Politics & Power Quote by Michael Tippett

Tippett’s line is a polite provocation aimed straight at the Western conservatory’s most cherished object: the score. By dragging “any Native American” into the room, he’s not doing anthropological name-dropping so much as weaponizing a contrast. In many Indigenous traditions, music lives as event and social practice, braided into ceremony, memory, and community authority. You don’t “consult” it; you participate in it. Tippett uses that idea to puncture the European habit of treating notation like scripture and the composer like a remote legislator whose intentions can be perfectly recovered from ink.

The subtext is a critique of museum culture in classical music: orchestras performing as if they’re restoring a painting, audiences trained to venerate fidelity over risk, and musicians reduced to high-level clerks. “It isn’t there in the score” is an insistence that the most important parts of music - time, breath, timbre, swing, hesitation, the collective feel of a room - are precisely what notation can’t capture. A score is a map; the landscape is sound made in real conditions by real bodies.

Context matters: Tippett came of age in a 20th century Britain where modernists challenged Romantic expressiveness while institutions doubled down on “correct” performance traditions. His own music thrives on rhythmic vitality and vocal line; it needs performers who interpret, not merely execute. The quote reads as a nudge to stop treating performance as secondary labor and start acknowledging it as where music actually happens - messy, contingent, alive.