Classical composer and performer here. You just hit upon the one aspect of my chosen genre that drives me batshit insane. I've had countless arguments with oth

Classical composer and performer here. You just hit upon the one aspect of my chosen genre that drives me batshit insane. I've had countless arguments with other performers about how rigid one has to be when performing any given classical composition. I'm told over and over again that, for example, Glenn Gould's unorthodox interpretations "aren't musical", but when I press my interlocutors for a justification of that statement, all they can offer is "it's not what the composer intended", which only begs the question. Composers aren't infallible, and they definitely don't always see or hear all the possibilities inherent in their own music. The whole division-of-labor between composer and performer is, I think, both a strength and a weakness in classical music. It's a strength because it's allowed composers to concentrate on exploring the possibilities of musical ideas and working out something marvelously and intricately crafted in advance. It's a weakness because it encourages this hard-set absolute-textual-fidelity mentality among performers, and discourages them from really leaving their individual mark on a performance (unlike in jazz). The great classical composers are among my heroes, but they weren't gods, and performers shouldn't treat them as such.