While the pianist who performed my piece (she and I will remain nameless so this doesn’t haunt her on Google) is undoubtedly a first-rate performer, she had not had adequate time to learn my piece for the festival. She explained this to me apologetically in a meeting the day before the concert. As a result, her performance rendered the piece virtually unrecognizable. With the exception of the first few bars and a few fleeting instants along the way, the performance was a cartoon-speed hurricane of sloppy, jumbled phrases, messy textures, and improvised, tin-ear lines. It was a cloud of confusion. The piece uses an impressionistic and rather traditional modal/tonal palette reminiscent of Ravel and Debussy, but in performance the harmony sounded more like total chromaticism. As my husband remarked after the performance: “It sounded downright Schoenbergian.”

As listeners, we tend to trust that a performance we’re hearing is accurate – at least, accurate enough. After all, that’s the performer’s job. But in the case of music we’ve never heard or seen before, how are we to know the difference? In the first half of the twentieth century, critics like Virgil Thomson avoided this by studying the score of a new piece before they attended its performance. Until recently, publishing companies like Boosey & Hawkes set aside scores to send inquiring critics pre-performance, but fewer and fewer critics inquired. In an age where performers are regularly expected to learn an unrealistic amount of music and critics have less and less time to pre-familiarize themselves with it, the music and the composer both suffer.

I know I’ve been guilty of presuming performance accuracy when experiencing a live performance of something I’m not familiar with: if I feel there are problems with the music, I blame the composer. But this experience opened my eyes. I know now to give the composer the benefit of the doubt.