I was listening tonight to a conversation between Jim Svejda and the amazing Hilary Hahn on Classical KUSC, my favorite radio station here in Southern California. For those who don’t now, Jim Svejda is the most knowledgeable person on classical music probably on the planet and hosts several absolutely fascinating programs on KUSC. And Hilary Hahn, at the age of 28, is one of the most phenomenal violinist on the current scene and certainly destined to be one of the great violinists of all time if not already so.
Their conversation delved into two dimensions of classical music performance – technique and interpretation. It went something along these lines – composers don’t write compositions that are difficult to perform to give the performer a chance to display their technique. Composers write compositions, difficult or easy, because they have something to say. And performers haven’t mastered the composition when they’ve mastered the challenges of technique. It is only when they also master the interpretation that they create music.
Hilary Hahn used a phrase that caught my attention – ‘Interpretive decisions.’ It was delivered in the context of discussing a very abstract, technical, even mathematical violin concerto by Arnold Schoenberg, a piece that’s a challenge to listen to not to mention the challenge it is to perform. Hahn said that there were ‘interpretive decisions’ that added meaning to or subtracted it from the piece. That makes a lot of sense. A poorly interpreted piece, no matter how great, is boring whereas a richly interpreted piece, while being very simple, can be captivating.
What does all this have to do with a photographer’s personal style. Well, in a word, everything.