32. Père et fils (or, “WTF-horn?!?”)

One day in a music history class in the autumn of 2016 (shortly after launching this blog), my students and I were huddled around a study score of Jacques Ibert’s Divertissement.  It is a piece I like very much—très amusant.  Ibert derived the suite from some incidental music he wrote for a 1929 production of Labiche’s hilarious Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (a stage production directed by René Clair, following hard upon Clair’s silent film adaptation of 1928).

There weren’t very many students in that class, so we all had a serviceable view of the score, despite its fairly small dimensions.  I had assigned them the second movement, “Cortège”—although it must be the most riotous cortège in the repertoire.  Compare, however, what we saw on the page

SOURCE:  scan of Ibert Divertissement (Durand, 1931, reprint n.d.), p. 17.

with what we heard from the CD recording I had chosen for them—Yan Pascal Tortelier’s 1992 Chandos recording with the Ulster Orchestra [Chandos 9023]:

[I am very grateful to Chandos Records Ltd. for permission to use this excerpt for this post.]

I had heard this recording many times before.  I am generally partial to Mr. Tortelier’s recordings.  (Among his very many fine accomplishments, I would recommend particularly his recording of Guilmant’s Symphony no. 1 for organ and orchestra (with organist Ian Tracey and the BBC Philharmonic) [Chandos 9271].  It is a work that seldom gets played, but it gets a splendid airing on that disc, and—as it exists in two rather different versions (organ solo and organ with orchestra)—it will probably emerge sooner or later as the topic of a post on this blog.))  [ADDENDUM:  it did.]

As I say, I had heard this recording many times, but apparently not with the score at hand.  That morning in class I exclaimed, “Where is that horn part coming from?”  As my students put it (in the vernacular), “WTF?”

Soon after class, I pulled a few other recordings off my shelves, but none of them had this extra horn line.  (This figure happens twice:  Reh. 6, and then again at Reh. 10 up a half-step; the horn part seemed the same in both places on the Tortelier recording.)  There was nothing in the Chandos liner notes to indicate that this recording featured a new edition of the score.  Anyway, I mentally filed it away to explore later.

Returning to it about two months ago, I was just as mystified as before.  I investigated getting the performing materials on perusal to see if anything useful was there; but, as the US distributor is Boosey & Hawkes, that effort proved prohibitively expensive.  Moreover, a more recent recording from Chandos—an excellent one with Neemi Järvi conducting the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande [CHAN 5168]—clearly manifests the text as printed in the Durand score.

 [Again my thanks to Chandos Records Ltd. for permission to use these recorded excerpts for this post.]

I have not laid my hands on an item catalogued in Worldcat as a “neue Auflage” apparently issued by Durand in 2012, but—as will be seen below—it wouldn’t have solved the mystery even if it is a new edition rather than just a reprint.  (It may well just be a re-setting using music notation software; no editor is listed.  I’ve complained about that sort of thing before on this blog, with the Glazunov Saxophone Concerto as my example.)

I decided it couldn’t hurt to try to contact Mr. Tortelier directly, but what exactly was I asking him?  I thought it best to transcribe what I thought I heard the horn playing, and I enlisted some other keen ears to give it a go.  Here is what I could convince myself I heard:

SOURCE:  my attempt to transcribe the rogue horn part at Reh. 6; I thank my colleagues Paul Rawlins and Michael Bratt (both University of Mary Washington) for their willingness to tackle the same problem.

I then sent what I had to Mr. Tortelier’s agent and wondered if I would get any reply.  A few weeks later it came, revealing that the source of this interpolation was his father, the esteemed Paul Tortelier (1914-1990), cellist, composer, and conductor.

Indeed the passage at Reh 6 for 8 bars as well as the one at Reh 10  for another 8 bars have an added and indeed optional horn part counterpoint which was added by my father Paul Tortelier and is none other than the main theme of rehearsal 2 ( trumpet pianissimo ) and tutti forte at 4 but in this instance it is funnily clashing with the same tune played  in augmented values on trumpet and flute.
To answer your question and sum it up, my father is to blame for that and I assume it should be heard on his own recording with the English Chamber Orchestra.   [email of 28 April 2018]

Once he mentioned the melody at Reh. 2, I saw why the second bar of my transcription had been naggingly familiar.  Here is Ibert's tune there (third staff, trumpet in C):

SOURCE:  detail of scan of Ibert Divertissement (Durand, 1931, reprint n.d.), p. 12.

Moreover, Mr. Tortelier was kind enough to provide a scan of his score, with the interpolated part neatly added in his father’s hand:

SOURCE:  Durand score p. 17 with Paul Tortelier's interpolated horn part in manuscript (by courtesy of Yan Pascal Tortelier, email 6 May 2018); for the parallel passage at Reh. 10, see this page. 

SOURCE:  Tortelier père et fils recording
Tchaikovsky in London in 1973, from EMI's 1981
Grand Echiquier reissue.

I haven’t actually been able to locate any recording of the Ibert conducted by Paul Tortelier, and it may be that he performed it thus without ever actually committing it to disc.  There is something charmingly audacious about this addition—in a way showing a loyalty to the impish style of the composer even while departing from fidelity to the text as such.  I am glad that Tortelier fils shared his father's inspiration with a wider audience.  It is a remarkable moment, and when I now listen to other recordings the original text seems... well, not bland, but at least a little lacking.

All this prompted me to wonder, though, what other contrapuntal “Easter eggs” (to borrow a gaming term) are lurking on recordings of standard literature—whether intentional interpolations by the conductor or as pranks by the players.  As a continuo player, I have in my realizations occasionally introduced a snippet from another work as a sort of countermelody.  (I have found that the phrase “Way down upon the Swanee river” works particularly well.)  I imagine others have amused themselves in similar ways.  I would be happy to add an addendum to this post if readers can point me to other examples.

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.

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

13. The best and worst of amateurism

...which is the third installment of the Settling Scores

Having discussed descriptive and prescriptive notation in my last post, I find an opportunity to explore an example (and which is it supposed to be?) relating to Bach.  Here is a surprising recent publication:

SOURCE:  Anthony Tommasini, "Glenn Gould's Every Detail.  But Why?" nyt.com (June 1, 2016)

This curious edition presents two texts of the “Goldberg” Variations on facing pages throughout.  The left-hand [verso] pages are labelled “Original Version,” while the right-hand [recto] pages are labelled “Gould’s 1981 Version.”  I reproduce an extract of the beginning of Var. 29 below, although with the twin texts arranged here vertically rather than horizontally just to be more legible in the blog medium:

SOURCE:  cropped scans of pp. 146-147 of Hopkins, ed., Glenn Gould's Goldberg Variations.

From what I can tell, Hopkins’s transcription of Gould’s 1981 performance is impressive, even if it leaves me with some questions.  (In the example above, what distinction does Hopkins intend between Bach’s triplet notation and his transcription of Gould’s performances as sextuplets? I found no explanation of this idiosyncracy, and the only thing I can imagine from it is that Gould’s performance downplays the half-beat.)   This project was clearly a labor of love for Hopkins, and the right-hand pages thus reveal the very best of amateurism—doing something for the love of it, going far beyond what might be asked or imagined.

It is the left-hand pages that leave me disturbed.  Even just the use of the word version for both the “original” (and I’m coming back to that word in a minute, too) and the performance troubles me.  I would have favored different words—maybe “text” for what Gould read, and “interpretation” for what he played.  Granted, the interpretation is filtered through Hopkins’s interpretation into score.  Whatever.  There would be great value in comparing what Gould had studied with what he played.  Of the text Gould used, Hopkins asserts that it was the 1938 G. Schirmer edition prepared by Ralph Kirkpatrick:

“We know that Gould used the Kirkpatrick edition, and only this edition, because three copies of this edition are presently housed in the Glenn Gould Archive (the official repository for Gould’s archives) in the National Library of Canada (NLC).  On the basis of Gould’s editorial markings in these scores (or lack of markings), each copy was seemingly used by him at various points in his career for various purposes.” [p. 10]

Hopkins suggests that one of these three copies (“almost entirely free of markings, such as fingerings, articulations, dynamics and tempos”) was likely the one that Gould used as he learned the work prior to the 1955 recording, and informs us that some pages have gone missing; a second copy seems to be a “reference score during the post-production process for the 1981 recording.”  (I wondered if it is a more recent printing; Hopkins doesn’t give any such information, still less any shelf-mark or locating information.)  The third copy, also incomplete but with very neat and comprehensive fingerings added for the aria and the first eight variations, belonged to Gould’s girlfriend during his conservatory years.  Hopkins concludes

“The relevance of the three copies of this edition is that they show Gould had little concern with the quality of editions that he used over the course of his career.  There is no evidence that he ever researched or consulted other editions for the purpose of critical analysis.” [p. 10]

And yet a page later Hopkins quotes Kevin Bazzana discussing films made immediately after the 1981 recording saying “in [NLC] videotape no. 50A, [Gould] can be seen with the 1979 [recte 1978?] Henle edition of the score.”  Well, what was he doing with that?  Is that not evidence—at least circumstantial, if not an actual smoking gun—of Gould “consulting” another edition?  And I noticed an instance (Var. 26, b. 14, 2nd beat, middle voice) where the note Gould plays in 1981 (D) is in the Henle text and NOT in the Kirkpatrick text (which has E; in 1955 he had played E).  As Hopkins uses these tapes to determine Gould’s fingering as best he can (and an impressive job it seems to be), clearly he deems the videos relevant to the 1981 audio recording.

If a facing-page edition is going to have some value, the facing pages need to relate to each other.  I can imagine two ways that this might have been done:  1) on the left-hand pages, provide a transcription of Gould’s 1955 recording, so that the two performances might be compared, or 2) on the left-hand pages, reproduce the Kirkpatrick text that Hopkins claims Gould used.  (Probably there would be copyright issues with that.  Did Hopkins ever pitch this project to Schirmer, who presumably holds that copyright?)

The Kirkpatrick edition is apparently still in print, and it is also very widely available in libraries (and, I imagine, in piano benches here and there)—indeed, more available in libraries than this Gould transcription will ever be—so interested individuals should have no trouble getting their hands on a copy to make the comparison.  (At a glance, WorldCat lists over 450 library copies of various printings of the Kirkpatrick edition, with just over 30 of the Hopkins/Gould score.)  Comparing the two is particularly interesting because Kirkpatrick often resorts to extra staves to realize Bach’s ornamentation or (yet more significant in this context) to modify the part-crossing to facilitate performance on a piano.  Here are two examples—the aria, where Gould’s ornamentation is somewhat slower than Kirkpatrick’s instructions (32nd-notes rather than 64th-notes), and an example of adapting the music for a single keyboard:

SOURCES:  first sixteen bars of the Aria, in scans of Kirkpatrick p. 3 and Hopkins p. 49.

SOURCES: the end of Var. VIII in marked-up cropped scans of Kirkpatrick p. 23 and Hopkins p. 75.

Instead of either of these strategies, on the left side Hopkins provides an entirely new text, which he explains thus in his introduction:

“Each of the variations [and the Aria] is presented in its original form on verso pages, accompanied by Gould's realization on recto pages, thereby allowing for ease of comparative analysis.  The original forms, labelled ‘Original Version,’ were produced from the Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe edition (BGA) of 1853, the Hans Bischoff edition of 1883 and the Ralph Kirkpatrick edition of 1938.  The Handexemplar, Bach’s personal copy of the first engraved edition, was likewise used for this purpose, yet the editions produced by the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA) of 1977 and Henle of 1979 could only be consulted, due to copyright restrictions.  Discrepancies amongst these editions are noted in the Critical Notes on pp. 45-47.”  (p. 9)

Bach’s Handexemplar, corrected in many places by the composer, was rediscovered in 1975.  It was naturally the most important source for Christoph Wolff’s NBA text and its discovery also prompted Henle to issue a revised version of Rudolf Steglich’s 1973 edition (with the revisions undertaken in 1978 by Paul Badura-Skoda).  What does Hopkins mean by “could only be consulted”?  All of the sources he lists were presumably “consulted,” and as his critical notes list variants in each of these texts, it is unclear how “copyright restrictions” have impinged on his task at all.  No, what we have here appears to me to be a reinventing of the wheel:  a new edition that presumes to be scholarly, but executed, in my opinion, in an haphazard way.

Before giving some examples of this, I should note that the NBA text of the Goldbergs has not been universally acclaimed.  In particular, in a 1990 article in Performance Practice Review, Erich Schwandt took Wolff’s edition to task for a number of perceived deficiencies, concluding

“Something must be broken in the mechanism when musicological ‘overkill’ produces 27 pages of Critical Apparatus (roughly two-thirds of a page of words per page of music) and then gets the notes wrong.  I believe that the Neue Bach Ausgabe should seriously consider withdrawing Christoph Wolff’s edition of the ‘Goldberg Variations.’” (p. 69) 

I have examined Schwandt’s critique closey, and I see no warrant for such a charge.  Wolff has not gotten “the notes wrong.”  An edition is an interpretation—a performance, if you like—and although I would like to see every alteration to a source text logged in the critical report, I find only four instances where this not is the case, each having to do with an added appoggiaturas that are not clearly marked in the score as editorial additions.  Schwandt may disagree with Wolff’s and the NBA’s editorial principles (over the ornamentation symbols particularly), but in the critical report Wolff articulates those principles and the decisions that proceed from them.

It must be stressed that in a critical edition, the printed score and the critical report are equally necessary for an understanding of the textual situation.  This seems to have escaped Nicholas Hopkins as he prepared his new “original version” for his Glenn Gould project.  His basic editorial principle seems to be that the Handexemplar, bearing corrections in Bach’s hand, establishes a final text for the Goldbergs once and for all.  His “original version” thus aims to be essentially a resetting (following modern notational practices) of the corrected reading of the Handexemplar, and his critical notes detail differences between his new text and the other five published texts he cites above.  In fact, the vast majority of his critical notes list places where an accidental is missing in the Handexemplar but appears in the other editions.  There is a good reason for this:  the first edition (of which the Handexemplar is a copy, of course) is a product of different notational conventions than ours today:  an accidental was regarded as affecting only the note to which it was affixed.  As an example, in Var. XXVIII b. 23, the left-hand part is crowded with repeated sharps for the recurring note:

SOURCE: cropped scan of the Handexemplar, p. 30 (my mark-up)

This would be too many accidentals by our current standards; the following bar has one too many, while also lacking two that would now be needed:

SOURCE:  ditto

The second natural sign seems superfluous by today’s standards, but we would now expect a natural sign for the last note in both hands—no longer D-sharp but D-natural.  As Hopkins seems unaware of the older practice, he documents it as if it is news.  More than half (at a rough count, 37 out of about 70 total) of his notes deal with this, an item not even worth noting.  Several of Hopkins’s notes record details such as “a dotted tie is notated ... in the NBA.  This tie is found in no other sources.”  Exactly:  the tie is dotted because it is an editorial emendation.

A more serious problem is that—as he gives no indication that he has seen the NBA critical report—he is apparently utterly unaware that of the seventeen other copies of the original print which Wolff examined, six have corrections that Wolff is able to attribute to Bach, and no two of these copies have exactly the same corrections:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Kritisher Bericht for NBA Ser. V, Bd. 2 (1981), p. 93.

In Wolff’s table, source A1 is the Handexemplar, but not all of the corrections made it into the Handexemplar.  (This table only lists corrections found in the other six copies, noting when they are or are not duplicated in the Handexemplar; there are quite a number of corrections unique to the Handexemplar which Wolff documents elsewhere.)  Evidently not knowing of this, Hopkins re-introduces errors into this text which Bach had corrected:

SOURCE: Var. XVI, from marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 102.

As the table above indicates, in five of the seven copies with corrections traceable to Bach, this E has been changed to F-sharp.  The note is given as F-sharp already in the BG edition (1853), as the copy Wolff identifies as A5 was the source for the edition and has the correction.  Kirkpatrick was working from a different copy, lacking the correction, and so gives E.

Another instance concerns a missing accidental:

SOURCE: marked-up cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 130

The circled A is given as A-flat in all of the editions that Hopkins consulted save the original print; it had been changed to A-flat in only two copies of the first edition (Wolff’s A6 and A8)—neither of which was used as a source for editions prior to the NBA, although it did show up in an early manuscript copy (Wolff's C1) which Bischhoff and Steglich had used.  All of these editors recognized the musical sense of A-flat; even in the intensely chromatic vocabulary of Var. XXV, the A natural is jarring.  Try it for yourself.

Hopkins did catch a genuine lapse in all of the editions he used, and apparently hitherto unnoticed.  It again concerns a missing accidental in this same movement, and it seems clear how it was missed for so long:

Composite of Var. XXV, b. 10
SOURCES:  marked-up cropped scans of  (top) Handexemplar p. 25; (lower left) NBA Ser. V Bd. 2 p. 104; (lower right) Hopkins "original version" p. 130.

The natural sign (missing in the NBA and all the other editions) would not have been expected in the original print, given its conventions regarding accidentals; but subsequent editors may have missed it because 1) in the original print there is a system break before beat 2 of this measure, so that the preceding D-sharp is out of sight and out of mind; and 2) it is so manifestly obvious musically that it was implied even when not on the page.  Neither is a satisfactory excuse.  But has anyone ever played a D-sharp here?  I wonder.  Hopkins is the first of these editors to publish the work as a computer-set (rather than engraved) score, and this is the sort of detail that computer-setting captures more readily than the weary eye.

That said, Hopkins also introduces what is, in my opinion, a shocking error:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 60.

The first two notes in the right hand are a third too high.  That might be regarded as a typo, but the error is compounded on the facing-page transcription:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of Hopkins, p. 61.

These are not the notes that Gould plays—he plays B-G, exactly as notated in every other edition.  And although this could be a simple copy-and-paste error if Hopkins used his own “original version” as the base text for his “Gould’s 1981 version,” it is further compounded by a footnote at the bottom of the same page, explaining the asterisk and even naming the notes (incorrectly) “D and B.”

SOURCE:  ditto

This is not a typo, but rather an editorial blunder.  That there could be an error of this magnitude—even redoubled in a footnote—suggests to me the possibility that there was no editorial oversight whatever to this production.  (Hopkins apparently set this edition himself.)  Lack of editorial oversight would be par for the course for a product that appears under a Creative Commons license on the IMSLP; it is astounding in a publication from a house of the reputation of Carl Fischer.  Granted, there is no backlist of “urtexts” at Carl Fischer, but now Hopkins’s “original” version (that is, the left-hand pages) has just been issued as a new urtext of the Goldberg Variations.  I have not examined that publication, but I hope that—at the very least—this error has been fixed.  Even so, given the rest of the concerns voiced above, Hopkins’s “original version” presumes too much.  As followers of the blog will know, I am all in favor of the proliferation of editions offering valid texts of all sorts, but I think the market has no need of this “urtext” edition of the Goldberg Variations.

The right-hand pages show the best of amateur devotion (although I think the introduction sometimes veers over into hagiography); the left-hand pages appear, in my view, to manifest ad hoc amateur naïveté presented as serious scholarship.  Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.