* EXTRA * EXTRA * In memoriam S. Craggs †

I learned this morning of the death a few weeks ago of a dear friend and (I’m proud to say) colleague, Stewart R. Craggs (1943–2019).  In my very first blog post I wrote about the experience of studying in a library room devoted to the research tools for works of composers, the M3s and ML134s.  Stewart produced an astonishing number of ML134s over the years for a wide range of composers, mainly British.  His first work was on William Walton, and over the decades he revised his works catalogue twice.  It was a great honor when he asked me to write the introduction for the third edition, which appeared as the final volume of the William Walton Edition.  Below, a jolly bunch of Waltonians celebrate the completion of the project at an OUP reception on 27 March 2014:

L-R:  JBK, Stewart Craggs, Lionel Friend, Alessandra Vinciguerra, David Lloyd-Jones, Michael Burden

My introduction for the catalogue was a bit of a gushing tribute.  OUP truncated it a bit, so I thought I would post the unedited version here in tribute to Stewart.  It says what I wanted it to the first time, although it is wholly inadequate to honor him as he deserved.  I send my condolences to his family.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

INTRODUCTION

The cover of the paperback issue. 

James Brooks Kuykendall

The individual that takes this volume down from the shelf is very likely in search of answers; indeed, facts it contains in abundance.  But the labour that produced it was one dedicated to hunting out facts even when they seemed contradictory, or when the pattern they produced seemed at odds with received wisdom.  The result is, to be sure, a nuanced account of the documents surrounding William Walton—documents which amass together to reveal much of the life and works of the man.  Motivating all of the archival research, though, is an abiding passion for the music itself.  Stewart Craggs can recall a fascination beginning already in his childhood beside the radio, ‘when the strength and majesty of the first symphony created an impression that has never faded’.

Dr. Craggs is not Dr. Johnson’s ‘harmless drudge,’ who remains ‘doomed to only to remove the rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius’.  Rather, Craggs’s work  has been devoted to discovering a complex Walton lying behind a number of façades—and the real figure seems to attract more attention from performers and scholars year by year, even as the nuances are revealed.  Craggs’s enthusiasm for even the minutiae of his subject is couched in a very congenial style, yielding a reference work of a sort the late Christopher Palmer classified even as ‘reading-in-bed material’.  Indeed, much else of what Palmer wrote in his introduction for the second edition of this catalogue (1990) still holds.  The compiler’s ‘untiring industry’ has not abated, and the rich harvest of information continues, so much so that it seems a pity that it has to be arrested so that it can be manifested on the pages of this volume.  Naturally the work goes on, and this third edition represents only a certain state of his Walton research, now in its fifth decade.

Craggs’s formal research on Walton began in the late 1960s when he selected the composer as the topic for a thesis to be submitted in application to become a Fellow of the Library Association (now the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals).  At first Craggs conceived of the work to be mainly a bibliography and discography; as his spadework uncovered a body of material that had been completely forgotten (for example, the incidental music for The Son of Heaven, The Boy David, and Macbeth), his supervisor, Alec Hyatt-King, advocated that the thesis include a work catalogue as well.  The thesis was successfully submitted in 1973.  Alan Frank, head of music at Oxford University Press and thus a key contact during the gestation of the thesis, proposed publishing Craggs’s research as a complete thematic catalogue.  This appeared in 1977, and it was perhaps the most tangible and significant of the many seventy-fifth birthday tributes to the composer.  The extended prefatory ‘critical appreciation’ by Michael Kennedy formed the nucleus of the authorised biography that was to appear only in 1989.  Kennedy had deferred writing his full-length biography until after the death of his subject; the publication of the catalogue before the composer’s death made a second edition a foregone conclusion, even with the decline in Walton’s compositional output in his last years. 

Hardly had the 1977 catalogue emerged from the presses before Craggs embarked on further Walton research for a Master of Arts at the University of Strathclyde.  His three-volume thesis “William Turner Walton:  his life and music” was completed in 1978 under the supervision of the eminent bibliographer William R. Aitken.  In the preface, Craggs remarks:

“There has been so far no entirely satisfactory and detailed biographical account of Walton.   Those that have been published all seem to have been based upon factual information communicated by Walton to H J Foss in 1932, to which nothing much has been added over the years.  In my research I have tried to discover the true facts rather than those purported to be true.  To do this, I have approached many individuals involved in Walton’s career.  Thus I have been able to begin correcting prior misapprehensions and have filled in much missing detail of considerable musicological interest....”

Walton himself was only partially helpful, in that he tended to favour the briefest possible reply to any query.  He was wary of the painstaking efforts of ‘Scraggs’ to verify every detail, to supplant a simple explanation with a more complicated truth, and to exhume what lay buried under a carefully constructed persona.  The ‘Grand Old Man’ image had been codified by the press and the BBC in the 1972 and 1977 birthday celebrations, and it was one Walton was happy to adopt as the story he wished to be told.  Although Walton himself had maintained an arm’s-length relationship with his chronicler, his widow recognised that Craggs knew the music and the documents more intimately than anyone had known the man himself.  At her suggestion, Craggs was given the task of examining the voluminous archive of Walton correspondence held by Oxford University Press; this yielded substantial new factual data for many works, and the more complete documentation is clearly evident in the 1990 second edition of the catalogue.  Craggs himself purchased a collection of letters from the young composer to Siegfried Sassoon, subsequently acquired by Walton and now a part of his archive at Ischia.  Moreover, if the composer himself was sometimes obfuscatory, many of Walton’s contemporaries with whom Craggs corresponded were more forthcoming.  Craggs’s archive of these letters from the Great and the Good is impressive to behold, and the 1990 edition is enriched by these recollections.  (Palmer’s ‘reading-in-bed material’ description highlights the remarkable amount of supplementary ‘titbits’ that fill-out the chronology and the source descriptions.)  The second edition was awarded the Library Association’s 1990 McColvin Medal for the outstanding reference book of that year.

As before, the publication of the catalogue left Craggs’s energies for Walton research unabated, producing two further books even as he simultaneously produced substantial reference works encompassing a very wide scope of related figures:  William Alwyn (1985), Malcolm Arnold (1998), Richard Rodney Bennett (1990), Lennox Berkeley (2000), Arthur Bliss (1988 (based on his PhD dissertation), 1996, 2002), Benjamin Britten (2002), Alan Bush (2007), Peter Maxwell Davies (2002), Edward Elgar (1995), Alun Hoddinott (1993), John Ireland (1993, 2007), William Mathias (1995), and John McCabe (1991), as well as a dictionary of film composers (1998)—all the while also fulfilling his professional responsibilities as a librarian and a magistrate.  In 1993 Craggs was appointed Professor of Music Bibliography at the University of Sunderland, producing in the same year William Walton:  A Source Book, which offered comprehensive documentation of the extant manuscripts, first editions, letters, and recordings.  In 1999 he edited a collection of essays, William Walton:  Music and Literature, that has acted as a catalyst for much later work.

Internal OUP documents indicate that already in soon after Walton’s death there was some thought given to reissuing all of their Walton publications in a uniformly bound edition.  This project was not ultimately realised; perhaps this was just as well, as there were no plans for a thorough critical examination of each work.  It would have been little more than a vanity edition, in tribute to a figure who had been a house composer since the very first days of the OUP Music Department.  When the subject was revisited in 1994, it was decided that a credible new edition would require more than photographic reproductions of the already published text.  A critical edition of Walton’s works would be an expensive undertaking, and required careful planning.  With the appointment of David Lloyd-Jones as General Editor of the William Walton Edition in 1995, Craggs was appointed Consultant, and he has given considerable assistance to several volume editors, as well as contributing a Preface that eloquently navigates the complex web of material witnesses to the Facade Entertainments (Volume 7).  Only 23 volumes were envisaged for the new edition.  This final volume—a third edition of the Craggs catalogue—was  subsequently recognized as essential and serves as a fitting culmination to the entire project, drawing as it does upon the considerable research efforts that went into the William Walton Edition in nearly two decades of fruition.

It may seem remarkable that barely three decades since his death Walton would have received already a third edition of a work catalogue when many of his contemporaries await a catalogue at all.  Many factors bear upon this.  With just 106 catalogue numbers, Walton’s oeuvre is not unmanageable (particularly because of his habit of destroying or otherwise obliterating unsatisfactory efforts), even if each work brings its own specific set of bibliographical and philological problems—for example, the Fantasia Concertante (C14), which seems all but apocryphal, and yet receives Craggs’s full attention, together with the survey of works Walton considered but did not begin.  With the sole exception of the piano quartet, all of the published works were issued by a single publisher, making the production files of the OUP Music Department a particularly vital primary source.  More significantly, the bulk of Walton’s Nachlass is generally well-preserved and available to be consulted in a handful of locations (with the autographs principally in the Koch collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library, large portions of the correspondence in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, the files of the BBC and the substantial collection of the Walton Museum in Ischia, in addition to the OUP holdings).  This notwithstanding, the task facing anyone attempting to verify every possible detail is herculean; at least Craggs got an early start.  The reader of this catalogue can be assured that ‘Holograph:  whereabouts unknown’ is not an idle phrase of an armchair bibliographer, but is a testimony of decades of indomitable search.   Thus the disappearance of the autograph full score of Belshazzar’s Feast is astounding.  That such a vital source for a work recognised so early to be a twentieth-century masterpiece could disappear without trace beggars belief, especially when at least a portion of the manuscript was extant and loaned out to exhibitions in the 1950s.  But there is hope.  “Tribute to the Red Cross” (1944), a manuscript collection containing contributions of men and women distinguished in politics, literature, art, and music (including Walton, Bliss, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Ireland, Lambert, and Moeran) was auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1944, and lost from sight for almost seven decades, only to be tracked down by Craggs only as this volume was being finished.  The foundation he has laid will enable others to continue these pursuits in coming years. 

Stewart Craggs has devoted a lifetime of tireless labour to clarifying the facts of the music of Walton and his contemporaries.  Walton himself warily suggested that Craggs’s ‘sleuth capabilities’ might be turned in some other direction, but appreciation for his work is evident time and again in the front matter of very many publications bearing on this material.  Michael Kennedy’s remark in 1993 that ‘present and future music historians will have every reason to bless the name of Stewart Craggs’ is a prophecy already fulfilled.  Moreover, his caginess notwithstanding, Walton’s own appreciation is manifest in an avuncular gesture:  one of his last compositions was the Duettino for Oboe and Violin (C101) for Barnaby and Cordelia Craggs, published here for the first time.  Craggs himself views all of his efforts as a lifetime labour of love:  ‘to study Walton’s music has been a rewarding experience; to submit to its impact, unforgettable’.

34. So teach us to number our bars

Today’s post marks the second birthday of Settling Scores.  I have been having altogether too much fun with it, and I’ve met all sorts of interesting (and interested) people.  Some were names I knew professionally, but very many have been entirely new.  I am gratified by the response, even if I am sometimes completely in the dark on the reasons why some posts take off and others fall comparatively flat.

Although when I started this project I had a long list of issues I wanted to cover—and that list remains long—I never imagined I would spend a post on bar numbers.  What could there possibly to say?  The bars are numbered!  End of story!  But just a few weeks after I began blogging, I knew eventually this post would happen.  It was prompted by a post on the blog put out by the G. Henle Verlag.  Henle urtext editions have dominated the market (particularly for piano students) in the USA for as long as I can remember.  You’d know those slate blue covers anywhere, even if they have updated the look a bit over the years.  Their blog comes out every two weeks, written by their house editors in rotation.  It offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse at editorial work in progress.

The post that got me thinking concerned their new edition of Camille Saint-Saëns’s marvellous second piano concerto.  (To clarify:  the edition is a two-piano version, with a new reduction of the orchestral material.)

SOURCE:  cropped page scan of https://www.henle.com/en/detail/index.html?Title=Piano+Concerto+no.+2+in+g+minor+op.+22_1355, accessed 20 July 2018

Although in the preface editor Peter Jost goes to some pains to point out that the piano reduction published as the first edition in 1868 was not by the composer (but rather his pupil, Adam Laussel), the Henle blurb above gets this wrong.

Jost’s blog post concerns the arresting opening of this concerto—a free-flowing, unmeasured prelude at first, developing gradually into more conventional Romantic virtuoso piano figures covering the whole compass of the instrument.  Here are the first three pages as they appeared in first edition of the full score:

SOURCE:  scan of 1875 Durand edition from 1995 Dover reprint.

The Durand engravers have provided the conventional full score accolade on the first page, showing the complete resources required for the work.  In the autograph, however, the first page to be in full score is the third page, at the orchestral entrance, and the preceding two pages appear very much as a separate introduction, ending mid-page with a double bar and a clearly implied attacca across the page:

SOURCE:  scans of the autograph score, F-Pn Mus. MS-488, fully available here.  In this example, I have taken the images not from the Bibliotheque Nationale site, but rather from the Henle blogpost.  This has required cropping them to display them appropriately:  Henle inaccurately represents p. 2 abutting p. 1 (as if recto facing the preceding verso), although it really should abut p. 3, as above.

Jost points out that Saint-Saëns numbered the measures of this movement, starting with the orchestral entrance.  Thus the “prelude” is unnumbered—although it isn’t entirely unmetered, and even concludes with ruled bars.  Jost follows the composer on this, yielding a movement of a prelude plus 112 bars.

The first edition lacked measure numbers, but had rehearsal letters.  Sabina Teller Ratner’s thematic catalogue of Saint-Saëns works gives the total number of measures in each movement, and thus in this case numbers from the beginning, with the last bar as number 115.  (Her bar 11 below is Jost’s bar 8.)

SOURCE scan of Ratner catalogue (OUP, 2002) Vol. 1, p. 353

I do not understand the value of Mr. Jost’s “return” to the composer’s “original numbering.”  We don’t know enough to understand whether those numbers were intended to mean anything at all.  Was Saint-Saëns making a philosophical statement about the music (as Mr. Jost inevitably is—some music designated as “preceding” the real piece)?  Was there at that moment nothing written on the preceding pages, with the composer planning to improvise an introduction based on material that appears later in the movement—eventually codifying it as text?  I exchanged e-mails with Mr. Jost in the days following his post, but came away unsatisfied.

As I see it, bar numbers serve one principal and practical function:  orienting the user in a score.  A bar number is a coordinate used to locate something.  It need not be anything else. 

For any music requiring more than one player, numbered bars are useful in rehearsal (“We’ll start in bar 63”), where the system is more precise—and arguably less cumbersome—than rehearsal letters (“We’ll start six bars before F”).  In Jost's edition, taking it “from the top” is not the same as from bar #1, and that may lead to some confusion.

Measure numbers are essential, however, in critical editions (like Jost’s) so that the editor can cite a detail in the critical commentary and the user can locate it easily.  Compare, in this connection, how the new C. P. E. Bach edition deals with the unmeasured sections of the fantasies:

Source:  cropped scan of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach:  The Complete Works, Ser. I, Vol. 3 (ed. David Schulenberg, 2005); detail of p. 34, the fantasy from Wq 63 no. 6.

Here the first portion of the piece goes without a barline for several systems, so each system is given a letter:  bar 1a, bar 1b, bar 1c.  This illustration begins at bar 1h.  The first barline does not appear until after the 3/4 time signature, so that in this edition the bar marked Largo is still bar 1j, with the bar following it reckoned (finally) as bar 2.  (The critical commentary can thus cite a note in a specified portion of this extended bar 1.)  This method is necessarily idiosyncratic:  it works for this edition, but it would not be readily translated to another.  But it doesn't need to be:  the sole function of these bar numbers is to connect the critical commentary portion of the volume with the score, and this system works well enough.  (To be fair, Jost does employ a similar policy:  the opening systems of the Saint-Saëns are labeled with Roman numerals—like the front matter of a book—which inevitably suggests that we haven’t yet reached the “real thing.”)

It is a more honest method than, for example, Henle’s treatment of the Mozart “Modulating prelude” (K. Anh. C 15.11) which gets a new bar number for each system, despite no barlines:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Mozart:  Klavierstücke (HN 22, ed Ullrich Scheideler, 2006), p. 66.

Glancing through their back catalogue, I see that Henle’s practice has been inconsistent.  Here is a page of K. 394 in their 1955 edition (no longer in print), and the circled bar numbers correspond with ruled bars rather than with systems:

SOURCE:  scan of p. 40 of Mozart:  Klavierstücke (ed. B. A. Wallner; Henle, 1955)

Incredibly, this same work—newly edited by Mr. Scheideler—appears in the same new volume as the modulating prelude (HN22) with the bar numbers allocated exactly the same way as in 1955, so the new volume itself is inconsistent.  The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe isn’t much better in this respect:  K. 394 is treated as above (although the Henle and NMA bar numbers do not correspond); other works in the volume, including the modulating prelude, use the a... b... c... system as in the C. P. E. Bach edition.  For a particularly interesting situation, see the NMA’s presentation of K. 284a [NMA IX/27/2, pp. 5–9]; bar “(25)” is my favorite.

Does any of this really matter?  It depends, of course, on whether a number is merely a milepost or whether it has any substantive meaning relating to the music.  Once you start disconnecting the numbers from the sequence of bars on the page you surely must mean something.  I looked to see what the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe does with those passages in the organ concertos in which they have interpolated Wolfgang Stockmeier’s “suggestions” of how to improvise in response to Handel's instruction “ad libitum.”  I, for one, don't think such interpolations belong in that sort of scholarly edition, but at least the editors had the good judgment to leave those bars unnumbered (and in small type):  Handel didn’t indicate how many bars to play, and neither should the HHA.

SOURCE:  cropped scan of a portion of the second movement Op. 7 no. 4 (HWV 309) as presented in HHA Ser. IV Bd. 8, p. 204

For comparison, here’s Handel's autograph for this section:

SOURCE:  page from Handel’s autograph for HWV 309 (Op. 7 no. 4), mvt. 2; British Library R.M.20.g.12, f. 66r

When I began work on my first editorial project—Walton’s Variations on a Theme by Hindemith for the William Walton Edition—I remember starting by numbering the bars and assuming that it would be a straightforward task (young and callow as I was).  The anxiety that awaited me!  I wanted to number the bars sequentially across all the variations.  In a way, this was a substantive statement:  it meant essentially the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  But really there was a practical reason for this:  the critical commentary would be much harder to use if you had to keep track not only of the bar number but also of the variation number.  When I set to work, however, I found that Walton had paid no attention to the seams between the variations.  This might be because he would send off a completed variation to his publisher before starting another, but it is just as likely that he didn’t care if a complete final bar of one variation was followed by a pick-up bar of the next.  In many musical editions, “bar number 1” is the first complete bar rather than the first thing on the page—but I found I would have to count each of these incomplete tags at the beginnings and ends of variations as full bars if I wanted to have just a single numbering system for the whole piece.  It worked, but I still don’t like the look of it.

On the substantive (rather than practical) value of rehearsal marks, the words of Jonathan Del Mar are a useful reminder.  The following disclaimer can be found in the preface to each of the scores of his Bärenreiter editions of Beethoven symphonies (and a similar one for the concertos, etc.):

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. V of Del Mar's edition of Symphony no. 9 (BA9009)

How orchestras survived for so long without rehearsal marks I can’t imagine, and at least those who attempt historically-informed-performance are not bound to historical rehearsal practices.  (The unions would never stand for it.)  I bristle against heavy-handed editing, when the editor goes out of the way to make a mountain out of a molehill.  Herr Jost’s treatment of the Saint-Saëns strikes me as just that.  Then again, this blog is made entirely out of molehills treated as if they were mountains, so I’m one to talk.

20. The chord that should get lost

So far I have generally avoided posting about my own work, but as it is only with my own work that I have really been able to be “behind the curtain,” I thought I would give an example where the reading I (as editor) wanted wasn’t what eventually made it to print, and where even the textual note about it didn’t ultimately satisfy me.  I don’t think this is a case of “telling tales out of school,” but a reminder (to myself, at least) that all sorts of hidden factors may stand between the editor’s intended text and that which is published.  I know that there must be many cases like these, but how can we know unless people share their experience?

I have the highest regard for my general editor on the William Walton Edition—the English conductor David Lloyd-Jones.  His path-breaking edition of Boris Godunov in the 1970s has had long-lasting effects on the way the opera was performed, restoring the quirkiness of Mussorgsky’s text, and he has produced critical editions of a wide range of works—principally nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian and British works, but with a distinguished foray into Berlioz, too—all moonlighting alongside a distinguished conducting career.  By offering me a Walton volume to edit, he gave me my first big break professionally; by offering me a second volume, he shored up my confidence to continue.  I owe him an incalculable debt; and yet here is an instance where we disagreed—in this case just a single chord, but a chord I would so much like to lose.

The second of the volumes I did for the edition was an unusual one, consisting of concert suites derived from Walton’s film scores, including those for the Laurence Olivier Shakespeare films Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955).  These suites were made in the 1960s by Muir Mathieson (1911-1975), who had conducted the recording sessions for each of these films.

SOURCE:  1946 78s; scan of  US release front cover

There seems to be a critical consensus that the most successful of these films (and of these Walton scores) is Henry V.  Right after the release of the film, a four-movement concert suite was prepared (credited at the time to conductor Malcolm Sargent, although I have not found the slightest evidence that Sargent had any hand in it), but Walton’s publisher never offered it for sale, so it had only a marginal impact.  (The two movements for strings only were put on sale and were more widely circulated.)  A more successful commercial re-use was a recording of musical excerpts paired with Olivier reciting newly-recorded speeches on four 78 rpm discs [shown at right].  This recording had a good bit more music than the suite.  Significantly, it included the dramatic “Charge and Battle” music, a musical and cinematic climax of the film.  As the title indicates, these are actually two different musical cues—separated in the film by the launch of a volley of arrows.  (Walton marked the end of his autograph of the charge with the caption “Bombs gone!”)  The charge sequence is tremendously exciting to watch—particularly the virtuoso tracking shot lasting some fifty seconds as the French horses trot, then canter, then gallop across the field.  (A contemporary reviewer noted that the audience at the press-screening gave a spontaneous ovation at this moment, even though “they were applauding t’other side.”)  The whole charge sequence is analysed shot-by-shot and bar-by-bar in the 1957 Roger Manvell and John Huntley text The Technique of Film Music.

SOURCE:  Manvell & Hartley, The Technique of Film Music, p. 91 (the very end of the “Charge”); I have reformatted the page here to better fit a wide rather than tall aspect-ratio.  The penultimate bar is incorrectly transcribed:  Walton writes this as two bars of 3/4, with each 8th-note here really a quarter.

When Mathieson set about producing a new suite, he used the “Sargent” suite as his starting point, but deleted the choral parts (and consequently the music requiring a chorus) and reduced the scoring to double-wind, hoping to make it more attractive to smaller orchestras.  He also inserted the “Charge and Battle” music (plus another section, appended after the battle—but thereby hangs a tale for another time) as the centerpiece of a five-movement suite—and very effective it is, too.

Mathieson has skillfully spliced the cues together, but in doing so he added a chord.  The “Charge” cue ends abruptly on a downbeat—just an eighth-note chord.  (It was followed on both the film and the 1946 RCA recording by the launch of the arrows; to hear those, click either of those hyperlinks.)  The “Battle” cue continues in 3/4 time although with an eighth-rest on the downbeat.  Mathieson elides the two, so that the downbeat chord that ends “Charge” takes the place of the eighth-rest on the downbeat of “Battle.”  The problem comes in the second bar, which Walton indicates only by a ditto mark:

SOURCE:  detail of Walton's autograph of the beginning of the “Battle” cue (147c) of Henry V, taken from a screenshot of the page at the website of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University [http://brbl-zoom.library.yale.edu/viewer/1237439].  The measure numbers in red ink across the top were added by Mathieson as he prepared his suite.

Mathieson applies this ditto sign to everything in his newly-elided bar, so the downbeat chord appears a second time.

I sought to remove this extraneous chord from the new edition, as it forms no part of the film or any of the early sources, even if it was unambiguously a part of Mathieson's arrangement.  David Lloyd-Jones’s response—reasonable as ever—was that as Walton had conducted a recording of the Mathieson arrangement at the time of its publication, the appearance of the chord on that recording could be taken to be Walton's acceptance of the variant reading.  (Hear him conduct it here; listen closely and you might hear my teeth grinding in the background.)  Given that this recording was made twenty years after the music was composed, and that Walton was hardly the most detail-conscious of composers, I was not persuaded that the presence of the chord indicated that he had even noticed it, let alone endorsed it.

And so the offending chord appears in the William Walton Edition, over the objections of the volume editor:

 

SOURCE:  marked-up digital scan of William Walton Edition vol. 22, p. 48 (detail).

The corresponding textual note documents that this was Mathieson’s addition, but does nothing to suggest—as I wanted to—that one should at least consider eliminating it.  I believe our volume is an improvement over the first edition of Mathieson’s arrangement (especially because ours restores Walton’s original triple-wind scoring), but here is one place where I think we didn’t go far enough in restoring the composer's text.

8. The right tools for the job

Although it isn’t unusual to find players disregarding a composer’s instructions about what instrument to use—frequently the specified instrument simply is not available—it is profoundly irritating to find editions that beat the player to it.  An example of this is the supposedly scholarly edition of Bizet’s Carmen edited by Fritz Oeser (Alkor [Bärenreiter], 1964), where the parts Bizet wrote for cornets-à-pistons are labelled trumpet instead:

SOURCE:  scan of Oeser ed., p. 1 (detail, with emphasis added)

I say “supposedly scholarly”:  the use of trumpets is the least of this edition’s faults—and some of these will certainly feature in future posts.  In any case,  Winton Dean made this point fifty years ago, demonstrating that the Oeser edition “goes disastrously off the rails” from sound editorial practice (p. 284).  Dean also remarks on the trumpet/cornet issue, pointing out that this mis-allocation had already happened in the Peters edition edited by Kurt Soldan (on the IMSLP here) although at least Soldan had the courtesy to add “Pistons” parenthentically underneath.

The instruments are regarded as interchangeable, probably because the cornet  (properly with accent on the first syllable, which makes it easily distinguished from the cornett) is virtually an endangered species, particularly in the USA.  A hundred years ago it was the other way around, and the trumpet seems to have taken over in the 1920s (with perhaps the coup de grâce being Louis Armstrong’s conversion to trumpet).  Thus we find Cecil Forsyth, writing in his Orchestration (1914/rev. 1935):

We must not forget that the contempt which is usually bestowed on the Cornet by those who have never heard it properly played is mainly a contempt because it cannot equal or beat the Trumpet in Trumpet passages.  These simple and straightforward phrases were always consciously designed by the old masters to produce their somewhat oppressive effect by the mere weight of the instrument’s tone.  In course of time we have come to associate that type of tone with that type of passage. (p. 107)

Erring on the side of oversimplification, the conical cornet is a melody instrument; the cylindrical trumpet is a rhythmic instrument, with a tone better able to cut through an ensemble.  To best illustrate the timbral difference between conical and cylindrical brass I suggest this performance of the piece we usually call “Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring” (from BWV 147) by the German Brass.  The arranger has cleverly divided the ensemble into a two distinct consorts.  For most of this arrangement, the 4-part chorale is played by cylindrical instruments (one trumpet and three trombones), while the rest is played by conical instruments (two flugelhorns, two horns, tuba—although at a two points a piccolo trumpet joins in, and in the final measures everyone is playing together).

Here is a handy diagram, from Anthony Baines’s Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (1992), which compares the profile of several brass instruments, although it warrants a few comments below.

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Baines, p. 43 (entry:  Brass instruments). 
Baines does not clarify this, but this diagram must assume that no valves are depressed, nor is the trombone slide extended; 
V then would indicate the passage through the valve section of the instrument, but not diverted through the crooks the valves would engage.  
Otherwise the proportions don't make sense, as (for example) nos. 4 and 5 at their full length would be much closer to #1.

A mountain out of a molehill?  Profiles 4 and 5 do not appear vastly different from each other.  Indeed, but the modern B-flat trumpet is significantly shorter—and thus proportionally more conical—than its predecessors in the Renaissance and Baroque, and indeed even down to the early twentieth century.  The old valved F trumpet of the late Romantic orchestra (an instrument which will figure in a later post) really would sound noticeably different from today’s ubiquitous B-flat, as the F trumpet has a narrower bore and is about half-again as long.  (Its profile would most resemble #1 in Baines’s diagram, although a little shorter.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard one live, although it can be heard on some of the recordings of the (new) New Queen’s Hall Orchestra; otherwise it is essentially extinct.)  If Bizet had been asking for trumpets in Carmen, he would have been expecting something of that sort—not the instrument we see and hear today.

Note that profile 6 above is only the shorter portion of the standard “double” horn today (F/B-flat); the F side would extend off well to the right, and would thus be proportionally more cylindrical.  For orchestral horns, the principle that the longer the instrument is the more cylindrical its profile has always been true:  even before valves, with the crooks players would use to change the key of the instrument, the low crooks produce a very different sound from the high crooks.  Listen, for example, to these recordings of the opening chorus of Bach's cantata Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (BWV 65) with either C alto or C basso horns:

• C alto:  Gabrieli Consort (dir. Paul McCreesh)
• C basso:  Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra (dir. Ton Koopman)

It isn’t just the pitch, but the whole timbre of the instrument that is changed.  At the extreme:  the shortest horns of which I am aware are the E-flat alto horns in Mozart’s K. 132 (the higher pair of two pairs of horns), which make a very round, bugle-ish sound.

In the ensembles that put pairs of cornets and trumpets together—as so often in French nineteenth-century literature, or in military band music—one may frequently find composers observing a distinction between the writing appropriate for one or the other.  Thus in his wind band piece Sea Songs, Ralph Vaughan Williams neatly distinguishes between cornet solos and trumpet solos, and (as below) demonstrates how to keep trumpet punctuation from overwhelming cornet lyricism, while still sometime needing either instrument to function as the other:

SOURCE:  scan of Sea Songs full score (Boosey & Co, "corrected edition 1991"), pp. 20-21 (composite details)

Likewise, Emamanuel Chabrier knew when to let the trumpets do the heavy lifting in a thick texture, relegating the horns and cornets to filling in the harmonies:

SOURCE:  scan of pp. 112-13 of 1997 Dover reprint of 1884 first edition of España (composite details; accolade added)

Working on this post got me wondering of any instances where a composer calls for a player to switch between the two instruments.  It seems like an obvious expedient, but it is curiously rare.  The published full score of Bernstein’s Candide reveals that for the Parisian waltz the first trumpet player takes up the cornet (an allusion, perhaps, to the showy cornet part that Berlioz added to the Valse of his Symphonie Fantastique?)  In the last movement (Marcia funebre) of Bartók’s Four Orchestral Pieces, op. 12, the four trumpet players switch back and forth between trumpets and cornets, although it would be hard to demonstrate that he is absolutely consistent with the sort of idiom he gives to one or the other instrument.  

But in other instances where one might expect such a practice, it just doesn’t happen.  In Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe, for example, the fanfares which begin the chorus “Loudly let the trumpet bray” are played by cornets, Sullivan’s default in the Savoy Theatre orchestra.  (Like Bizet’s Opéra Comique, this may have been a balance issue more than anything else; when Sullivan wrote his grand opera Ivanhoe, he called for trumpets—and even a Wagnerian bass trumpet.)  Seldom do I hear cornets in performances of the Savoy operas.  The rare cornet solo does strike my ear as odd on the trumpet, though.  Compare the solo in the overture of The Pirates of Penzance (by Sullivan's assistant, Alfred Cellier) in these two performances, one with trumpet (at least to my ear, although the player is trying to compensate with a fair bit of vibrato) and the other with cornet.  I note that the Kalmus score (apparently scored from parts) gives no indications that the cornet was what Sullivan had in his ensemble:

SOURCE:  scan of undated Kalmus full score of The Pirates of Penzance, p. 3 (detail)

I started this post remarking on performers disregarding the instructions of a composer, and have given a few examples of editors doing it.  I have been wondering if we could imagine an editor imposing cornet where a composer wrote trumpet?  Has this ever been done—outside of brass band transcriptions?  I can think of a place where I’d like to do it:  the “Tango-Pasodoblé” movement of Walton’s Façade.

SOURCE:  scan of William Walton Edition vol. 7, Façade Entertainments, p. 42 (detail)

This seems to my ear to be begging for a cornet (with its quotation of “I do like to be beside the seaside”), but Walton’s tiny ensemble calls for trumpet.  Changing that is the sort of liberty a conductor is free to do, but not an editor.