59. The latent textual value of a derivative score

A few weeks ago, my colleague Justin Vickers posted a very generous profile of my blog.  Speaking with Justin a few months ago, I gave him an example of material that has been on my idea list for posts even before I posted the very first one in the summer of 2016.  These ideas sometimes linger while I wait to find the right examples to illustrate the issue at hand.  One of those ideas—the second on the list, actually—was about the importance of vocal scores to the textual record.  (A vocal score is an edition of a vocal or choral work in which the orchestral accompaniment has been “reduced” so that is reasonably playable by one person at a piano; as opposed to a full score, in which all the orchestral lines are spelled out—but there are varieties of full score too numerous to discuss in this post).  Knowing that Justin is a Britten scholar, the example I shared was Peter Grimes.  But now is a good chance to finally write this post (not as post number 2, but as number 59), and thus to back up and look more into the Peter Grimes instance.  And, as so often in this blog, there is a long backstory here.  If you want to cut to the chase, skip the indented paragraphs and I’ll see you on the flip side.

Decades ago, during my graduate studies, the music seminar room doubled as the 

“locked press” of the music library.  In my very first blogpost, I described my favorite space in the Cornell music library before the building was renovated:  it held the M3s (collected editions) and the ML134s (work catalogues).  The locked press inspired a certain awe, as it held the stuff that could be accessed only with special oversight—the holdings that would be only rarely consulted and which would be impossible or expensive to replace.  I remember the bewildering array of facsimiles (in those days before digital scans were so readily available online), and sometimes during a class my eyes would wander up onto the shelves to behold these special volumes.  I remember one catching my eye, noteworthy because it wasn't a facsimile of a medieval or renaissance source, nor even of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century manuscript, although it was as impressively lavish in its presentation.  Two big volumes:  The Making of Peter Grimes:  I. Facsimile of Benjamin Britten’s composition draft and II.  Notes and Commentaries.  I knew very little of Britten’s music at the time; I knew the name of the opera, but I had never seen or heard it.  I knew it was an important work, but I was still surprised to see that something so recent—hardly fifty years old at the time—would merit a place in the holy of holies in the music library.

You should keep in mind that I was a snob of the first order at that time.  I had very strong opinions about what was worth looking at and what was worth listening to.  When in the late 1980s I came across the Dover reprints of full scores, what interested me most was that they were full scores (i.e., what I assumed to be “everything the composer wrote”), not really anything about what editions were being reprinted.  With my interest in Gilbert and Sullivan, it was a little frustrating at the time to be pretty much limited to vocal scores, but I still generally held vocal scores in contempt—at least at one remove from the real thing, at best.

I occasionally requested something from locked press, and those seemed like particularly momentous times.  In fact, almost soon asI arrived on campus campus I called up the facsimile of The Mikado, spending several hours at my carrel poring over it.  I perused several other locked press items over there years, but never Peter Grimes.  That wasn't until many years later, by which time I had come to know the opera pretty well, and was devoting much of my energies to British music generally.  So, in the spring of 2013, when I had some faculty development funds to spend, I splurged on several facsimiles:  Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, the composition score of Messiah, and a few others.  But also, seeing a chance flyer from Boydell & Brewer, I ordered The Making of Peter Grimes.  I spent a lot of time with it over a few weeks, looking at the score with the full score at hand, and reading the commentaries.  But then it went up on the shelf and didn't often come back down.

Fast forward a few years, when I was considering using something from Peter Grimes for one of my classes to analyze.  Finally over my full-score-only snobbishness, I had recognized that it would sometimes be easier for my students to see what I wanted them to see if they could use a reduced score of some sort (like Ravel’s two-piano transcription of La Valse... and, I thought to myself, at least the transcription is by the composer...).  So I went down the hall and borrowed the vocal score of Peter Grimes from one of my applied voice colleagues.

I had never looked at this vocal score before, but flipping through it, I kept thinking I’ve seen this before.  And I knew exactly where I had seen it.  It looked a lot like the “composition draft” that was in the facsimile on my shelf.  No, it’s not note-for-note the same—hardly that.  But what the vocal score transmits is derived not from the full score but from the composition draft.  The draft is written in “short score,” meaning lots of stuff crammed in a few staves, but generally not really conceived as a piano accompaniment.  Maybe because Britten was himself a formidable pianist, the notation of the short score betrays to my eye a sort of “pianistic thinking” which transferred nicely to the clean vocal score text prepared by Erwin Stein.  Looking at it now, it is actually hard to find a really good example to demonstrate this.  The section that had first attracted my attention was the interlude that opens Act III; the example below is from the storm interlude in the middle of Act I (the beginning of which has always struck me as prefiguring some of the “rumble” in West Side Story; Bernstein had conducted the US premiere of Peter Grimes in 1946.  Just sayin’...).  These are some of the most fascinating pages in the composition draft:  they reveal a complicated gestation, as Britten was asked to lengthen it, adding and revising material in the middle of the movement.  I think this is sufficient example, though, of how the compositional draft is taken over into the piano reduction with little more than cosmetic retouching (as well as spelling out everything that is otherwise indicated with ditto slashes).

 

SOURCE: Britten: Peter Grimes, Interlude II (Act 1); composite of (l.) p. 110 of the published vocal score; and (r.) detail of f. 35r from the composition draft, scanned from the Boydell facsimile.  The material of the composition draft begins in the second bar of the vocal score page (indicated by the red bracket).

There are even times when Britten brackets the upper two staves as “I” and the lower two as “II”—which certainly suggests thinking of it as two pianists.  Stein's reduction even sometimes asks for two pianists, but it interesting to note that these do not really match up with the times Britten writes that way.  The great Passacaglia in the middle of Act II, for example, appears in the composition draft on no more than three staves (though Stein expands it to full piano duet).

What this suggests to me is that the heart of Britten’s ideas of the piece are more easily seen in the notation of the vocal score than of the full score.  Moreover, since this was Britten’s regular working habit—short score before full score—maybe the vocal scores of his other works would similarly convey the essence of the work in ways that might be obscured in the full score, especially such complicated and overwhelming scores as War Requiem.  When Imogen Holst prepared the War Requiem vocal score, she relied on the compositional draft, and Philip Reed has made this point before (and doubtless others have, too):

“As with the vast majority of Britten’s output, the War Requiem took shape on the manscript paper as a through-composed short score draft written in pencil throughout, with the orchestral texture reduced onto two, three, or occasionally four staves and the vocal lines occupying their own staves.  At first glance the draft resembles something approaching a vocal score and was certainly used as a guide by Imogen Holst when she prepared the vocal score (under Britten’s supervision) for Boosey & Hawkes.  The instrumentation is indicated by verbal abbreviations—‘str’, ‘trbn’, ‘ww’—at the time of composition, ready for instant retrieval when the moment came for the full score to be made.  This simple technique was effective in allowing Britten to press on to the end of a work before making the full score, safe in the knowledge that the piece was in effect written; in the case of complex works, such as the War Requiem, it also allowed an assistant to follow behind the composer using the draft as a basis for the all-important vocal score from which the soloists and chorus would learn their music” (37).

And to add another nuance:  my guess is that greater fluency with the published reductions in the vocal scores of Britten’s works would yield similar fluency with reading his compositional drafts.  I think that it would give a greater facility to perceiving aspects of his compositional process than the rest of us can readily discern.

On this practical matter of needing a piano reduction of the orchestral material for rehearsals, in other research before I started this blog I had a few examples where the composer would depart from his [sic] usual routine in order to produce a vocal score first--because it would be needed sooner than a full score.  When Charles Villiers Stanford wrote his Songs of the Sea in 1904, he seems to have first thought of it as an orchestral song cycle for one singer, and started work on the full score; only later did he decide to add a men’s chorus, and then set to work on the vocal score.  When, in 1910, he followed it up with another cycle, Songs of the Fleet, he knew from the first that it would feature a mixed chorus along with the baritone soloist, so he started with writing the vocal score (with a piano part) before then turning to the full score.  All four of his autograph manuscripts for these two pieces are preserved at the Royal College of Music, London.  (What do we make of the well-established Stanford having to prepare the piano reduction rather than it being hackwork for someone contracted by the publisher?  I’m not sure.)

Another example:  William Walton was not much of a pianist himself, and so generally composed in full score (but, if the sketches that remain for the Variations on a Theme of Hindemith (1963) are typical, writing in concert pitch before producing a fair copy with the correct transpositions); in the case of the Cello Concerto (1955-56), however, Walton produced a keyboard “reduction” first.  (Can you “reduce” something that doesn’t yet exist?)  In the case of his chamber opera The Bear (1966–67), Walton worked on the piano score in tandem with the vocal score, apparently using the discipline of working out a piano score as the opportunity to test the worth of what he had already written.

But perhaps the greatest musicological value of vocal scores must be the preservation of material subsequently cut and lost in other sources.  Among the treasures on the IMSLP (and there are many!) is a scan of the two early Choudens vocal scores of Bizet’s Carmen.  They prove to be from two different issues:  the Eastman copy includes the recitatives composed by Ernest Guiraud, documenting the early reworking of the opera—and thus an early exemplar of the performance tradition that dominated during the first century of Carmen performances; the Chapel Hill copy is a true first edition, without recitatives (although the scan missed a few pages—most frustrating!).  But what is so important about this edition is that it contains the “Scène et Pantomime” that initially followed the opening chorus but was cut during the first run.  The autograph for this portion was removed from the rest of the opera, although it survives now in a private collection.  Fortunately, it has since been published (as in the 1992 Schott/Eulenberg score), but for a long time the first edition vocal score was the only available source for it.  Of this score, as Winton Dean notes, the 1875 vocal score is the authoritative source in determining the provenance of the early changes to the score:

“No retouch to the autograph, whether it is in the hand of Bizet, Guiraud, Antony Choudens, General de Gaulle, or the Archbishop of Canterbury, can by any human possibility have got into the 1875 vocal score after Bizet’s death or (barring misprints) without his approval.  All such modifications to the autograph must have been made in conformity with Bizet's wishes as expressed in the vocal score.”  (p. 289)

(Note that the Eastman copy indicates at the end of the opening chorus to follow directly with “no. 2,” but there is no “no. 2” in that source.) If you're interested, Richard Langham Smith (pp. 161–89) argues persuasively for the importance of this pantomime scene in understanding the work, even if it does seem to me like a speed bump in a performance.

One other example of the vocal score as an important conduit of evidence:  this spring I was teaching an American Music course, and for the class session when were talking about late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American hymnody, I wanted them to look at a source I remembered seeing years ago (via a da Capo press reprint, but now of course more readily available as a scan online).

SOURCE: cropped screenshot of the title page of IMSLP 242918, the first edition (a copy at Eastman)

The reason I remembered looking at this source some thirty years ago was because of that line in the subtitle “together with many beautiful extras from the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other eminent modern composers never before published in this country.”  One such tune that had struck me as a particularly odd choice and thus memorable decades later.

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of p. 180 of IMSLP 242918

I recognized this melody from Act I of Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, and it struck me as strange that it would show up here.  As was customary in such sources, the melody is presented in the staff directly above the bass.  (Lest this be thought the tenor—one of my pet peeves—please note that the first hymn in this collection explicitly labels the top staff as “TENOR” and the third as “TREBLE OR AIR.”  The fact that tenors may sing this melody is another issue altogether and has to do with the practical use of these tunebooks, not the initial intention they present.)  

But this spring when I looked at it again, what stood out was that first triplet in the melody (second system, first downbeat).  I’ve never heard that before, I thought.  Where did they get that?  Out of curiosity, I looked up Mozart's autograph.

SOURCE:  cropped and marked-up scan of the autograph score, from IMSLP 807497 (p. 42); for reference, this is p. 74 as presented in the Bärenreiter facsimile of the autograph, which re-assembles portions held in different collections.

We are in a different key (A major) and in different clefs (the upper staff is the bassoon in bass clef, the lower staff is Annio, in soprano clef), but the reading shows two downward triadic arpeggios, a tonic and a supertonic chord.  None of that 8-7-8 neighbor-tone motion in the hymnbook.  Were the editors of the hymnbook trying to make it easier to sing?  (But if so, why include this tune at all?)

As the IMSLP had a scan of an early vocal score, I clicked on that.  Lo and behold!

SOURCE:  cropped marked-up scan of p. 25 of IMSLP 572308, a vocal score published by Simrock c. 1800

There was the Boston reading, clear as day.  So where did this come from?  The piano reduction in this source was credited (even on its title page) to Christan Gottlob Neefe, and it must have been one of the last things he did, since he died in 1798.  Was this figuration Neefe's idea?

I looked in the critical report of the Neue Mozart Ausgabe.  Crickets.  Not only was there no mention of the Simrock vocal score (and indeed very little reference to any of the early vocal scores), but there was nothing flagged about this passage.  So I pulled out the new edition of the Köchel Catalog.  Neefe's vocal score was not listed.  Instead, I found two 1795 editions of the vocal score:  one was published in Leipzig by Breitkopf, with a keyboard reduction by Siegfried Schmiedt; the other in Hamburg by Günther & Böhme, with a keyboard reduction by August Eberhard Müller.  I found a scan of the Schmiedt score right away; the only digital scan I could locate of the Müller reduction was from a subsequent Breitkopf score (c. 1803), but in any case both of them gave the same reading as the autograph:

SOURCE:  composite, marked-up, cropped scans of early vocal scores:  (top) p. 24 of Breitkopf (1795) available at archive.org; and p. 17 of Breitkopf (c. 1803), available at Harvard University Library.

I looked at other published vocal scores and manuscript copies; I couldn’t locate any other source that transmitted Neefe’s reading (assuming he originated it), but I was only looking at scores of the complete opera.  Maybe Neefe’s reading made it into some other excerpted anthology that I haven't seen.  Otherwise I can only conclude from all this at the moment that a copy of Neefe’s edition was the one that the Boston editor(s) referred to in preparing the Handel & Haydn Society Collection.  Not much, but it is gratifying to have at least something other than a wild goose chase.

ADDENDUM 5 July 2026

A fantastic recent example of the value of a derivative sources is Marc Shepherd's discovery of three cut numbers from Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe, extant only in a manuscript copy of the full score; the score was under wraps in a D'Oyly Carte vaults for almost a century, and then languishing in the British Library until Shepherd paged it and saw what it contained.  It's a great story.

51. Cutting out the middleman?

 Why should we assume a priori that any score prepared some centuries ago by one musician for another musician to play from cannot be used by a musician today without the intervention of someone (often a non-musician) with a Ph.D. in musicology?  Why does the score first have to be entirely rewritten in some other form and accompanied by a lengthy critical report that can only be understood by someone else with a Ph.D. in musicology?

Alexander Silbiger:  “In Defense of Facsimiles”

Historical Performance 7/2 (Fall 1994), p. 103

SOURCE:  screenshoot of Facebook group post (June 26, 2022); poster name and profile picture redacted 

Today this blog turns six years old.  My original intent was to get to about fifty posts, posting twice a month for two years.  But it has slowed to a trickle.  With a change of jobs and then the more crowded schedule imposed by a global pandemic, it has taken me six years to reach the intended scope, and yet the list of topics that I scrawled in the summer of 2016 is not yet exhausted.  Today’s topic is from that list; it came to mind again this past February with the death of composer George Crumb (1929-2022).

There’s nothing quite like examining one of Crumb’s scores—especially those which require an oversize format to be legible at all.  His published scores very often bear this notice:

SOURCE:  found in a considerable number of Crumb scores; this is scanned from the title page of Mundis Canis (Edition Peters, 2000).

With good reason:  his notation is meticulously clean, and his innovative and idiosyncratic graphic notation would be challenging for a professional copyist/engraver to reproduce (which would add substantially to the cost of publishing the music).  If you haven’t seen any of it, just google george crumb graphic notation; sure, you’ll also get some non-Crumb images, but you will quickly get a sense of what he accomplished.  (Here’s a tribute that appeared in the Washington Post and has remained on my desk for several months to remind me to write this post.)  Crumb reminded me of this long-delayed post because he effectively bypassed an editor:  he cut out the middleman, with his carefully prepared fair-copy scores becoming the unmediated text for the performers’ eyes.

That sounds like a good idea:  no interfering editor meddling with the text.  And I have sometimes taken editors to task for overreach; even for making things too easy (in a way, like subverting the teaching of cursive by putting everything in print).   But I’m not in the least ready to dispense with the what a good editor offers us.

I remember very clearly a particular moment on an afternoon in the autumn of 1997.  It was in my first semester in graduate school, and my classmates and I were in a seminar about Haydn’s string quartets.  The professor was at the time finishing up a volume of some of the quartets for JHW—Joseph Haydn Werke, the (still ongoing) complete critical edition of Haydn's works.  One very important thing I learned from that seminar was to never assume I knew “what the composer wrote,” based on whatever edition I was using.  The JHW is actually among the most scrupulous of the 20th-century critical edition projects to give a pretty clear indication within the musical text of what the principal source really shows.  The edition uses a complicated series of brackets:  < > angle brackets to indicate material which the editor has filled in following Haydn's shorthand instructions in the autograph score; ( ) rounded brackets to indicate something that is lacking in the principal source but is supplied from a source that is right below it in the chain of textual authority, like performance parts prepared by one of Haydn’s copyists; and [ ] square brackets to indicate something that the editor has added by analogy with some other passage or in order to spell out something musically necessary.  Taking an example almost at random, here is the first system of the musical text of Symphony no. 46 as it appears in JHW, although I have highlighted these distinctions in different colors:

SOURCE:  scan (detail) of the opening of Haydn's Symphony no. 46, as it appears in JHW series I, volume 6 ("Sinfonien 1767-1772"), ed. C-G. Stellan Mörner, p. 104; I have added color highlighting.

The orange passages (indicated in the edition by angle brackets) are realizations of Haydn’s abbreviated instructions for the second violins to double the firsts; the markings highlighted in blue (indicated by the rounded brackets) do not appear in Haydn’s autograph at all but are taken from the most authoritative set of parts.  (Notice that the initial f dynamic is assumed in the autograph, but made explicit in the parts—except for the horns, who maybe never have to be told to play forte.)  The green markings (indicated by the square brackets) are not found in the first or second tier of sources, but were deemed by the editor to be intended or otherwise necessary.  All of this is clearly marked on the published score itself, without even having to turn to the critical report (which gives further details of Haydn’s corrections and second thoughts, as well as other variant readings in the principal sources).

I forget what the particular issue was that afternoon in the Haydn quartet seminar, but when the class was reminded that we needed to know what Haydn wrote (not just what was presented in whatever edition we might have to hand), one of my classmates posited that the ideal music library would comprise high-resolution scans of every source:  then we could all see exactly what was on the page—not just of a composer’s manuscript, but of all the copyists’ scores and parts, and even all the early editions.  Then we would not have to take anyone else’s word for it (as even a critical commentary gives one only the information an editor bothers to relay, and sometimes it may be in error).  

My reaction at the time: Wouldn’t this just compel us all to reinvent the wheel every time?  

A few years after this conversation came sites like Bach Digital:  such portals have the potential of fulfilling my classmate’s wish, with high-resolutions scans not just of autographs, but often a range of derivative sources too—and with no limit to how many sources might be uploaded in the future.  Or take the Online Chopin Variorum Edition—a misnomer, since there is really no editorial authority producing an edited text.  These resources encourage a see-for-yourself approach, even maybe a do-it-yourself approach, and I heartily approve making such resources available beyond the walls of the libraries and other holdings in which they are found.  But do the users of such sites know how to read them?  We are making the materials of editing available without any instruction of what it means.  

In an earlier post, I strongly criticized a particular “urtext” edition of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations because of its amateurish assumption that it was presenting the Holy Grail (i.e., Bach’s intended text), while the editor had unknowingly taken a shortcut that undermined his claim.  And the unknowingly is the issue:  when we don’t know what we don’t know, we don’t really know what we’re doing.

Take this example, from a scan of Beethoven’s autograph of his Septet, op. 20, very near the end of the first movement.  The top stave is the clarinet, and below that the horn.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20 (held in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow), available on the ISMLP as #774464 and #774465.  This detail  (showing bb. 271–273) comes from the upper right corner of p. 25 (which appears as scan p 15 of $774464).

The last note in the clarinet staff is clearly marked c-natural.  The natural is ostensibly superfluous, as the key signature for a b-flat clarinet in a movement in e-flat major would be just one flat.  Thus it is no surprise that this accidental is eliminated in the new Beethoven Werke edition (ed. Egon Voss, 2008). 

SOURCE: detail of BW IV/I:  Kammermusik mit Blasintrumenten, p. 25.

The critical commentary does not even mention that there was ever a natural sign there—nor does it comment on b. 273 at all.  The commentary does list as a supplemental source Beethoven’s later arrangement of the work as a piano trio, op. 38 (with the option for a clarinet to substitute for the violin), and one would expect that substantial textual differences in otherwise analogous materials would be mentioned.  But when we look up the corresponding moment in op. 38 we may well be surprised:

SOURCE:  detail of p. 95 of Beethoven: Klavier Trios III, ed Friedhelm Klugmann (Henle, 1968), showing bb. 271–273 of the first movement of op. 38.

The top staff here is the violin, which may be replaced by the clarinet on the second staff.  Note that the last note in the clarinet here is c-sharp ( = the b-natural of the violin).  Voss doesn’t mention any of this in his critical commentary to the Septet. 

For the do-it-yourself editor, this discrepancy may seem like an inconsequential difference between the two texts, and that Beethoven clearly must have meant c-natural ( = concert b-flat) in the Septet at this moment, as he actually notated the natural sign.  That is the reading transmitted in virtually every edition.  (I see that someone involved in producing the French edition (Pleyel) in 1828 caught the mistake and emended it, but that emendation didn’t catch on.)  But, looking across a much wider range of manuscripts and with decades of experience, editor Jonathan Del Mar has spotted a pattern of errors which very neatly explains this problem.  This pattern manifests in erroneous accidentals in transposing parts, and indicates that Beethoven used the “clef substitution” method of transposing.  That is, instead of thinking that, for example, each note of a b-flat clarinet part sounds a whole tone lower than notated, he merely thought of this staff as being in the tenor clef, on which he could then note that sounding pitch (albeit sounding an octave higher).  

Beethoven indisputably notated c-natural; Del Mar makes the case that he meant concert b-natural (and thus c-sharp, when transposed up a tone).  He points to exactly the same mistake in a place in the second movement of the Eroica where there really cannot be any doubt of the error.  The autograph is lost, but as the wrong accidental occurs in the closest copyist score, the surviving parts used in the 1804 first performance, and the first edition of 1809 (shown below), the mistake surely descends from Beethoven himself.

SOURCE:  detail of p. 60 of the first edition of Beethoven, Symphony no. 3 (Cianchettini and Sperati, 1809), taken from scan available at https://www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4716012494651392/scan/61; this shows bb. 139-144 of the second movement.

Surely the clarinets and the violas should be in unison; the viola b-natural would need to be transposed as c-sharp for the clarinets, and yet the same natural persists.  Del Mar has observed the same pattern with horns, for example the dubious f-flat that occurs in the fourth movement of the Septet.  Using the clef-substitution method for e-flat horn, Beethoven would have imagined a bass clef on this stave, and the flat is thus coming from the intended sounding a-flat.  Again the argument is that what Beethoven meant is not what he wrote (which should have been f-natural), but we need an experienced editor to recognize that; a facsimile won’t clue us in.

SOURCE:  (cropped) scan of Beethoven's autograph of the Septet, op. 20; This detail  (showing bb. 100–102 of the fourth movement) comes from the upper right corner of p. [52] (which appears as scan p 7 of IMSLP #774465).

But editors should tread lightly on this thin ice, seeking what is meant in preference to what is actually on the page.  (Query:  What did the framers of the Constitution intend?)  A notorious example of this is Jacques-Louis Monod’s recomposed edition of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, in which Monod altered Schoenberg’s score to accord with Schoenberg's theories... or at least with Monod’s analysis.  As James Grier cautions, "Let the editor not be accused of printing the piece the composer would have written had he or she known as much as the editor" (p. 136).  (I think what my client was meaning to say...)

Many of my posts have dealt with overly intrusive editing—which I think often comes from the temptation to prefer a variant reading just for the sake of an audible difference, maybe in some sense justifying the new edition.  (Here’s a recent post on precisely that topic.)  But I find myself torn between the two quotations with which I started this post.  Silbiger (who himself earned two PhDs) is right to champion the great value of experiencing the sources closest to the original context of the music; and I looooove facsimiles.  I am interested in seeing sources that allow me a glimpse of the composer at work—composing scores, or revisions happening on the page of what otherwise seems to be an attempt at a fair copy.  Here, for example, is Bach revising the text as he transforms the E major violin concerto (BWV 1042) into the D major harpsichord concerto (BWV 1054) in D-B Mus. ms. Bach P 234, a collective score of all seven of the extant concertos for (one) harpsichord, plus a fragment of another.  He had already copied out and transposed the solo line (which at this point features some double stops in the violin version) when he decided to rework the figuration to be more idiomatic on the keyboard.  Having run out of space, he opted for keyboard tablature below the system:

SOURCE:  cropped scan from Bach Digital of P 234, p. 48 (detail), showing BWV 1054/iii, bb. 77-87.

There are many examples of similar re-workings throughout these seven concertos—sometimes squeezing in passing tones, at other times inserting much more florid ornamentation.  There is a lot to learn from it. Werner Breig, the editor of the NBA volume of these works carefully documents the corrections and changes to the manuscript in his critical report.  I, for one, am glad to be guided by an editor who has the experience and expertise to discern the patterns behind the markings on the page as it stands; and I would certainly not attempt to perform from a scan of P 234, even the beautifully-produced Bärenreiter facsimile of it.

That is not to say, of course, that Bach intended anyone (other than himself?) to perform directly from this score.  But what of a text from the composer’s hand that is intended to be the performance copy?  This brings up the Facebook group post above:  “Why don’t composers just do their own engraving [recte computer-setting] and page layout?”  Cut out the middleman—like George Crumb, or (for that matter) Wagner.

I have learned a lot from the facebook “Music Engraving Tips” group:  there are all sorts of issues of spacing, orthography, and best-practices in preparing and printing parts, a lot of which had never crossed my mind.  But I’ve also learned that many people who prepare editions of music (whether professional or not) have very little education about music history.  I see the most elementary questions about the meaning of some mark in a manuscript or an old edition; thankfully, these queries are generally answered gracefully and without contempt.  And the group’s members are genuinely concerned with presenting the text in the way that is most immediately accessible to the user—that is, the performer.

Although an individual may interact with a musical text in many different ways, we should conceive of these as distinct roles.  There are surely very few people truly suited to fulfill all of them.  The primary roles might be delineated as: 

1. Composing:  originating and finalizing musical ideas;
2. Notating:  getting those ideas into a graphic form comprehensible by others;
3. Editing:  encompassing a wide variety of activities, but essentially amounting to tweaking the notated text (ideally in dialogue with the composer) to ensure that it presents what is meant; Ralph Vaughan Williams referred to this as “washing its face,” and his sometime assistant Roy Douglas has written an illuminating account of such activity;
4. Setting:  actually getting this text into a form that can be mechanically printed and/or distributed; and
5. Reading/Interpreting/Performing:  the “end user”(?) is presumably a performer, scholar, or listener.

Of course we might interpolate other such functions:  1a might be Orchestrating.  That in itself is a good reminder that an individual may be prodigiously gifted in one of these tasks while having no appreciable ability in another.  Certainly we expect roles 1 and 2 to go together, but we do not necessarily expect a composer to be the best conductor of their own music, though.  (William Walton, a composer I’ve done a lot of work on in my research, is a good example of someone who was generally better off leaving the conducting to the professionals.)  The Facebook post I reproduce above suggests that role 2 is essentially the same as role 4, and that role 3 might be bypassed altogether.

But at what cost?  The value of the middleman editor is to push back:  Is this what you mean?  (Or, for the dead or otherwise unavailable composer, Is this what was meant, given what we know about this composer’s usual practice?)  From my own experience with this blog, I know that I need someone else’s eyes to look over my prose.  I never publish a post without several pairs of eyes reviewing it—and always at least one of the reviewers is neither a musicologist nor a musician.  The comments and suggested revisions I get from that person are particularly helpful because they show where I have made a complete pig’s breakfast of my explanations.  I don’t always adopt the suggestions for revision—as sometimes they have completely misunderstood what I was trying to convey—but I am sure to do something to fix the problems that led them to misread it.  Here I am composing verbal text; musical text it is no different, and it can only be improved by an editorial review of some sort.

And yet, as stated above, I understand why publishers are glad to have camera-ready scores from their composers:  it saves money.  Again:  at what cost?  Here is a bit of the published score to Judith Weir's powerful one-unaccompanied-singer opera King Harald’s Saga.  In this scene, Harald’s two wives bid him farewell as he sets off to conquer England.  Weir wrote the libretto, too, and here it gives each wife the same 12-syllable text.  Weir duly sets this as a 12-tone row; presumably in order to throw the differences in characterization into sharp relief, the second wife presents the row in inversion.

SOURCE: detail of scan of  Judith Weir, King Harald's Saga (Novello, 1982), p. 6.

I have enjoyed teaching this work for many years now, and I’ve used it in classes for music majors as well as for general students who cannot even read music.  It is a fascinating work, particularly in the ways it pushes generic conventions to (maybe past) the breaking point.  And, as a meditation on the senselessness of violence and conquest, it seems always timely.  So I’ve spent a lot of time with this score.  Every time I look at this passage I am irked by the absence of a bar-line near the beginning of the second system:  the second wife should have “take / care,” shouldn’t she?  This is the only place in this section where the bar-line for the second wife is different than the first, and in every other place it seems to indicate which syllable is to be accented—namely, the one right after the bar-line.  I think this is a simple omission in Weir’s fair copy—one that may not matter, as in performance the singer may intuit what Weir was after despite any irregularity of the notation.  Or did Weir mean to break the pattern?  (I haven’t bothered to reach out to her and ask her.  It seems such a petty complaint.)  

Note that here the problem is what isn’t there:  it is not an erroneous marking (as in the Beethoven examples above), but a presumably missing marking.  I do not know in what ways the editorial staff at Novello were involved in the publication of this score, but I think someone should have caught that.  Sure, editors can and do introduce mistakes of their own.  Merely by imposing a house style, an edition can obscure a composer’s musical fingerprint (what in German is usefully called the Partiturbild).  John Eliot Gardiner’s Music in the Castle of Heaven posits that Bach's manuscript notation is expressive of performance gestures:  “There is also the bonus of his graceful and expressive orthography, which reveals the way he experienced his music and expected it to unfold—the shapes and gestures suggestion of his phrasing an motion” (p. 226).  Perhaps. For a much more nuanced argument (relating to Haydn), I recommend James Webster’s “The Triumph of Variability:  Haydn’s Articulation Markings in the Autograph of Sonata No. 49 in E Flat.”  (Webster was the professor directing the seminar discussed above, although I didn’t come across this article until years later.)

Clearly, there is no substitute for getting back into the sources as much as possible; but I don’t regard a musician as negligent if they don’t do that, nor do I regard the performer who plays from a facsimile as on a higher artistic plane than anyone else.  Maybe an analogy would be that a critical edition is like currency or a credit card in place of gold:  the edited text is a convenient substitute for the real thing that will suffice for most musicians in most situations.  But for anyone for whom the text itself is a supreme concern, a good edition is a useful guide and nothing more.

39. standardize/compromise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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