hey Derek,scouring the internet trying to retrieve...

2006-07-17T12:43:00.000-05:00

hey Derek,

scouring the internet trying to retrieve some lost dates, I ran into your wise little blog: how nice and curious to run into my name under the context of manic reviser! I recollect this must have been sometime in 1998 or earlier? and like you, I read this and wonder:"who was this guy?" "Did I really say this?!"
Like you, many things have changed since then and I suspect that we've probably switched positions in the meantime and undoubtedly someday they'll meet up at exactly the same point!
By now, I would never take out a vast amount of time to revise anything. The lack of available time aside, it mostly indicates the piece just doesn't work and we're unwilling to admit so! Better to toss it and carry on. Besides, there's really nothing more horrible than living through an old piece, we really want to move on. But I think a lot of these problems are really just solved through experience: at a certain point you simply dont put out anything, which would need major revisions in the first place.
But just to update you on my current views re revising: if the piece is good and the revisions are mere practical technicalities we've learned about during the rehearsal and performance procedures, all revision is necessary to make sure the score is as clear as it can be. If however the revisions are of a much more fundamental nature, relating to the entire concept of the piece, it's probably more worthwhile to just dump the piece, although of course, that point should have been thought of at an earlier stage. I believe the only real point of revision is putting out a score that leaves no room for doubt about its' realisation: it's your final point before saying goodbye to the piece once and for all! (after which you disown it and are utterly bored by it!)
But I think a major point is the following..
A lot of this is of course allied to our wishes to achieve 'perfection' of some sort and maybe this whole idea of 'perfection' betrays an underlying sense of insecurity about a piece's ability to portray our total competence. Of course, some pieces call for perfection and then they must be so, but underlying a lot of this quest are aspects of 'mastery', which, more often than not, are imposed on us by factors outside the actual piece and actually have the danger of determining more of the sounding result than we really would like to admit. As you know of course, many free scores, with huge discrepancies between what's notated and what we actually hear, can also be perfect in their way... though they leave millions of question marks in their run. And maybe that's the greatest danger about revision: it's a form of giving in to a mastery syndrome, which can also be quite superficial. Living in the West and being dictated to a great deal by its cultural dictates and history - and all of its rampant individualism in which people really have a desparate need to admire... and we're expected to supply - the whole aspect of mastery (and in its slipstream, revision in order to achieve it) can be quite constricting as to what, I think at least, the real nature of music should be: a manner in which to edify and liberate... mostly from exactly these kind of paralysing restrictions!

Anyway, thank you so much for this opportunity to think about something I really haven't thought about in a while! Hoping all's well!

cheers,

Peter

Hey Derek,Great post. I responded on my blog.

2006-05-28T12:40:00.000-05:00

Hey Derek,

Great post. I responded on my blog.

Comments on inspirations: Revisionist History

hey Derek,scouring the internet trying to retrieve...

Hey Derek,Great post. I responded on my blog.