Much More is Composed than is Performed

   I’ve been reading, with no particular goal in mind, biographies of composers. So far I’ve read full-length books about Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert and the New Grove pieces about Bartok and Stravinsky, focused more on music than on life. And I’m now partway into a recent biography of Debussy. I learned a great deal about these composers that I had not known, though how much I will remember, given my enfeebled brain, is another question. In this blog post, however, I want to make what is essentially a single point.
   Works by each of these composers are regularly performed by individual musicians and by orchestras and chamber ensembles of every kind. They don’t need to be “discovered;” they have long since been pulled into the mainstream. Look at the programs of a hundred performers, individuals or ensembles, and you’ll find music by the above group on a great many of them.

   And yet, . . . And yet, you will find the list of works played with some regularity, works, as we say, rather vaguely, “in the repertory,” to be only a fraction of the music they actually wrote—a small fraction, actually. It’s not even clear that what we get to hear is uniformly the best that the composer has created (I leave that “best” undefined), though, with perhaps some exceptions, it is not wacky either. But there is a huge amount of music composed by these same eminences that is not performed.

   Now some comments. It is the case that for all successful artists, some of their works become popular and others don’t or lag behind. But there is one uneliminable fact that makes musical compositions different. Written novels or poems, assuming they are published, can be read and appreciated (or not) by everyone who has a few bucks to buy a copy or has access to a decent library.  Visual works of art—paintings and sculptures, mostly—are each unique and must be chased after, wherever they are. A great many of these also exist in reproductions, good, bad, and indifferent—though only a selection.
   The roads to neither of these art forms are perfect or even smooth; many are beset with obstacles. But when you get there, you got there, mediated—and hence to various degrees distorted in the case of reproductions of the visual arts. But if you can read and if you have eyes to see you have access to what the artists have produced.

   It is not that (relatively) simple with musical compositions. For all but competent musicians, mediation is needed to convert a score to be found on paper into sounds heard by the ear. For some works only a single performer is needed, most often a pianist. But for a huge number of compositions anything from several players are called for to a large number of players to actualize notes into sounds. Only then does a composition become available to listeners who are only potential listeners, but not themselves musicians.
   Then there are if course recordings and for quite some years now, the internet, especially YouTube. A cursory record, however, reveals that the vast majority of what is in that way available for listening are works already in the repertory. What is there to be found, rather, are multiple performances of those works. (Some time ago I determined that there were over one hundred recordings of the Mozart Requiem. That kind of fecundity only makes available different performances of compositions, without extending the repertory that is ready to be heard.  

   Accordingly,  for ordinary listeners, even serious ones, there are a great number of compositions that are not “available.” In discussions of arts this fact tends not to be noted. But it matters—a lot.