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.

46. Look ere ye leape

For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal,
Some person in authority, I don't know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal,
Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, 
twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty,
One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine-and-twenty.

And here we are on that leap day.  Perhaps I ought to be celebrating Rossini’s birthday while I have the chance, but this is a post I’ve had in mind almost from the beginning of this blog:  What about scores that seem to have one bar too many (or too few)?

An example that many pianists know is the extra bar that shows up in some editions of BWV 846/i, the first prelude of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I). 

SOURCE:  cropped from G. Schirmer (c. 1893) reprint of Czerny edition, from IMSLP #01005

This bar was introduced by Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwencke (1767–1822), I suppose as a remedy two faults he perceived in Bach’s text.  He seems to have wanted to make the prolonged Dominant pedal begin on a “strong” bar (the first of a group of 4 bars)—thus he needed that to fall on b. 25 instead of b. 24, and so introduced a new b. “23.”  He also took pains to eliminate the two false relations (here shown in color) in the voice-exchange.  The bracketed solid note-heads represent Schwencke’s interpolated bar.

(Incidentally, this doubly-chromatic voice-leading troubled analyst Heinrich Schencker too.  He made a big deal about the fact that in an autograph manuscript, Bach wrote stems for the bass F-sharp turned upward.  To Schencker this was conclusive proof that Bach thought of that note as nothing more than a foreground harmonization of the soprano E-flat.  I’m not convinced that the stemming was anything more than fortuitous.  Whatever.)  

The retention of Schwencke’s extra bar was codified by Czerny’s edition (reprinted and reissued by a number of publishers, and probably in print continuously to this day.)  Gounod was likely working from Czerny’s edition when he created his superimposed melody—initially as an instrumental Méditation, but subsequently texted (and forever after known as) Ave Maria.  Gounod has thus transformed this “Schwenckenische Takt” into a load-bearing bar:  it is impossible to correct it, as the climax of Gounod’s melody depends on it.  I am reluctant to claim that it does much damage to the Bach original.  It matters if you know to listen for it; otherwise it passes unnoticed.  And, as Malcolm Boyd has observed,

“Schwencke wrote numerous compositions—oratorios, cantatas, concertos, sonatas, and songs—but his most frequently performed piece of work is without doubt bar 23 of the first prelude in Book 1 of Bach’s The Well-tempered Clavier....” [p. 444]

As it happens, Schwencke is a link to another work for which editions generally seem to have one bar more than the composer intended—although in this case the variant stems from the composer's hand.  It is Mozart’s celebrated thirteen–instrument serenade, K. 361, a work with a long history of textual problems, and to which I will return in future posts.  (The Schwencke connection:  he devised a charming version for piano quartet plus one woodwind.) The superfluous(?) bar is in the fifth movement, the Romance.  Here is the relevant page of the autograph manuscript:

SOURCE:  Mozart, K. 361, v (Romance) bb. 22-30; p. 54 of Mozart’s autograph; a downloaded digital scan on the Library of Congress website; a scan of the whole manuscript is available.

This movement is in a large ABA structure, but the A section is itself a binary form (aabb).  The page above shows the last three bars of the b and the first six bars of the B.  The return to A is indicated by the instruction da capo senza repliche a few pages later.  So the moment in question here is the third bar on the scan above:  it is to be played as b. 24 twice (as it is repeated); but is it to be played again as b. 111 on the third time through—the da capo without repeats?  

Mozart’s curved bracket above and below this bar was his usual indication of a first ending, but that wouldn't work in this case, as the transition from b. 23 to b. 25 is nonsensical.  Rather these seem to be an indication to skip b. “111” and go straight to the coda.  But—crucially—these curved brackets were both smudged while the ink was still wet.  Was Mozart changing his mind?  Or was the smudge accidental?  After all, if he made these markings after composing the B section, then all the rest of the ink on this page would have already dried.

Actually, I think this is exactly what happened.  Mozart was presumably impatient to start to work on the coda:  the previous page (folio 27v, numbered 53) of the manuscript shows a tell-tale mark where the still-wet slur near the top of this page (28r, p. 54) would have set-off when the page was put down too soon on top of the other folio.  I have marked the off-set smudge on p. 53 in red, as well as a space at the bottom of the page where we might expect to see a similar offset from the slur below the contrabass line:

So, is it a problem that the lower mark isn’t there?  Maybe.  But maybe not.  I speculate that the wet ink of the lower bracket of p. 54 could well have been smudged by the bottom edge of page 53, without leaving much on the page itself.  Here is my effort at representing the pages as they would have lain together to create the offset.  For this image you must imagine you are seeing through p. 54 (and so here its image has been reversed and made partially transparent).  The top brackets coincide when placed at such an angle—possible, as the pages were then unbound nested bi-folios:

The smudged top bracket and the mark on the previous page are uncannily similar.  The most suggestive detail to me is the “1” which, I suggest, explains the blob under the set-off bracket on p. 53.  Here’s a detail—p. 53 on the top, p. 54 (reversed, to align the offset) below, with the “1” and the set-off blob circled:

As I say, maybe.  I think editors are perfectly justified in omitting this bar on philological evidence (and speculation, it must be said) like that presented above.  One of the editors of the NMA volume including K. 361, Daniel N. Leeson, has written at length about this bar, voicing his regret that he did not fight more with the general editors in order to omit it from the NMA text.  (See, for example, his 2009 summary of his decades of research into this piece.  He seems not to have noticed the off-set on p. 53, however.)  Leeson, with his co-editor Neal Zaslaw, did at least manage to get a footnote in the NMA score to the effect that perhaps Mozart did not want this bar played, and directing the user to the critical report:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of NMA VII/17/2 (1979, ed. Leeson & Zaslaw), p. 191.

In fact, the critical report wasn’t issued until 2002, and was the work of a yet another hand—Dietrich Berke.  (See his comment here.)  When the NMA score was issued as a separate Bärenreiter offprint, the Leeson/Zaslaw footnote was modified:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Bärenreiter TP 312 (otherwise an offprint of the above; this is from the 6th printing, 2006), p. 51.

The Henle edition (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese) at least puts the bar in brackets, with an explanatory footnote:

SOURCE: detail of scan of Henle 9809 (2005, ed. Henrik Wiese), p. 45.  The relevant comment cited here describes the notation and the smudging, remarking “It is impossible to determine with absolute certainty whether this ‘volta’ applies or not, and what it refers to.  Presumably it relates to the transition from the recapitulation to the coda in mm. 111–112, so that the chords from M 24 (= M 111) give way to the entrance of the coda” [p. 77].

According to Leeson, the only edition yet to completely omit bar “111” is that edited by Roger Hellyer.  After explaining the situation in his Preface, Hellyer comments:  “If performers cannot accept my decision that I am here following Mozart's ill-expressed intentions, they are of course free to reinstate what has been played here at least since 1803, as in bar 24.”  Exactly so.

Unsurprisingly, performers have been more willing than editors to take a chance on omitting this bar.  Here, for example, is this moment in Christopher Hogwood’s recording with the Amadeus Winds.  The missing bar comes—or, rather, doesn’t come—at ten seconds into this clip, at the start of the coda:

I find this reading musically compelling, and certainly plausible as Mozart’s intention, with the suddenly reduced forces on the beginning of the coda (and the surprise dissonant harmony when we expect the full cadence).  Moreover, I think the textual evidence is suggestive enough to back it up, even if it is not conclusive.

Of course we may be deleting a bar Mozart intended, merely to satisfy our taste.  That seems to be what has sometimes happened near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s fourth symphony.  To some ears this ending seems to have one too many bar.  Jonathan Del Mar reports that Schumann (1840) and Czerny (1853) were early advocates of deleting it, and in one early set of manuscript parts the bar has been deleted—but it is impossible to say when this alteration was made, and no other source close to Beethoven supports it.  Other critical editions have brought up this question, but the only one I have seen to delete a bar for the sake of metrical regularity is Peter Hauschild’s 1996 edition for Breitkopf [below on the right].  Hauschild’s astoundingly naive justification for relying so heavily on this single source as transmitting Beethoven’s supposed alterations:  “da es wohl ausgeschlossen ist, daß andere an Beethovens Symphonie herumkorrigiert haben”! [p. 84; “because it is surely out of the question that others would have corrected Beethoven’s symphony.”]  The irony is delicious.

SOURCE:  marked-up page scans of the last page of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 4, op. 60:  (l.) Bäenreiter (1999, ed. Jonathan Del Mar—here from 2001 off-print); (r.) Breitkopf & Hartel (1996, ed. Peter Hauschild).

If you want to compare these in performance, compare John Eliot Gardiner (with the text on the left) and Daniel Barenboim omitting the bar, as on the right.  I suppose Barenboim and anyone else may do with the text as they see fit.  The composers themselves sometimes take such liberties.  Here is an extract from Saint-Saëns’s symphonic poem Danse macabre (1875) in the composer’s own transcription for violin and piano.  He added the bar marked in red when he produced this version; it does not correspond to anything in the orchestral version.

SOURCE:  cropped screen shot of 1877 Durand edition of violin/piano version, p. 11 (from IMSLP #33277); the extract begins at b. 340.

Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz no. 1 is a similar example, if even more complicated in Liszt’s piano version both adds and delete bars compared to the orchestral original—so that the two versions do not correspond.  Already in the first 150 bars each version contains a bar that the other lacks, and it is clear from the composer’s sketches for the piano version that he had second thoughts.

SOURCE:  marked up scan of first edition (Leipzig, c. 1862), bb. 1–32; b. 25 is new to the piano version.  Scan from IMSLP #13711.

SOURCE:  top, as above, bb. 120–136; the orchestral version has an extra bar after b. 134; below, detail of manuscript sketch of this passage, scan from the Morgan Library.

For an example where I believe a new scholarly edition is led by the early sources into an error that an older edition had set right, look at the last aria of BWV 52, “Falsche Welt, dir trau ich nicht.”  As often elsewhere, Bach did not write out the final ritornello, but indicated it merely with a da Capo instruction:

SOURCE: detail of scan of the autograph (D-B Mus.Ms. Bach P 85, f. 8v) available on Bach Digital.

SOURCE:  the same, f. 7r.

Because the final cadence is (or at least I would argue is) elided with the return of the ritornello, Bach has notated the first bar of the ritornello again before the instruction “DC.”  Consequently, he surely meant not really a return to the beginning, but rather to the second bar.  And, indeed, at the second bar we find the segno marking we would expect to see [at right].

The BG edition interprets it thus, assuming that Bach’s “DC” really meant “DS.”  The NBA, on the other hand, takes the DC literally—correctly pointing out that the earliest performing parts (which are all the work of copyists) have da Capo, following the autograph faithfully.  In fact, one of these early parts—Oboe III—has a segno at b. 2, which indicates that someone recognized the problem early on.  (The lack of a correction in the other parts does not mean that it wasn't corrected:  the mistake seems so obvious that the musicians could recognize and remember the error.)  Incredibly, there is no comment in the NBA critical report about any of this—nor about the different editorial decision that has been taken.  As it is the policy of the NBA to print in full such passages that Bach has abbreviated, a redundant bar is introduced into the text:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite page scan with detail from pp. 162 and 163 of NBA I/26 (1994, ed. Andreas Glöckner), here scanned from Bärenreiter offprint TP1290 (2007).

In my opinion, this is just wrong—and the conclusive proof for it is an overlooked detail of the autograph score.  Where the other parts are given the da capo instruction, the singer—who will have nothing further to sing—is given exactly fifteen bars of rest (after the bar in which the cadence occurs):

SOURCE detail of scan of the autograph f. 8v again, just further enlarged.

 ...yet the NBA text calls for sixteen bars of rest to reach the end of the aria (as enumerated above).  Significantly, I haven’t found a single recording that includes this extra bar.  If they are using the NBA, the musicians are deleting it.  Sometimes an extra bar is just too much of a good thing.