24. Against the muddy tide

SOURCE:  scan of Dirk Stoop's engraving Aqua Triumphalis (Aug. 23, 1662, preceding the wedding of Charles II) at the National Maritime Museum; available at http://www.historyextra.com/river

Images like the one above are a healthy reminder to me that George I was not the first to have elaborate festivities on the Thames.  And yet the date that will always be most associated with such water parties must surely be 17 July 1717—the impending tercentenary of which I simply must mark with this post.  As musical water parties are known to have happened in each of the three preceding summers, the eye-catching 7/17/1717 date may not be the first performance of Handel’s Water Music, but it is the earliest documented performance—and it is very well documented indeed.

Water Music fits into a long tradition of music for a social occasion; but as a musical structure itself, the work is shockingly innovative—an orchestral piece of unprecedented length and variety.  Are there any predecessors to rival it?  In a way, Water Music represents the first maturity of the orchestra—and, maybe except for occasional performances of Corelli concerti grossi, it must be the earliest music that can be said to fit into the established orchestra repertoire.  While modern symphony orchestras have largely abandoned the Baroque, edged-out by their HIP rivals, Water Music is still performed by all sorts of ensembles, and seems to be a perennial crowd-pleaser.  New recordings (and cheap reissues of old ones) emerge year after year, and twice in recent years (2003 and 2012) there have been conspicuous performances on the Thames itself—conspicuous enough for me to have noticed, anyway.

SOURCE:  Daily Mail image of the 3 June 2012 Jubilee flotilla on the Thames; the Academy of Ancient Music website has some entertaining videos concerning their part of the festivities.

Probably the work seldom gets performed intact.  The 22 movements that comprise what we call Water Music do not cohere in any traditional pattern, and that has caused problems for Handel scholars in the past.  Lacking an autograph, it was assumed that the strange sequence of movements indicated that something had been garbled in transmission.  Here is a handy index from Christopher Hogwood’s Cambridge Music Handbook:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of pp. 18-19 of Handel:  Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks (2005)

As indicated by the catalogue numbers of the Handel Werke Verzeichnis (HWV), Water Music has been allotted three entries—the movements in F (and two in D minor) are HWV 348; those in D major are HWV 349; and those in G major/minor are HWV 350.  HWV thus presents three “suites” together making up a larger collected work.  Lacking any further evidence, this division would be wholly reasonable—and it is more practical in performance, as each suite is unified not only by key but by instrumentation (with trumpets appearing only in the movements on HWV 349, and no brass at all in HWV 350, which instead features flute and recorder).  The idea that the conglomeration of movements that we think of as “Handel’s Water Music” actually comprise three separate works goes back to Handel’s time: some manuscript copies dating from the late 1730s and early 1740s, together with  the 1743 Walsh keyboard arrangement presents the movements grouped together into the three suites.  That sequence took over the received history, and thus the three catalogue numbers.  The work had appeared as three suites in the Hällische Händel Ausgabe (HHA) in 1962, and that imprimatur led to a myriad of recordings that present Water Music so allotted.  And it works:  I was at a concert not that long ago that had the F major suite at the beginning of the program, a smattering of Bach and Telemann in the middle, and the last two suites as the conclusion, the whole making a very satisfying musical experience.

SOURCE:  scan first page of score (f. 2) of 1718 ms.
in the library of the Royal Society of Musicians [no shelfmark];
scan from https://museums.eu/event/details/120375/handels-water-music

Given Handel’s default modus operandi, it would seem a little unusual if Water Music wasn’t to some extent a thing of shreds and patches.  Terence Best points at the solo violins in the fugal section of the French overture, suggesting that that sort of writing would have been inaudible in the open air, and thus likely to have been retained (unthinkingly?) from some preëxisting work.  And yet, as Best is also at pains to point out, all of the earliest manuscript copies not only mix movements of the D and G “suites” together, but in fact they all preserve most or all of the 22 movements in very nearly the same order.  The 2004 discovery of the earliest known manuscript copy (datable to 1718 [and the first page is shown at right])—which gives the 22 movements in precisely the same sequence as the first published full score (ed. Samuel Arnold in 1788), a sequence familiar to us because Arnold’s edition was the primary source for Chrysander’s in the old complete works volume (1886).  We do not know Arnold’s source (although Best [p. 102] argues reasonably that it was indeed this source), but the newly-discovered copy is enough to verify that this sequence of movements was known within a year of the supposed 1717 premiere.  The HHA has thus now issued a new volume (2007, co-edited by Best and Hogwood) to supersede the old.  (This pair of editions would make an ideal topic for my series of “moving targets,” but I haven’t done sufficient homework comparing them to write that up yet.  Eventually.)

So what about that unusual sequence, now being restored to favor?  It is a curious hybrid of suite and concertante forms, and it doesn’t even settle down to just one sort of suite.  It opens with a French overture, interrupted before a final cadence by a solo oboe number; following that is really an Italian overture (fast-slow-fast) featuring the horns; then a series of conventional dances or dance-like numbers (menuets, bourrée, hornpipe, “Air”).  After all the F major movements are done, there follows a d-minor number displaying Handel’s orchestrational technique at its most forward-looking—but which is hardly either a closing or an opening to a suite.  Thereafter, in Hogwood’s words,

“From this point in the suite both the scoring and the changes of tonality become more varied, a strategy that seems designed to maintain attention through an hour-long performance—the length of time of a full act in an opera, but no other musical form to date.”  [p. 35]

The brilliant brass writing that follows is closer to Handel’s (subsequent) concerti a due cori than to anything else—in other words concertante writing again  The remaining dances are diverse and diverting, but there is no conclusion as substantial as those of Telemann’s Tafelmusik; the “Trumpet Menuet” that de facto brings the whole thing to a close seems perfunctory, and to my ear the weakest part of the whole set.

SOURCE:  discogs.com

Given his later scholarship on this work, I was curious to revisit Hogwood's own recording (1978).  It is inevitably a product of its time.  Hogwood not only followed the three suite model of the original HHA, but also interpolated two much later F-major reworkings of the two central D-major trumpet/horn numbers.  Wonderful music as these are, their inclusion here only muddies the textual waters.  And to confuse things further, Decca several times reissued only either the “horn suite” or the “trumpet suite” from these sessions.  Hogwood’s dominance in the recording market place in the 1980s and 1990s has surely meant that—for better or worse—these performances have played a large role in shaping our sense of the work.  (Or works?)  I’m not even sure that it is a problem, but it is worth acknowledging.  (A similar issue came up in a post concerning Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos.)

I tried an informal experiment for this post:  listening to a recording with the CD or MP3 player set on SHUFFLE, hoping to see if any resulting sequence of movements would be viable.  It won’t, at least for me, but if we were to view the whole thing as a sort of compendium of music to keep the party going, a number of routes might work.  A crucial difference is to have a musical intelligence making the decision, rather than just a mechanical randomization.  In other words, it requires a deejay.

5. “What's the best edition of ________?”

Every now and then a student will come down the hall to my office—away, that is, from the mire of applied studies and into the transcendent world of musicological speculation (... or so I sometimes would like it to seem)—and say:  "Prof. X told me to ask you what edition I should get of _________."

It doesn’t happen all that often.  Usually Prof. X tells the student what edition to buy, so they never come to see me.  As before in this blog, I turn to the words of Walter Emery:

The ordinary musician does not buy an edition because it is good; as he does not know how editing is done, he cannot tell whether an edition is good or bad.  He buys an edition because its title-page bears a famous name or the magic word Urtext:  or because it has a pretty cover:  or, more likely, because it is sixpence cheaper than any other:  or again, because his teacher has told him to (which means only that the teacher was told to buy it by his teacher, has used it for twenty years, and has got used to the look of it).  [pp. 7f.]

In a very interesting and useful article that deals with edition selection as a teaching moment, Rachel E. Scott gives an anecdote which fulfills Emery's worst fears:

As a freshman vocal performance major, my voice teacher assigned me “Le Violette” by Alessandro Scarlatti. The following week I naively showed up for my lesson with my shiny new 26 Italian Songs and Arias: An Authoritative Edition Based on Authentic Sources. I quickly learned that my “Le Violette” was not her “Le Violette.” My professor rejected my anthology, pulled out Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and declared that the accompaniment in my edition was “just awful.” Not only are the accompaniments very different, but the vocal line is also slightly different. In short, the two editions presented two very different pieces.  While this experience certainly opened my eyes to the existence of different editions, it did not provide a solution to the problem. I did not understand that my teacher’s preference was based on tradition and not on the quality of the editorial work....  [pp. 133f.]

No doubt this scenario has repeated itself countless times.

Sometimes a teacher might think they are recommending the best edition simply because the publisher has a good reputation.  (See for example this recent post by violinist Phillipe Quint (“Usually I rely on two editions:  Henle and Barenreiter”).)  Certainly when I was studying piano 20+ years ago, Henle seemed to have sewn up the market, despite a wide variety in the quality of their backlist—a problem that has been rectified to a significant extent as new editions have superseded many old ones.

Judging from Google searches, the perennial question of which edition to buy has migrated to various internet forums.  Typical of many hits that came up was this one:

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of
http://music.stackexchange.com/questions/22938/good-non-henle-urtext-edition-of-bach/23012
(accessed 30 Sept. 2016)

There is much to read between the lines here.  The teacher said “urtext” so that a student would have a text free from interpretive interpolations (mainly, I imagine, slurs); the teacher didn’t specify which, as the various urtexts of the Bach English Suites do look pretty much the same.  The student knows the word urtext has to be on the cover and has noticed that this increases the price—money which it would probably be more enjoyable to spend elsewhere.  The first responder points out that the BG edition is “urtext” in the sense that the teacher probably wants.  The estimate of the quality is attributed to they (“they say”—a vile phrase), followed by recourse to Wikipedia.  There is no assertion of an edition being good for x reason or bad for y reason.  And who can say?

Indeed, who can say?  Very few people actually spend their time looking at multiple editions of the same works, still less comparing multiple editions to their sources and (if present) the editorial remarks.  As has been brought home to me when reviewing editions, I simply don’t have enough information to verify that the editor has done the work properly.  Unless I have all the sources in front of me and can do the editor’s work over again, I have to take the editor’s word that the edition is what it claims to be.  True, I can talk about methodological problems (particularly sources not consulted) or editorial policies that I find disagreeable, but otherwise I am only barely qualified to offer an opinion.  And I suspect this is the case for most professionals (except perhaps for the repertoire at the very center of our interest).

Musicologist Linda Shaver-Gleason calls her admirable blog Not another music history cliché!  I wish someone would write one called Not another uncritical review!  These are easy to spot, as they are almost invariably glowing reviews, and they usually conclude with a formulation like “It is handsomely bound and will make an attractive addition to your shelves.”  While these tend not to be by musicologists, they do tend to be published in sources more readily available to the average musician, and thus are much more significant in terms of their influence.  There are some, however, who have dealt explicitly with comparing editions, not just reviewing a new edition in a vacuum.  Judging from my RILM and Google searches, many of these are in practical periodicals (The Strad, Clavier, and the like), where they would be most useful to teachers.  This topic also seems to be a frequent topic for DMA dissertations.

I don't believe in “best” editions, but I've certainly seen some bad ones.  I also am familiar with the gnawing sense that I don't know enough to evaluate what is in my hands.   And so I  propose a crowd-sourced bibliography.  I welcome citations for articles/chapters/blogposts/etc. that compare different editions (i.e., not just reviews of a new edition).  With the rise of the IMSLP and students’ use of it, these need not necessarily focus on new editions.  The old editions are ever with us—and I think that is a very good thing.  Many are superb.  (They also have the virtue of printing more music per page, and so have fewer page turns.  If a requirement for best edition is practicality, page turns might rank pretty high.)  I have put a new tab on the blog for this project so that it will be readily available; send me citations through the contact form and I will gladly add them to the list:  articles, books, blogposts, webforum posts, whatever.

1. The weight of tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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