Classical music is a peculiar art form, guided by two artistic drivers: the composer and the performer. The composer encodes a musical vision on the page through dots, lines, and words; the performer, who might be a single musician or an ensemble with its own internal hierarchies, interprets these signs to bring them to life. We could say the composer provides the bounds within which the performer creates sound. But the performer is not merely an envoy. While representing the score as faithfully as possible, we also expect their performance to be moving and personal. Most of the repertoire we hear today has been performed countless times, yet we still attend concerts when we could, more easily and economically, open a streaming service and listen to a near-perfect recording. We want to hear, see, and feel how the composer and performer merge in that moment of performance.
Every performer brings a unique anatomy, memory, upbringing, education, and set of influences. The instrument, the room, the audience, the weather, even a stray conversation, all further shape what performer and listener experience in the moment. Classical musicians must also grapple with the fact that most of the music we play is by composers long gone. We can’t ask them questions about their scores; we rely instead on writings and treatises to parse their notation. Each composer carries their own baggage, too: as a living tradition, classical music comes with strong ideas about how a particular composer should be played. Radical deviations in pedal use, articulation, or dynamic range can feel distracting and, at least by current tastes, inauthentic.
Of course, one need not be dead to be a composer, and many living composers write within the Western classical tradition. For my final recital this year, I wanted to explore that relationship between composer and performer, not as performer of a dead composer, but as a very much alive performer working with living composers, and as a living composer myself.
The program centred on my involvement in the ANAM Set, which pairs each third-year musician with a composer who writes a piece for them to play in their recital (and, hopefully, future ones). Each pairing finds its own dynamic: some composers cocoon and emerge with a finished score; others lean into collaboration. Victoria-based composer and trumpeter Louisa Trewartha embraced the collaborative approach. Our video calls included discussions of music we liked, and I played through her drafts so she could hear how they felt under my fingers. Because she also works with ANAM brass players, it was easy for her to drop into a piano class and offer feedback. I’m still looking for a medium with a connection to Beethoven who can give me feedback on his 30th piano sonata…
I built the rest of the recital around this project, commissioning my friend Josh Taylor to write a short piano solo. His score is almost baroque in its spareness: no dynamics, articulation, pedal marks, or tempo, its upward-cascading arpeggios even echo Bach’s Prelude in C major. This gave me both freedom and panic. Much of the creative responsibility shifted from composer to performer, the “bounds within which I could make sound” suddenly far wider. Yet, unlike the Baroque masters, Josh is alive: he could assure me of certain musical directions. Even without a marked tempo, we discovered an implicit pacing, the number of notes in each phrase and the rate of harmonic change pushed me toward a brisk tempo, to be adjusted for the room, the audience, and, of course, my nerves.
I also included three of my own compositions. For one, I stood aside as composer while Jasmine Milton (violin), Lili Stephens (violin), Angelina Kim (viola), and Jack Overall (cello) brought my string quartet Who Will Come? to life. I had been active in rehearsal, but on the day the performance was out of my hands. I joined the other two pieces myself: Prelude and Fugue for an Ill-Tempered Clavier with Jasmine, Angelina, and Tom Allen (horn), and another with alum Reuben Johnson (piano). During rehearsals, I was surprised to realise how specific the musical outcome in my head had been, and how it sometimes differed from what I heard. I could amend the score or leave aspects free, making decisions unique to that performance. It was also a relief to see colleagues offer suggestions (and even debate my writing in front of me), proof they were invested too.
In every permutation I found that the composer-performer relationship is a complex, symbiotic one. When we fully trust each other and serve the music, there we can find the magic of the art orm that we love.
Words by Po Goh.
See Po's next curated performance at St Silas Anglican Church.
ANAM AT ST SILAS: PO GOH
Sunday 19 Oct, 2.30 pm
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