Driving to the Sydney Opera House the other day, I became aware of the number of signs and directions along the way. Speed signs, Go Back You Are Going the Wrong Way signs, merge carefully signs, reduce speed signs. As I merged and indicated and sped as directed I had a sense that two aspects of my life had also merged – driving in Australia is like playing a page of classical music, with the government composer telling us what to do and when to do it. Rallentando here, softer there, play with passion here, don’t overtake the bassoons on the left there.

All composers give performance information in their scores, but some go way overboard in their directions. Mahler was probably the worst, his symphonies littered with lengthy Germanic directions. In one symphony he writes: “An dieser Stelle wirken die Posaunen, Violinen und Viol. nur im Notfalle mit, wenn es gilt den Chor vor “Fallen” zu bewahren” (In this passage the trombones, violins and violas should play only if necessary to keep the chorus from going flat). What excellent advice, once you’ve hired a German translator to work out what he was saying. Here’s another: “Muss so schwach erklingen, daß es den Charakter der Gesangstelle Celli und Fag. in keinerlei Weise tangiert. Der Autor denkt sich hier, ungefähr, vom Wind vereinzelnd herüber getragene Klänge einer kaum vernehmbaren Music” (Must sound so weak, that it in no way affects the melodic passage of the cellos and bassoon). If a conductor said that to an orchestra, they’d all roll their eyes, but because Mahler is Mahler, he can get away with it. 

These very flowery musical directions can all get a bit much, as if your GPS suddenly sprouted poetry as you tried to find your way to the airport. David Pesetsky, Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT, is also principal second violin in the New Philharmonia Orchestra of Massachusetts and came up with some delightful directions that Mahler never wrote. Here is a note to the horn section: “Von hier an in sehr allmaehlicher aber stetiger Steigerung bis zum Zeichen” (From this point on, the spit valves should be emptied with ever-increasing emotion). I sometimes wish composers would let us make our own decisions about tempi and phrasing, and write something like “play as fast as you can without crashing” or “ the actual notes don’t matter, just look busy” or “do what you want – I’m probably dead by the time you play this, so knock yourselves out.”