In the autumn, I did a string instrument performance workshop-course thing run by Oxford University’s adult education department. The musicologist, composer, cellist and pianist teaching the course had a real bee in his bonnet about ‘classical’ string playing becoming both technically fixated and highly conservative and homogeneous within the last 80 years or so. As far as I can recall from the two or three times he gave this vent, the argument went something like this:

In the 1920s and 1930s, music recording goes mass-market for the first time ever. This means individual performances can be replayed and scrutinised over and over again in the minutest detail; not just by musicologists and academics but by audiences, performers and teachers. It also mean it is possible for the first time to really compare your own (or your student’s, or your rival’s) performances with those of the leading professionals of the day.

At the same time, Heifetz was the reigning genius of the violin, one of the most admired art music performers of any instrument at the time, and making full use of the career potential of recording (something that could not be said of all musicians at any time, but certainly not between the world wars). And while he certainly had style and originality of interpretation, he also had an astonishingly, rigorously perfect technical mastery that was perhaps easier to imitate or to grasp.

As a result, players (initially students, but the students of today are of course the career professionals of tomorrow) started to focus more and more on technique being absolutely right and dependably so. Technical slips became more and more taboo, whatever the other virtues of someone’s playing. But the result of making such great efforts to achieve dependability was of course a reduction in risk-taking – both in spontaneous modifications to interpretation (if you haven’t practised exactly how you’re going to play, you might not quite get what you try to do right), in individuality of style (what if a deliberate but unexpected effect is taken for a mistake?) and in pushing your own envelope (better to stick with what you know you can do without errors than try something that’s only just within your grasp and risk making a mistake). The process, of course, gathers momentum from being gradually more and more universal, but also particularly from the increasing access of players to recording themselves and playing the recording back without hiring studios, from the cassette recorder onwards.

Last night I was chatting to one of my bandmates in the String Project about this, and it struck me that this phenomenon coincided fairly well with art music ceasing to be viewed as exciting. The original musician rumoured to have sold his soul to the devil was the violinist Paganini back in the early nineteenth century; Romantic pianist-composer Liszt was considered little short of terrifying by audiences and older musicians alike (Clementi, by this point elderly, asked after hearing him play ‘Does it bite?’) and art music seems to have had capacity to shock, dynamise and inspire well into the twentieth century. But the idea gradually fades, whether by the diminishing returns of ever more jarring modernist and postmodernist composers, or by lessening musical conviction and communication.

Now there are a couple of fallacies it would be easy to fall into. Technical mastery and emotional effect, or effect of any kind upon an audience, are not straightforwardly mutually exclusive. Indeed, at both extremes of the range it is fairly evident that one cannot do without the other. But, as with any other choice of priorities, focusing more on one means to some extent focusing less on another, and in general what you work at is what you will achieve. So if you focus entirely on playing a piece right, and once you can do so move on, never having worked at its mood, expression, effect or style, then you will play it correctly, but it is really only chance whether you play it in a way which is engaging, enjoyable or moving to listen to, or in any way genuinely craftsmanlike, let alone artistic.

Secondly of course, communication and engagement do not mean that every piece has to be a channel for the direct pouring of the performer’s most extreme emotions out to the audience. That may be a good approach to a considerable amount of 19th- and 20th-century music, but it would be murder to most Classical (sensu strictu) pieces and should be treated with real caution in the Baroque. There are excellent pieces of music which, played with style, should be light, entertaining, balanced, perhaps with a satisfying sense of structure and completeness. Played purely with attention to notes, they will most likely be dull as ditchwater, an interminable row of unremarkable little notes. Attempting to make them into heart-wrenching storms of passion would be rather like trying to do symphonic thrash metal covers of early Beatles ballads – it just ends up wrecking or even satirising the original.

A classically trained musician in gigging bands, and a lot of non-classical music in general, is likely to encounter a lot of the opposite extreme to this in both playing and audience expectation and evaluation; the ignoring of such technical details as singing flat or speeding up through a whole song provided the ‘feel’ is right. And of course that can be grating and can lead me to want to lash back. But, having encountered the effect that can be achieved by prioritising performance over perfection, there is certainly a case for going back to the classical tradition and looking to play with conviction, with style and with genuine performativeness. The technically-fixated classical performer all too often plays on stage as if in a practice room, rather than actually and clearly to the audience. Art music performance didacts may hate it if I fluff the odd run or have a couple of unsettling slides into tune because of the speed I think a movement has to go to be fun enough, or because I’m trying to look like a performer (rather than a stuffed shirt) as well as sound like one; but audiences are likely to welcome the trade-off with open arms.