whether set down by him- or herself or transcribed by others; knowledge of the

circumstances of performances contemporaneous with the work’s composition,

whether personally sanctioned by the composer or not; awareness of the kinds of
instruments and numbers of them likely to have been employed in such perfor-
mances; and testimony from theorists and treatise writers about what, for them,
constituted sound performance practice (and, often as importantly, what didn’t)
at the time of the work’s composition. In general, the principle applies that the
more evidence we amass, and from the greater variety of sources, the more confi-
dent we may feel that we are on a warm trail leading us towards fidelity.
But when the pool of available evidence includes actual performances given
by the composer him- or herself, the question of which evidence to use, how to
use it and with what relative priorities becomes both richer and more problem-
atic. In particular, we are led to reflect more intently than we might otherwise
on the assumed primacy of the score and whether what the composer tells us
to do through the instructions encoded in it is more, or less, reliable than what
he or she does him- or herself. And insofar as the act of musical creation has
an important speculative phase that exists a priori to the ostensibly dogmatic
certainties of the notated score, we may find ourselves reminded by a given
composer’s relative freedom in the execution of his or her own music that
the act of performance, too, might legitimately seek to recapture something
of that speculative dimension. The article will propose a possible theoretical
framework for these reflections, based upon a model developed by in the 1930s
by the composer and writer Ernst Krenek, and will then examine through a
case study how Stravinsky, as both composer and conductor of his music, sheds
some characteristically stimulating light on these issues.
Of course, the availability in stable, durable form of evidence as to the nature
of composers’ possible compositional intentions deriving from their own per-
formances is a phenomenon of the era of recorded sound or, at best, may be
pushed back to the advent of technologies such as the piano roll. Moreover,
the very notion of a composer’s performance as something unique and funda-
mentally separate from the entire class of performances given by others is only
as old as the concept of composition as a specialist vocation, distinct from that
of the production and performance of music more generally. It goes hand in
hand with the rise of the cult of the musician-creator as heroic individualist
and the concomitant sense of the rank-and-file musician-executant as merely a
necessary adjunct to the transmission of the creator’s unique vision.
Before the nineteenth century, a composer’s performance of his or her own
works was the norm and only remarked upon if his (and it was usually his) per-
formance style or ability were in some way out of the ordinary. Many of the
nineteenth century’s great individualist creators, such as Chopin and Liszt,
were also outstanding performers of their compositions; their works and their
ways of performing them were two sides of the same virtuoso coin. But this was
also the century where it became acceptable and, by gradual degrees, common-
place for composers to write music beyond their own capabilities as perform-
ers—and to expect there to be a ready supply of highly-skilled executants able
and willing to expend the time and effort necessary to master the demands

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