I definitely inherited the pleasure of window shopping from my mother. Sure, there are times when money burns a hole in my pocket, but more often I enjoying mentally acquiring various things, imagining buying this or that, but satisfied in the end to walk away without a purchase. I am thankful that my kids are even better at this than I am. And the internet helps: in the days before abebooks.com, I would often splurge on a book found in a used book store because I thought I might never see it again.
I also enjoy a sort of “textual window shopping.” This is more the luxury of the scholar over the practitioner. (As Susan Hellauer memorably put it, “You can’t sing a footnote,” going on to say, “we have to make choices that convince us, and that will convince our audiences” (p. 50).) Examples of this literally abound. Indeed, this has been the primary subject of this blog from Day One. Just for the fun of it (and because a post just does not look right without scans of manuscripts), here's an example:
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| SOURCE: digital scans of Gaetano Donizetti: Don Pasquale, Facsimile dell'autografo (Ricordi, 1999), ff. 1v and 2. |
These are the second and third pages of the autograph manuscript of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. A blurb for the new critical edition of the opera explains the situation:
Continuing with the performance options provided in the critical edition, one particularly interesting example in Don Pasquale regards the opening theme of the Symphony, which today’s audiences know as being played on a cello. However, Donizetti originally assigned the piece to a horn. Indeed, the reviews that appeared following the work’s premiere reveal the problem—the poor horn player put in a regretfully uncertain performance. Donizetti immediately sought refuge and replaced that solo with a clarinet. Apparently, that didn’t work either, and the composer was forced to return to the manuscript to make yet another change, nixing the clarinet and adding a cello. The theme is undoubtedly a beauty when played by a cello, but equally as beautiful if played by a horn—which, after all, was Donizetti’s original intent. If the performance by the horn player in Paris had been up to snuff, would Donizetti have left the part as it had been written? The critical edition gives performers the choice.
But that’s the point: once you start adding options, the performer is forced to choose. A performer may opt for the “standard” reading, but that is still a choice. It's like an optical illusion: duck/rabbit, figure/ground, convex/concave, old women looking this way versus young lady looking that way... it can be either, but it can’t be both at the same time. A performer must commit at least temporarily to a reading, while the philologist can have the text exist simultaneously in a multiplicity of options forever. It is Schrödinger’s Bach: as long as you don’t actually play it, all possible readings coexist. From the comfort of my desk (and not an instrument), somehow settling on a single text to present seems like a disservice to my expansive concept of the musical work. The work is not easily fixed—the notation (and certainly any performance of it) is just too limiting. (And don't get me started on the marketing adjective definitive....)
I was struck when I heard Alfred Hitchcock uttering a similar idea, from the perspective of the artist. Here he is in a 1972 interview:
I wished I didn’t have to make [films]. Having worked with the writer on the design of the film, really the whole creative work is finished. All you have now is to wait and see it diminish, and find you only arrive with 60% of the original conception on the screen.
SOURCE: screenshot from the Masters of Cinema interview linked above
The other 40% is—one presumes—irretrievably lost. But is it also extraneous? We clearly have done just fine without it. Don't we bring that other 40% to the film ourselves? (And, of course, the 100% film is useless if it only exists in the artist's imagination: no one ever engages with any of it until it is manifested in a form that can be transmitted.)
Having said this about his dissatisfaction about actually making the film, Hitchcock then immediately rejected the idea proffered by the interviewer (William Everson) that Hitchcock could have done all the storyboards and then handed it off to another director to actually make the film. Even recognizing the artistic compromises of moving from ideal to real, one must draw the line somewhere. But this also reminded me of an anecdote I ran across in Christopher Small’s Musicking (not the first time I’ve cited that fascinating treatise in this blog):
There are even those who believe that, since each performance is at best only an imperfect and approximate representation of the work itself, it follows that music's inner meanings can never be properly yielded up in performance. They can be discovered only by those who can read and study the score, like Johannes Brahms, who once refused an invitation to attend a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, saying he would sooner stay home and read it. (p. 5)
I’ve never tracked down this story in Brahms biographies, so I don't know whether he meant that he could commune with Mozart's score more perfectly by looking at it than by attending a performance; or maybe he meant that it wasn't worth taking the trouble to go out to a performance when the score would suffice; or perhaps both. Studying the score and enjoying a performance are two different experiences, and both of great value. I do find that as I get older, I listen to music less, but I’m thinking about it more. And a few years ago I got into an (amicable) argument on Facebook over whether the scene in Amadeus of Salieri audiating (i.e., hearing in his head) Mozart’s music as he frantically and blissfully scrutinizing the manuscripts would count as diegetic music in the film. (For reference: “Diegetic (diegesis) is a concept used in studies of film music to refer to music that is produced and received within the constructed world of the film and therefore forms part of its narrative” Beard/Gloag, p. 54.)
While I grant that the soundwaves of the music are not pulsing through the air to his ears, I cannot be persuaded that Salieri’s experience of the music is not “real” within the narrative: this is diegetic music which the 1781 Salieri “hears,” even if Constanze doesn't (nor the confessor in the flash-forwards to 1825, nor maybe even the 1825 Salieri). I was in the minority in the argument. Unrepentantly.
I am willing to grant that there is music which exists more perfectly on the page than in performance: perpetual canons are such. (For a more mundane example, try “This is the song that doesn’t end.” Or better still, don’t try it.) Similarly, there are plays that really can't be staged--"closet dramas." To quote the final stage direction of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Drama of Exile (1844),
The stars shine on brightly while ADAM and EVE pursue their way into the far wilderness. There is a sound through the silence, as of the falling tears of an angel.
This prompted G. K. Chesterton, in an otherwise sympathetic assessment of Browning’s work to remark:
She could write finally of the factory wheels “grinding life down from its mark,” a strong and strictly true observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides “with his droppings of warm tears.” She could write in A Drama of Exile, a really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only broken by the dropping of angel’s tears. How much noise is made by angel’s tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth Barrett’s extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask. (p. 180)
And—so long as it doesn't have to be produced on the stage—this is an evocative and effective description, despite Chesterton’s justifiable queries. (I'm grateful to Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker for calling my attention to both the original and the criticism.) But Don Giovanni is hardly a closet drama, and I’m not sure even I can stand with Brahms on that one.
What prompted all these thoughts was reading through a volume of selected writings of the late Jonathan Miller—a polymath of extraordinary scope (of whom, as Alan Bennett remarked, “it was always difficult to tell Jonathan anything, only to remind him of it”). Despite my tremendous respect for the range of his insights, when it comes to music his musings are embarrassingly naïve, in my estimation. To give Miller his due, I must quote him at some length. (This essay, “The Afterlife of Art” originally appeared in a slightly different form in his Subsequent Performances (1986); page numbers are given for both.)
The important point is that the so-called language of music cannot be usefully compared to the language of human discourse. People speak glibly of the language of music, and although this is only a figure of speech, I think it has encouraged a critical assumption that words and music lie on the same level of interpretability. The extent to which music can be regarded as a language at all is highly questionable.
We might accept that a score, like a script, relies on notation, the forming of “phrases,” a syntax, and that music an conjure up images—the third [sic] movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony skillfully recreates the impression of a storm. It can evoke moods and, in its own idiosyncratic way, it can also represent colourful scenes and natural events but, since it can neither assert nor deny, there is no way in which music can be said to describe the scenes that it represents.
Nor is there anything in music, for example, that corresponds to a word: there can be no recognizable units or segments for which one can substitute alternative bits with equivalent meanings. Perhaps the best way of highlighting the differences is that you cannot even imagine a paraphrase in music. We talk about phrases in music and we talk about phrases in language, but it is central to language that phrases can be paraphrased. The meaning that is expressed by a sentence can remain more or less under constant paraphrase, whereas it is impossible to imagine what would count as a paraphrase of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, because there is no central, underlying proposition that would remain constant and survive an alternate expression in another series of notes. Music is syntactical but not semantic. (p. 248; pp. 38f. in the original)
But isn’t that what a performance is—each artist interpreting what the musical notation is striving to indicate? Is that not a "paraphrase"? I take paraphrase to be something like let me take what I read and put it into the words I would have used, to illustrate how I understand this. Why else do performances sound so different from each other, even when playing from (essentially) the same text? Granted, the more specific the notational instruction, the more restricted the range of legitimate “paraphrase”—but the same is true in language. And Miller seems to acknowledge this, but again with very naïve assumptions about musical notation:
Shakespearean scholars, for example, often insist that the metrical structure of the verse automatically distributes the stresses to convey the meanings that Shakespeare had in mind, and to eliminate the unacceptable alternatives. Now, while there is a great deal to be said in favour of this argument, in so far as a disregard for metre usually leads to a misconstruction of meaning, the structure of the verse does not specify as much as the scholars believe, and playgoers are often startled to discover that metrically indistinguishable readings are, none the less, enjoyably different. The question all these points raise is: why do playwrights submit their work in such a remarkably indeterminate condition? Musical scores, after all, leave much less to the imagination of the sight-reader. Over and above the accurate specifications of pitch, key and rhythm, composers often make detailed references to loudness, energy, and overall phrasing. Changes of pace are indicated and the tone of a passage is often identified by reference to a rich, descriptive vocabulary. Nothing comparable is to be found in the text of one of Shakespeare’s plays. (p. 256f.; p. 45)
Indeed. Nothing comparable is to be found in the music of Shakespeare’s time, either. Nor any music until... well, when? In different historical moments, composers have specified different degrees of information, but one could argue that we were well into the twentieth century before the latent indeterminacy of so many of these factors in the score is replaced with much greater specificity of the sort that Miller seems to imagine has always been a regular characteristic of a musical score. Bach’s scores hardly look like Stravinsky’s, and the degree to which a listener will recognize the various liberties a performer will take with Bach will depend to a very large extent on what factors the listener values (or is even aware of). And it is because different performers value those factors differently that, if we listen, our ears are offered such a wealth of interpretive possibility.
Miller holds that a critical difference between musical and dramatic performance is that a musician doesn’t have to “be” a character in the way that an actor does:
Whereas the artist who plays the solo instrument in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D can successfully perform the part without having to imagine being anything other than a cellist, she does not have to pretend to be Haydn or some person imagined by Haydn. The actor who plays the part of Claudius, on the other hand, can expect to succeed only if he imagines a person who consistently means something by the lines that appear opposite his name in the script. (p. 249; p. 40)
Well, I am not much of a performer, but this is certainly not consistent with my experience. It’s not just that I feel I'm a different me when performing, say, Bach or Mozart, but that even within the works of a single composer the me playing is a different sort of person than I am—that is, that Bach calls from me emotions that I can’t say I have ever felt beyond the experience of living in the music, even if only for the moment. I’m not imagining being an organist, or even being the sort of organist who plays this sort of music. Actually, I am not aware of “imagining” anything, but I am trying to live through the character of what the music suggests to me at that time in that space on that instrument. I wonder: Does that makes sense to anyone else?
It seems to me that it is precisely because subsequent performances of Shakespeare’s plays are interpretations, rather than copies, that they have survived. The amplitude of Shakespeare’s imagination admits so many possible interpretations that his work has enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife unforeseeable by the authors at the time of writing. (p. 266; p. 55)
Yes. But is this not also true of Bach or Mozart or any other composer you might care to name? There is always textual ambiguity, and it is in the interpretation of that ambiguity—even the defiance of it—that we find ourselves. We may think we’re looking through a window, but it turns out to be a mirror.
