An Unrepresentative Representation

Once I performed in a master class for an extremely well-known guitarist who is not known for his knowledge or repertoire of contemporary music. He happened to be in the process of broadening his horizons and he was searching for contemporary works to add to a new recording. One of the other performers in the class played for him, “The flight of the lovers through the valley of echoes” from Leo Brouwer’s, “El Decameron Negro”. This piece, in three movements is quite possibly my favorite piece ever written for guitar. The student played it fairly well and the teacher, having never heard it before, was impressed with the piece. He expressed his interest and asked the student to play the first movement as well. The student, ill-prepared, butchered it beyond recognition. The teacher, in his unfamiliarity, was unable to differentiate between a poor performance of a good piece, and an indicative performance of a poor piece. He exclaimed, “oh, I don’t like that very much”, and so was turned off to the piece forevermore.
I have thought about this incident often since that day, realizing my responsibility to do justice to that which I choose to represent. I realize too, that the listener also had a responsibility to learn to discern between the quality of the performance and the quality of the piece. This insight has shaped the way I view my work in training people to give a representative performance, to learn to recognize quality stuff even when done poorly, and to learn to recognize poor stuff performed well.

©2003 rod lewis