47. X marks the spot(s)

As with most of us these days, I’m working more from my home office than usual.  A week or so ago, as my eyes wandered during a Zoom session, they fell upon a box containing files from work during my first summer of graduate school—a project involving all of Mozart’s works for wind ensemble.  Some of the questions I considered that summer prompted a first-hand examination of the autograph manuscript of the thirteen-instrument serenade K. 361 (the so-called “Gran Partita”), held by the Library of Congress.  This document has garnered a lot of attention over the years:  I recall a remark by one of the librarians in the manuscript division that day that it “ought to be attached to a clothesline” because they brought it out so frequently.  The LOC published a widely-available facsimile of it in 1976, and a few years ago supplanted that with a high-resolution digital scan on their website.  Readers of this blog will recall that I used those scans in the previous post.

There was something from that research long ago that I had long meant to write about here, but it always seemed too complicated to explain cogently.  (My intention for this blog is basically non-technical writing about very technical stuff, and sometimes I live up to it.)  It has preoccupied me so much in recent days, however, that I thought I might as well give it a try.  So I pulled out the file and flipped through it until I found this photocopied page.

SOURCE:  scan of my photocopy of Book Conservation Report (dated July 1986) shelved with the autograph of K. 361

The above was preserved with the autograph when I examined it in July 1998.  (I have no idea if it still is, and I have no way of checking right now because the Library is closed to the public as part of the COVID-19 shutdown.)  This page gives details about a specific aspect of how the fascicles—the individual sections of the manuscript—are bound together.  The vertical lines represent the binder's threads passing through the spines of each fascicle to make a codex.  The penciled note at the top is my identification of the item; conservator Pamela Spitzmueller’s note below that says that the fascicles are “all double folios / except 6 and 13 / which are single / folio.”  (A double folio here means that one large sheet (folded to produce two leaves = four pages) is nested inside another.)  “All” is not completely accurate; the description in the critical commentary the NMA (pub. 2002) gives a more typical schematic representation of the folio structure of this manuscript, revealing a slight discrepancy in the collation.

SOURCE:  description of the structure of the autograph of K. 361 as presented in the critical report (ed. Dietrich Berke, 2002) of NMA VII/17/2 p. 35, available in full online here.

Here the fascicles are given Roman Numerals (I-XIV); the single leaf the NMA labels as IX was apparently counted in with the next fascicle in Spitzmueller’s diagram.  (My illegible note in ink below Spitzmueller’s legend was to indicate how the stub end of the single leaf IX was folded behind the binding of X—which together were labelled just “9” by Spitzmueller, so the NMA numbering differs by one from that point onward.  I called it “Coda” there because it is the coda of the fifth movement—the moment that figured prominently in that last post.  I am not sure when I made that note:  because it is in ink it couldn’t have been in the LOC reading room, but must have been fairly soon after that visit.)  But the most important detail of Spitzmueller’s diagram is her discovery of the consistent appearance of three sets of “unused sewing holes” in the last half of the manuscript (each of which she marks with an X).  It is impossible to know where and when the fascicles were first bound together as a codex, but Spitzmueller’s evidence suggests that the last portion of the manuscript were at some point bound without the first portion.  The first six fascicles have five holes each, (almost) uniformly placed; the rest have those five holes but an additional two more—again uniformly placed in each fascicle—which remained unthreaded in the binding as of 1986 when Spitzmueller examined it.  My suggestion here is that this last portion, consisting of the last four movements of the work (as we know it today), existed as its own four-movement work for a time, bound together apart from the rest.

The idea that the seven-movement work could have originally been shorter is nothing new:  in fact, the first publication of K. 361 presented it as two shorter works, adapted for a more standard scoring of wind octet (pairs of oboes, clarinets, horns, and bassoons):  one contained movements 1, 2 3, and 7; the other presented movements 5, 4, and 6 (in that order).  This of course does not account for my suggestion, which groups movements 4–5–6–7 in some order.  And it has been suggested that the work initially included four movements, based on the first unambiguous documented reference to this unique combination of instruments:

“I heard music for wind instruments to-day, too, by Herr Mozart, in four movements—glorious and sublime!  It consisted of thirteen instruments, viz. four corni, two oboi, two fagotti, two clarinetti, two basset-corni, a contreviolon, and at each instrument sat a master—oh, what an effect it made--glorious and grand, excellent and sublime!”

[Johann Friedrich Schink, quoted in Deutsch (trans.), pp. 232f.]

Sitting through yet another Zoom presentation the other day, I tried to construct a different schematic representation of all of this information:  the NMA collation of the manuscript structure; the portions of Spitzmueller’s “unused sewing holes” (bracketed in red); an indication of the two types of paper used in this manuscript (yellow shading indicates Tyson 57—unshaded portions are Tyson 56); along with labels for each movement, to show which pages they make up (along the bottom).  The green markings I will explain below.  (For a larger view of this densely-packed image, see this page.)

SOURCE:  my attempt to represent all the information cited above; this diagram should be read left-to-right, and as if looking at the manuscript right-side up (so that a Necker illusion would confuse things, as everything would then be turned inside out):  the first page is facing away from you on the left extreme, while the blank final page is facing away from you on the right extreme.  NOTE:  There are seven blank (unnumbered) pages:  one after p. 43 (end of Fascicle V); one after p. 68 (end of Fascicle X, between Vars. 2 and 3); four after p. 80 (end of Fascicle XII); and the final page of Fascicle XIII. 

The musicological literature concerning K. 361—and particularly its autograph manuscript—is unusually large, and a substantial portion of it is by the late Daniel N. Leeson (1932–2018).  An enthusiastic and knowledgeable amateur, he was co-editor of the 1979 NMA volume that included K. 361 (though not its 2002 critical report), and he continued to explore and write about it for the next several decades, producing several important articles in the Mozart-Jahrbuch.  Near the end of his life he summarized all he had to say about K. 361 in a self-published monograph, gran Partitta [sic—adhering to the spelling and capitalization on the first page of the autograph—although he notes that this inscription is not in Mozart’s hand].  In that book, Leeson endeavored to “summarize everything that I think is important and valuable to be known about this work” [p. 12], delving into many mysteries and proposing solutions.  One that left him stumped, though, is a series of markings, each on the first page of five successive fascicles—but written-over by the subsequent enumeration of the pages of the whole manuscript.  For my own convenience, I am borrowing his representation of these—a composite of scans of details of five different pages—although readers can refer to the full pages on the Library of Congress scan here:  No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and No. 5.

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of Leeson, gran Partitta, p. 31.

It is these markings that I have indicated in green on my diagram above.  It can be clearly seen that all of these pages are within the section that Spitzmueller’s evidence suggests was at one time bound separately.  That is intriguing:  might these numbers and these holes have something to do with each other?

Leeson could find no meaning in the numbers.  His speculations about their origins go so far as to suggests they (not in Mozart's hand) were on the pages even before any music was written on them:

“What these sequential numbers represent, No. 1 ... No. 5, in entirely unknown.  They serve no enumerative purpose in describing anything in K. 361.  That there is no other such superfluous information anywhere on the 34 surfaces of these five units of paper is a clear indication that they—and, perhaps, others not known to us—were prepared in this fashion before Mozart began composing K. 361.”  [p. 30]

He notes that the numbers start where the type of paper changes (although there is no “No. 6” for the last fascicle of Tyson 56).  But I believe Leeson is wrong to say these “serve no enumerative purpose”:  what they do is place these fascicles in the order they now appear—putting the Theme and Variations (which begins at “No. 3”) after the Romance (which comprises Nos. 1 and 2).  What if at some earlier point the fascicles (and thus the movements) were in a different order?  I communicated this idea to Leeson in the summer of 1998, we corresponded briefly about it.  He pointed out that we know next to nothing about the way Mozart’s manuscripts were bound during his lifetime—if they were at all; and that to advance my hypothesis would require years of trying to sort out that issue for the whole corpus (much as Tyson did with watermarks).  I had other things I wanted to work on, so I left it there.

I have speculated on this blog before (as with my hare-brained idea about the absence of small-note ornaments in Bach autograph scores, and their presence in autograph performing parts):  indeed, it is one of the pleasures of writing a blog like this one.  I am a scholar of neither Bach nor Mozart, but I have found it fun to poke my head in the door (so to speak), eavesdrop for a bit, and see what I can make of the textual issues.  This is armchair musicology, admittedly, but I don’t think it is entirely irresponsible.  My speculation (not wholly from the armchair) in this case:  the autograph of K. 361 suggests that the work consisted at some point—maybe not originally, but possibly at the time of the documented 1784 performance—of movements 4–5–6–7 in a different order.

It would be extremely unlikely to begin with the present movement 4:  I can think of no other multi-movement work (other than suites of dances) by Mozart—or anyone else, off the top of my head—to begin with a Menuet specified as such.  (K. 188 is a possible exception.  If there are others, I’m sure I will hear about it and will post them in an addendum below.)  It would be impossible to begin with movement 5, as it is in a subordinate key (the Subdominant).  Movement 7 is labelled—in Mozart’s hand—Finale (although I suppose it is impossible to be certain when he wrote that label).  Thus movement 6 would be the first movement of the four-movement version I am positing.  Beginning with a Theme and Variations?  Unusual, perhaps, but he did it in the famous K. 331 (the A major piano sonata that concludes with the rondo alla Turca).  More to the point, the wind divertimento K. 253 also begins with a theme and variations (and with a not-dissimilar theme), so this would not be unprecedented.

My putative sequence would either be

• [6] Theme and Variations
• [4] Menuet/Trio/Trio
• [5] Romance
• [7] Finale

or

• [6] Theme and Variations
• [5] Romance
• [4] Menuet/Trio/Trio
• [7] Finale

Six of one and half a dozen of the other?  I'm not sure.  It is hard to make a very firm argument either way—but both of these sequences present the movements 6 and 5 out of their present order—which would explain why those fascicles would be numbered to get them right.  I favor my second suggested sequence because:

1. The last variation of Movement 6 is too similar in style to the Menuet for them to be adjacent movements, and
2. I think if the first order was correct then the fascicle for movement 4 would also have been included in the reordering enumeration.  The present movement 4 may have been an afterthought, anyway, given the change in paper-types:  thus Mozart would have composed 6, 5, and most of 7 on Tyson 56, then switched to Tyson 57 for the end of the finale, after which movement 4 (and subsequently the first three movements as we know them now) were added.  But Tyson finds that Mozart was mainly using these paper types in 1781:  the performance in 1784 is of “four movements” (if the account is to be trusted), and surely all seven movements were notated by then.  (I allow that if one were going to choose four movements to perform from this marvelous work, I cannot imagine leaving out the sublime Adagio.)  And why the four blank pages at the end of the Theme and Variations (the “No. 5” fascicle)?  Like Leeson, I am left with mysteries I cannot resolve—but trying out playlists in these alternate sequences has at least enabled me to hear this very familiar piece with new ears.

One further point about all of this:  Spitzmueller’s evidence is the sort of thing that is not transmitted in either a facsimile or scan of the page (which often serve us now as surrogates for an original):  the sewing holes become evident only when the manuscript is taken apart.  Unsewn and unseen these may be, but Spitzmueller’s X-marks are vitally suggestive of a hidden layer of this remarkable work’s history.  And yet the value of X remains unknown.

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.

* EXTRA * appreciating Linda Shaver-Gleason

In the summer of 2016, just as I was launching Settling Scores, I saw a post on the Facebook page of the North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) from Linda Shaver-Gleason, a Mendelssohn scholar just finishing up her doctorate at the University of California–Santa Barbara, about the upcoming NABMSA conference at Syracuse University.  Somewhere in the responses to the post someone mentioned Linda's blog, Not Another Music History Cliché!  She, too, had just started blogging—but she started with a bang:  thirteen substantial posts in the first two months.  Intimidating!  She was covering an astoundingly wide range of topics, with a surpassing understanding of historiography [how history has been written], and a winsome tone.  Moreover, she demonstrated that the blog was a good medium not just for musicological commentary, but for real scholarship.  As I read, I thought My students need to be reading this.... Actually, virtually everyone I know needs to be reading this.  She was clearly getting a wide readership, judging from the comments to each post.  Linda was already a genuine public musicologist, still in graduate school.

I was a little nervous about meeting her:  Linda knew what she was doing.  My first post would come out a few days before the conference, and I could hardly introduce myself as a “fellow social-media musicologist.”  I was impressed that she already had her own voice, while I was only (ten and more years after my doctorate) just beginning to realize I had a voice at all.  But then, at a coffee break on the last morning of the conference, I summoned up the courage to speak with her.  She was gracious, encouraging, and enthusiastic.  In fact, she was exactly the person I should have expected after reading her blog:  genuine, curious, irreverent, serious, funny....  I’d like to recall that she friended me on Facebook after the meeting, but I think it was the other way around.

Shortly after that meeting—where she clearly acquired a number of new Facebook friends from the NABMSA crowd, she posted this:

Source:  cropped screenshot from Facebook (taken 5 Dec. 2019).   Yes, that is Alex Trebek on the left:  Linda was a contestant on Jeopardy! in 2017.

Once again I was humbled.  How did she have it altogether, while at the same time battling—and winning—against cancer?  And she also has a young son, who is about the age of my youngest.  As so often in my career, I feel honored just to know such people.

Early in 2017, Linda announced that the cancer had returned and had metastasized to her brain.  It seemed pretty grim then, but she has fought, endured—flourished, even—over the last two and half years.  She was working on transforming her blog into a book.  Tonight, from her hospice bed, she announced that she won’t continue with that project.  Much as I would have valued that book, I suspect it could never have given her the readership that the blog already has, and I hope will, in perpetuity.

A few days ago as I started this post, I feared it would be titled “In Memoriam.”  I don’t want another one of those.  And so why not honor Linda now?

She has been a voracious reader, and always looking for suggestions.  At the beginning of 2019 I sent her a copy of Josephine Tey’s mystery novel The Daughter of Time (1951).  It is an odd example of the genre, and it took Linda a little while to warm to it.  Tey’s regular detective, Alan Grant, is flat on his back in a hospital bed, but his active mind desperately seeks a problem to solve.  He ends up considering the case of Richard III and the princes in the tower, going through piles of library books that all tell the same old story.  Actually, I’ll let Linda describe it:  click here for her review.

At the end of her review, Linda came back to the title, puzzling over what she must have missed.  “Who/what is the daughter of time?”  I realized then that the used copy I had ordered from abebooks.com must have been missing the epigram page, which Tey presents thus:

TRUTH IS THE DAUGHTER OF TIME.

—Old Proverb

(I would gloss this as “the stories as they are told and retold acquire the power of truth, even if they didn't really happen.”  That has been the substance of her pathbreaking blog.)

It occurs to me now that this situation—the missing page, which would be the key to the puzzle—is very much how I see Linda’s work.  In her blog, she explains those pages missing from the way music history has been told; when those pages are presented, the whole picture can look very different.

With Linda's inevitable retirement from the field, suddenly, again, it was if a page has been ripped out.  We have to remember that the source is incomplete, that there is more to be told—and that others may have explained away those missing pages so that they no longer seem necessary.  I am reminded of Mozart’s fragmentary Rondo for Horn and Orchestra, K 371.  The work is fragmentary in two ways:  1) Mozart never completed the orchestration, and 2) the autograph lost a few leaves at some point, only rediscovered in 1990.  The absence of these leaves was not clear to the editors of either the old or the new complete works, despite a bizarre moment at the juncture of the two sections where the 60-bar passage is absent.

Source:  scan of K. 371 as in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Werke, XXIV/1 (1882) from IMSLP #88078, but the reading of the NMA is essentially the same.  This system begins with bar 19; after b. 26 should have followed sixty more bars in the missing leaves discovered by Marie Rolf in 1990.

With Linda’s death, we will have lost a page—nay, countless pages.

... and yet, as history always has still to be written, I should not despair:  Linda has shaped the way so many have approached their work as musicologists—and the testaments on her Facebook page now demonstrate this.  Rather than thinking of missing pages, I expect she’d rather us be looking at the blank pages (and blog posts) of that history waiting to be filled.  Filled honestly, unflinchingly, and with whatever grace we can muster.

Thanks, Linda.  You encouraged me to be myself, and it was probably the most important lesson of my career.

UPDATE  15 January 2020

Linda was assassinated by cancer on 14 January 2020.  There have been a number of tributes in recent weeks, and I’m sure more will follow.  But here are two:
https://nationalsawdust.org/thelog/2019/12/31/linda-shaver-gleason-exit-interview-with-a-public-musicologist/
and
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/music/myth-busting-music-blogger-honored-mourned-online-in-her-final-days

UPDATE 27 April 2020

And this, from the American Musicological Society newsletter:
https://www.amsmusicology.org/news/503457/Linda-Shaver-Gleason-1983-2020.htm

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.