Musical untruths
I had a strange thought today. It's a little difficult to explain, but it has to do with idly thinking, while leafing through some of Debussy's Preludes, that music is the composer's mind on paper, and that playing the composer's music is almost like a violation of that mind. I say "violation" because one could never hope to play the music precisely as, say, Debussy imagined it, because we are not Debussy, and we do not have his mind; we can never completely fulfil his musical vision. In addition, musical notation can never adequately or precisely convey what Debussy wanted. The music in his mind is in all probability not the music he eventually had to write down on paper, equipped with the monumentally limited toolbox of standard notation available (well, limited in comparison to the breadth of the human mind). Therefore, while it is said that written music preserves the mind of a composer on paper, it can never a) be precisely reproduced, and b) be precisely preserved in the first place. In conclusion...music is a lie?
And yet, I will continue to prod away at my trusty Kawai piano, repeatedly violating Kabalevsky's musical vision, knowing full well that I am simultaneously playing a lie (or at least, not the full truth of Kabalevsky's original music) and lying to myself that I will, somehow, someday, eventually be able to play it.