2. Risky business

It’s not news that music is a risky business.  Even with the narrower field of musical text, there is an element of risk.  Certainly music publishers are now more than ever in a risky business:  they compete for what is apparently a diminishing number of customers, and this competition may be against free legal downloads even more than against other publishers.  For a composer, notation is itself risky—virtually every element fraught with potential misinterpretation.  If they choose for their music to be performed by live musicians (and that is no longer the no-brainer that it used to be), they must give up some degree of control of “their” music:  the score is the inevitable nexus between the person trying to get the musical material in and those who would get the material out.   And I find the issues that arise from that interface compelling.

Much of what I will write in this blog has been said before—sometimes, indeed, because I want to point out things others before me have said (and done) that deserve renewed attention.  One such example is a small booklet by Walter Emery, published in 1957 by Novello & Co.  He called it Editions and Musicians, but I think his subtitle says it all:

Emery can get preachy at times.  At times that is stimulating, at times perhaps a little tedious.  I appreciate every page of this book, even when I find that I disagree with him.  For example, Emery concludes his chapter “The Need for Editing” thus:

“The fact is that until an editor has done his work, and done it properly, no performer can safely play old music, no analyst can safely analyse it, and no historian or critic can safely assess it.  The editor’s work is the foundation on which all other musical and musicological activities are based.”  (p. 14)

Really?  I can remember a time when I would have endorsed every word of this, but no longer.  It is not that I am against good editions of music—on the contrary, even when they cost a bundle.  It is really the word “safely” that bothers me.  Implicit in it, I think, is the idea of a definitive conception of the piece in the composer’s head, and that we are obliged to try to get as close to that as we can before we do anything else.  Moreover, I think Emery would say that these other activities (performance, analysis, criticism) that occur without such a proper editorial foundation are doomed eventually to crumble.

I’m skeptical that such a definitive conception ever existed in any meaningful and permanent way, and even more skeptical that such an idea could be conveyed to anyone else.  Think of the composers—first-rate composers—who couldn’t leave well enough alone.  (Not just “well-enough”—we might sometimes tend to gush with phrases like “apparent perfection.”)  Chopin might be an extreme example of this:  not only was he praised for “ever different expression” (and “Chopin never played his own compositions alike twice,” etc.), but those remarks are consistent with the documentary record of his own manuscripts and the editions that flow from them (i.e., all sorts of authorized variant readings).  Even given the fascinating editorial collation that has been unfolding through the superb Online Chopin Variorum Edition, isn’t there perhaps just too much here for anyone to take in?  Must the establishment of every authentic Chopin text of a work be complete before anyone can “safely” (to use Emery’s word) perform or analyze or critique it?  Could Emery be satisfied if an authentic text (say, a copy of the first French edition of a work marked up by Chopin for his pupil Jane Stirling) was all that a performer had seen?  This is, of course, extremely improbable, given the glut of Chopin editions on the market, settled in domestic piano benches, littering cabinets and weighing down shelves.  When Emery writes of the need for editing, it is a need to redress a context dominated by editing that was not done “properly” (again Emery’s word).

Or consider J. S. Bach, for whom, as Christoph Wolff has put it, there was apparently “no such thing as ‘untouchable’ text,” evidenced by his changes (not just “corrections”) even to his published works, and his revisions and reworkings of  (for example) the cantatas as he reused them in a subsequent years.  These are often instances where it is difficult to argue one reading is better than the other (indeed, there a few cases, like the two versions of the Canonic Variations, BWV 769 and BWV 769a, when it is seems impossible to say definitively which version came first).

Or Mendelssohn—whose “Revisionskrankheit” was a chronic (fatal?) compulsion to tinker away endlessly at his completed works.  At some point in this blog I will eventually return to the case of Mendelssohn’s celebrated “Italian” Symphony—a work that until recently was known only in its first version; Mendelssohn’s second thoughts prompted him to rewrites of the last three movements; the first movement he ultimately deemed unredeemable.  All this notwithstanding, it is one of his most popular works with audiences, who don’t seem to have noticed how unredeemable it is.  But more on that later.

In my first post, I mentioned the very different manifestations of Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, diverging in many respects from the autograph score, but still holding a secure place in the repertoire of pianists and orchestras.  I’d guess that Emery would regard any performance of the Rimsky-Korsakov version (or the editions derived from it) as a travesty.  But what about when later minds uncover new ways of hearing a piece—and a composer even embraces those new readings?  (Think Bob Dylan’s response to Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.”)

I have been delighted to see that the editorial principles behind the new Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter) take into account not just the authorial conception of the works, but also these works in performance, accumulating non-authorial performance traditions.  The score of the recent edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia (ed. Patricia Brauner), for example, includes in appendices not only three substitute numbers Rossini composed for later productions, but also several vocal variants (i.e., ornamented versions) that are extant in Rossini’s hand in as many as three (differing) sources.

Source:  cropped scan of p. 504 of WGR score of Il barbiere... (Bärenreiter, 2009)

Beyond this, however, the critical commentary includes materials about the performance tradition not directly deriving from Rossini:  a) the libretto for a Neapolitan-dialect version with spoken dialogue, and b) an extensive essay (59 pages!) by Will Crutchfield on “Early Vocal Ornamentation.”  I think it is a pity that these gems lie in the comparative obscurity of the very pricey commentary volume.

Would Emery say that as these latter variants are not from Rossini (but rather from the early performance tradition), a “safe” performance would be no performance at all?  Or that analysis or critique would be meaningless because it doesn’t relate directly to the composer?

Then again, just because Chopin was known to interpret his music anew each time, he didn’t take just any pupil; should we read his varying instructions to them with similar caution?  His famous remark to Filtsch (“We each understand this remark differently, but go your own way, do as you feel, it can also be played that way”) could hardly be regarded as interpretive carte blanche for any pianist.  Still, there is a sense in which G. Thomas Tanselle’s conceptual distinction between the text of the work and the text of the document might be useful—another idea I will be returning to in later posts.

I find that I’m more willing to see more risky performances, ponder risky analyses, and read risky critiques.  The safe alternative seems embalmed (fossilized?) in an established text, when the text itself was never sufficient.  That said, inauthentic readings (when they are known) should be acknowledged as such.  The situation can become bizarre, such as an exchange prompted by David B. Levy’s review of a critical edition of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (1996).  (Levy's review is “Urtext or Performing Edition?” in Beethoven Forum 9/2 (2002), pp. 225-232).  Del Mar’s edition is a remarkable accomplishment in many respects, but Levy is astonished to see Del Mar depart from an established reading to favor a variant that is admittedly authentic (mvt. I, b. 81; the D in flute and oboe, rather than the familiar reading of B-flat):

Source: detail (woodwinds only) of scan of p. 13 of Del Mar’s edition of Symphony no. 9 (Kassel:  Bärenreiter, 1996)

[Here is a performance of this moment with this text.]

This “new” (original) reading results in a curious discrepancy in the subsequent appearances of this figure, where there is no leap of a sixth.  (This isn’t really an issue of recomposition in the recapitulation, but rather a different conception of motivic unity.)  Yet, as Del Mar remarks in the critical commentary, this D appears in all sources (which for this instance means the autograph (below), five scores made by copyists, and the first edition score and parts (1826)).  Del Mar surmises that the Bb (which first appeared in the 1864 Breitkopf edition)

“… was apparently invented by analogy with 276/80,346 [later recurrences of the motive].  Yet Beethoven wrote d in both instruments in A, so it can hardly be a mistake.”  (p. 25)

Source:  detail of screenshot of http://beethoven.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/beethoven/pix/sinfonien/9/1/990/00000020.jpg  
(mm. 80-84 as in Beethoven’s autograph f. 8v.)

 Levy puzzles that Del Mar would depart from the reading that would support “many published analytical studies… [which] have drawn attention to the significance of the perfect fourth (and its inversion, the perfect fifth) not only within the first movement, but throughout the entire work” (p. 229).  Del Mar replies:

“… where I as a sensible musician have to judge that the reading in the authentic sources is inconceivable (no less)—and especially where I can show how the error could well have arisen—I will present the more likely text. But if it is conceivable, I have a duty to stick to what Beethoven wrote. So despite all published analytical studies—which inevitably were based on the text they had in front of them—I restore Beethoven’s D in movt. I, m.81. Sorry: if we subsequently find that the analysts’ text was faulty, their studies will have to be rewritten. That is quite simply inevitable, and to argue that we must print a text that accords with previously published analytical studies is obviously putting the cart before the horse.”  (p. 105)

No need, in my view, for these “risky” analyses to be “safely” re-written:  the analyses can account for the work as it came to be known.  More significantly they document an important aspect of reception history:  our(?) sense of what the product of a genius should manifest, with (in this instance) an organic unity of motivic development encompassing the whole work.  The altered B-flat is no less a part of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (i.e., the cultural property it has become) just because Beethoven didn't write it.  If, with Del Mar, we regard the B-flat as bad editorial judgment, we must now correct it; we can't eliminate the effects it has had over the years (and we could, if we chose, continue to play it and analyze it), but we do have to acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it.  Those who disagree with Del Mar should still acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it, but they may argue however they may that Beethoven meant it.

As my envoi, take this example from Emery (p. 19), who quotes Donald Francis Tovey’s hedging conclusion when faced with an (unknown) chromatic error in his text of the F# minor prelude from Bach’s WTC II: “a harmonic point of peculiar subtlety.”  But of course.  That’s what we expect from a genius, right?

1. The weight of tradition

Among the many things I loved about graduate school, the best was the music library.  Having come from an undergraduate institution with modest (although by no means insignificant) music holdings, walking into a major research library felt like being handed the keys to a high-performance sports car.  I knew I would only be using it to go around the block, but the amount of potential placed before me was thrilling.

My favorite place in the music library was a small, out-of-the-way room that held mainly two things:  the M3s and the ML134s.  In the Library of Congress classification, the shelf listing M3 indicates a collected edition of the works of an individual composer; ML134 is used for reference books devoted to a single composer, like thematic catalogues and bibliographies.  In other words, this room was set up to house the standard resources for research on the output of composers.

Working on a composer has rather gone out of fashion in musicology these days, as it seems inevitably to reinforce “the canon” of dead white males.  I remember meeting someone a few years ago at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society who asked “Who do you work on?” but then immediately apologized, as the question had implied I was doing old fashioned stuff.  No apology necessary:  I do work on composers (and mine have admittedly been dead, white, and male), and I don’t mind being out of date in that respect.  I don’t think we’re through dealing with the canon, even if we have rightly broadened the field exponentially beyond just musical works.  I think that if you can say something interesting, it doesn’t matter what you’re talking about.  I just do better thinking in terms of composers and their music, so I work less on –isms.

Source:  https://www.loc.gov/item/det1994005418/PP/

I spent many happy hours at the large table in that downstairs room.  (It was the central window of the South end—the right hand side on this picture, third window in on level above the basement.)  Many of the things on the shelves were intimidating.  I still remember gazing over at the massive, forbidding bright red tomes of the Verdi edition (but shouldn’t he have been bound in green?); the purple Wagner volumes were just as tall, but they weren’t nearly as wide, as they tended to divide the works into separate acts.  In a way, that was even more intimidating.  Handel was navy blue; Mendelssohn was green; Rossini was brown (and now he’s yellow, in the newer edition), Mozart maroonish, and Bach a variety of shades of rust.  The 19th century editions had marbleized endpapers, but they somehow seemed less intimidating since they were familiar from relatively inexpensive reprints.  And beside many of the editions were the diminutive volumes of footnotes, the critical reports.  At the time those seemed the most forbidding of all, but then I can remember opening them and thinking how amateurish some of them looked, typewritten and on aging paper.  (There were reasons for that, but I didn’t know it at the time.)

One afternoon as I was working at that seminar table, the music librarian escorted in a group of people, including two or three structural engineers.  They were doing a thorough assessment of the building.  It was about 120 years old then, but it had been built to house the Civil Engineering department—classrooms and offices.  It had never been built to house noisy music studios, still less to withstand the ever-increasing weight of a library.  Already before I had arrived, much of the music library had been moved into the far end of the basement:  those stacks were locked, and items had to be paged by library staff.  But the library was still running out of space and—more worrying—the beams holding up the floors were sagging and pulling away from the supporting walls.  That problem would only get worse as more material was brought in every day.  (That sagging is a problem I see on my office shelves too….)

In my second year, it was teams of architects coming through, drawing up proposals for the music library.  In my third year, we were packed up and moved across the quad for the renovation of the building (including substantial new construction).  In my fourth year, we were back over.  The new building was wonderful in many respects, and the library was now designed intentionally—not just forced into a space.  But gone was my room of M3s and ML134s.  Those reference volumes were still together, but they were more impersonally disposed, rank on rank in shelves near the circulation desk, and with no convenient and inviting workspace.  I felt very much a stranger to that new library.

I remember, though, that as all of the circulating scores were at last in open stacks, I was surprised by the number of scores in the library collection as whole that seemed to be “duplicate”—lots of scores of the same works.  Of course I have realized since that (with the exception of a few duplicate copies and unaltered reprints) these were not really duplications.  Rather, these various editions testified to a lengthy and sometimes disparate tradition of music making.  The scores reflected something about how that music was perceived at the place and time that each of them was produced.  There is a tendency, I suspect, to regard the newest or most expensive of them as likely the best edition, or the oldest of them as likely being the most directly connected to the composer; the scores in between (when there are any) often get completely ignored, sometimes even abused.  (“The Novello, Schirmer (ed. Albert Schweitzer) and Bornemann (ed. Marcel Dupré) complete sets [of Bach's organ works] present highly edited texts and are to be avoided as playing editions,” we are told.  But what if one is interested in playing Bach on a Cavaillé-Coll instrument, in the style of the French Romantics?  Dupré's edition is a vital window into that significant moment in Bach reception.)

My blog name—SETTLING SCORES—uses “settle” not in the sense of pronouncing judgement, but rather in the sense of structures sinking gradually into their foundations.  This isn’t pretty:  usually the plaster cracks and the floor becomes uneven and creaks when you walk on it.  But it is inevitable, unless you raze the building and start over.  I want to use the blog to think stratigraphically about musical texts—not necessarily the most recent, not necessarily the oldest, not necessarily (indeed ever) the whole picture.  

Take the case of Mussorsgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which for many years was known only in intrusively edited versions (deriving from the sweeping changes made by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who published it soon after the composer’s death), or in orchestrations which used those versions as their point of departure.  (The long crescendo of “Bydlo”—suggesting the slow approach of the ox cart—was not in Mussorgsky’s autograph, which is ff from the start.)  Even after the “uncorrected” readings from the autograph were published, they have by no means entirely supplanted the Rimsky-Korsakov version.  Should they?  Should the “false” version be banished even it if has proven to be musically effective for performers and audiences who didn’t know the original?  Is that performance tradition invalidated (and with it Ravel’s orchestration, for example) because we know that it was not the composer’s idea?  To indulge in groundless speculation, who knows in what ways Mussorgsky might have revised the work had he lived longer?  The autograph is authoritative; is it definitive?  And—seeking the death of the author—what gives him the final say anyway?  

What about Bach’s keyboard transcriptions of (for example) Vivaldi’s concertos?  Very often Bach’s texts depart creatively from the original—in such ways that one could not readily import Bach’s revisions into Vivaldi’s (even if one wanted to).  But every now and then Bach—or his source—seems to have perceived a “mistake” that warranted “correction.”  The examples below compare the Etienne Roger first edition parts of L’estro armonico (the D minor concerto for two violins, Op. 3 no. 11, in the Largo e spiccato section) with Bach’s transcription.  Vivaldi’s autograph is lost, and so it is out of consideration.  Vivaldi editions follow Roger with the unambiguous E for note no. 8 in the example, although it is a dissonant melodic leap (tritone) to an unresolved harmonic dissonance.  Bach’s reading (BWV 596; see his MS here) is an unambiguous D (although admittedly he also thickened the texture here, adding the D to a new accompanimental voice here:  Vivaldi has only G and F)—altogether more conventional, and thus perhaps less interesting.  The two versions of this work are conceptually distinct pieces, but we might imagine performers using one to affect their interpretation of the other.  I haven’t noticed any organists trying to import (restore?) Vivaldi’s E against Bach’s full harmony, nor have I seen a Bach edition that “corrects” Bach by printing the E; but I wonder if any violinists have used Bach’s D as a less jarring alternative?  Why not?  It has eighteenth century credibility from the very highest quarter.

Source:  detail of screenshot p. 16 of Roger's Violino primo part, scanned as
http://hz.imslp.info/files/imglnks/usimg/7/71/IMSLP52255-PMLP06105-Op.3_7-12.pdf  (pdf p. 18);
and my transcription of Bach’s MS, although the note in question is reflected in the NBA and every edition I have checked.

These are the sorts of things I want to think aloud about; if it interests you, stick around.  I aim to post on the 1st and 15th of each month.

I staged the picture for the blog nameplate, but it hadn’t occurred to me until later that it is a pretty good representation of the sorts of musics I expect to show up in these posts:  of the eleven volumes visible (each devoted to a single composer), five contain eighteenth-century repertoire, four contain nineteenth-century, and two twentieth-century; although Germanic repertoire leads (six out of eleven), there is also representation from England, France, Italy, and the Soviet Union.  Solo keyboard, chamber, symphonic, stage, and choral/orchestral repertory are all represented.  These composers are all European men (my apologies); and they are all dead (although that may be unavoidable, given that my topic demands some textual tradition to have something to write about).  Other composers (earlier and later), other traditions and editions, other sorts of problems will show up (I considered including The Beatles:  The Complete Scores, but it took up too much space); still, I think this probably is a good sense of what will be the main focus.  You have been warned.