36. What shall we tell the students?

In some ways, I feel that musicology is both my job and my hobby.  I’m paid to be a musicologist (or maybe I’m really paid to administer a department, but I have to teach something); I “do” musicology on the side, too.  With occasional exceptions, my bedtime reading and the books I take on vacation are musicological; issues of the Music Library Association journal Notes (which always has a few articles, but is mainly filled with reviews of books, scores, and other musical media) accumulate on my desk to take when I travel.  (I’ve found that Notes is perfect for travel conditions, as the fairly short items can easily be interrupted at any moment—a gate change, the refreshment cart coming down the aisle, etc.—and resumed later without really losing the thread.)  Most of what shows up on this blog inevitably comes from the “hobby” side of my musicology interests; indeed, very little has actually concerned the textual materials that have been my own research focus.

But this is one of my rare posts from the “job” side, straight out of the classroom.  It’s not that the others don’t deal with issues that might be useful in a classroom, but I tend not to write about what I do in the classroom.  In the blog I often dive deep into geeky details, but in class I seldom wade into textual waters, maybe for fear of drowning in digressions, or of scaring my students away.  But there are times where a textual matter is so central—a veritable elephant in the room—that it must somehow come up in class.

I have usually taught music history classes without a textbook as such, using anthologies instead—one of scores and one of primary sources.  (For years I did this happily pairing the W. W. Norton survey score anthologies with the Weiss/Taruskin Music in the Western World source readings.)  More recently, my approach to music major courses has changed so much that I find no text worth my students’ money, and so I have sometimes opted to make my own anthology—particularly with the easy access to public domain editions via the IMSLP.  I have kept my eye on the products out there, though, so I know pretty well what I am foregoing.

The only thing that I don’t like about the Norton anthologies is that they have recently opted sometimes to computer-set an item anew rather than reprinting an early edition.  Here is an example:

Source:  scan of Norton Anthology of Western Music (6th ed., 2010), pp. 238–9. 

I know that the notation of an early edition might be unwieldy for students, but it is not so foreign as to lose them completely.  (For example, here are the relevant pages of a 1679 printing of the Geneva Psalter, and a 1635 Scottish Psalmes of David in Prose in Meeter).  On the strength of the maxim about the value in teaching someone to fish, I would rather have the occasional difficult source in the classroom than always predigested texts.  Granted, the Norton anthologies do not generally seek out give original sources to reprint, but why re-set these here when the early printings could be such a handy teaching tool and take no more space?

Enough quibble about Norton.  A far larger disservice to students has been done by the competing Oxford Anthology of Western Music, three volumes conceived as an ancillary resource for the textbook version of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music.  Whatever one might say about Taruskin’s accomplishment (and many people have... including the bloggers of The Taruskin Challenge), he is a significant voice.  Whether adopted or rejected, his retelling of the story of Western music will inevitably influence the classroom (and music journalists, for whom he seems to have become a one-stop shop), despite his particular interests and lacunae.  If Oxford University Press has its way, Taruskin’s version will supplant all others for the next generation.

My criticism in this post has to do not with Taruskin but with the companion score anthology, which was prepared by others.  As far as I can tell, the editors have—understandably—resorted to public domain editions as often as possible to keep the costs down.  I have no problem with this:  I am convinced that you can teach effectively from any source (although some sources are better in one context than another); furthermore, in a music classroom there is no such thing as a “bad” edition, as long as we consider what precisely that edition can teach us.  What frustrates me is when the editors fail to realize the value of the eccentric edition they have chosen to reprint.  I will offer two examples here.

First, Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, op. 13:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed., "2019" [sic!]), Vol. 2, p. 204.

The Oxford anthology reprints the old Breitkopf complete edition (although bar numbers have been added and the layout is altered to fit more systems on the page).  This is a work for which no autograph manuscript survives, so that the first edition (1799) is the most authoritative source, despite the occasional likely misprint.  One significant aspect in which some subsequent editors have departed from the text of that first edition is the placement of the exposition repeat:  is the pianist to go back to the beginning or to the Allegro di molto e con brio (b. 11)?

SOURCE:  bb. [11–13] cropped from the IMSLP scan of the 1799 first ed.

The first edition places this repeat at b. 11.  To be sure, there may be good musical reasons for wanting a reprise from the start—analogous to the Tempo I section which begins the development (b. 133)—but that is not what the first edition shows.  In his edition, Jonathan Del Mar concludes “There can be no [textual] justification for taking the repeat from bar 1, as has in some circles become fashionable” (p. 26; the bracketed emendation is mine). The Oxford anthologizers have missed a chance to remark on this textual detail, and it is a good "teaching moment" lost... or at least inconvenienced, as now the instructor would have to know of this discrepancy in order to point it out, if someone in the class doesn’t notice a difference between the text on the page and a recording they might hear.

Second, the overture to Rossini’s Barber of Seville:

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2nd ed.), Vol. 2, p. 281.

Oxford reprints this from a 1900 G. Schirmer piano/vocal score.  It includes a very common textual variant in the first theme of the Allegro:  the opening motive is immediately repeated note-for-note—with three pick-ups—rather than with only two, as here in a Choudens vocal score of 1897:

SOURCE:  bb. 25-28, cropped scan of 1897 Choudens piano/vocal score "Edition conforme au manuscrit de Rossini", with piano reduction credited to L. Narici; scan from IMSLP 280519.

According to the critical commentary of the new WGR edition, the three-note echo appears in no authentic source of il Barbiere (1816), although Rossini had apparently previously altered the text thus when he used the same overture earlier in the year for Elisabetta, regina d’Inghilterra.  (He was recycling it there from Aureliano in Palmira (1813), which had the two-note version.)  Rossini’s regularization mystifies me, as it is the lack of conformity that seems to me truly ingenious:  I am struck by the way in which the omission of a single eighth-note makes the whole passage seem less cluttered, less fussy.  The original is “the harder reading,” and it is no surprise that copyists would knock it back into conformity.  Whatever Rossini thought in the meantime, when it shows up again in Barbiere (here) the extra pick-up is gone, and the original text is restored.  But you wouldn’t know that from the Oxford anthology, where no mention of it is made at all.  Do we tell the students?

Perhaps these are nothing more than missed opportunities.  Most troubling in the Oxford anthology is the cavalier identification of some of the sources in the first volume.

Source:  cropped scan of Oxford Anthology of Western Music (2013), Vol. 1 p. 530.

It appears to me that whoever put this list together regarded its purpose as indemnifying the publisher rather than citing the sources.  To say merely that items 56, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, and 78–91 are “public domain” tells us nothing about the identity and, consequently, the quality of the texts before us.  Some of these are newly typeset by OUP (although what the source text was, or how much intervention has occurred, is not shared).  Others are lifted from major nineteenth-century editions—Denkmäler deutscher Tonkunst, the Bach-Gesellschaft edition, and the like—and as such they represent a variety of different editorial approaches (including the piano reductions included on the full scores of the old Handel edition).  Why these editions are not identified is a mystery to me, unless no one thought any of this mattered.  It does to me.  And it should matter to students, as I daresay their instructors would never let them get away with citing a source merely as “public domain.”

But it’s not like I have been a paragon of textual transparency in the classroom.  For years I have had indistinct qualms about an example I have taught in which there is a huge textual departure which I never mention to my students.  I have regularly used the last portion of Act III of Le nozze di Figaro in my core-curriculum music course (the sort of course that has generally supplanted “appreciation” courses).  Even though the bit of the act I assign in the course starts just before the dictation duet (“Canzonetta sull'aria”), I have found it useful to screen the whole of Act III for the class.  It takes about 40 minutes, and so with a few minutes of contextualizing, and occasionally interrupting to make some comment about form or technique, it just fits in a 50-minute period.  The students always seem to enjoy it.

SOURCE:  DG website

For this screening I have regularly used the 1993 Jean-Louis Thamin stage production (for the Théâtre du Châtelet), featuring the team assembled by John Eliot Gardiner, and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in 2001.  I like to use this production because it looks pretty traditional on stage, but the stage “business” feels very current even after 25 years, and the students seem to relate pretty well to the singers-as-characters.  (It has a spectacular cast, too, with a young Bryn Terfel as Figaro.)

What I have always failed to tell my students, however, is that Gardiner modifies Mozart’s sequence in Act III to accord with a hypothesis of Christopher Raeburn and Robert Moberly—essentially moving the Countess’s aria to before the legal proceedings.  This scheme puts two soliloquy scenes back to back and removes altogether any solo numbers from the second half of the act.  Nonetheless, I like the pacing, and I think it works very well in that production.

Raeburn and Moberly published their idea in Music & Letters in 1965, at a time when Mozart’s autograph score of Acts III & IV was still missing as a casualty of World War II, but even among various copyists’ manuscripts and printed libretti they could produce not even a single document that would support them.  Subsequent scholars (in particular, Alan Tyson) have revisited the hypothesis now that the autograph has resurfaced, and still there is no documentary evidence to back it up.  As sensible as the revised Act III sequence is, it never seems to have been part of da Ponte’s or Mozart’s plan for the piece.  And yet this is the version I show to my students—and with no comment from the lectern to say that this is an eccentric ordering of the material.  (Granted, I don’t show the class Act IV, where Gardiner makes an even more daring departure from the text, bisecting a recitative in order to reposition later numbers in the midst of it, but even then I’m not sure that I would mention it.)  

My vague qualms notwithstanding, I’ve never lost any sleep about my silence in class about any of this.  Although (as should be clear from my blog) text is a matter of enormous import to me, the textual situation isn’t what I’m trying to teach in that particular general-education context.  I want my students to be moved, amused, shocked, transfixed by Figaro and by that performance of it.  In another context—this one, for example—the textual issue is my subject.  I expect that most of my students wouldn’t care about the manhandling of Mozart’s score.  Even if one did, given a 50-minute class period for a 40-minute act, I have no time for it, and it is scarcely worth returning to at the next class meeting, particularly when it isn’t even the assigned portion of the act.  (Then again, I also don’t tell them that the fandango in the Act III finale—very much part of my assigned section of the piece—is absent from most of the early Viennese sources, apparently cut after just a few performances.)

I remember once hearing a senior scholar respond to a graduate student’s idea, “Well, that's something you might tell undergraduates.”  I hated that.  I understood what he (sic) meant—something like “that is a hideously oversimplified explanation, but it is pedagogically useful as it is easily understood and would allow you to move on to other material.”  I don’t ever want to condescend to my students like that.  But I also don’t want to obscure the subject by belaboring them with my textual hobby.  While it is fun to have a hobby and a job that so closely intertwine, I’ve got to keep the two distinct enough that the everyone in the room is aware if I am momentarily digressing (or transgressing, really) into the hobby territory.  Such transgressions can be valuable—as sometimes I have had to see someone being passionate about something in order to understand why it matters.  And I don’t mind being geeky if my students can understand why I care about something.  Actually, I just don’t mind being geeky.

My conclusion is so trite as to not need saying, perhaps, to anyone but me:  What shall we tell the students?  Whatever works.

23. Tidbits at the first milepost

The subject of this eighth installment of the Settling Scores

comes about by chance.  Quite independently of this project, I had set myself the task of studying all of Bach’s extant cantatas in more-or-less the sequence in which they were performed during his first few years in Leipzig.  (I will go back later to pick up the earlier cantatas—those, anyway, that he isn’t known to have reprised.)  This project occurred to me a few years ago when reading Music in the Castle of Heaven, a stimulating Bach book by John Eliot Gardiner, who himself undertook a different sort of Bach cantata pilgrimage in the Bach anniversary year, 2000.  Gardiner’s book was for me a healthy resituating of the context, especially as he gives much more attention given to the vocal works than to the instrumental works.  (Moreover, Thuringian potato farming had never before crossed my mind.)

Gardiner inspired me to go through the cantatas methodically, giving myself basically a week with each—looking, of course, for specific ways in which Bach himself developed over the years.  I splurged on a copy of the NBA study scores of the complete set of cantatas (and when Bärenreiter tweeted asking for pictures of “towers” of their publications, I obliged with this [at right]—even just my NBA holdings now loom over my middle child).  And so I started in the first week of June with his first cantata for Leipzig, BWV 75 Die Elenden sollen essen, written for the first Sunday after Trinity, 1723.  (At the moment I’m a little ahead of the liturgical calendar, as Easter was later this year than it was in 1723, but this allows me to get Advent in the right place.)

On Sunday, 4 June, I listened to the cantata and read what Alfred Dürr had to say in his magisterial survey.  On Monday, I went through the score and listened again, and then that evening idly opened the relevant Kritischer Bericht of the NBA.  I wasn’t expecting my listening project to be a topic for this blog, but already I find interest stirred by textual minutiae—the “trees,” so to speak, that may well prevent me from giving Bach's “forests” my full attention.  I think I have written already that I can’t look at a critical report without finding something that is curious enough to make me want to say “Hey, listen to this....”  (In this respect I am particularly blessed to be married to a musician; she is used to hearing me go on about such trivia, and while she may not particularly care about it, she at least understands why I do.)

SOURCE:  marked-up Bach-Digital screen-shot

Curiosity no. 1

C. P. E. Bach inherited the now-extant autograph score after his father’s death, but the work is mislabeled in the subsequent catalogue of C. P. E.’s estate.  It is listed there not as “Die Elenden sollen essen” (the first words to be sung) but as “Was hilft des Purpurs Majestät” (the beginning of the recitative that follows the opening chorus) because his economical father had used the empty staves under the chorus to write in the recitative.  “Was hilft” are thus the first words to appear in the score, and the hasty cataloguer of the estate skipped the title page and copied merely the words on the first page of the score, not recognizing that the beginnings of two consecutive movements appeared together.  The first page of the autograph score is shown at right; I have added a red-dotted line to divide the opening chorus at the top of the page from the first recitative at the bottom, and I have circled the quoted text.

Curiosity no. 2

The BG edition omits fourteen bars in the middle of the first aria.  This was discovered by Robert L. Marshall more than 50 years ago, but IMSLP users (or those who use Kalmus reprints of it) may well be unaware of the omission.  It is an egregious textual error:

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of extract from first aria (no. 3): (left) BG volume XVIII, detail of p. 166, downloaded from IMSLP; (right) digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 106 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6, p. *132).

This parablepsis is easily explained, as it relates directly to curiosity no. 1:  the opening chorus is so long that not only the first recitative but also this first aria is notated one-system-at-a-time at the bottom of the page.  The first movement ends on the same page (a verso) that concludes with b. 111 of the aria.  On the facing recto, Bach continues with b. 112 at the top of the page—for the first and only time in that aria.  Wilhelm Rust, the BG editor, overlooked this and the following system as he was preparing the third movement, as for the previous eighteen pages he could safely tune out everything at the top of the page (material that he would have already dealt with for the first movement).  He didn’t realize that he had omitted fourteen bars, but he must have noticed something was wrong, as he altered the text in order to make syntactic sense.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite scan of pages from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 18-19).

Curiosity no. 3

Hypermeter (that is, groupings of bars in strong-weak patterns).  Much of this is obvious without turning to the critical report—for example in no. 10, an alto aria notated in 3/8 time, but in which the only bar that is a simple 3/8 bar is the very first one.  All the rest are grouped together by means of short barlines into groups of two (effectively 6/8) or, occasionally, three (= 9/8).  I am reminded of Beethoven’s instruction ritmo di tre battutte in the Scherzo of Symphony no. 9—although, with no timpani thundering away here, it may be less obvious to the listener.

SOURCE:  marked-up composite of the first two systems of no. 10, cropped from Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 29 and 30);
I have marked some of the short barlines and circled the first of the quasi-9/8 groups.

Although Bach does not always notate these short barlines in all three staves, the pattern is clear.  He is thus more consistent in his usage here than, for example, in his autograph of the Corrente of the B-minor solo violin partita, BWV 1002  There the hypermetrical paired bars of the musical material is clear enough, but it is hard to know from his notation whether he intended short barlines to indicate the hypermetrical groupings (as above in BWV 75), or if these were merely a matter of notational convenience—that is, a short barline (not always the same length) in the immediate (i.e., vertical) proximity to each note on either side of that barline.  Without pushing any argument here beyond this, I have circled below in red those short barlines that are placed close to the notes before and after; in green the strongest evidence that these barlines are indeed intended to be short (together with the fact that his full barlines tend to extend either above or below the staff, or both); and in blue the two instances where the full barline before the putative “weak” bar is again proximate to the notes on either side (in both cases the d and c in the staff).

SOURCE:  marked-up cropped screenshot of autograph fair copy of BWV 1002/iii, bb. 1-32 (P967 f. 5r  from Bach-Digital)

A further hypermetrical curiosity in BWV 75 is a change Bach made as he prepared the manuscript.

SOURCE: cropped scan of the beginning of no. 5, from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

Although it manuscript is very clean (and Stephen Crist has unraveled fascinating evidence by comparing this clean manuscript with the unusually messy manuscript of BWV 76, the cantata that followed it for Bach’s second week in Leipzig), as he began no. 5, a soprano aria with obbligato oboe d’amore, he first notated the solo part with the time signature C, immediately cancelling it by superimposing 3/8.  (As shown at right, the other two staves have 3/8 from the start.)  I have puzzled over this.  This aria proceeds in a regular pattern of 4-bar groups (with few deviations); was he thinking of [re-notating?] it as a compound meter, essentially 12/8?  (If so, why not just write 12/8?)  Was it merely a slip of the pen?  Very curious indeed.

Are we having fun yet?

Curiosity no. 4

Neither the BG nor the NBA text accurately reflects the autograph’s rhythmic notation for the Oboe d'amore in movement five (the beginning of which is pictured above), but this is because the editors sought to present what they surmise Bach intended rather than what he ultimately left on the page.

SOURCE: cropped scan of no. 5 (bb. 16-18), from
Berlin Staatsbibliothek Digitalisierte Sammlungen (pp. 20)

The opening figure of the oboe d’amore ritornello recurs as a primary motive in the solo vocal part, but by the time he wrote the vocal entry he recognized that the placement of the dotted rhythm made for very awkward text declamation.  Consequently he moved the 32nd-note earlier in the figure [at left].  The discrepancy between the oboe figure and the vocal figure continues in the autograph until b. 59 (an incipit indicating the repetition of the opening ritornello), at which point he wrote the revised (that is, vocal) rhythm into the instrumental part.  In no instance, however, does the autograph show any signs of an alteration to the rhythm.  Both the BG and NBA presume (reasonably, but not inevitably) that the rhythm should be made uniform throughout.

SOURCE:  cropped digital scan of NBA Ser. I Bd 15, p. 108 (although taken from the set of study scores—where it is reproduced as vol. 6 p. *134)

These were not the only curiosities in this work (for example, how the 32-bar choral setting concluding each part of this cantata was later transformed into the 39-bar setting that concludes BWV 100)—and of course one wouldn’t have to resort to the critical report to find all of these.  Still, I think it is a pity that musicians generally seem to regard the critical reports—even without looking at them—as dry if not actually intimidating.  Admittedly they are not generally page-turners, to say the least.  For Americans, it doesn’t help that they’re often in a language other than English, and even when they are not the technical language can seem impenetrable.  But it doesn’t take long to get used to them with their specialized vocabulary and the ubiquitous abbreviations.  After I got this blog off the ground, a colleague remarked to me that “it’s sort of like you read the critical reports so we don’t have to.”  I hope that’s not the case.   And I greatly respect those editors like Jonathan Del Mar who make a genuine effort to make their commentaries as lucid and even winsome as possible—editors, that is, who seem to take real joy in communicating with others about their work, rather than regarding the critical report as a contractual obligation of unutterable drudgery.  There is buried treasure in many critical reports, a subject I will return to time and again, I’m sure.