58. Leaving traces

One of our dogs, Lorraine, is a hound mix of some sort.  She has an incredible nose.  (Actually, the ears and jowls are pretty impressive, too.)  Her favorite thing on a walk is to find a piece of pizza that someone has left on the ground—which occurs more often than you might think.  But her second favorite thing is just follow some new scent that wasn’t there the last time we walked by.  She loves it.

SOURCE:  my photographs of Lorraine out for a walk/sniff on December 28, 2025.  No pizza found, alas.

Even with a short list of unfinished drafts for other posts, today’s post occurred to me because of a number of thing coalescing in my reading in the last few weeks.  Some of the books were Christmas presents, some were in piles of things to read when I had time, and others for ongoing research.  Let me start with a few excerpts that struck me:

Maria Caraci Vela [trans. Elizabeth MacDonald]:  “Copying, therefore, manuscript or printed, and to a large degree also of computerised type, is never a completely mechanical act: the text is assimilated by the reader and copyist—who lives and acts within precise horizons and cultural and historical conditioning—in an individual manner, and its reproduction necessarily passes through a filter that includes the risk of deviations from the model, whether they are voluntary or involuntary, mechanical or due to reflection, intrinsic in any case to the very act of transmission” (p. 18).  “Every witness [source] is a physical individual and a historical reality, which documents a precise moment in the life of a text.  There may of course be a witness that definitely transmits the wishes of the author.  But this does not mean that the philologist should not in any case study other witnesses: because, as has already been said, that witness does not exhaust all point of interest or the field of investigation in musical philology, as it is important to evaluate both whatever may have preceded him (the history of the creative process), and whatever came after (further author’s corrections; the history of tradition and the reception given to the musical text)” (p. 25).

[Name withheld to shield a naïve academic, in a pre-publication review included in the eventually printed volume]:  “He does not quote sources for his findings, for he is himself an unimpeachable source for anything you might care to know about a wide range of yuletide musical gems, spanning centuries and encompassing the globe.”

Yo Tomita:  “In a modern critical edition it is standard practice to discuss any potentially controversial decisions in relation to the musical text in the form of a commentary, usually found at the back of the volume.  Yet, when it comes to issues that are generally considered outside the realm of the main musical text, such as the style of movement headings, score layout, beaming, the distribution of text between the left and right hands in the case of keyboard works, and so on, editors tend to mention very little or nothing at all” (p. 13).

And it came to pass that as I was walking Lorraine the other day, I started wondering if while she is keenly aware of the traces left by others she gives any thought to the traces she leaves behind for the next scent hound.  Sure, dogs may sometimes intentionally mark territory, but even as they proceed along their merry way they are leaving a scent trail behind at all times.  As are we all.

I remember being taught that we cite sources just to give credit it where it is due, but also that those who follow us can replicate our work and see if they agree with our conclusions.  I have noticed that my own students seem to regard citations as a sign of weakness (equivalent to a confession that I didn’t come up with all of this myself), while I try to show them that they are actually a sign of strength and should be a source of pride (Look at all the work I did on this!).  Scholarship is joining an ongoing conversation, and doing that productively requires a good bit of listening to what others are saying before venturing in yourself.

I understand Tomita’s frustration:  sometimes, in the interest of tidy new editions, all manner of clues are expunged from the text.  I have been guilty in acceding to house style guides that tacitly regularize all manner of things that seem (as Tomita puts it) “outside of the main musical text.”  It can be difficult in such instances to know what the composer really wrote on the page—and even in instances where an editor makes a point to retain some notational aspect as musical significant, the user may still be at a loss.  Why this now?  As an example, in Charles Villiers Stanford’s orchestral song cycle Songs of the Fleet, the third movement—“The Middle Watch”—opens with just octaves in the strings, together with the downbeat given in the timpani.  It is in a slow 6/4 meter.  This is Stanford’s notation in both of his autographs—the choral/piano score (which he notated first):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph vocal score (Royal College of Music MS 4158a), f. [7r].

and the full orchestral score (although I have cropped the wind parts from this image):

SOURCE: cropped scan of Stanford, Songs of the Fleet, autograph full score (Royal College of Music MS 4158), f. [18v]

In this instance, for the new edition I felt it would be wrong to regularize the tied dotted half-notes as dotted whole-notes already in b. 1.  Yes, in a sense they are equivalent (each filling a whole bar), but I think they connote different things.  Perhaps perversely, the tied dotted half-notes suggest to me a longer sound than a dotted whole-note, as using the tie suggests to me that the break between the end of the held note and the attack of the next should be a shorter.  Stanford soon switches to using dotted whole-notes—easier to write, certainly.  In fact, it is because it would be easier to write—as a shorthand—that I do not think he is suggesting that they require a different interpretation.  Rather, it suggests I’ve shown you what I mean, now you keep doing that.  He doesn’t bother to indicate ‘simile’ because it seems obvious.

That said, I contend that it would have been wrong of me to change all his dotted whole-notes into tied dotted half-notes—that is, to regularize it in a way that so often is a hallmark of editions, by spelling out what the editor thinks the composer meant.  But it is worth leaving editorial traces, and so it was important to include a note explaining what I was up to, a scent for interested hounds to follow:

SOURCE: cropped scan from the critical notes of our edition (A-R Editions, 2019), p. 213. 

“Inconsistent thereafter” covers a lot.  It could be regarded as carelessness on the part of the composer.  If the matter had been really important to me, I should have documented every instance of the tied dotted whole-notes in the two Stanford autographs.  Moreover, I shied away from stating outright my musical reasons for wanting to retain Stanford’s idiosyncratic notation for those first two bars, as maybe there would come others after me who would recognize a different and greater significance in it.  I think it is important, though, in such situations, for the user to know to what degree what they are seeing reflects the composer's notation, and to what degree that has been altered.  (For an example where I think the standardization goes a good deal too far, see my post about the HHA edition Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks.)

I give my Stanford example as one in which we see the composer leaving one sort of trace and the editor another, but my point is that we are all leaving traces all the time.  An example comes to mind from Malcolm Bilson’s Knowing the Score lecture, which includes an anecdote of a pianist coming to him with Beethoven's op. 111 using an edition in which the lower-staff leap (in octaves) of the treacherous opening diminished seventh is re-notated to be use both hands, thus bypassing the danger.  As Bilson remarks, this student “doesn’t even know what Beethoven wrote!”

This issue—not knowing what a composer wrote—is exceedingly common.  That is just the state of things.  (Q.  What's the difference between ignorance and apathy?  A.  I don’t know and I don’t care.)

I see that the edition to which he is referring—Leo Weiner’s 1959 edition for Editio Musica Budapest—is not yet accessible via the IMSLP, and maybe that is just as well.  But Weiner was a highly educated musician, and I’m sure he did not make this alteration without considering it carefully.  (The same cannot be said of a lot of the stuff uploaded to the IMSLP:  entirely new files, in which some manuscript or older edition has been re-set by someone with access to musical notation software.  Sometimes these are done pretty well; sometimes they are abysmal—but maybe that should be the subject of another post someday—again an issue of the worst of amateurism).  Still, one of the traces Weiner’s edition leaves behind inevitably betrays at least a different understanding of the music than Bilson argues is manifest in the original notation.  And, as James Grier memorably puts it, “Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as he editor” (p. 136).

I thought about Bilson’s indignation a few months ago when I was filling-in for the organist at a local church.  One of the communion hymns was a new one to me: “He’ll understand, and say ‘well done’.”  It is number 190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II:  An African-American Hymnal (1993), a publication of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, overseen by the renowned gospel music scholar Horace Clarence Boyer (1935-2009).  Boyer knew what he was doing, and if I second guess him now, it is because it may reveal the different sorts of traces left by him as editor and me as user.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

The chord that I have indicated is (to my mind) misspelled, or rather contains a misspelt note.  I would argue that bass note should really be a b-double-flat, a chromatic upper neighbor to the a-flat which follows.  We might hear that just as the bass line skipping up while  the rest of the chord is sustained, or specifically as a familiar “French augmented 6th” sonority in this case borrowed from a d-flat major tonality that never itself actually gets stated as such.  The a-natural just doesn't register with me:  I can’t make sense of it, or at least couldn’t make sense of it as I sight-read the example verse after verse.  It actually was even harder in the refrain, where the same chord progression occurs, but this time the cautionary flat sign for the ensuing a-flat is missing.  That really threw me.

SOURCE: marked-up, cropped photograph from #190 in Lift Every Voice and Sing II (1993)

In such a context, I would ordinarily expect an a-natural to resolve upwards, and a b-double-flat downwards.  The a-natural seemed to me non-sensical.  But the point is the I would ordinarily expect.  It is the theory training that has messed up my ability to read the music as it is.  I will grant, in the abstract, that an a-natural is much easier to imagine than a b-double-flat.  But this is not in the abstract:  it is in context.  And in context, the way I have been taught has made it harder to read as notated, even though the a-natural is a “simpler” concept.  (I used this in class to illustrate to some beginner theory students that as they acquire theoretical knowledge and think more in terms of theoretical concepts, they may find that they lose facility at things they can already do now.  This example demonstrates one way that has happened to me.)

I don’t know what the back-story of this version of this hymn is—my hound nose isn’t as good as Lorraine’s—but it would seem that in the production of the Lift Every Voice and Sing II Boyer and the others of his editorial team either passively let the a-natural stand from whatever source-text they were working from, or actively changed b-double-flats to a-naturals to appear—I’m guessing—more user-friendly to the church musician.  The attribution for this arrangement is to Boyer himself, and I haven’t found this harmonization anywhere else.  (Hymnary.org cites seventy appearances of the tune in the hymnals and songbooks in their database; the melody in some of those other instances is remarkably varied in a lot of ways, and I was gratified to find in another harmonization two true c-flats rather than b-naturals.)  The chosen spelling of the note makes it easier for some, harder for others.  I suppose I sniff out here some general sense of the intended end-user, and that user wasn't expected to put up with b-double-flats.  And yet, not quite:  I only have to turn the page to no. 191 (also in e-flat major) to find b-double-flats notated.  I’m not sure what to make of it.  The trail has gone cold.

And thus another excerpt which has been on my mind for several months:

John Jowett:  “Text is puzzling, Protean, and capable of shifting beyond reach at the very point where we try to grasp it.  In that awareness lies the fascination of the subject” (p. 6).

I find myself thinking of both the textual trails that lead to musical editions and the trails that those editions leave behind—for better or worse.  What I have learned most as I have written this blog over almost ten years is that the textual situation continually surprises me.  I know what Jowett means.  So very often when I go to check a point in whatever early sources are accessible to me, there is something unexpected—and that something that was already fascinating to me becomes increasingly more absorbing.  Just in time for Christmas 2024, Bärenreiter put out a facsimile of the autograph manuscript of Bedřich Smetana’s Vltava.  As soon as my copy arrived, I turned to a magical moment—my favorite use of the triangle in the whole of the orchestral repertoire (or, more accurately, the bit of it that I know).  It happens at b. 36, the moment presumably representing the confluence of the sources of the river that have been so evocatively depicted in first 35 bars.  But what I found surprised me:

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of Bedrich Smetana: Vltava [autograph score: Národní muzeum - Muzeum Bedřicha Smetany inv. č. S 271/1250] (Bärenreiter Facsimile, 2024), p. 4

If that is hard to make out in that image, I have uploaded a larger scan of the full page here.  But what is important to note is that the triangle part is not on the staves, but is added at the bottom of the page.  Those little dots are three notes (the downbeats of bb. 36, 38, and 40) and rests in between.  If you check the full page, you will see that it is ruled with 24 staves.  The first three are blank; then nine are used for the first system (bb. 30-34); then there is a blank staff to separate the systems; and the remaining nine are used for the last system (bb. 35-41).  This means that there was space for Smetana to include the triangle on a staff if he had planned to use it here.  (The triangle is given its own staff on the first page of the score, where the full instrumentation is spelled out; although the timpani has its standard placement in the middle of the page, Smetana puts the rest of the percussion at the bottom of the system:  triangle on stave 23; cymbals and bass drum on stave 24.  Is this a trace of an afterthought?  The barlines on p. 1 seem to be drawn without a break to the bottom staff, so perhaps not.)  The next page comprises bb. 42-46; the triangle does not play, and it is not allotted a staff.  Only on the next page do we find the triangle given its own staff (23), and with music to play—but even then it is impossible to know whether it was added as he scored that page or added later.  The triangle never again appears in the lower margin of the page, but it is also never included in a general system bracket unambiguously made in preparing a page of the score (even on p. 1).  

What I sniff out of all of this is that that magical moment in b. 36 is sheer inspiration, and inspiration that apparently caught Smetana off guard, as he hadn’t made room for it.  And—most curiously—he adds a performance instruction for that first triangle note:  

“p elegante”

I have my doubts on whether anyone would know what to do with this instruction.  (I can almost hear a conductor in rehearsal: Percussionist, can you ‘ding’ more elegantly, please, as instructed?)  In b. 48 he adds another baffling triangle instruction:

“p zvonkovitě”

The Czech here, I am informed, means "bell-like" or "reminiscent of bells."  The new Bärenreiter critical edition gives “quasi campanella.”  Again, I would be at a loss.  (Percussionist, can we have a bit more ‘dong’ in that ‘ding’?)  Does the player need to switch to another triangle?  Clearly, Smetana sensed an expressive potential in the triangle that few others ever have.  And if I think he overdoes the triangle a bit in Vltava a bit, that first “ding” still gets me every time.

In recent months I have been following Marc Shepherd’s substack posts about editorial issues in Gilbert & Sullivan, particularly their 1875 one-act Trial By Jury.  Shepherd is concerned with getting practical and authoritative texts affordably into the hands of companies producing these shows.  Such companies often work on a shoestring budget, and so have tended to use whatever free performing materials they could access, despite the hosts of textual problems such materials contain, rather than shell out any money on more reliable texts.  I commend Shepherd for taking it upon himself to improve the available performing texts, and for taking the editorial task so seriously.  I also appreciate the transparency of these substack posts—the traces are left everywhere for anyone interested.  Not only can we follow Shepherd’s traces in the decision making (and vis-à-vis other editions of the work), but Sullivan’s traces in the compositional process.  Sullivan’s various short-hand notations and labor-saving devices (ditto passages, colla parte doublings...) left all manner of irreconcilable differences, including a surprising note for Oboe II, even when Sullivan never once had a second oboe in his comic operas.  Although Shepherd’s task is to solve these problems, he goes one better by calling attention to them.  Knowledge of a textual curiosity in one work may well illuminate a real problem in another, and the more minds aware of it the better.  (An example I have mentioned before in this blog of how such wider knowledge is required to answer even tiny puzzles is Jonathan Del Mar’s insight into Beethoven's use of the clef-method of transposition, leading Beethoven to write (for example) an umambiguous c-natural when he just as unamibuously meant c-sharp).

Sometimes we have enough of the materials to verify that what seems odd in a source is actually a trace of something that was odd.  For example, looking through some printed parts for Charles Lecocq’s charming 1872 opera La Fille de Madame Angot, I was puzzled to see three bars of rest notated individually rather than with an extended rest (as elsewhere in the part), and—even more suspicious—an extraneous pp mark:

SOURCE: cropped marked-up scan from 1873 flute/piccolo part on the IMSLP (#876459), p. 15.

Surely there was a story here!  And indeed, the autograph full score revealed that the piccolo had had a pp melody there that had been since deleted in blue pencil.  

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from autograph full score on Gallica (ark:/12148/bpt6k8559382), p. 113 (f. 52r).

So (my hound nose tells me) the part was prepared before the deletion, but then altered; but as it had been laid out with three bars there, it was easier to put in whole rests in each bar than to make it a three-bar extended rest.  (If you don’t know this work, by the way, this brief promo video for a marvelous new recording is a great introduction.)

I try to get my students to look for such curiosities in whatever we are studying.  For example, we look at the Bach concerto for two keyboard, BWV 1060, asking the question if this was indeed originally written for different solo instruments, what traces can we find to suggest what they were?  The solo lines are so markedly different each other (at least judging by the right hand parts of the solo keyboards) that they do not seem to have been both of the same instrument.  It seems conventionally accepted that it was originally violin and oboe, which certainly seems very reasonable to me—but I do want them to look at the evidence (such as it is) and see what they would make of it.

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan from BG edition of BWV 1060, Bd. 21.2 (IMSLP # 849611), p. 29 

I quoted one line of James Grier’s The Critical Editing of Music above.  I should give him a little more space, and I wholly endorse his sentiment on the traces left by an edition, a starting point rather than a finish line:

“Critical editions should generate critical users.  The advantage a critical edition offers its users is guidance from a scholar who has devoted a considerable amount of time, energy, and imagination to the problems of the piece and whose opinion is therefore worth considering.  This is not to say that users need not do any thinking for themselves, nor that they must agree with the editor in every particular.  But a critical attitude should stimulate a critical response, of which one possible manifestation is a competing edition.  Many of these ambiguous issues can never be resolved definitively, either because source materials have perished or because ambiguities were present from the original compositional conception of the work.  Therefore no edition is definitive, and, perhaps more important, the truth is simply not ascertainable....  The greatest works of music, as of literature, have attracted and will continue to attract the attentions of editors whose approach varies considerably, and so it is inevitable that several editions of a given piece might exist, each different in many aspects.  If such is the case, in variably the truth will fall somewhere in between the competing editions, and the student of the work is better served by consulting all editions or as many as is practicable.  In this way the users themselves can draw conclusions about the whereabouts to the truth” (p. 181f.).

Indeed, for this textual hound, edited texts become as absorbing as the the source(s) to which they point.

SOURCE:  my picture of Lorraine displaying her wingspan (October 2025)

51. Cutting out the middleman?

 Why should we assume a priori that any score prepared some centuries ago by one musician for another musician to play from cannot be used by a musician today without the intervention of someone (often a non-musician) with a Ph.D. in musicology?  Why does the score first have to be entirely rewritten in some other form and accompanied by a lengthy critical report that can only be understood by someone else with a Ph.D. in musicology?

Alexander Silbiger:  “In Defense of Facsimiles”

Historical Performance 7/2 (Fall 1994), p. 103

SOURCE:  screenshoot of Facebook group post (June 26, 2022); poster name and profile picture redacted 

Today this blog turns six years old.  My original intent was to get to about fifty posts, posting twice a month for two years.  But it has slowed to a trickle.  With a change of jobs and then the more crowded schedule imposed by a global pandemic, it has taken me six years to reach the intended scope, and yet the list of topics that I scrawled in the summer of 2016 is not yet exhausted.  Today’s topic is from that list; it came to mind again this past February with the death of composer George Crumb (1929-2022).

There’s nothing quite like examining one of Crumb’s scores—especially those which require an oversize format to be legible at all.  His published scores very often bear this notice:

SOURCE:  found in a considerable number of Crumb scores; this is scanned from the title page of Mundis Canis (Edition Peters, 2000).

With good reason:  his notation is meticulously clean, and his innovative and idiosyncratic graphic notation would be challenging for a professional copyist/engraver to reproduce (which would add substantially to the cost of publishing the music).  If you haven’t seen any of it, just google george crumb graphic notation; sure, you’ll also get some non-Crumb images, but you will quickly get a sense of what he accomplished.  (Here’s a tribute that appeared in the Washington Post and has remained on my desk for several months to remind me to write this post.)  Crumb reminded me of this long-delayed post because he effectively bypassed an editor:  he cut out the middleman, with his carefully prepared fair-copy scores becoming the unmediated text for the performers’ eyes.

That sounds like a good idea:  no interfering editor meddling with the text.  And I have sometimes taken editors to task for overreach; even for making things too easy (in a way, like subverting the teaching of cursive by putting everything in print).   But I’m not in the least ready to dispense with the what a good editor offers us.

I remember very clearly a particular moment on an afternoon in the autumn of 1997.  It was in my first semester in graduate school, and my classmates and I were in a seminar about Haydn’s string quartets.  The professor was at the time finishing up a volume of some of the quartets for JHW—Joseph Haydn Werke, the (still ongoing) complete critical edition of Haydn's works.  One very important thing I learned from that seminar was to never assume I knew “what the composer wrote,” based on whatever edition I was using.  The JHW is actually among the most scrupulous of the 20th-century critical edition projects to give a pretty clear indication within the musical text of what the principal source really shows.  The edition uses a complicated series of brackets:  < > angle brackets to indicate material which the editor has filled in following Haydn's shorthand instructions in the autograph score; ( ) rounded brackets to indicate something that is lacking in the principal source but is supplied from a source that is right below it in the chain of textual authority, like performance parts prepared by one of Haydn’s copyists; and [ ] square brackets to indicate something that the editor has added by analogy with some other passage or in order to spell out something musically necessary.  Taking an example almost at random, here is the first system of the musical text of Symphony no. 46 as it appears in JHW, although I have highlighted these distinctions in different colors:

SOURCE:  scan (detail) of the opening of Haydn's Symphony no. 46, as it appears in JHW series I, volume 6 ("Sinfonien 1767-1772"), ed. C-G. Stellan Mörner, p. 104; I have added color highlighting.

The orange passages (indicated in the edition by angle brackets) are realizations of Haydn’s abbreviated instructions for the second violins to double the firsts; the markings highlighted in blue (indicated by the rounded brackets) do not appear in Haydn’s autograph at all but are taken from the most authoritative set of parts.  (Notice that the initial f dynamic is assumed in the autograph, but made explicit in the parts—except for the horns, who maybe never have to be told to play forte.)  The green markings (indicated by the square brackets) are not found in the first or second tier of sources, but were deemed by the editor to be intended or otherwise necessary.  All of this is clearly marked on the published score itself, without even having to turn to the critical report (which gives further details of Haydn’s corrections and second thoughts, as well as other variant readings in the principal sources).

I forget what the particular issue was that afternoon in the Haydn quartet seminar, but when the class was reminded that we needed to know what Haydn wrote (not just what was presented in whatever edition we might have to hand), one of my classmates posited that the ideal music library would comprise high-resolution scans of every source:  then we could all see exactly what was on the page—not just of a composer’s manuscript, but of all the copyists’ scores and parts, and even all the early editions.  Then we would not have to take anyone else’s word for it (as even a critical commentary gives one only the information an editor bothers to relay, and sometimes it may be in error).  

My reaction at the time: Wouldn’t this just compel us all to reinvent the wheel every time?  

A few years after this conversation came sites like Bach Digital:  such portals have the potential of fulfilling my classmate’s wish, with high-resolutions scans not just of autographs, but often a range of derivative sources too—and with no limit to how many sources might be uploaded in the future.  Or take the Online Chopin Variorum Edition—a misnomer, since there is really no editorial authority producing an edited text.  These resources encourage a see-for-yourself approach, even maybe a do-it-yourself approach, and I heartily approve making such resources available beyond the walls of the libraries and other holdings in which they are found.  But do the users of such sites know how to read them?  We are making the materials of editing available without any instruction of what it means.  

In an earlier post, I strongly criticized a particular “urtext” edition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations because of its amateurish assumption that it was presenting the Holy Grail (i.e., Bach’s intended text), while the editor had unknowingly taken a shortcut that undermined his claim.  And the unknowingly is the issue:  when we don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

Take this example, from a scan of Beethoven’s autograph of his Septet, op. 20, very near the end of the first movement.  The top stave is the clarinet, and below that the horn.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20 (held in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow), available on the ISMLP as #774464 and #774465.  This detail  (showing bb. 271–273) comes from the upper right corner of p. 25 (which appears as scan p 15 of $774464).

The last note in the clarinet staff is clearly marked c-natural.  The natural is ostensibly superfluous, as the key signature for a b-flat clarinet in a movement in e-flat major would be just one flat.  Thus it is no surprise that this accidental is eliminated in the new Beethoven Werke edition (ed. Egon Voss, 2008). 

SOURCE: detail of BW IV/I:  Kammermusik mit Blasintrumenten, p. 25.

The critical commentary does not even mention that there was ever a natural sign there—nor does it comment on b. 273 at all.  The commentary does list as a supplemental source Beethoven’s later arrangement of the work as a piano trio, op. 38 (with the option for a clarinet to substitute for the violin), and one would expect that substantial textual differences in otherwise analogous materials would be mentioned.  But when we look up the corresponding moment in op. 38 we may well be surprised:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 95 of Beethoven: Klavier Trios III, ed Friedhelm Klugmann (Henle, 1968), showing bb. 271–273 of the first movement of op. 38.

The top staff here is the violin, which may be replaced by the clarinet on the second staff.  Note that the last note in the clarinet here is c-sharp ( = the b-natural of the violin).  Voss doesn’t mention any of this in his critical commentary to the Septet. 

For the do-it-yourself editor, this discrepancy may seem like an inconsequential difference between the two texts, and that Beethoven clearly must have meant c-natural ( = concert b-flat) in the Septet at this moment, as he actually notated the natural sign.  That is the reading transmitted in virtually every edition.  (I see that someone involved in producing the French edition (Pleyel) in 1828 caught the mistake and emended it, but that emendation didn’t catch on.)  But, looking across a much wider range of manuscripts and with decades of experience, editor Jonathan Del Mar has spotted a pattern of errors which very neatly explains this problem.  This pattern manifests in erroneous accidentals in transposing parts, and indicates that Beethoven used the “clef substitution” method of transposing.  That is, instead of thinking that, for example, each note of a b-flat clarinet part sounds a whole tone lower than notated, he merely thought of this staff as being in the tenor clef, on which he could then note that sounding pitch (albeit sounding an octave higher).  

Beethoven indisputably notated c-natural; Del Mar makes the case that he meant concert b-natural (and thus c-sharp, when transposed up a tone).  He points to exactly the same mistake in a place in the second movement of the Eroica where there really cannot be any doubt of the error.  The autograph is lost, but as the wrong accidental occurs in the closest copyist score, the surviving parts used in the 1804 first performance, and the first edition of 1809 (shown below), the mistake surely descends from Beethoven himself.

SOURCE:  detail of p. 60 of the first edition of Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 (Cianchettini and Sperati, 1809), taken from scan available at https://www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4716012494651392/scan/61; this shows bb. 139-144 of the second movement.

Surely the clarinets and the violas should be in unison; the viola b-natural would need to be transposed as c-sharp for the clarinets, and yet the same natural persists.  Del Mar has observed the same pattern with horns, for example the dubious f-flat that occurs in the fourth movement of the Septet.  Using the clef-substitution method for e-flat horn, Beethoven would have imagined a bass clef on this stave, and the flat is thus coming from the intended sounding a-flat.  Again the argument is that what Beethoven meant is not what he wrote (which should have been f-natural), but we need an experienced editor to recognize that; a facsimile won’t clue us in.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20; This detail  (showing bb. 100–102 of the fourth movement) comes from the upper right corner of p. [52] (which appears as scan p 7 of IMSLP #774465).

But editors should tread lightly on this thin ice, seeking what is meant in preference to what is actually on the page.  (Query:  What did the framers of the Constitution intend?)  A notorious example of this is Jacques-Louis Monod’s recomposed edition of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, in which Monod altered Schoenberg’s score to accord with Schoenberg's theories... or at least with Monod’s analysis.  As James Grier cautions, "Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as the editor" (p. 136).  (I think what my client was meaning to say...)

Many of my posts have dealt with overly intrusive editing—which I think often comes from the temptation to prefer a variant reading just for the sake of an audible difference, maybe in some sense justifying the new edition.  (Here’s a recent post on precisely that topic.)  But I find myself torn between the two quotations with which I started this post.  Silbiger (who himself earned two PhDs) is right to champion the great value of experiencing the sources closest to the original context of the music; and I looooove facsimiles.  I am interested in seeing sources that allow me a glimpse of the composer at work—composing scores, or revisions happening on the page of what otherwise seems to be an attempt at a fair copy.  Here, for example, is Bach revising the text as he transforms the E major violin concerto (BWV 1042) into the D major harpsichord concerto (BWV 1054) in D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 234, a collective score of all seven of the extant concertos for (one) harpsichord, plus a fragment of another.  He had already copied out and transposed the solo line (which at this point features some double stops in the violin version) when he decided to rework the figuration to be more idiomatic on the keyboard.  Having run out of space, he opted for keyboard tablature below the system:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Bach Digital of P 234, p. 48 (detail), showing BWV 1054/iii, bb. 77-87.

There are many examples of similar re-workings throughout these seven concertos—sometimes squeezing in passing tones, at other times inserting much more florid ornamentation.  There is a lot to learn from it. Werner Breig, the editor of the NBA volume of these works carefully documents the corrections and changes to the manuscript in his critical report.  I, for one, am glad to be guided by an editor who has the experience and expertise to discern the patterns behind the markings on the page as it stands; and I would certainly not attempt to perform from a scan of P 234, even the beautifully-produced Bärenreiter facsimile of it.

That is not to say, of course, that Bach intended anyone (other than himself?) to perform directly from this score.  But what of a text from the composer’s hand that is intended to be the performance copy?  This brings up the Facebook group post above:  “Why don’t composers just do their own engraving [recte computer-setting] and page layout?”  Cut out the middleman—like George Crumb, or (for that matter) Wagner.

I have learned a lot from the facebook “Music Engraving Tips” group:  there are all sorts of issues of spacing, orthography, and best-practices in preparing and printing parts, a lot of which had never crossed my mind.  But I’ve also learned that many people who prepare editions of music (whether professional or not) have very little education about music history.  I see the most elementary questions about the meaning of some mark in a manuscript or an old edition; thankfully, these queries are generally answered gracefully and without contempt.  And the group’s members are genuinely concerned with presenting the text in the way that is most immediately accessible to the user—that is, the performer.

Although an individual may interact with a musical text in many different ways, we should conceive of these as distinct roles.  There are surely very few people truly suited to fulfill all of them.  The primary roles might be delineated as: 

1. Composing:  originating and finalizing musical ideas;
2. Notating:  getting those ideas into a graphic form comprehensible by others;
3. Editing:  encompassing a wide variety of activities, but essentially amounting to tweaking the notated text (ideally in dialogue with the composer) to ensure that it presents what is meant; Ralph Vaughan Williams referred to this as “washing its face,” and his sometime assistant Roy Douglas has written an illuminating account of such activity;
4. Setting:  actually getting this text into a form that can be mechanically printed and/or distributed; and
5. Reading/Interpreting/Performing:  the “end user”(?) is presumably a performer, scholar, or listener.

Of course we might interpolate other such functions:  1a might be Orchestrating.  That in itself is a good reminder that an individual may be prodigiously gifted in one of these tasks while having no appreciable ability in another.  Certainly we expect roles 1 and 2 to go together, but we do not necessarily expect a composer to be the best conductor of their own music, though.  (William Walton, a composer I’ve done a lot of work on in my research, is a good example of someone who was generally better off leaving the conducting to the professionals.)  The Facebook post I reproduce above suggests that role 2 is essentially the same as role 4, and that role 3 might be bypassed altogether.

But at what cost?  The value of the middleman editor is to push back:  Is this what you mean?  (Or, for the dead or otherwise unavailable composer, Is this what was meant, given what we know about this composer’s usual practice?)  From my own experience with this blog, I know that I need someone else’s eyes to look over my prose.  I never publish a post without several pairs of eyes reviewing it—and always at least one of the reviewers is neither a musicologist nor a musician.  The comments and suggested revisions I get from that person are particularly helpful because they show where I have made a complete pig’s breakfast of my explanations.  I don’t always adopt the suggestions for revision—as sometimes they have completely misunderstood what I was trying to convey—but I am sure to do something to fix the problems that led them to misread it.  Here I am composing verbal text; musical text it is no different, and it can only be improved by an editorial review of some sort.

And yet, as stated above, I understand why publishers are glad to have camera-ready scores from their composers:  it saves money.  Again:  at what cost?  Here is a bit of the published score to Judith Weir's powerful one-unaccompanied-singer opera King Harald’s Saga.  In this scene, Harald’s two wives bid him farewell as he sets off to conquer England.  Weir wrote the libretto, too, and here it gives each wife the same 12-syllable text.  Weir duly sets this as a 12-tone row; presumably in order to throw the differences in characterization into sharp relief, the second wife presents the row in inversion.

SOURCE: detail of scan of  Judith Weir, King Harald's Saga (Novello, 1982), p. 6.

I have enjoyed teaching this work for many years now, and I’ve used it in classes for music majors as well as for general students who cannot even read music.  It is a fascinating work, particularly in the ways it pushes generic conventions to (maybe past) the breaking point.  And, as a meditation on the senselessness of violence and conquest, it seems always timely.  So I’ve spent a lot of time with this score.  Every time I look at this passage I am irked by the absence of a bar-line near the beginning of the second system:  the second wife should have “take / care,” shouldn’t she?  This is the only place in this section where the bar-line for the second wife is different than the first, and in every other place it seems to indicate which syllable is to be accented—namely, the one right after the bar-line.  I think this is a simple omission in Weir’s fair copy—one that may not matter, as in performance the singer may intuit what Weir was after despite any irregularity of the notation.  Or did Weir mean to break the pattern?  (I haven’t bothered to reach out to her and ask her.  It seems such a petty complaint.)  

Note that here the problem is what isn’t there:  it is not an erroneous marking (as in the Beethoven examples above), but a presumably missing marking.  I do not know in what ways the editorial staff at Novello were involved in the publication of this score, but I think someone should have caught that.  Sure, editors can and do introduce mistakes of their own.  Merely by imposing a house style, an edition can obscure a composer’s musical fingerprint (what in German is usefully called the Partiturbild).  John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven posits that Bach's manuscript notation is expressive of performance gestures:  “There is also the bonus of his graceful and expressive orthography, which reveals the way he experienced his music and expected it to unfold—the shapes and gestures suggestion of his phrasing an motion” (p. 226).  Perhaps. For a much more nuanced argument (relating to Haydn), I recommend James Webster’s “The Triumph of Variability:  Haydn’s Articulation Markings in the Autograph of Sonata No. 49 in E Flat.”  (Webster was the professor directing the seminar discussed above, although I didn’t come across this article until years later.)

Clearly, there is no substitute for getting back into the sources as much as possible; but I don’t regard a musician as negligent if they don’t do that, nor do I regard the performer who plays from a facsimile as on a higher artistic plane than anyone else.  Maybe an analogy would be that a critical edition is like currency or a credit card in place of gold:  the edited text is a convenient substitute for the real thing that will suffice for most musicians in most situations.  But for anyone for whom the text itself is a supreme concern, a good edition is a useful guide and nothing more.

50. That ain’t the way I heer’d it

I grew up listening to the radio a lot.  South Carolina Public Radio in the 1980s played what you would expect from a listener-supported channel:  classical music and jazz; NPR news; and shows like Prairie Home Companion, but also a good bit of programming picked up from the BBC World Service (like the delightful panel games My Word! and My Music!) 

Sometimes American shows from half a century earlier would be re-broadcast.  Of these, I remember particularly Fibber McGee and Molly.  While not exactly a show about nothing, it did manage to succeed without much of a plot.  Instead, it consisted of a continuous series of running gags—most famously the avalanche from a precariously-stacked hall closet, which I'm sure was a perennial challenge for the sound effects team.  Many of the gags involved phone calls or visits with recurring characters.  One of these was known simply as “Mister Old Timer.”  The set-up was the same every time:  Fibber would tell a joke, which Mister Old Timer would then improve, starting off with “That’s pretty good, Sonny; but that ain’t the way I heer’d it.”

Another show I grew up hearing—or really overhearing, since it was usually my dad who tuned in—had the astonishingly pretentious title Adventures in Good Music.  (Of course, “good” meant dead, white, and male.  It was a massive dose of mainly nineteenth-century German repertoire—piano, chamber, and orchestral—the canon of instrumental music.)  It was hosted by the avuncular Karl Haas, who had a spectacular radio voice; more than that, he always had something to say.  (Bootleg recordings of a number of his broadcasts are available on the Internet Archive.)  He opened every episode—and it was broadcast every weekday—by performing anew the opening sixteen bars of the second movement of Beethoven's “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13.  So I heard that opening many, many, many times.  What I heard—what my brain perceived—was this:

But, of course, that is not what Beethoven wrote. I was astonished when I later saw a score and realized I had been mishearing it for many years.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Bärenreiter BA10851, ed. Jonathan Del Mar (2012), p. 11

Well, that ain’t the way I heer’d it.  The b-flat I heard on beat two of the second bar was actually just in the accompaniment.  If had paid more attention—if, that is, my mind had not already decided what I had heard—I would have noticed an oddity when the accompaniment becomes more complicated: the b-flat isn’t there on the beat (in bar 10).  But I didn't.  And even now it is hard for me not to hear it “my” way, unless I’m actually playing it.  My college roommate had an expression for this sort of thing:  it puts a crease on your brain.  No matter how you may unfold it and try to flatten out, that initial impression is indelible, like it or not.

In a graduate school ethnomusicology seminar we were assigned to read Bruno Nettl’s magisterial text The Study of Ethnomusicology, which has appeared in ever-more expanded editions.  The copy I read at the time had the subtitle Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts; the second edition on my desk at the moment says Thirty-one Issues and Concepts; and I see that before his death in 2020 the subtitle of the third edition had become Thirty-Three Discussions.  It is a superb book, welcoming newcomers into a very dynamic and complex field of study.

One of Nettl’s early chapters deals with transcription—writing down music in some sort of notation—and I recognized myself in the title of his chapter:  “I Can’t Say a Thing until I’ve Seen the Score.”  He gives a brief history of transcription as a component of ethnomusicological study—recognized from the start to be problematic, but in some sense unavoidable.  “We have an excessive association of music and notation, equating conventional Western notation with musical sense and musical reality.  We can’t quite remove ourselves from this hallmark of urban Western academic music culture....  To the Western ethnomusicologist, Western notation makes the music seem like ‘real music’.”  [2nd ed. pp. 87f.]  Sure, music exists—thrives even—without notation; but the academic study of it has relied on notation to reify as a visual entity some salient detail of the (sounding) music.  And it doesn't matter what music you’re talking about:  the Beethoven above and my misperception of its performance are both presented to you here as transcriptions.  One is what Beethoven presumably “heard” as he composed (“audiated” is the musical jargon); the other is what I perceived in Karl Haas’s nightly broadcast.  The musical notation isn’t the music, but I use it by default because it helps me to communicate it to you.

I have mentioned in a previous post Malcolm Bilson's engaging video lecture “Knowing the Score,” in which he asks the interesting question “How did he write it down?”  That is, how does a composer (and at the moment Bilson is talking about Prokofiev and Bartók) choose to notate the music?  This is especially fascinating when we can compare the notation with the composer's own recorded performances, but is a worthwhile question of any written compositions.  Notation betrays priorities:  it naturally fails to account for things so obvious as not needing to be made explicit.  A great demonstration of this was performed on Nov. 2, 1963 at the eighth annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology and published nearly a year later in an issue of the journal Ethnomusicology—available via JSTOR, but alas behind a pay-wall.  (There is, however, a 2014 open-access Twentieth Century Music article which opens with a discussion of this famous example.)  This session featured an examination of transcriptions made by four distinguished scholars, each asked to transcribe the same field recording.  It was not a competition in the sense of who had transcribed it best, but rather a consideration of what different transcriptions could reveal about the music and our varying perceptions of it.

  

SOURCE:  reproduced from Jason Stanyek, Forum on Transcription, in Twentieth-Century Music Vol. 11 no. 1 (2014), pp. 101-161; here cropped from p. 102.

What this demonstrated most clearly was that we hear different things.  Each of the four transcriptions emphasized certain nuances of the music while ignoring others.  Hardly a surprise.  Have you ever been at a piano recital when the sustain pedal squeaked?  (I hope not.)  I have, and what I found is that, once I had noticed it, the only thing I could hear was the squeak-squeak-squeak of the pedal.  Or take this moment:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of J. S. Bach, "Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf," BWV 226, bb. 154-161 in the BG edition.

Settling Scores · J. S. Bach: "Der Geist hilft," BWV 226, bb. 154-160

All I can hear in this recording are the almost oppressive S sibilants reverberating around the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.  I can't hear the fugue for all the hissing, and if I was transcribing this without any awareness of the idiom in which it is written, I might think there was an essential percussive element, which is actually incidental and of which Bach was probably utterly unaware.

SOURCE: discogs.com

In that same gradate ethnomusicology seminar, we were assigned to make transcriptions of anything that caught our attention, just for the discipline of transcribing.  I had run across a fascinating disc released by Lyrichord featuring the choral songs of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, an African-American denomination with a distinct oral-tradition repertoire.  So I set about transcribing the very first item on the disc, a piece called “O Lord, How Excellent is Thy Name,” the composition of St. Cuetta Connors of Dayton, Ohio (d. 1970).  The 1990 Lyrichord recording is available on iTunes and Spotify, and is worth a listen.  My transcription (which I post on a separate page) is revealing in its naïveté.  It presents this piece as if Connors had written [sic] a conventional [ = W.A.S.P.] four-part anthem, which the recorded performance was somehow not quite living up to.  I note at the beginning “this transcription assumes a constant tonic of C major,” as the pitch changes (mainly downward) as the piece progresses.  In other words, I made no effort to reflect the changing pitch as sung on the recording, but rather presented some idealized (to me) version.  I see that I identified the purpose of my transcription as “part-writing analysis,” which itself betrays my own predilection to understand this music as some how reflecting a classical (even Handelian) choral tradition rather than accepting it on its own terms.  I assumed that the four parts I heard were S/A/T/B, but as I listen to it now, I think it is a three-way division of the women, with the men all on the lowest part.  But I’m not sure.  Every now and then I mark extra notes with “some voices,” as if suggesting “well, they’re singing those pitches, but they’re not supposed to be.”

Googling now, I find a performance from 2016 of the same choral song.  In some respects, I’m amazed how consistently it preserves what I heard in the 1990 recording, given that it has not been transmitted through notation (that device that supposedly “fixes” music as it should be).  But as I listen, I delight also in “new” notes that have crept in, particularly in the men's part.  (Are they new or just absent in the 1990 rendition that was caught on tape?)  Different as well are the abrupt modulations upward in the extended coda—and very effective they are.  A new performance reveals that there is much more to the piece than I had heard in my attempt to transcribe it 20+ years ago, but similarly my transcription tells me more about myself than it does about the recording I was trying to reify on paper.  That ain’t the way I heer’d it.

 

Other examples that come to mind of my misplaced mental creases are metrical:  mishearing the meter.  An example I have not been able to overcome is the opening of the third movement of Gustav Holst's Second Suite for Military Band.  I first heard these chords as on the beat, and I cannot break free of that until b. 7 (after the melody enters at the end of b. 6).  Maybe Holst was trying to play with the ears of his audience by articulating a sort of “shadow metre.”  Maybe, that is, I am supposed to fall for it.  But even when I know what it is supposed to be, my ears will not cooperate.  (Here’s audio, if you want it.)

SOURCE:  Gustav Holst, Second Suite for Military Band, mvt. 3 bb. 1-12; condensed score (pub. Boosey & Hawkes, 1922); scan available as IMLSO #166850.  (I have added the red arrow added in b. 6 to highlight the entrance of the melody.)

There are lots of examples of such false meters.  Brahms does it all the time.  The finale of the Saint-Saëns Septet is another great example, as is the first movement of his fifth piano concerto.  And sometimes I enjoy knowing that I’m being deceived.  But—and this is the thing—I wouldn't have known I was being tricked if I had not seen the music.  That ain’t the way I heer’d it.  Yet, how much of the music is really intended to be experienced with score in hand?  Am I cheating by looking behind the curtain to see the notation?

Every now and then I see something that ain’t the way I heer’d itt, but the problem is not my perception but the notation.  Here (on the middle staff) is an example of a triple meter tune—3/2 with an upbeat—shoe-horned into common time (and with the whole-notes in bb. 4 and 11 representing a lingering on the last note of a phrase).  

SOURCE:  cropped scan from The Southern Harmony (1854 edition), from Hymnary.org

You see that sort of thing every now and then in the shaped-note tradition, and occasionally the error has lingered on into modern hymnbooks.  In this instance, many other books of its time got it “right.”  Then again, such an assessment assumes that the composer and I share a like musical understanding, but that the music is just notated wrongly.  But what if it’s not?  How can I know?  I came across a passage in the autobiography of Broadway arranger Robert Russell Bennett (1894–1981) where he notates a bugle call he heard regularly in France during World War I:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of George J. Ferencz, ed, "The Broadway Sound":  The Autobiography and Selected Essays of Robert Russell Bennett (Univ. of Rochester Press, 1999), p. 89

What puzzles me is Bennett’s metrical notation.  What was he hearing?  Was the player thinking in terms of these uneven bars, or was it something more like this?

SOURCE:  my own hypothetical re-barring of Bennett's example

Of course I could not hear the source performance, but it seems to me that Bennett’s transcription is needlessly complicated.  And yet I don’t doubt that he wrote what he heard.  But would I have heard the same thing?  And are we just back to Beauty is in the eye of the beholder?

My concern in this blog—and my professional preoccupation—has been the written music, the notated text.  Now I am confronted by that humbling truism.  Just as we will never be nourished by the delicious odors in the kitchen, still less perusing a cookbook, but only in the eating of meal, the only music that truly matters is not what is written down nor what is realized in performance but rather what is heard.  Of course, it may be heard and appreciated differently by each listener in turn (and it may be heard aright or misheard in various ways).   Neither the composer nor performer(s) may have much power to rectify what any individual listener perceives.  Yet I am inclined to think of that space between the sounding of the notes and the interpretation by the listener as holy ground.