Chapter One

What I Say and What I Do

The Role of Composers’ Own
Performances of Their Scores in
Answering Our Research Questions
about Their Works and
How We Should Interpret Them

Jeremy Cox
European Association of Conservatoires (AEC)

The title of this article refers to the old adage: “Do as I say, not as I do.” It
implicitly poses the question: “when composers perform their own music and
the results diverge from their own scores, which performance cues should
we follow: those of the score or of the performance?” If we were to observe
the spirit of the saying, the answer would be “do as they say”—i.e., follow the
instructions of the score. But, of course, things aren’t as simple as that, and the
article will examine how, as artist researchers, we might use the special case of
the composer as performer of his or her works as a kind of interpretational “tri-
angulation” tool for addressing some of our key research questions concerning
how best to probe to the inner core of the musical work and connect with the
embedded knowledge and understanding which we believe to be located there.
Western art music, with its strong tradition of transmission via the notated
score, has given rise to the concept of the musical work, once written down
and disseminated, as having an autonomous identity to which it is our indi-
vidual and collective responsibility, as performers, to be faithful. This notion
of Werktreue has been predominant since the nineteenth century. Werktreue
brings with it a set of quasi-ethical imperatives concerning the preparation and
execution of a “proper” performance, of which adherence to the evidence set
before us—rather than wilful pursuit of our own subjective instincts and spec-
ulations—is the cornerstone.
In most cases, the primary, and most obviously concrete and stable, evidence
is the score; work-fidelity, as a result, is widely equated with score-fidelity. But
there is a range of secondary factors, which become increasingly important
the further back in time one goes. These include utterances by the composer,

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