, an architectural structure). I like the term "to realize" for the interpretive artists who help to bring into realization the original creation. But Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was _created_ on score paper, and performances of it, _realizations_ of it seem to me less re-creations than simply renderings of what is there in essence (the creation) all along.

I suspect that playwrights, song writers, composers and such artists have a different viewpoint of their "creations" from those artists whose work is complete with the creation: painters, sculptors, poets, novelists. Of course, things get even more complex when one considers that a composer may set a poem to music or a film director may render a novel into a film script. What do we then have? Re-creations, or plain old "new" creations, or ... re-realizations?

Perhaps some contemporary composers in the aleatory realm (such as John Cage) allow for re-creation of pieces, but then the debate is whether or not the original work is a true creation at all. If the performing artist is allowed to make choices that change the fabric and nature of the "created work", one might challenge whether such a work has any prior creation at all, much as like a work-in-progress which shifts and changes as the artist works and reworks it.

It seems to me that Sophocles created the _Oedipus_ play. But even his initial performance of the work, with actors and dancers and musicians, remains a realization of that creation rather than a re-creation. Even interpretations (such as Oedipus done in modern set and costuming circumstances) may prove bizarre or wondrous without exactly being any sort of re-creation of the work.

One may re-create the _Oedipus_ tale by producing a new script, which has been done. But then those new works are _creations_ and their performances will entail not _re-creations_ but rather _realizations_.

Which is why in the theatre arts we distinguish between a play or drama and a theatre piece or spectacle. Of course, both the script of the _Oedipus_ and the stage performance of the _Oedipus_ are "creations", but one is done by the playwright, the other by the director, designers, and performers, based upon a blueprint rendered by a playwright. As genres of art there remains a profound difference between a play script and a theatrical performance of a play. (Which brings one to realize that a play script is a _piece_ of a theatre piece, just as, I suspect, the score of Beethoven's Fifth, Beethoven's "creation", is a _piece_ of a symphony performance or realization of the music; it also involves performers with instruments.)

This is all philosophical stuff, not much the stuff of folks like me who just want to listen to some music every once in a while. If I want my head to hurt, I contemplate the size and majesty of the universe and try to place it within an understanding of the quantum world of atomic particles and sub-particles. I don't really need headaches from music.

So, I'll end here. (I can feel the throbbings already beginning.)


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

SONNET CLV said:


> Some of us play professionally, and get paid for it. The remainder of us likely play recreationally, which we gladly do for no pay at all.
> 
> The word "recreation" itself provides insight into human behavior. Work apparently changes us from what we were or are supposed to be, while our pastime enjoyments (recreation) allow us to re-create ourselves, hopefully neutralizing the subversive changes brought about by paid-for-hire toil. I suspect.
> 
> ...


I think that's commonly called an adaptation. Hence the eponymous Spike Jonze movie, which, oddly enough, is about that very process.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Nawdry said:


> I surmise that Roger's piano instructor was essentially describing interpretation but was trying to convey a more intensive aspect - "re-creating", the work, making it become part of you, so you could imbue life from yourself into it, "creating" it anew.


Thank you, Nawdry. You have caught exactly what I meant.

I was a piano performance major with this professor in the early 1970's. I don't know how the term "re-creative art" originated, but it may have to do with professional standing. In the 1950's and 1960's some Canadian universities began music degree programs in performance and teacher education as well as in academic music specialties. For professors in academic areas original research is the key activity; in composition it's creative activity; for performer/teachers the question is how _original_ are recitals, broadcasts, recordings as the main professional activity? The idea of "re-creative art" may have been developed so that the performer/teachers could be evaluated for their original work in re-creative art.

There is another possibility: in 1963 Harold Schoenberg's _The Great Pianists_ was influential in its advocacy of more original and varied performances and recordings of Romantic-era compositions. Schonberg lectured with recordings of Chopin by Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, de Pachmann, and others, demonstrating the variety of styles, departures from the printed music, ornamentation and improvisation, plus tempo fluctuation practised by these 19th-century trained pianists. Back then I collected recordings from the International Piano Library; to adopt an individual style involving 19th century knowledge became possible. Piano performance could become a more re-creative art according to my teacher.

As pianist examples, in addition to Gould I think Horowitz, Lupu, and Buniashvili among others are re-creative artists. But I'm not lobbying for this term -- for one thing it looks and sounds too much like the standard word recreation. Rather, it's the _idea_, as stated by Nawdry and supported to some degree in posts by ariasexta, MarkW, and FrankinUSA in this thread.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

Ariasexta said:


> Seemingly easy questions like this are the most difficult to answer.


True. I don't intend to post any more on this thread.


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## KevinW (Nov 21, 2021)

Here is a very good example:





If you don't understand why the Blue Danube Waltz is put into such a scene, check the best explanation so far:


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

It can be a recreational artform


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