57. Window shopping

I definitely inherited the pleasure of window shopping from my mother.  Sure, there are times when money burns a hole in my pocket, but more often I enjoying mentally acquiring various things, imagining buying this or that, but satisfied in the end to walk away without a purchase.  I am thankful that my kids are even better at this than I am.  And the internet helps:  in the days before abebooks.com, I would often splurge on a book found in a used book store because I thought I might never see it again.

I also enjoy a sort of “textual window shopping.”  This is more the luxury of the scholar over the practitioner.  (As Susan Hellauer memorably put it, “You can’t sing a footnote,” going on to say, “we have to make choices that convince us, and that will convince our audiences” (p. 50).)  Examples of this literally abound.  Indeed, this has been the primary subject of this blog from Day One.  Just for the fun of it (and because a post just does not look right without scans of manuscripts), here's an example:

SOURCE:  digital scans of Gaetano Donizetti:  Don Pasquale, Facsimile dell'autografo (Ricordi, 1999), ff. 1v and 2. 

These are the second and third pages of the autograph manuscript of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale.  A blurb for the new critical edition of the opera explains the situation: 

Continuing with the performance options provided in the critical edition, one particularly interesting example in Don Pasquale regards the opening theme of the Symphony, which today’s audiences know as being played on a cello. However, Donizetti originally assigned the piece to a horn. Indeed, the reviews that appeared following the work’s premiere reveal the problem—the poor horn player put in a regretfully uncertain performance. Donizetti immediately sought refuge and replaced that solo with a clarinet. Apparently, that didn’t work either, and the composer was forced to return to the manuscript to make yet another change, nixing the clarinet and adding a cello. The theme is undoubtedly a beauty when played by a cello, but equally as beautiful if played by a horn—which, after all, was Donizetti’s original intent. If the performance by the horn player in Paris had been up to snuff, would Donizetti have left the part as it had been written? The critical edition gives performers the choice.

But that’s the point: once you start adding options, the performer is forced to choose.  A performer may opt for the “standard” reading, but that is still a choice.  It's like an optical illusion:  duck/rabbit, figure/ground, convex/concave, old women looking this way versus young lady looking that way...  it can be either, but it can’t be both at the same time.  A performer must commit at least temporarily to a reading, while the philologist can have the text exist simultaneously in a multiplicity of options forever.  It is Schrödinger’s Bach:  as long as you don’t actually play it, all possible readings coexist.  From the comfort of my desk (and not an instrument), somehow settling on a single text to present seems like a disservice to my expansive concept of the musical work.  The work is not easily fixed—the notation (and certainly any performance of it) is just too limiting.  (And don't get me started on the marketing adjective definitive....)

I was struck when I heard Alfred Hitchcock uttering a similar idea, from the perspective of the artist.  Here he is in a 1972 interview:

I wished I didn’t have to make [films].  Having worked with the writer on the design of the film, really the whole creative work is finished.  All you have now is to wait and see it diminish, and find you only arrive with 60% of the original conception on the screen. 

SOURCE:  screenshot from the Masters of Cinema interview linked above

The other 40% is—one presumes—irretrievably lost.  But is it also extraneous?  We clearly have done just fine without it.  Don't we bring that other 40% to the film ourselves?  (And, of course, the 100% film is useless if it only exists in the artist's imagination:  no one ever engages with any of it until it is manifested in a form that can be transmitted.)

Having said this about his dissatisfaction about actually making the film, Hitchcock then immediately rejected the idea proffered by the interviewer (William Everson) that Hitchcock could have done all the storyboards and then handed it off to another director to actually make the film.  Even recognizing the artistic compromises of moving from ideal to real, one must draw the line somewhere.  But this also reminded me of an anecdote I ran across in Christopher Small’s Musicking (not the first time I’ve cited that fascinating treatise in this blog):

There are even those who believe that, since each performance is at best only an imperfect and approximate representation of the work itself, it follows that music's inner meanings can never be properly yielded up in performance.  They can be discovered only by those who can read and study the score, like Johannes Brahms, who once refused an invitation to attend a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni, saying he would sooner stay home and read it. (p. 5)

I’ve never tracked down this story in Brahms biographies, so I don't know whether he meant that he could commune with Mozart's score more perfectly by looking at it than by attending a performance; or maybe he meant that it wasn't worth taking the trouble to go out to a performance when the score would suffice; or perhaps both.  Studying the score and enjoying a performance are two different experiences, and both of great value.  I do find that as I get older, I listen to music less, but I’m thinking about it more.  And a few years ago I got into an (amicable) argument on Facebook over whether the scene in Amadeus of Salieri audiating (i.e., hearing in his head) Mozart’s music as he frantically and blissfully scrutinizing the manuscripts would count as diegetic music in the film.  (For reference:  “Diegetic (diegesis) is a concept used in studies of film music to refer to music that is produced and received within the constructed world of the film and therefore forms part of its narrative” Beard/Gloag, p. 54.)   

While I grant that the soundwaves of the music are not pulsing through the air to his ears, I cannot be persuaded that Salieri’s experience of the music is not “real” within the narrative:  this is diegetic music which the 1781 Salieri “hears,” even if Constanze doesn't (nor the confessor in the flash-forwards to 1825, nor maybe even the 1825 Salieri).  I was in the minority in the argument.  Unrepentantly. 

I am willing to grant that there is music which exists more perfectly on the page than in performance:  perpetual canons are such.  (For a more mundane example, try “This is the song that doesn’t end.”  Or better still, don’t try it.)  Similarly, there are plays that really can't be staged--"closet dramas."  To quote the final stage direction of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Drama of Exile (1844),

The stars shine on brightly while ADAM and EVE pursue their way into the far wilderness.  There is a sound through the silence, as of the falling tears of an angel.

This prompted G. K. Chesterton, in an otherwise sympathetic assessment of Browning’s work to remark:

She could write finally of the factory wheels “grinding life down from its mark,” a strong and strictly true observation. Unfortunately she could also write of Euripides “with his droppings of warm tears.” She could write in A Drama of Exile, a really fine exposition, touching the later relation of Adam and the animals: unfortunately the tears were again turned on at the wrong moment at the main; and the stage direction commands a silence, only broken by the dropping of angel’s tears. How much noise is made by angel’s tears? Is it a sound of emptied buckets, or of garden hose, or of mountain cataracts? That is the sort of question which Elizabeth Barrett’s extreme love of the extreme was always tempting people to ask. (p. 180)

And—so long as it doesn't have to be produced on the stage—this is an evocative and effective description, despite Chesterton’s justifiable queries.  (I'm grateful to Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Mind of the Maker for calling my attention to both the original and the criticism.)  But Don Giovanni is hardly a closet drama, and I’m not sure even I can stand with Brahms on that one.

What prompted all these thoughts was reading through a volume of selected writings of the late Jonathan Miller—a polymath of extraordinary scope (of whom, as Alan Bennett remarked, “it was always difficult to tell Jonathan anything, only to remind him of it”).  Despite my tremendous respect for the range of his insights, when it comes to music his musings are embarrassingly naïve, in my estimation.  To give Miller his due, I must quote him at some length.  (This essay, “The Afterlife of Art” originally appeared in a slightly different form in his Subsequent Performances (1986); page numbers are given for both.) 

The important point is that the so-called language of music cannot be usefully compared to the language of human discourse.  People speak glibly of the language of music, and although this is only a figure of speech, I think it has encouraged a critical assumption that words and music lie on the same level of interpretability.  The extent to which music can be regarded as a language at all is highly questionable. 

We might accept that a score, like a script, relies on notation, the forming of “phrases,” a syntax, and that music an conjure up images—the third [sic] movement of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony skillfully recreates the impression of a storm.  It can evoke moods and, in its own idiosyncratic way, it can also represent colourful scenes and natural events but, since it can neither assert nor deny, there is no way in which music can be said to describe the scenes that it represents.

Nor is there anything in music, for example, that corresponds to a word: there can be no recognizable units or segments for which one can substitute alternative bits with equivalent meanings.  Perhaps the best way of highlighting the differences is that you cannot even imagine a paraphrase in music.  We talk about phrases in music and we talk about phrases in language, but it is central to language that phrases can be paraphrased.  The meaning that is expressed by a sentence can remain more or less under constant paraphrase, whereas it is impossible to imagine what would count as a paraphrase of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, because there is no central, underlying proposition that would remain constant and survive an alternate expression in another series of notes.  Music is syntactical but not semantic.  (p. 248; pp. 38f. in the original)

But isn’t that what a performance is—each artist interpreting what the musical notation is striving to indicate?  Is that not a "paraphrase"?  I take paraphrase to be something like let me take what I read and put it into the words I would have used, to illustrate how I understand this.  Why else do performances sound so different from each other, even when playing from (essentially) the same text?  Granted, the more specific the notational instruction, the more restricted the range of legitimate “paraphrase”—but the same is true in language.  And Miller seems to acknowledge this, but again with very naïve assumptions about musical notation:

Shakespearean scholars, for example, often insist that the metrical structure of the verse automatically distributes the stresses to convey the meanings that Shakespeare had in mind, and to eliminate the unacceptable alternatives.  Now, while there is a great deal to be said in favour of this argument, in so far as a disregard for metre usually leads to a misconstruction of meaning, the structure of the verse does not specify as much as the scholars believe, and playgoers are often startled to discover that metrically indistinguishable readings are, none the less, enjoyably different.  The question all these points raise is: why do playwrights submit their work in such a remarkably indeterminate condition?  Musical scores, after all, leave much less to the imagination of the sight-reader.  Over and above the accurate specifications of pitch, key and rhythm, composers often make detailed references to loudness, energy, and overall phrasing.  Changes of pace are indicated and the tone of a passage is often identified by reference to a rich, descriptive vocabulary.  Nothing comparable is to be found in the text of one of Shakespeare’s plays.  (p. 256f.; p. 45)

Indeed.  Nothing comparable is to be found in the music of Shakespeare’s time, either.  Nor any music until... well, when?  In different historical moments, composers have specified different degrees of information, but one could argue that we were well into the twentieth century before the latent indeterminacy of so many of these factors in the score is replaced with much greater specificity of the sort that Miller seems to imagine has always been a regular characteristic of a musical score.  Bach’s scores hardly look like Stravinsky’s, and the degree to which a listener will recognize the various liberties a performer will take with Bach will depend to a very large extent on what factors the listener values (or is even aware of).  And it is because different performers value those factors differently that, if we listen, our ears are offered such a wealth of interpretive possibility.

Miller holds that a critical difference between musical and dramatic performance is that a musician doesn’t have to “be” a character in the way that an actor does:

Whereas the artist who plays the solo instrument in Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D can successfully perform the part without having to imagine being anything other than a cellist, she does not have to pretend to be Haydn or some person imagined by Haydn.  The actor who plays the part of Claudius, on the other hand, can expect to succeed only if he imagines a person who consistently means something by the lines that appear opposite his name in the script. (p. 249; p. 40)

Well, I am not much of a performer, but this is certainly not consistent with my experience.  It’s not just that I feel I’m a different me when performing, say, Bach or Mozart, but that even within the works of a single composer the me playing is a different sort of person than I am—that is, that Bach calls from me emotions that I can’t say I have ever felt beyond the experience of living in the music, even if only for the moment.  I’m not imagining being an organist, or even being the sort of organist who plays this sort of music.  Actually, I am not aware of “imagining” anything, but I am trying to live through the character of what the music suggests to me at that time in that space on that instrument.  I wonder:  Does that makes sense to anyone else?

It seems to me that it is precisely because subsequent performances of Shakespeare’s plays are interpretations, rather than copies, that they have survived.  The amplitude of Shakespeare’s imagination admits so many possible interpretations that his work has enjoyed an extraordinary afterlife unforeseeable by the authors at the time of writing. (p. 266; p. 55)

Yes.  But is this not also true of Bach or Mozart or any other composer you might care to name?  There is always textual ambiguity, and it is in the interpretation of that ambiguity—even the defiance of it—that we find ourselves.  We may think we’re looking through a window, but it turns out to be a mirror.

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.

16. Forty years ago in a galaxy far, far away....

“That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.  Often, the demand may impose itself in defiance of the author’s considered interests and at the most inconvenient moments.  Publisher, bank-balance, and even the conscious intellect may argue that the writer should pursue some fruitful and established undertaking; but they will argue in vain against the passionate vitality of a work that insists on manifestation.  The strength of the insistence will vary from something that looks like direct inspiration to something that resembles a mere whim of a wandering mind; but whenever the creature’s desire for existence is dominant, everything else will have to give way to it; the writer will push all other calls aside and get down to his task in a spirit of mingled delight and exasperation.” [pp. 140f.]

Thus the always fascinating Dorothy L. Sayers in The Mind of the Maker, her examination of the human creative mind via a Trinitarian analogy.  She argues that even before a creator may have a clear conception of it, a “creature” (artwork?) has an existence of its own and insists on being realized in form knowable outside of the creator’s mind.  Elsewhere in the same treatise she writes

“[Let us imagine that] Our perfect writer is in the act of composing a work—let us call it the perfect poem.  At a particular point in this creative act he selects the ‘right’ word for a particular place in the poem.  There is only the one word that is ‘dead right’ in that place for the perfect expression of the Idea.  The very act of choosing that one ‘right’ word automatically and necessarily makes every other word in the dictionary a ‘wrong’ word....  Now, the mere fact that the choice of the ‘right’ word is a choice implies that the writer is potentially aware of all the wrong words as well as the right one....  Potentially and contingently, his intelligence ‘knows’ all the wrong words.  He is free, if he chooses, to call all or any of those wrong words into active being within his poem....  But the perfect poet does not do so, because his will is subdued to his Idea, and to associate it with the wrong word would be to run counter to the law of his being.  He proceeds with his creation in a perfect unity of will and Idea, and behold! it is very good.”   [pp. 104f.]

And all of this is in an analogical discussion of the origin of evil....  But it is this ex post facto sense of inevitability that I want to highlight.  That was the word used in a particularly purple Leonard Bernstein passage, expounding on why Beethoven was a “great artist”:

“Always probing and rejecting in his dedication to perfection, to the principle of inevitability.  This somehow is the key to the mystery of a great artist:  that for reasons unknown to him or to anyone else, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably.  It seems rather an odd way to spend one’s life; but it isn’t so odd when we think that the composer, by doing this, leaves us at the finish with the feeling that something is right in the world, that something checks throughout, something that will follow its own laws consistently, something we can trust, that will never let us down.”  [p. 93]

My interest in variant texts is sometimes an idle curiosity about what publishers have seen fit to present a buying public, but most of the time it is the drive to know more about uncertainties and second thoughts that composers faced as they tried to bring a work to fruition.  The final product may seem as if it were inevitable, but even in works generally accepted as masterpieces of their kind, the progress toward the familiar version—whether or not this is the Fassung letzter Hand—is not inevitable nor even inexorable, and may unfold with various fits and starts.  A few summers ago I was fascinated to read Dominic McHugh’s account of the challenges that Lerner and Loewe faced in trying to morph G. B. Shaw’s Pygmalion into a musical.  My Fair Lady was a hit musical by the time they were done with it, but at many points along the line it was not at all obvious what to do—even how to end it.  With a good portion of the work done, they aborted the project, only to return a year later to bring it to fruition.  And similar tales could be told of a great many pieces—many more, I’m sure, than I will ever know about.

The artist’s perennial “divine dissatisfaction” notwithstanding, I tend to think writers and composers—with rare exceptions like Felix Mendelssohn—generally know when they’ve produced something that is pretty much what they were trying to say, or at least the best version of it they can get on paper at the moment.  Or at least something they can live with.  (Sure, they may change it later.)  So I was startled a few months ago to be reminded of a musical moment which in my estimation is pretty much “perfect,” but of which the composer was unsure even in the recording studio, recording five substantially different takes—substantially in that the musical substance was different each time.  It wasn’t just a matter of the performers playing to his satisfaction, but rather of not being certain which performers should play what and when.

And so we go back exactly forty years ago this month:  March 1977, when 86 musicians of the London Symphony Orchestra sat for eight days of sessions under the baton of composer John Williams to record the music for the soundtrack of STAR WARS.

I was a little too young for STAR WARS (and somehow I feel like I have to capitalize it), being just over two years old when it came out.  But I had two older brothers, and my childhood was inevitably saturated with STAR WARS stuff, including the LP record The Story of STAR WARS, which juxtaposed soundbytes from the film with narration, and a generous share of Williams’s score.  I must have listened to that album many times, as when I saw the film again in the theater in 1997 I was surprised how the lines of dialogue excerpted in that LP jumped out at me as intimately familiar, despite a general unfamiliarity with the complete film.  Coinciding with the 1997 re-release, I bought the re-released soundtrack for the first of the films, figuring it was the sort of thing someone of my generation and background needed to know better:  STAR WARS as cultural obligation.

Now as my children get older (and as the franchise of films keeps expanding), I sensed the same obligation.  So I borrowed the DVD from a friend and one night sat down with the kids to watch—knowing I was going to be pausing every 20 seconds to explain (at the 7-year-old and 5-year old level) what was going on.  There was the familiar 20th-Century Fox fanfare, and then the pregnant silence under the words “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....”  And then that memorable cymbal clash + B-flat explosion, the fanfare that opens the main title music blasting at us, over the iconic opening crawl.  (Watch it here, almost as in 1977.)  Suddenly I felt tears welling up, and I couldn’t say why exactly.  Sentimental memories from childhood?  But those opening three bars are as close to perfect music—doing the right thing at the right time—that I know; and I’m usually a snob about such things.

They liked the movie, and so a few days later I took the soundtrack CD off the shelf and put it on in the car while taking them to school.  A while later, driving and without even noticing that the music had gone off, suddenly a voice crackled over the speakers:  “Take sixteen.”  And then for the next two minutes or so, there was the first musical cue of the film, starting with the main title music.  Then “Take seventeen,” and there it was all over again.  The 1997 release (and apparently some subsequent reissues) includes a hidden extra, an “archive” of the five session takes of the main title music.  I had heard all these years ago but had totally forgotten them.

As I said above, there are substantial differences in the takes.  To use a philological term, the takes are actually variant readings.  The most stunning of these to me was that three of the five takes started with a pick-up chord before the B-flat fanfare—a “flat-VI” G-flat major chord, swooping up with a crescendo into the familiar downbeat.  Really?!?  That famous first chord almost wasn’t the first chord?!?  Searching around on the web, these tracks are not generally available from legal streaming services.  (For the moment, at least, these can be accessed on archive.org (starting at 05:00 on this track [Track 119]), although I can't imagine that they’ll always be accessible there.)

An authorized score for this music has been published as a concert suite for full orchestra, but I avoided consulting it until after listening and transcribing (sometimes from half-speed files) what I could hear, and consulting others with acute ears.  When I finally compared my five transcriptions with the published score, there were even more surprises.  Here is the middle of the score—brass and percussion—for the three-bar opening fanfare as published:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of p. 1 of STAR WARS:  Suite for Orchestra, I. Main Title

There are a number of differences between the published version and the five takes from the 1977 sessions; indeed, none of those takes is accurately represented by the published score, at least as far as my ear can tell—even Take 19, which was the one used for the film soundtrack for this passage (complete with a very obvious cracked trumpet note on beat 3 of b. 3).  For example, while it is a most effective and even obvious idea to have the first trumpet on the high B-flat (written C here) tonic for the initial chord, I don’t hear this on any of the takes from the 1977 soundtrack.  In all but Take 20 that pitch is there in woodwinds and tremolo strings, but not trumpet.  That trumpet top B-flat is very clear on the soundtrack of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and so perhaps it was a very early revision.  (I also have my suspicions that the Empire main title is using a larger brass section, maybe 4 trumpets and 4 trombones; I have no way of confirming that, but it sounds thicker to my ear, even when the parts are in unison.)

Another way in which the score differs from the 1977 takes is the thirty-second notes in (at least) the trombone part in b. 1.  I have puzzled over this:  is it just sloppy playing?  Were the 32nds on the part, but the players just weren’t able to articulate them fast enough?  When I listen to it at half-speed, I hear something that sounds like triplets (i.e., only three iterations in each of those half-beats).  Are the 32nds being muddled up by the players, or were they reading triplet 16ths?  With the trumpets in b. 2, it is harder to tell, as in each of the five takes I hear the trumpets play four iterations, but except for Take 19 (the one on the film), these notes slightly too early and too slow, as if triplet-16ths.  The effect is this:

SOURCE:  my transcription of the rhythms suggested by the playing on Take 16, 17, 18, and 20; only on Take 19 are the trumpets late enough for me to believe they are reading (but not quite playing) 32nds.  With the trombones, sometimes the first of the triplet groups isn’t clearly articulated (Take 17 especially).  Also, in Take 20 there is no initial chord from the trumpets (nor indeed anyone else).

As it happens, on the soundtrack of Empire, the trumpets are very clearly 32nds, but the trombones—on which it is admittedly more difficult to make such quick notes speak cleanly—are still pretty muddy.

I mentioned above the G-flat swoosh into the downbeat on Takes 16, 17 and 18.  (This upbeat is even slightly elongated in Takes 17 and 18—just a bit longer than a beat of the ensuing tempo.  And I haven’t tried to calculate where this extra beat would need to begin on the film to preserve the rest of the synchronization, but I think it would have to be when the screen is still completely black just before the text STAR WARS appears.)   For these takes the harp glissando that appears in b. 3 of the published score happens instead as a component of this initial swoosh (and presumably with the harp set on a G-flat major scale, although it is devilishly hard to discern).  When the upbeat was deleted for Take 19 (and 20), the glissando was moved to the end of b. 3 and adapted to the dominant harmony.

The upbeat of the first three takes also has a woodwind flourish—a scale leading up to the high B-flat.  The strings seem to have this too, and certainly—as in the familiar version—from the downbeat the violins prolong high B-flats (in octaves) with a tremolo for most of these three bars, doubled by the triangle roll.  (Trill?  What do you call it on the triangle?)  That shimmering background is a memorable hallmark of this musical moment.  Thus it is astonishing to discover that Take 20—the last of the takes, the one just past the “keeper” (no. 19)—begins very sparsely:  no big chord, no string tremolo, no woodwinds.  Just the cymbal clash, the rolling triangle and the unison trombones.  The horns, trumpets and tuba accumulate gradually, but there is no hint of the rest of the ensemble until the pick-up to b. 4.  (This starts at 14:38 on the track on archive.org, and its spareness really must be heard to be believed.)  Was this seriously considered for the iconic introduction?  Shocking as it may seem with the benefit of hindsight, this was a plausible alternative in the studio.

I haven’t attempted to scrutinize the remainder of the main title music on these five tracks so carefully, but as far as I can tell, all of the variants in the first portion (except for the relocation of the harp gliss. mentioned above) were accomplished by having various players remain silent at designated places.  Thus all of these could be accomplished with the same parts on the stands.  In that case, maybe in Take 20 they recognized that they had just gone too far with the “tacet” instructions.  In any case, these are all orchestration details.  Did Williams orchestrate this passage, or his collaborator Herbert W. Spencer?  Was Williams just editing from the podium?   Probably these questions could be answered—the composer is still with us, after all—but answering them is beyond the scope of my blog.  (There's a reason I work with dead composers:  they can’t answer back.)  Still, examining these more closely has been a good reminder for me that the “inevitable” may rarely seem that way at the time.

ADDENDUM   22 March 2017
Brendan Finan responds to this post on his blog at http://www.brendanfinan.net/wordpress/a-star-wars-speculation/


ADDENDUM   20 July 2019
A follow-up with information from someone who has seen the sources: 
http://www.settlingscoresblog.net/p/star-wars.html