From the Framers to Mozart: Questions of interpretation explored at forum
BY BARBARA PALMER
From left to right, St. Lawrence String Quartet violist Lesley Robertson, Paul Brest, Rob Kapilow (standing), Jack Rakove, Larry Kramer and Barbara Fried at the music and law forum at Kresge Auditorium.
Comparisons of issues encountered in interpreting musical compositions and in interpreting legal documents such as the U.S. Constitution brought the St. Lawrence String Quartet and a quartet of constitutional scholars together on the stage in Kresge Auditorium on April 21.
The multidisciplinary forum, "Originalism in Law and Music," was moderated by Rob Kapilow, a conductor, composer and pianist who blends musical performance and commentary in his series What Makes It Great?, which Kapilow presents as a National Public Radio feature and in concert. An assistant professor of music at Yale University, Kapilow has made two appearances during the current Stanford Lively Arts performance season and is scheduled to make two more appearances during 2006-07. The forum was presented by the Law School, the Music Department and the St. Lawrence String Quartet.
The idea for the April 21 forum sprang from the pages of Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1997) by Jack Rakove, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Kapilow said. While reading Rakove's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, which analyzes the ideology and political interests of the framers of the U.S. Constitution, Kapilow was "struck again and again that the kinds of questions that we face daily in music were illuminated by looking at them from a constitutional law perspective," he said.
The classical music field is roiled by debate over the original intentions of composers and ways in which contemporary musicians can figure them out, Kapilow said. "Does this sound familiar?" he asked, turning to a panel he called a "legal dream team": Rakove; Larry Kramer, dean of the Law School; Paul Brest, former Law School dean and law professor emeritus; and Barbara Fried, the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law.
Questions of constitutional interpretation, Kapilow said, are "utterly connected and related to" such questions as: "Can we ever get at the meaning of a piece of music in Mozart's time?" "What are our obligations to that meaning?" and "How does a changing world affect the meaning?"
During the two-hour-long forum, members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet—joined by Bill Moyer, a lecturer in string bass in the Music Department, and harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani—performed works by Mozart, Bach and Corelli to illustrate the many ways a written piece of music can be interpreted, as well as the obstacles that a quest for absolute fidelity to a composer's intentions can encounter. In between performances, legal scholars drew analogies between interpreting music and laws.
As the string quartet performed the first 27 measures of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, varying its tempo, its accents and even certain of its notes, Kapilow polled members of the audience as to when they thought the musicians strayed too far away from an authentic reading. (No one in the audience approved of changing any of the notes.)
Such questions of authenticity, however, can themselves be inauthentic, Kapilow said.
Contemporary performances of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik—which was written in 1787, the same year that the U.S. Constitution was written—are almost never performed exactly as it was written on the page, Kapilow noted.
Many of the conventions associated with the piece have come into existence since Mozart's time, Kapilow said. For example, there is only one accent mark in the entire movement, he said. Only after composer Ludwig van Beethoven did it become customary for compositions to be heavily notated with accents, crescendos and diminuendos, he said.
In the law, there are parallels to questions about what notes to play, contemporary interpretations of terms first used centuries ago and making decisions in the absence of clear instructions, Kramer said. "There are things we might do or not do that the law doesn't speak to," he said.
Many people come to the law expecting to find that it can be literally interpreted, but "a literal interpretation of anything almost never makes sense," Brest said. No court ever doubted that the copyright laws grounded in the Constitution protect musical compositions written on a computer, Brest said. And similarly, courts have ruled that the free speech clause in the First Amendment protects burning the flag, although burning is not literally the same thing as speech.
Kapilow, on piano, and Esfahani, on harpsichord, performed music written by J. S. Bach to illustrate how changing technology has complicated the literal interpretation of musical compositions. Bach was composing before the modern piano was invented, and his compositions must be adapted in order to closely replicate the sound of the harpsichord, Kapilow said. "A question emerges: Should you be faithful to the pitch or the note?"
A legal analogy can be found in the Fourth Amendment's protection from unreasonable search and seizure, which historically was understood largely in terms of property, and its application to wire-tapping and other forms of surveillance, Kramer said.
The musicians and constitutional experts also debated whether there is more contested ground in law or music, and compared a well-educated musician to a wise judge, able to draw on years of accumulated knowledge.
And at times, the lawyers and the historian simply yielded the floor to the music. "In the war of beauty and truth, it's clear that beauty has won," Fried said.
