39. standardize/compromise

As we welcome the new year, fireworks are inevitably on my mind.  At the very least, my dogs make me aware of fireworks:  even distant explosions are enough to keep my dogs anxiously pacing the house.  (I can only imagine what it must be like for veterans with PTSD, hearing these explosions at too-close range well into the early hours.)  Moreover, beautiful as such displays may be, it’s hard for me not to feel that if you’ve seen one good one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.  I don’t bother to stay up for them, and then I’m cross when I am woken by worried canines.  On such occasions, I'm inclined to agree with Hamlet’s view of a similar noisy custom: 

More honoured in the breach than the observance (Act 1 Sc. 4).

SOURCE:  “A view of the magnificent structure erected for the fireworks to be exhibited for the solemnization of the General Peace” (uncredited, but apparently in the British Library), cropped from scan of the cover of Bärenreiter facsimile Georg Friedrich Händel:  The Musick for the Royal Fireworks / Feuerwerkmusik / British Library Manuscript R. M. 20.g.7 (2004).  (Christopher Hogwood's introduction to this volume is available here.)

Only because of this pyrotechnical connection, I thought it was time for me to comment on a few of my frustrations related to editions of Handel’s Musick for the Royal Fireworks (celebrating the 1748 Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle).  I grew up on a musical diet in which the largest “food group” consisted of Bach, Handel, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Mendelssohn.  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know the Fireworks music, I think mostly from a 1972 recording by Neville Marriner and his Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields.  (It sounds very familiar to me now, and it’s exactly the sort of recording my father would have bought.)  But I remember, too, a recording of the suite orchestrated by Hamilton Harty, as well as hearing some of the early attempts at historically-informed reconstruction of the original all-winds and percussion scoring—24 oboes, 12 bassoons, a contrabassoon (and, by rights, a serpent—although I’m not sure if that has yet been included on any of the recordings), nine each of trumpets and horns, plus timpani and side drum.  Those outrageous figures were already scaled back from the official plans.  A press blurb several months before the actual event listed “40 trumpets, 20 French horns, 16 hautboys, 16 bassoons, eight pair of kettle-drums, 12 side-drums, a proper number of flutes and fifes; with 100 cannon to go off singly at intervals, with the musick.”

SOURCE:  detail of A Description of the Machine for the Fireworks... (London, 1749), p. 8, just for the heck of it; cropped scan from appendix in Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 92.

Then, as now, one must be skeptical of figures from those in power.  Just two years ago, the (then) White House press secretary Sean Spicer stepped in front of journalists to insist that “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, PERIOD, both in person and around the globe.”  (My transcription hardly does him justice.  If you want to watch it again, here he is.)  Handel rehearsed the work inVauxhall Gardens, south of the Thames, on 21 April 1749 to what must have been a large audience, but—as David Hunter has shown—the official figure quoted (“an audience of above 12,000 persons (tickets 2s. 6d.)”) is just not possible.  Taking “physical, economic, social, and mathematical” factors into account, Hunter reckons the realistic audience size charitably around 3500, allowing that it might have been a good bit smaller still [pp. 75–84].  Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

I grant, however, that the music Handel wrote was extraordinary, at least in that it departed dramatically from any sort of ensemble he had used hitherto.  Handel was much more adventurous in his use of brass sonorities than was his contemporary J. S. Bach (although admittedly Bach called upon greater technical feats from his players).  The only Bach work I can think of that employs trumpets and horns simultaneously is BWV 205, the secular cantata Zerreißet, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft.  (If there are others, perhaps someone will let me know.)  Handel uses those instruments in combination more often, particularly—as in the Water Music and his sumptuous oratorio Solomon—for antiphonal or double-chorus effects, where the contrasting timbres have much more impact than when he pits two identical ensembles together. (In this regard these works have the advantage of his three Concerti a due cori).  The three distinct ensembles of the Fireworks music are very evident on the first page of Handel’s autograph:  trumpets/timpani (four staves), horns (three staves), woodwinds (five staves):

SOURCE:  scanned from Bärenreiter facsimile, p. 59; also available at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=R.M.20.g.7 (see f. 16r).

When in about 1988 I learned of Dover’s reprints of public domain editions, their paperback comprising the Water and the Fireworks music (both reprinted from Friedrich Chysander’s Händelgesellschaft volume of 1886) was on my very first order form.  As I had grown accustomed to that, which prints the score with the staves allocated more or less as in Handel’s autograph, I found myself disorientated when opening both the 1962 volume of the HHA and its 2007 HHA revision.  In these newer editions, the score has been radically redistributed according (almost) to modern ordering conventions:  woodwinds at the top of the page, then brass (horns first, trumpets next), then percussion, then strings.  (What strings?  I’ll come back to that.)  The “almost” is that in both of these HHA volumes, the bassoons are at the bottom of the page among the strings.  There is a reason for this:  in practice, the HHA only gives a bassoon its own staff when Handel has written an independent part, not just doubling the bass line common to the strings.

SOURCE:  (l.) Händelgesellschaft edition, vol. 47 (1886),  p. 100 [available at IMSLP #24009]; (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 87.

I grant that a standard score order is a useful thing, especially for a standardized ensemble.  I don’t object to seeing Mozart scores reorganized in this way, with the upper strings moved from the very top (where he habitually put them) to the bottom (just above the cello/contrabass line).  That said, I think we do miss something when we look at a page so differently laid out from what he wrote, and I appreciate those texts—a good example is Simon P. Keefe’s Mozart in Vienna:  the Final Decade—in which the musical examples restore his score order.  Whatever reordering the HHA might impose on Handel in general, I think the Fireworks music deserves to be treated as an exception:  even by Handel's terms, the ensemble is exceptional.  (Even the NMA abandons its use of modernized score order when dealing with works for a non-standard ensemble; see for example the wind serenades, which retain Mozart’s placement of the horns above the bassoons.)  There are times when the modernized allotment of staves obscures what Handel is doing with his triple ensemble.  Compare the pages below.  The HHA gives me the impression of a dialogue between only two ensembles—brass (in the middle of the score) and oboes/strings (at the top and bottom); placing the horns above the trumpets means that when any of the horns play with the trumpet ensemble they appears to lead the brass altogether, and the use of two consorts (three trumpets + horn, then three horns) becomes almost invisible, while it is very clear in the autograph.

SOURCE:  (l.) autograph, f. 22v (facsimile p. 72); (r.) revised HHA Ser. IV Bd. 13 (2004), p. 107.

(I note with some distaste that already in 1788 Samuel Arnold had put the horns above the trumpets in his edition.)

A further complaint:  both the original HHA volume and the revised version present a score including five staves of strings, realizing instructions for doubling that Handel added to his autograph score.  Doing so while also retaining the inflated wind numbers conflates two distinct versions—outdoor and indoor—into a form Handel never heard:  massed winds + strings.  The conflation makes a striking effect, but it is not something that ever happened in his time.  If you’d like to experience this version but can’t muster 80+ period-instrument players, here’s a 2012 BBC Proms performance by Le Concert Spirituel under Hervé Niquet that does it for you, even adding a drum interlude (at 01:43ff, corresponding with Handel’s later-cancelled instruction “alla Bruit de guerre”) in lieu of discharging cannon:

Strings were not part of the outdoor performance—apparently vetoed by George II himself.  I have my doubts that the overture was composed with strings in mind, given the problematically high “viola” line (generally doubling Oboe III), and the confusing pair of bass lines, in which the contrabass seems to be on the wrong line.  In his revised HHA, Christopher Hogwood has modified the viola line;  I find his version just as dubious, often doubling the bass up an octave even when it seems to me to intrude in the texture.  Whatever one does seems unsatisfactory.  The string doublings were likely added with an eye to a performance at the Foundling Hospital several weeks after the fireworks display; for that concert, the doubled-and-redoubled winds must surely have been scaled back to normal size.

Intriguingly, Hogwood interprets the marginalia in the autograph manuscript as indicating that the work heard at the Foundling Hospital performance differed in another significant respect:  the suite was truncated with just a few movements, and for the finale Handel borrowed the last movement of a trumpet/horn “due cori” concerto, HWV 335a—a work thematically linked to the Fireworks overture and preserved in a different fascicle of the same bound volume now.  (For Hogwood's argument, see his Cambridge Music Handbook [pp. 115 and 127] and the revised HHA volume [p. xxviii-xxix].)  Musically, I like this suggestion a lot:  to me, the two menuets that conclude Fireworks are an unconvincing conclusion to such a work, at least when not followed by fireworks.  Those menuets plod.  The finale of HWV 335a, however, is buoyant.  (Hear it here.)  A problem with this solution to the marginalia is the scoring:  although the scoring is similar, it is not identical:  two (not three) trumpets + two pairs of horns (the first pair consistently with oboes, the second pair consistently with strings).  In that the rest of that Foundling Hospital performance included music from Solomon (two trumpets + two horns), I began to wonder if they jettisoned Trumpet III (or, Principale, as he labels it, denoting its low register) altogether—but what did they do about the extra horn part?  A further problem:  the only movement in the autograph of Fireworks to have a staff allotted to the violas is the final menuet—which this theory would exclude from the strings version of the piece; granted, the staff is lightly crossed-out as it stands.  Is that significant?

SOURCE:  cropped scan of autograph, f. 28v (facsimile, p. 84)

This leads me to my third frustration:  my sense is that the “indoor” version of the Fireworks music (and “Fireworks” no longer seems the right name) really deserves to be published as its own distinct work—and with its own catalogue number.  The revised HHA volume does right by the Water Music (and I’ll come back to it sometime), but I fear an opportunity was missed to do justice to the Fireworks music.  The new volume’s blue covers enclose both a triumphant flourish (the much-needed update of Water Music, since many important sources had come to light) and a damp squib.  Surely there will not be a second revised volume to give us distinct “outdoor” and “indoor” versions of Fireworks; we will have to wait for someone else to do it—someone willing to defy standardization and its inevitable compromise.  Someone, that is, willing to honor the custom in the breach rather than the observance.

24. Against the muddy tide

SOURCE:  scan of Dirk Stoop's engraving Aqua Triumphalis (Aug. 23, 1662, preceding the wedding of Charles II) at the National Maritime Museum; available at http://www.historyextra.com/river

Images like the one above are a healthy reminder to me that George I was not the first to have elaborate festivities on the Thames.  And yet the date that will always be most associated with such water parties must surely be 17 July 1717—the impending tercentenary of which I simply must mark with this post.  As musical water parties are known to have happened in each of the three preceding summers, the eye-catching 7/17/1717 date may not be the first performance of Handel’s Water Music, but it is the earliest documented performance—and it is very well documented indeed.

Water Music fits into a long tradition of music for a social occasion; but as a musical structure itself, the work is shockingly innovative—an orchestral piece of unprecedented length and variety.  Are there any predecessors to rival it?  In a way, Water Music represents the first maturity of the orchestra—and, maybe except for occasional performances of Corelli concerti grossi, it must be the earliest music that can be said to fit into the established orchestra repertoire.  While modern symphony orchestras have largely abandoned the Baroque, edged-out by their HIP rivals, Water Music is still performed by all sorts of ensembles, and seems to be a perennial crowd-pleaser.  New recordings (and cheap reissues of old ones) emerge year after year, and twice in recent years (2003 and 2012) there have been conspicuous performances on the Thames itself—conspicuous enough for me to have noticed, anyway.

SOURCE:  Daily Mail image of the 3 June 2012 Jubilee flotilla on the Thames; the Academy of Ancient Music website has some entertaining videos concerning their part of the festivities.

Probably the work seldom gets performed intact.  The 22 movements that comprise what we call Water Music do not cohere in any traditional pattern, and that has caused problems for Handel scholars in the past.  Lacking an autograph, it was assumed that the strange sequence of movements indicated that something had been garbled in transmission.  Here is a handy index from Christopher Hogwood’s Cambridge Music Handbook:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of pp. 18-19 of Handel:  Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (2005)

As indicated by the catalogue numbers of the Handel Werke Verzeichnis (HWV), Water Music has been allotted three entries—the movements in F (and two in D minor) are HWV 348; those in D major are HWV 349; and those in G major/minor are HWV 350.  HWV thus presents three “suites” together making up a larger collected work.  Lacking any further evidence, this division would be wholly reasonable—and it is more practical in performance, as each suite is unified not only by key but by instrumentation (with trumpets appearing only in the movements on HWV 349, and no brass at all in HWV 350, which instead features flute and recorder).  The idea that the conglomeration of movements that we think of as “Handel’s Water Music” actually comprise three separate works goes back to Handel’s time: some manuscript copies dating from the late 1730s and early 1740s, together with  the 1743 Walsh keyboard arrangement presents the movements grouped together into the three suites.  That sequence took over the received history, and thus the three catalogue numbers.  The work had appeared as three suites in the Hällische Händel Ausgabe (HHA) in 1962, and that imprimatur led to a myriad of recordings that present Water Music so allotted.  And it works:  I was at a concert not that long ago that had the F major suite at the beginning of the program, a smattering of Bach and Telemann in the middle, and the last two suites as the conclusion, the whole making a very satisfying musical experience.

SOURCE:  scan first page of score (f. 2) of 1718 ms.
in the library of the Royal Society of Musicians [no shelfmark];
scan from https://museums.eu/event/details/120375/handels-water-music

Given Handel’s default modus operandi, it would seem a little unusual if Water Music wasn’t to some extent a thing of shreds and patches.  Terence Best points at the solo violins in the fugal section of the French overture, suggesting that that sort of writing would have been inaudible in the open air, and thus likely to have been retained (unthinkingly?) from some preëxisting work.  And yet, as Best is also at pains to point out, all of the earliest manuscript copies not only mix movements of the D and G “suites” together, but in fact they all preserve most or all of the 22 movements in very nearly the same order.  The 2004 discovery of the earliest known manuscript copy (datable to 1718 [and the first page is shown at right])—which gives the 22 movements in precisely the same sequence as the first published full score (ed. Samuel Arnold in 1788), a sequence familiar to us because Arnold’s edition was the primary source for Chrysander’s in the old complete works volume (1886).  We do not know Arnold’s source (although Best [p. 102] argues reasonably that it was indeed this source), but the newly-discovered copy is enough to verify that this sequence of movements was known within a year of the supposed 1717 premiere.  The HHA has thus now issued a new volume (2007, co-edited by Best and Hogwood) to supersede the old.  (This pair of editions would make an ideal topic for my series of “moving targets,” but I haven’t done sufficient homework comparing them to write that up yet.  Eventually.)

So what about that unusual sequence, now being restored to favor?  It is a curious hybrid of suite and concertante forms, and it doesn’t even settle down to just one sort of suite.  It opens with a French overture, interrupted before a final cadence by a solo oboe number; following that is really an Italian overture (fast-slow-fast) featuring the horns; then a series of conventional dances or dance-like numbers (menuets, bourrée, hornpipe, “Air”).  After all the F major movements are done, there follows a d-minor number displaying Handel’s orchestrational technique at its most forward-looking—but which is hardly either a closing or an opening to a suite.  Thereafter, in Hogwood’s words,

“From this point in the suite both the scoring and the changes of tonality become more varied, a strategy that seems designed to maintain attention through an hour-long performance—the length of time of a full act in an opera, but no other musical form to date.”  [p. 35]

The brilliant brass writing that follows is closer to Handel’s (subsequent) concerti a due cori than to anything else—in other words concertante writing again  The remaining dances are diverse and diverting, but there is no conclusion as substantial as those of Telemann’s Tafelmusik; the “Trumpet Menuet” that de facto brings the whole thing to a close seems perfunctory, and to my ear the weakest part of the whole set.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Given his later scholarship on this work, I was curious to revisit Hogwood's own recording (1978).  It is inevitably a product of its time.  Hogwood not only followed the three suite model of the original HHA, but also interpolated two much later F-major reworkings of the two central D-major trumpet/horn numbers.  Wonderful music as these are, their inclusion here only muddies the textual waters.  And to confuse things further, Decca several times reissued only either the “horn suite” or the “trumpet suite” from these sessions.  Hogwood’s dominance in the recording market place in the 1980s and 1990s has surely meant that—for better or worse—these performances have played a large role in shaping our sense of the work.  (Or works?)  I’m not even sure that it is a problem, but it is worth acknowledging.  (A similar issue came up in a post concerning Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.)

I tried an informal experiment for this post:  listening to a recording with the CD or MP3 player set on SHUFFLE, hoping to see if any resulting sequence of movements would be viable.  It won’t, at least for me, but if we were to view the whole thing as a sort of compendium of music to keep the party going, a number of routes might work.  A crucial difference is to have a musical intelligence making the decision, rather than just a mechanical randomization.  In other words, it requires a deejay.

12. Recorded history

A question to which I will periodically return in this blog is “What sorts of non-textual musical evidence nevertheless bear upon the text?”  Another way of thinking of it is “Beyond the notated sources, what other sources can/should affect a new edition of a work?”  A fairly obvious non-notated source is an recording involving the composer as interpreter, or perhaps involving a performer who had worked directly with the composer.  An editor might introduce, for example, metronome marks to approximate a given recorded performance—although this might very well be misleading.  I have already remarked in this blog of an instance where the composer’s performance tempo slowed down considerably over the years; and in early recordings, where the play duration was short and unavoidably constricted by the dimensions of the playback medium (wax cylinder or shellac disc), performers are known to have opted for faster tempi just to squeeze their rendition into the time available.  As far as new critical editions are concerned, my feeling that the editor should do the due diligence of studying any recording that might have claims to be authoritative in any respect, even if none of the findings make it out of the critical report.

An interesting example of this is to be found in Jonathan Del Mar’s excellent edition of the Elgar cello

SOURCE:  baerenreiter.com

concerto (Bärenreiter, 2005).  The critical commentary is a wonder to behold, containing seventeen color facsimiles comprising the whole of the solo cello part in Elgar’s hand prepared for the cellist who gave the premiere (Felix Salmond), four pages of the original short score draft, and the first page of Beatrice Harrison’s copy of the printed solo part.  Later in the commentary Del Mar carefully catalogues the pencilled instructions in this source—a significant document because Harrison recorded the work twice under Elgar’s direction (first in 1919-1920, subsequently in 1928).  These two recordings are among the sources Del Mar uses for his edition, and they feature in one of the most fascinating discussions in the commentary itself:  second movement, bb. 40-48 and the parallel passage at 78-86 (“the most severe dilemma for the interpreter in the entire work,” as Del Mar puts it).

In each of these two passages, a single idea is presented by the soloist and then the orchestra, and then the same exchanged is repeated a third higher:

SOURCE:  my resetting (with Finale) of II mm. 40-48 (using Elgar's piano reduction), reset just to fit it in a smaller space.

Of these last four bars Del Mar asks “Did Elgar intend (but not mark, assuming it as understood) the same ‘largamente   a tempo’ as four bars earlier, or did he, on the contrary (and as some soloists make a point of doing), wish these bars to make a contrast, continuing this time a tempo?”  Here Elgar’s own recordings with Harrison employ the unwritten largamente in these second exchanges, although not a single written source includes it.  (At least not a source in Elgar’s hand; Harrison has added to her copy of the printed part “largamente molto” to b. 43.)  Del Mar concludes tellingly

“Fortunately, there is at least no conflict whatever between individual sources between either group [paper or recorded], so that there is absolutely no doubt as too what we should (a) print (b) play—even if these two groups are in direct opposition with each other.”  [all of these quotations from pp. 36-37 of the critical commentary]

Even more interesting to me is that Elgar apparently took pains to erase some instruction at this point:  what was written above the cello stave here that was subsequently obliterated, distorting even the lines of the blank stave above?  This is bb. 44-46:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Bärenreiter facsimile (2007) of autograph full score (RCM ms 402), pp. 44-5.

Of this Del Mar remarks, “there is—tantalizingly—distinct evidence of deleted markings, but these are very efficiently scratched out so that almost nothing remains.  Only from the extremities of a few individual letters can we tentatively conjecture that Vers. I might have read (44 ‘largamente’ altered to) 45 ‘largamente a tempo’.”  Interestingly, the obliterations occur in both the autograph full score (above) and in the short score draft.

In any case, acknowledging this distinction between how the music is performed and how it is notated is significant.  Del Mar decided to deal with the whole issue in the critical commentary rather than in the separately published score, but at least a footnote in the score directs the user to the commentary.  A more intrusive editor might impose instructions (bracketed or not) or more extensive footnotes to indicate that the solo in bb. 44-45 should resemble bb. 40-41, etc., citing these recordings as support for that.  (I say intrusive—but is that the right word for this?  Heavy-handed?  Patronizing would be more pejorative; the positive spin might be avuncular.)

Christopher Hogwood has cited an interesting case of this sort of detail:  Aaron Copland’s 1974 Columbia recording of Appalachian Spring in its original scoring (13 players) included a bonus disc with excerpts of Copland rehearsing the Columbia Chamber Orchestra.  At this passage

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Boosey & Hawkes study score (HPS876), p. 5. 

Copland instructs the string players “Would you mark a crescendo on the [first] A—the fermata? [demonstrates]  I’m used to that; I don’t know where it came from.”  (Hear this moment of the recorded rehearsal here.)  Hogwood comments

“That, to me, constitutes something as good as written evidence.  Copland wanted it, asked for it in rehearsal and fixed it in his recording.  That crescendo can then go back into the score, but indicated differently from the crescendos he actually wrote, being one that he dreamed he had written but never had, but asked for, and if you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.” [pp. 5f]

Hogwood's “as good as written evidence” suggests that if he were editing Appalachian Spring the crescendo would be in the score, modified in some way (brackets, dotted lines, whatever) to indicate an editorial addition, but he felt that an indication of its source is optional:  “If you want to explain it in the critical notes, you can.”  Okay, we have the composer literally on the record in this instance, and the ensuing studio recording backs it up.  The critical notes should say at least “hairpin absent from A[utograph], B[oosey published score], P[arts]....”  I think ideally the notes would be the place to document not only the 1974 rehearsal comment, but also if the crescendo is present in Copland’s other recordings of the work (in its larger scoring).  It could therefore be a task for an editor to seek an answer to Copland's “I don’t know where it came from.”  [ADDENDUM 10 June 2020:  The new critical edition of the original ballet score of Appalachian Spring cites the rehearsal recording among sources, but no mention is made of this crescendo, nor does it appear in the score.  An opportunity missed.]

Patrick Warfield documents a much more complicated situation in his edition of six Sousa marches in the Music of the United States of America (MUSA) edition.  He lays out the case for why the early recordings are not to be trusted—greatly reduced recording forces, truncations made to fit works on to a disk or a cylinder, and uncertainty of the identity of the performing ensembles billed on the record label as Sousa’s band (often conducted by assistant Arthur Pryor).  Add to this Sousa’s jealously guarded authentic sound for his own music in live performance:  the published texts of the marches lacked the details of his own performance practice.  Sousa is quoted as saying “we make some changes now and then to make it a little bit different” (p. xxxii).  At best these “authentic” recordings could document only a moment of that dynamic tradition.

Thus Warfield turns to the recollections of Sousa’s players (each keenly aware, after all, of intentional departures from the face-value reading of the printed parts) to try to establish Sousa’s performance practice as best that he can.  These changes generally involved certain groups of instruments sitting out during a repeat (or a first-time-through), getting the melody brass (cornets/trombones) or the percussion out of the way to let a mellower ensemble sound prevail; or it might be moving players to a higher or lower register—clarinets an octave higher or lower than notated.  Warfield’s edition cautiously refrains from printing these alterations directly into the score (“as no printed source includes these changes” [p. xxxviii]), although they are indicated in bracketed instructions.  For example, this bit of The Washington Post:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Sousa: Six Marches (A-R Editions, 2010), p. 10; there are further instructions at the bottom of the page as well.

Warfield has done an admirable job presenting the evidence of Sousa’s practice without imposing it.  Conductors may experiment as they like.

A more vexing sort of recorded evidence is conveyed by surviving mechanical instruments like player piano rolls or the eighteenth-century barrel-organs that preserve versions of Handel’s organ concertos.  (For the former, Neal Peres da Costa has done admirable work disentangling performance practice evidence.)  The Handel concertos are shown to be laden with what might otherwise be considered improbable ornamentations.  Of course these cannot be exact transcriptions of Handel’s—or anyone’s—performances, as they have had to be “pinned” by hand (the metal pins hammered one at a time into the wooden cylinder).  Due to the minute distances of linear travel as the cylinder turns, it is hard to believe that these can transmit very much in terms of precise rhythmic relationships, still less is there a pattern to suggest notes inégales:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of David Fuller's transcription of an eighteenth-century barrel organ [p. viii]

For pitches (for example, starting a trill with the principal note) the barrels are much more reliable.  They certainly serve to indicate something of the variety of added ornamentations known (even plausible) at the time, and what sorts of ornaments would happen on repeats while other things might be altered.  When such instruments came to be studied in the 1980s (for example this) there was great hope that they were a sort of Rosetta Stone for understanding Handel’s performance style:  thus David Fuller insists that

“Here, in principle at least, there are no decisions to be made, no opportunities for interpretation.  One may like or dislike what he sees here [in Fuller’s meticulous transcriptions]; one may not dispute it....  The listener may imagine his ear pressed to a speaking tube extending without obstruction nearly 200 years into history.”  [p. v]

This was too good to be true, but that doesn’t make such evidence irrelevant by any means, and a few pages later Fuller backs down a bit to something much more useful:

“That Handel himself played this or that particular ornament on a particular note in a particular measure could not possibly be claimed; this his style of playing was wholly without effect on general English practice of mid-century and thence upon these cylinders is, on the other hand, unlikely.”  [p. x]

Beyond Handel, such barrel organs can offer us a lot about early eighteenth-century ornamentation in general.  Paul Badura-Skoda even opens his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard with a chapter on the Handel barrel organs. But these tell us more about eighteenth-century musical culture—barrel organs in particular—than they do anything about keyboard playing or ornamentation, and they must be treated with caution.

The barrel organs are recordings of performances rather than notational instructions about music—and I think we must keep that distinction in mind.  In 1958, Charles Seeger articulated concepts of prescriptive and descriptive notation—“a blue-print of how a specific piece of music shall be made to sound” over against “a report of how a specific performance of it actually did sound” (MQ 1958, p. 184).  When we think of music in terms of composers and works, we are (almost invariably) conceptualizing written music as prescriptive:  How did the composer want this to sound?  When, instead, we think of music in terms of performers and performances, we conceptualize notation as a description of that performance:  How did the performer render this?

The notation may well look pretty much the same in either case, as (despite what Seeger argued for in 1958) descriptive notation is still very much bound to the notational elements devised around prescriptive writing, particularly if the descriptive notation is expected to be an adjunct to some sort of recording of the real thing.  Thus the curious, 1100+ page anthology The Beatles: Complete Scores is descriptive of the Beatles recordings, laboriously (although to me not always convincingly) transcribed by Tetsuya Fujita, Yuji Hagino, Hajime Kubo, and Goro Sato.  I presume it is a labor of love, and it’s difficult to know what it is for:  a coffee table curiosity (commercial)?  A handbook for cover bands (prescriptive)?  An ancilliary resource—but a dangerous one—for scholars of the “British Invasion” (descriptive)?  We can see more rigorous approaches in the MUSA volumes devoted to (for example) transcribed recordings of “Fats” Waller (ed. Paul Machlin) or Sam Morgan’s Jazz Band (trans. John J. Joyce)—fascinating volumes to peruse, even when I did not have the recordings immediately to hand.  These volumes do much to emphasize the complexity of this music, and of course the notation acts to “freeze” the improvised music to allow us to scrutinize and dissect it (... to apply, in other words, the autopsy-table analysis that has been the stock-and-trade of music scholarship).

There is much more to be said here, but this post is already overlong.  I should return at some point to some prescriptive transcriptions—that is, of transcriptions from recordings intended to facilitate new live performance of music that was originally improvised—like Maurice Duruflé’s reconstructions of Charles Tournemire’s Cinq Improvisations, or (rather differently) the Jazz Arts Trio’s “note-for-note transcriptions of historic moments in piano jazz.”  In the latter instance, when I sat through a concert in which these transcriptions were realized (and with scores available for purchase), I was left pondering what manner of performance this could be.  Somehow the music seemed to have been violated in an attempt to bring it back to life.

11. Dart’s Brandenburgs

...which is the second installment of the Settling Scores

I am never in Manhattan over New Year’s, but years of following the concert listings in The New Yorker and The New York Times indicate that in NYC there is a holiday tradition of programming all six of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.  (Okay, so that’s a nineteenth century name for these works, but I think we’re stuck with it, so I’ll dispense with the scare quotes.)  Somebody—the Chamber Music Society of of Lincoln Center, the NY Phil, or St Luke’s, or a visiting group at Bargemusic, Symphony Space or somewhere—presents these six exquisite pieces as an essential secular holiday event.  With that in the back of my mind, this seems like as good a time as any to look at textual issues relating to these works.

Bach’s 1721 fair-copy dedication manuscript survives to this day, and one might assume that it should settle any textual questions about the music.  It served as the sole source for Wilhelm Rust’s 1871 Bach Gesellschaft edition, except for the fifth concerto, for which Rust also consulted an autograph set of parts.  Rust’s edition is readily available in inexpensive reprints, and that is a good thing:  with really just one source, the edition is quite faithful to that dedicatory manuscript.  In one important respect, the BG edition is closer to Bach’s notation than that of the Neue Bach Ausgabe (ed. Heinrich Besseler in 1956):  the BG preserves the transposing notation, not converting everything to concert pitch as the NBA does (although determining “concert pitch” in Bach is an issue I must return to later this year).  This affects not only the brass:  importantly, it affects the violino piccolo (conc. no. 1), whose triple-stops appear completely unidiomatic when rendered in concert pitch.  (Granted, the BG changes the clef of the recorders (if that’s what they are, in nos. 2 & 4), which the NBA does as well.  The NBA goes further, and changes the clef of the violas da gamba in no. 6 from tenor to alto.)  It’s nice when the cheap and convenient editions are also good ones.  The Dover reprint even includes an English summary of Rust's preface, which at least makes users aware that there are textual issues to consider.

I describe Rust’s edition as “good” because it is so close to the reading of the dedication score, although Besseler was right to question what value that source should have:  “The numerous errors show that Bach was careless.  As only some have been corrected, the dedication score does not have the value that a manuscript made for his own use would have.”  [NBA Krit. Ber. p. 12.]  This would mean that the dedication score is “authorized” (i.e., in Bach’s hand) while not really being “authoritative” (i.e., his intentional definitive presentation of the text)—an interesting distinction—although, as I discussed last month, “definitive” is not the most useful term in such contexts.  The search, then, is for the parent texts from which Bach (carelessly) prepared the dedication score.  That search led Besseler to some manuscript copies made by Christian Friedrich Penzel some ten years after Bach’s death.  Penzel was one of Bach’s very last students—not quite 13 when the old man died in 1750.  As the readings differ a bit from the dedication score (and, as that score would not have been available to Penzel in Leipzig anyway), these sources seem to be a useful point of departure in understanding a “first version”—even if, at best, Penzel’s source postdates Bach’s re-use of some of the material in cantatas (BWV 52, 207, and 207a), and it cannot be regarded as an uncontaminated earliest [i.e., Ur-] text.  Other Leipzig copyists transmit material we associate with the Brandenburg Concertos, but these too are disconnected from the dedication score, and so also likely transmit early readings—most famously, perhaps, the much shorter version of the harpsichord solo in concerto no. 5, transmitted in only one source.  Indeed, that source is eccentric in other ways, for example its description of the concerto as a “Concerto Quadruplo,” elevating the cello into the concertante group:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, detail of title wrapper for parts of  Concerto no. 5 copied by J. C. Farlau.
To my eye, the word Quadruplo is clearly a later addition, as is the insertion Violoncello Concertato,
but even then it's not clear that both of those are written in the same hand:  look at the r in each.

(The cello part transmitted with that set—but in the hand of yet another copyist—is rather different than the traditional reading, adding it as continuo in the second movement, and doubling or adapting the left-hand harpsichord part in other places.  If you want to see something crazy, look at the first movement, bb. 95ff., where this cello is included with the six-bars of trills from the soloists.)

SOURCE: The Music Parlour blog

The most powerful way to become aware of musical textual variants is to hear them, and no one brought these audibly to our attention more than the short-lived but remarkable English musician and musicologist Thurston Dart.  Already in 1959 he released a recording of the Brandenburgs which was a veritable shot across the bow of conventional musical wisdom.  These recordings—available for download via this interesting post on The Music Parlour blog—seem  to borrow the rhetoric of the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard it said..., but I say unto you....”  You think Bach’s corni da caccia are horns?  Dart says they should be Jagdhörner sounding an octave higher, so he does the first concerto using trumpets instead.  He inserts the slow movement of BWV 1021 to provide the Phrygian half-cadence between the two movements of the third concerto.  It is a provocative recording.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Dart wasn’t finished with the Brandenburgs.  He prepared an version for the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields for their 1971 recording, conducted by Neville Marriner.  (Although the Phillips release refers to “Dart’s edition” it was never published in score. Perhaps “version” or “reading” is a more accurate term?)  Here again the same I’ll-show-you spirit prevails in Dart’s interpretations of the evidence, and the album cover has the audacious claim “FIRST VERSION—FIRST RECORDING.”  He follows Penzel's text for the first concerto, so that the third movement is gone, as is the polonaise (both appear in an appendix) and the accompaniment to the horns in Trio II is a rather different unison line for strings rather than oboes.  In this recording the corni da caccia parts of the first concerto are restored to the horns in their usual octave, but the tromba of the second concerto is allocated to the horn rather than the trumpet, down an octave, no longer at the very top of the texture.  His evidence for this is a copyist’s part annotated (by whom?) “ô vero Corno di caccia”—and this alters the soundscape in a remarkable way.

Dart expended a lot of scholarly energy on Bach’s description Fiauti d’Echo in the fourth concerto:

SOURCE:  Bach Digital, cropped page scan from the dedication score, f. 38r. 

His conclusion was that these were really flageolets, sounding an octave higher than notated, so that on the 1971 Marriner recording these are performed on sopranino recorders.  You can’t miss them. Much more could be said here, and this issue has generated a literature of its own.

Dart died before the 1971 recordings were issued; he participated as a continuo player in only six movements (including all of Conc. no. 3, including the interpolated movement from BWV 1021).  Although Philips re-released the 1971 Marriner recording on CD at least as late as 1989, these recordings seem utterly unavailable today through newer releases or streaming/download services (other than Concerto no. 4 as part of a 2004 Marriner tribute collection).  I only ran across them because I married into a copy.  Dart’s approach—if not precisely his conclusions—has become much more widely known through the output of his former Cambridge student Christopher Hogwood, who was also always ready to perform a variant for the sheer excitement of hearing something new.  His 1985 recording of the Brandenburgs retains some of Dart’s ideas, as well as some new departures (particularly regarding the choice of instrument for the bass line).  The Dart attitude is clear in Hogwood’s liner notes:

[Bach’s] desire to impress the Margrave with variety above all is apparent, alarmingly in Concerto 1 where the revised version addas a new concertante third movement for the violino piccolo to a work that opens with a strongly ripieno movement; and in Concerto 5, where a harpsichord episode of nineteen bars is inflated out of all proportion to produce what is currently mistermed a ‘cadenza’ of sixty-five bars.  [Notes to Decca 414-187-1, p. 2]

SOURCE:  allmusic.com

How alarming!  How disproportionate!  How tasteless!  Add to this Hogwood’s characterization of the dedication score's “specious authority stemming more from its Dedication and calligraphy than from its value as source material,” and we may perceive that we are receiving Dart’s spirit through Hogwood’s hands.  At every turn he offers something different.  For the first concerto, Hogwood follows Penzel’s text strictly—no violino piccolo, no Allegro 6/8 and no Polonaise.  Marriner had conceded to the 1971 public with an appendix, but Hogwood’s public in 1985 was ready to be shocked by difference.    To differ from Dart he scraps the idea of interpolating a movement from BWV 1021 as a slow movement to Concerto no. 3; he restores alto recorders as the Fiauti d’Echo in no. 4; and the horns and trumpet are back in their usual places (nos. 1 and 2 respectively) at their usual octave.  With admirable restraint—or is it marketing savvy?—he eschews the lengthy harpsichord solo in no. 5 for the more abrupt version.  I can remember hearing this recording of no. 5 on the radio in about 1987, as I was about to shell out some cash for the Brandenburgs.  Hearing the short variant, I recall reacting “Aw, man! No!” and buying Trevor Pinnock’s recording instead.  And—much as I admire Hogwood and his work over the decades—I can’t say I’ve regretted that youthful investment.  As well-played as these recordings are, are they (and Dart’s) not just a little too eccentric to become standards?  As Richard Taruskin wrote thirty years ago, after quoting the same Hogwood passages I quote above,

In his recording, Mr Hogwood has rectified Bach’s lapse by reinstating the original nineteen-bar solo.  Let me suggest that this conglomeration of shallow fireworks and harmonic barbarities, however ‘in proportion’, and however it may conform to the performer’s idea of the stylistic norms of the day, is poor music by any standard, and that by replacing it Bach judged it so.  As a snapshot of Bach the improviser, it has human interest to be sure, but it is unfinished composition at best.  It is amusing to hear it as a once-only curio, but to offer it as a viable substitute for what Bach offered as representative of his best and most fully elaborated work is manifestly to devalue both that work and the critical sensibility that impelled its revision....  I see here the ultimate perversion of the idea of authenticity:  the elevation of what amounts to a rejected draft to the status of a viable alternative—and even a preferable one—because it is earlier, more in keeping with ex post facto historical generalizations, and less demanding on the listener.  [pp. 192f; later included in Text & Act, p. 139]

Indeed, as Taruskin goes on to insist, the label Brandenburg on the Hogwood (and Dart) recordings is false advertising, as that can only be used to describe the texts contained in the dedicatory score.  Certainly those Leipzig copyists would have been mystified if someone requested one of Bach’s Brandenburg works.  Was ist das?  The alternative texts really ought to be called something different.  “Dart’s Brandenburgs” don’t exist.