Listening Across Time
To interpret Medtner today is to work from a historical position unavailable during his lifetime. His music carries a tradition reaching back to Bach and Beethoven. The modern interpretative ear has also been shaped by everything that followed — Nono, Ligeti, Silvestrov or Saariaho, for example. Their radically different ways of organising musical experience enlarge the horizon from which Medtner’s scores can be read and performed.
The interpretative approach of The Medtner Code is also informed by philosophical thought, particularly Derrida’s understanding of context. Meaning emerges through relations and remains open to reconfiguration by them. Applied to music, this places every score within an expanding field of experience, where earlier encounters affect what can become perceptible in the work at hand.
This perspective reaches into the smallest details of performance. A shift of harmonic weight may redirect the trajectory of a passage. A change of sonority can alter the perception of form. A local event may acquire structural significance through the coherence it creates across musical time.
The performing superobjective of The Medtner Code is to sustain a unified interpretative narrative across the project. Each new encounter with Medtner enters an existing field of interpretation and can recast what came before. Coherence is formed cumulatively through the growing experience of the music.