27. “Let the rain pitter-patter”

The weather is fright’ning—

The thunder and lightning

Seem to be having their way;

But as far as I’m concerned,

It’s a lovely day.

Even with that epigram, this is the ninth installment in my now-slowed-down-but-still-appearing

This post is essentially a bit of the pre-history of this blog, and there will be more of that in time.  For now I want to tell about the time that the rainy weather changed my professional trajectory entirely.  And, as Irving Berlin put it, oh, what a break for me!

I have mentioned in passing that I am an organist, although this is very much an avocation.  I don’t really keep up my organ playing as I ought to, and for the first time in 15+ years I’m in a job where (with no organ on campus) I can’t just walk down the hall to practice.  I need to make more effort, and to make time for it.  But I do occasionally fill in for various congregations when the organist has to be away.  And so it happened one Sunday (25 October 2015, to be exact) that I was on the bench of a big downtown church in Greenville, SC for both morning and evening services.  I had a busy afternoon in between, so I had to choose music that I could pull together on minimal practice time.  Usually for me this means Bach, as you can pull the stops and go:  you don’t have to work out complicated registration changes unless you want to.   As on that day the church was celebrating Reformation Day (about a week early), Bach was a natural choice anyway.  I had learned from experience that this congregation didn’t listen to the postlude, so I chose something short and to the point for the evening service:  one of Bach’s settings of Luther’s German paraphrase of the Gloria, “Allein Gott in de höh sei Ehr.”  There are a quite a number of Bach settings extant, but I chose BWV 715, one of the easiest, flashiest, and most striking.  It is one of the six (extant) so-called “Passaggio chorales” which probably manifest something of the sort of chorale playing that got Bach in trouble with his congregation in Arnstadt in February 1706 after his Buxtehude pilgrimage:

“Reprove him for having hitherto made many curious variationes in the chorale, and mingled many strange tones in it, and for the fact that the Congregation has been confused by it.”  [trans. in The New Bach Reader, p. 46]

In these works, the chorale is stated with a dense and aggressively dissonant in-your-face style harmony, with interspersed flamboyant runs and arpeggios.  (Hear Ton Koopman performing this work here.)  Think Jimi Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in a high Baroque vocabulary.

That morning between services as I was running through the music for the evening, it occurred to me that the dense chromatic writing would make good fodder for an exam I would be giving on the following Tuesday to my Theory II students.  Then I had an extra credit idea:  spot as many sets of parallel fifths/octaves as you can.  And would my students notice the disguised B-A-C-H in the last two bars?

SOURCE:  conclusion of BWV 715; cropped scan of NBA Ser. IV Bd. 3 (ed. Hans Klotz, 1961), p. 15. 

And so it happened that on the next morning I was sitting in my office working on the theory midterm exam, and I remembered my idea for the analysis question.  I discovered that I had left my organ score in my car.  Looking out the window to see a cold rain pouring down, I thought I’ll just go to the IMSLP and use the old complete works edition.  I had been playing out of the Bärenreiter offprint of the NBA text.  (These offprints sometimes include corrections, although the text in this instance was identical with that reproduced above.)  When I pulled up the BG edition, however, all but one of my parallel fifths/octaves were gone:

SOURCE:  the same passage; a marked-up cropped scan of the BG edition (1893), taken from the scan available on the IMSLP.  Those parallels in the NBA text that do not appear in the BG text are indicated in red (although I have not marked other variants here).  The parallel octave that remains is indicated in blue.

Although I had followed Bach research casually over the years, Bach was not at all my area of study.  I was intrigued by this, however, as it seemed like a pretty good example of different editorial ideologies:  the “1893 Bach” couldn’t have possibly intended such solecisms; the “1961 Bach” was a brash rebel.  It was a music textual equivalent of the difference between these famous representations:

SOURCES:  (left) Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of Bach in Leipzig, photo from wikimedia commons; (right) Bernd Göbel's 1985 statue of Bach in Arnstadt, photo from wikimedia commons.

Of course I wanted to know more, and promptly set aside the midterm.  The college library had many of the NBA scores but none of the NBA critical reports.  I e-mailed Patricia Sasser, the music librarian at Furman University just up the road, asking whether she could send me a scan of the page or two covering BWV 715 from the relevant critical report.  Within about an hour she graciously responded, but it only whetted my appetite.  When I asked for a few more pages and explained what I was looking into, she replied “That sounds like a paper for AMS-SE [the Southeast chapter of the American Musicological Society].”  At first I thought it was nothing more than a diversion from the work I ought to be doing, but having spent an hour pulling out all of the editions of Bach’s organ works that I could lay my hands on, I realized I was obsessed.  It did become a paper for AMS-SE, with the most complicated hand-out I’ve ever put together.  Here’s the first page of it:

There are six extant passaggio chorales attributed to Bach:

• Allein Gott in der höh sei Ehr, BWV 715
• Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ, BWV 722
• Herr Jesu Christ dich uns zu wend, BWV 726
• In dulci jubilo, BWV 729
• Lobt Gott, ihr Christen, allzugleich BWV 732
• Vom Himmel hoch da komm’ ich her, BWV 738

These six works offer a great perspective on the editing of Bach’s works because 1) none of them survives in his hand (although they do survive in manuscript copies from quite close to him) and 2) the texts conveyed by surviving sources are problematic at best.  None of these works was published until the 1840s.  Indeed, BWV 715 (together with BWV 726) actually did not make it into print until the 1893 BG volume.  These two chorales survive together in a manuscript copy by Johann Peter Kellner—neither a student nor a close colleague of Bach, but his sometimes flawed copies are nonetheless important sources for much of the Bach repertoire (as Russell Stinson has shown).  However audacious Bach’s chorale playing might have been, Kellner’s copy of BWV 715 is manifestly deficient—not only frequently omitting voices haphazardly, but giving harmonies that are implausible in their own terms or as the result of the counterpoint.  The start of Kellner’s manuscript is this:

SOURCE:  (left) detail of Kellner's score, from Bach-Digital; (right) my Finale transcription

Here the irregularity of the part-writing (at times three, or even just two voices) is surely suspect:  voices don’t merge, but they just disappear for a few beats, mid-phrase.  When the same melody is reharmonized a few bars later,

SOURCE:  as above, this time arranged vertically

that initial quartal harmony is, to the say the least, eccentric.  There are, indeed, enough problems here to make me wonder if Kellner was working from a fully-realized score at all, particularly as the four extant chorales apart from the two Kellner copied exist in two separate lines of transmission—one with full realized harmonies, and the other employing figured bass.    If Kellner was trying to realize the figured bass, though, he did it exceedingly poorly in this case.

All of this warrants further discussion, and this summer I was at work on an article about the editing of these works over nearly two centuries, but I had to put it aside when a new source for BWV 715 emerged.  It appears in a practical notebook of 154 pieces (mostly chorale settings) described on its label as being from the repertoire of Bach’s student Johann Christian Kittel (1732-1809—an exact contemporary of Haydn).  This notebook is dated 1800, and is the work of one Johann Christoph Bach (1782-1846), an organist in Bindersleben.  Speaking of eccentricities, this Bach copies some of the pieces across the full spread of an opening (verso and recto), so that there are only four systems in image below, with the gutter of the binding crossing through each of them:

SOURCE:  BWV 715, in my composite of verso and recto digital scans from the Saxon State and University Library, Dresden 

What I note about this source:

1.  It lacks the harmonic eccentricities of Kellner’s copy, 
2.  While the number of voices is inconsistent (including the disappearance of the bass line entirely in the fifth phrase—was this ever played from this score?!?), there are never fewer than three in the harmonized sections, and there very often more than four (five, six, and at one point eight), and
3. While such a thick texture means that parallels are inevitably present, the parallel fifth in the final cadence which had been eliminated in BG is here eliminated by means of precisely the same strategy—arriving at the tenor C early, echoing the cadence which had concluded the fourth chorale phrase.

Curiously, BWV 715 is the only one of the 154 pieces in this collection to be attributed to J. S. Bach.  There are several other passaggio chorale settings—not surprising, as it was a common practice for chorale playing during the eighteenth century.  If Kittel was the conduit through which BWV 715 entered this collection, it suggests that JSB didn’t regard this showy style of harmonizing and peacock preening as a youthful indiscretion set to annoy his Arnstadt elders:  he was still conveying it to his students in Leipzig in his very last years.

Nevertheless, these pieces have been tainted in some of the Bach literature as unworthy of the master.  On that rainy October morning, one of the first commentaries I pulled off my shelf was candid:

I have much more to say about these pieces, and eventually I need to get around to writing that article, if it doesn’t get scooped.  In the meantime, I reflect upon the strange intersection between weather and career:  if it hadn’t been raining on that Monday morning, all of the subject matter of the blog would have remained for me just items of idle curiosity, and you wouldn't be reading this now.

Long as I can be with you, it’s a lovely day.

19. (im)posing

which is the sixth installment of the Settling Scores

In this post I consider an edition of a central item in the Bach keyboard repertoire, BWV 971, the Italian Concerto from Clavierübung II.  The edition at hand was the work of Rosalyn Tureck (1914-2003), and it was published by G. Schirmer in 1983 under an imprint revealing that it was to be the first of many:

SOURCE:  cropped scan of the title page of Tureck’s 1983 edition

The series nameplate combines three terms that do not necessarily mix well:  critical edition, performance edition, and urtext.  (Later issues in the short-lived series add facsimile to the namplate, and this is accurate as each one includes a facsimile reproduction of her principal source(s), although sometimes these are reduced in size or too faint to be very useful.)

A critical edition is particular type of scholarly edition:  it is the product of the studious application of some text-critical method involving multiple sources.  In musical editions these methods are usually deployed in pursuit either of the earliest version penned by a composer, the last version as revised by a composer, or (increasingly, so it seems to me) a version that the composer never got down on paper but for which there is some authoritative evidence; but a critical edition need not seek a version known to the composer, but might seek a subsequent version (like Mendelssohn’s or Vaughan Williams’s re-scorings of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—in either case the usual Bach sources would be generally irrelevant to the text-critical process).  Whatever goal a critical edition is aiming for, I am all in favor of it when it is done well.

Many critical editions also claim the label urtext, which was coined to refer to the original reading of a text, but which in musical editions has come to describe little more than editions purged of interpretive editorial accretions—slurs and other articulation marks, dynamics, fingerings, pedalings, bowings, etc.  In that sense an urtext may not prove to be “critical” in the sense described above.  I would argue that an edition based on a single source—that is, in which there has been no collation of variant readings—cannot be a critical edition in its strict sense, although it may well be an urtext in at least the marketing sense.  (Although a number of webpages credit the publisher Günter Henle as the first to apply the term to music, the OED has a 1932 citation from the TLS referring to “the nearest thing possible in Chopin’s case to an Urtext,” and Breitkopf & Härtel used it for a series of publications in the 1890s.)

A performance edition aims to make visible to the user the various unwritten or obscure conventions that are otherwise invisible on the page—or, indeed, performance practices that are quite far removed from the composer.  Editorial additions to the text in such editions vary widely, and sometimes recognizing them for what they are can be difficult, as you have to know what a composer “looks like” to know when something has been added; at other times the interpretive suggestions are bleedingly obvious.  And—as I indicated in my very first post—I don’t disparage such editions in the least, as they are vital resources in understanding performance conventions of their time.  The goals of urtext and performing editions are  essentially at odds.  While it is a standard practice to adapt a text to modern notation conventions (for example, using treble and bass clefs only for keyboard music), many editions I see marketed as urtexts make more extensive concessions to aid in performers’ interpretations.  Tureck’s does this, but at least she explains in her preface exactly the sorts of interpretive marks she has added.   Nonetheless, her approach to these editions seems to transfer them out of the urtext realm into something else altogether.

The two other issues of the Tureck’s series were the lute suites BWV 996 and 997 adapted for the guitar.  These bear a curious note in which the editor insists that “[t]he Suites in this series, edited for classical guitar, are not arrangements.  This edition preserves the original form of Bach’s compositions” [p. ii].  Indeed?  An urtext for the wrong instrument?  If the word arrangement was too slippery for her to assert authority, why not transcription?  Clearly adjustments have been made in order to make this playable at all:  “Where notes are considered unplayable on the guitar the editor does not omit them.  For the sake of musical completeness they are included within parentheses in the musical text.  8ve signifies an octave above the original register, an editorial solution” [BWV 996, p. v].  An “editorial solution,” that is, to a problem created by the editor.  These are transcriptions—very good ones, perhaps, made by an authority on Bach performance—but they unnecessarily claim a specious scholarly objectivity.  She is posing to be more than she is.

So too her edition of the Italian Concerto (which Tureck significantly describes as edited “for Harpsichord or Piano”), which presents not merely a critically-established text, but overlays it with her interpretation.  The fidelity is not thus to the text of the work but rather to a learned artist’s understanding of it.  She glosses the Italian Concerto so that we can see what she perceives when she reads the music.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that:  I am reminded of Malcolm Bilson’s complaint that everyone uses urtext editions but few know how to read them. Tureck’s profuse prefatory remarks give the impression that hers is—for the first time ever—the text Bach meant.

“No autograph copy of the Italian Concerto exists.  Although several manuscripts in other hands are extant, the most reliable source is Bach’s own corrected copy of the first printing, published in 1735, in which revisions are set down in his hand. [Bach-Digital description here.]  The second printing appeared in 1736.  The inestimable value of Bach’s text is self-evident.  It is a rare instance in the keyboard works of direct contact with the original textual and performance intentions of Johann Sebastian.  The editor employs this musical text [i.e., the 1736 edition or the hand-corrected 1735 edition?] for this edition which, besides being an urtext edition, is also edited for performance on the piano or the harpsichord according to all the original indications in Bach’s corrected copy.  The stem directions, which in the editor’s opinion are of prime importance, have also been preserved as closely as possible.... [p. iii]  It has long been the custom to present a ‘clean’ score with urtext references, leaving the performer to find the way to performance solutions.  This procedure has served two functions:  (1) it has rescued editions from erroneous music texts and anachronistic performance directions[,] and (2) it has reflected scholarly research and orientation.  The bare urtext editions give the performing musician and teacher contact with the scholar’s approach and with increasingly reliable scores which provide a textual foundation upon which an authentic performance art may be developed....”  [p. iv]

The eyes glaze over at some point, and she relies increasingly on an authoritarian passive voice:

“In addition to current editing procedures, performance practices must now be introduced if musicians are to employ an urtext which will contribute to an authentic performance style.  Heretofore, the performer has been left uninstructed, an impossible practice for music composed some 250 years ago. Innumerable specific, historical performance practices are identifiable, and substantial data concerning them are available....  This edition integrates the textual sources with Bach’s own performance indications and historical style, based on Baroque performance practices for harpsichord. These practices, when combined with an uncompromising purity of Baroque style, considerations of the musical structure, and a fitting piano technique, have valid applications on the piano.” [p. iv]

Paul Badura-Skoda blasts this edition in his Interpreting Bach at the Keyboard, particularly in a section he calls “The Urtext Problem: An Imaginary Interview” [p. 188-200], where he imagines all the questions he wants to be asked and so that he can respond pithily.  In particular he takes Tureck to task for her radical proposal that in the second movement the accompanying alto line may be ornamented.  See her note before the beginning of the movement:

SOURCE:  digital scan of Tureck ed., p. 8

Whatever else one might say of this edition, it doesn't have the look of an Urtext.  As promised, it is laden with interpretive information.  These alto-line embellishments are a step too far for Badura-Skoda:

B.-S.  Look, if a professional musicologist comes up with a sensational claim such as, for example, that in the second movement of the Italian Concerto the alto voice should be freely embellished throughout, then he or she should adduce some evidence to support it.  I know of no Italian or German treatise written during Bach's lifetime that suggests the embellishment of accompanying (in contrast to imitative) inner voices.  Thus one might expect from Dr Tureck some evidence or explanation for such a claim... 

DR C.  Doesn’t she point to the fact that the thirds in the lower system of the Andante have two tails [stems] throughout, thus proving that they are two distinct voices? 

B.-S.  This is simply a naïve remark and doesn’t prove anything.  Everyone who is acquainted with the keyboard music of the eighteenth century knows that it was common notational practice to add tails to all thirds, sixths, and so on.  This even occurs in Haydn and Mozart.  If what she says were true, one could also, in the Italian Concerto, set about enriching the accompaniment of bars 30f., 46f., and 129f. of the first movement with ornaments. 

DR C.  But Tureck points to bar 17 of the second movement, where, in the first edition, there really is a Pralltriller sign in the middle voice... 

B.-S.  ... which is almost certainly an engraver’s error...  [p. 195f.; the ellipses are his]

He belabors this point at some length, adding that her suggested execution of the trill is wrong “because the Pralltriller formula she adduces is not found in a single treatise before 1757, seven years after Bach died.”

This notwithstanding, the only thing that irks me about Tureck’s edition is that she overreaches, imposing her way as the one true path to Bach.  Badura-Skoda does the same.  Maybe this is an occupational hazard for performers, but particularly for one who communed with the composer as “the high priestess of Bach.”  And, like any editor, Tureck is delighted when she can restore some textual variant in order to give us the truth:

“As a result of this comparative analysis, the editor brings to light an error in the first movement which appears in well-known 19th and 20th century editions including the Neue Bach Ausgabe.  At measures 13-14 the figure in the soprano had been altered to match measures 175-176 in the closing da capo section.  This figure is restored in this edition to its original version.”  [p. iii]

The figure to which she refers is this:

SOURCE: composite; my own transcriptions (clefs updated) from the first edition (1735) from IMSLP #417409

Tureck makes a big deal of this, but other editors before her have noted the oddity and opted to regularize.  Badura-Skoda’s response: “In the other Bach concertos initial and final tuttis of a movement are identical, which means that this discrepancy goes back to an engraver’s error that Bach overlooked” [p. 198].  Just off the top of my head I can think of one closing ritornello markedly different from the opening—the first movement of Bach's second “Brandenburg” concerto. (When another example occurred to me, I find that it is slippery—so slippery that, rather than digress here, I will plan to get back to it a future post; if you want to whet your appetite, you can see it here.)

In any case, “Original version” may be too much for Tureck to claim, as it appears that this figured had changed a bit before the 1735 publication.  A manuscript copied by Johann Christoph Oley (1735-1789) held by the Boston Public Library (details at Bach-Digital here, but a scan is available at the IMSLP) presented an earlier reading of the text which Oley subsequently updated to match the published version (altering even the title page to conform—see the account in the NBA Kritischer Bericht).  Wherever they might be placed metrically, these twiddles seem to have been second thoughts.  In these and other instances Oley has originally written 16th-notes, and then crammed the extra note in to make a pair of 32nds.  (Note that here, in addition to the cramped space, often the stem of the added note does not cross the closest beam, although in the places where Oley originally wrote 32nds (as throughout the second movement), the stems cross all the way to the main beam.)

SOURCE:  cropped screenshots from Oley MS, at IMSLP #302163

Even here, Oley doesn’t quite match the printed text: in bb. 73-74, the 32nds are early (by which I mean, on the first half of each half-beat); in bb. 175-76, the first pair is early, while the other two pairs accord with the printed reading.

Tureck’s labors devoted to Bach interpretation are admirable—especially her “progressive anthology” series, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach (3 vols, Oxford,  1960).  Most interesting there is a sort of etude in which she has rewritten the C-major 2-part invention (BWV 772) so that the hands are essentially reversed “for the development of flexible thinking in two parts”:

SOURCE:  cropped page scan  from Tureck, An Introduction to the Performance of Bach, vol. 2, p. 14

This series is naturally a product of its time.  (See especially her discussion of the sources of the Aria Variata, BWV 989, in vol. 3, p. 7)  The same is true of the Schirmer series from the 1980s.  This edition of the Italian Concerto remains in print, and it is part of a long tradition of instructional editions.  Its presumption to be more than it is probably does no harm—but a phrase from an earlier Badura-Skoda publication come to mind (co-written with his wife, Eva):  “[i]t would be a good thing if the use of the word ‘Urtext’ were protected by law...” [p. 129], rather like Champagne and organic in some jurisdictions.  It sells well, but is the label accurate? 

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

7. On second thought

In the Christian liturgical calendar, today is All Saints’ Day, which prompts me to consider small textual point about a hymntune that will be much in use today in Anglican services.  Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his tune SINE NOMINE for the text “For all the saints who from their labors rest” as a processional hymn in The English Hymnal (1906), for which he served as music editor.  This book revolutionized the music of Anglo-American hymnody, incorporating a wealth of traditions (chorales, Genevan Psalms, plainchant, folk music) into a new mainstream.  In addition to many hymn arrangements of folk tunes, Vaughan Williams contributed a several original tunes to the book.  SINE NOMINE is probably RVW's best known hymntune, but there are a handful of other contenders for that distinction.  

Some fifty years after the fact, RVW described his work on the hymnal partly as one of purging the Victorian hymntune repertory:

Whilst trying to include all the good tunes, I did my best to eliminate the bad ones.  This was difficult, because I was not entirely my own master.  My committee insisted that certain very popular tunes should be retained.  The climax came when my masters declared that I must myself write a fulsome letter to a prominent ecclesiastic asking for leave to print his horrible little tune.  My committee and I finally settled our quarrel with a compromise by which the worst offenders were confined to an appendix at the end of the book, which we nicknamed the “Chamber of Horrors.”  (p. 3)

In his preface to the volume itself he is somewhat more restrained:  “...a short appendix is added of alternative tunes to certain hymns for the use of those who do not agree with the choice of the musical editor.”  (p. xii).  Joseph Barnby's tune for "For all the saints" was clearly one not to RVW's taste, as it is confined to the Appendix.  Charles Villiers Stanford's stirring tune ENGELBURG (1904) was under copyright in the new edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern, and thus not available for The English Hymnal.  So Vaughan Williams wrote his own.

Below on the left is the beginning of the hymn as it appeared in the first edition.  The hymnal appeared in a second edition in 1933, and the image on the right is how it appears there.  Ignore the difference in formatting:  the textual variant is bb. 4-6.

Source:  cropped digital scans (600 dpi) of (L) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826; and (R) The English Hymnal (OUP) 1933 ed., p. 832.

The harmony of b. 4 is identical (tonic) in both versions, but in the later edition the walking bassline of the pedal is changed in order to accommodate a new harmony (V/V) in b. 5.  This, in turn, allows a suspended E on the downbeat of b. 6, resolving back to the 1906 text in the middle of that measure.

I have wondered about this passage for years.  This hymn is always in the service when I am on the organ bench on All Saints’ Day—or on the Sunday nearest to it.  It appears in many American hymnals, some with the 1906 text (as I first came to know it), and some with the revised text.  Why and when was the change made?

It is hard to date when it was changed, but earliest example I have found with the revised reading is another hymnal which RVW edited, namely Songs of Praise (OUP) which appeared first in 1925:

Source:   cropped digital scan Songs of Praise (OUP) 1925, p. 162.

If anyone can locate this reading in any printing of the first edition of The English Hymnal, I would be eager to know about it.  (A number of separate pamphlets of hymns from The English Hymnal were published over the years, including one in 1921 that included “For all the Saints.”  The only copy I have located is in the British Library, and for this post I haven't been able to check the reading there.  Perhaps the alteration was made at that time?)  Hymns are often the victims of cavalier and arbitrary musical alterations, as often the music editors of a hymnal are not really editors at all; at least in this instance, where Vaughan Williams was the musical editor and this is his own hymn tune, we can rule out the arbitrary and cavalier as a factors.

As to why the change was made, I can only suggest a possible reason.  Over the first notes of the hymn are instructions:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 826.

Verses 4-6 are given a four-part harmony setting:

Source: detail of The English Hymnal (OUP) 1906 ed., p. 828.

There we note that the “original” harmony is used for bb. 5-6, and that all that is lacking of the original in b. 4 is  the walking bass of the organ pedal line.  My suggestion is that, as this harmonization would appear in three verses already, RVW made an alteration for the other five just for the sake of variety.  I can’t prove it, and I’ve never been convinced that is an improvement.  But while I’m on the subject of this alternate four-part setting, I think the counterpoint for the Alleluyas is gorgeous, the tenor line in particular:

Source:  ditto

Here is a performance from York Minster; it uses the 1906 reading through verse 7.  At verse 8, the revised reading is used.  I’ll remember that idea the next time it is on the service list when I am on the bench.

4. Moving targets (Episode #1)

As will be gathered from the title, I will be doing an occasional series of “moving targets” posts.  In these posts, my targets are not the musical works so much as the editions of them—editions which change while under cover; sometimes under the same physical cover without any notice from publisher of the nature of the changes.  Sometimes the ISBN or ISMN remains the same, so that the alterations might only be discovered by accident when they are not advertised as “corrected.”  But even when they are so advertised, it isn’t always immediately clear what we hold in our hands.

For a while in the second half of the twentieth century, the concept of the Fassung letzter Hand held sway in scholarly editions of music, particularly those of 18th and 19th century music.  To a certain extent it still does.  It doesn’t really translate well:  “the version of the last hand” doesn’t convey much.  It really means something more like “the last authorized version.”  The concept has even been stretched to mean the version the composer indicated in some way that (s)he preferred, even if (s)he never documented it precisely.  (A good example of this is William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida.  The version that appears in the William Walton Edition is not one the composer ever heard or even put down on paper, but it is consistent with the comments he made about the 1976 Covent Garden revision:  he preferred the cuts, but he didn't like the transpositions and other alterations to accommodate Janet Baker's lower tessitura.)  And of course the idea of “new and improved” is a good marketing tool for selling another copy of something to someone who already owns it.  So even if some musicologists have moved on to “process editions” which document a piece in various stages of its existence, commercial publishers love it when a composer’s final thoughts can boost sales in an already established work.

In the course of looking into something for quite a different post appearing months hence, I stumbled across an interesting example of this.  I knew already that Leonard Bernstein's Candide has a complex textual history.  The show has been different things at different times, not only with lots of music scrapped and then resurrected (sometimes with entirely new lyrics, assigned to a different character), but the whole book replaced and then later patched and re-patched.  A good sign of this textual confusion is the copyright page of the only published full (i.e., orchestra) score of any version of the show—billed on its title page as “”SCOTTISH OPERA EDITION OF THE OPERA-HOUSE VERSION / (1989).”

And of course this doesn’t account for the further vicissitudes this work has undergone since Bernstein’s death in 1990.  I don’t expect to live to see a comprehensive critical edition of Candide.  It would probably take at least four volumes:  the 1956 version, the 1973 version (in which Bernstein took no active part, but which had great consequences for the subsequent manifestations), the 1988 version, and a huge appendix of all the other material, including details of at least the 1971 and 1982 versions.  The only project I have run across that seeks such comprehensivity in a work with such textual complications is this edition of Bizet's Carmen, but I don't know how much of it has actually come to fruition, as all of the information detailing what it was supposed to encompass has disappeared from the web.  [Here are scans of a few pages I downloaded a few years ago.]

Regarding the 1994 full score, the Bernstein website acknowledges:

While this publication encompasses the complete score, it by no means reflects a final, frozen show. Like its hero, Candide is perhaps destined never to find its perfect form and function; in the final analysis, however, that may prove philosophically appropriate.

Fine.  But Boosey & Hawkes seems to want to have it another way.  In this self-same 1994 score, we find the following notice:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. [i] of 1994 score

And yet, when the overture was included in Leonard Bernstein Orchestral Anthology, vol. 2 (1998), we find a notice that at first glance would amount to pretty much the same thing:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of p. viii of 1998 score

These two scores cannot present identical readings, however, because the instrumentation is substantially different.  The 1998 score presents what must be called—although it isn’t anywhere that I can see—the “concert version” of the work, scored for full symphony orchestra (basically triple wind with three percussionists, in addition to timpani).  This scoring seems to be Bernstein's own, as here is the first page of his manuscript (according to the Bernstein website).  This orchestra is too big for a theater pit, and always was.  The original 1956 Broadway recording is for a smaller ensemble, and from my listening it seems to correspond closely to scoring of the “Scottish Opera” version.  (The two aren’t quite identical, at least to my ear:  the most prominent differences are in the percussion.)  The reduced scoring—and reducing also the expense of remunerating musicians—cuts and redistributes the music of one flute, one oboe, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, a trombone, and a percussionist.  That saves 10 players, not counting shrinking the string sections too.

Listening to the 1989 recording, one finds that Bernstein actually used the full symphonic scoring for the overture, and the reduced scoring for the rest of the show.  (Just listen to the percussion at the beginning.  If in doubt, watch the live performance given a few days before the recording was made.)  Thus, despite the apparent contradiction because of the different scoring, both statements reproduced above could be true, as both texts do relate to the 1989 recording.  But it seems more complicated than that.

Although the 1994 publication is the only edition of the orchestral score of the complete show, the overture has been published in score three other times (not counting arrangements for band, etc.): in 1960 (G. Schirmer), reprinted with a few alterations in 1990 as “corrected edition” (Boosey & Hawkes), and newly computer-generated in 1998 as “corrected edition” (in the Boosey & Hawkes Anthology mentioned above).  I do not want to bog down this blog with all of the textual variants of these three editions, but the findings of my somewhat hasty collation of these sources are here, for the most indefatigable of readers.

A few of the most audible differences are worth mentioning.  One is the tempo:  the 1960 version is quite a bit faster (half-note = 152 at the beginning; whole-note equals 96 at the coda) than the subsequent editions (half-note = 132 at the beginning; half-note equals 152 at the coda), although the original metronome marks appear in the 1976 vocal score of the 1973 version.  This slowing down of the whole piece is consistent with Bernstein's own recordings.  His recording with the New York Phil made on Sept. 28, 1960 is at the tempi published in 1960; his 1989 London Symphony recording is at the tempi published in 1990.  In this respect at least the scores published in the 1990s can be said to reflect his performances in 1989.

This is not always the case.  The 1998 score (which claims to reflect changes made in 1989) includes an interesting change made at some later point.  Bernstein's performance 1960 recording, 1989 recording (and indeed the 1989 concert performance) all give this reading for the cymbals.  Note particularly the two clashes in b. 51

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 10, bb. 47-53

The 1998 score—and only that score—prints this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 9, bb. 47-53

Sensible though this is (i.e., aligned with the brass pattern), it is nowhere to be heard on Bernstein's recordings, nor indeed on any recording I have located before the 1997 “New Broadway Cast” recording.  It is not in the 1994 score, which claims to be based also “on the manuscripts of Leonard Bernstein at the Library of Congress.”  One wonders on what authority this change was made.   I haven’t seen those manuscripts, but even if the 1998 reading accords with the original notation, do we know enough—does anyone know enough, that is—about how the 1960 reading came about to know it does not have an authority superceding the original?  Is it an accident that has been performed faithfully for decades (and recorded by the composer), or is it the correct reading?  Are Bernstein’s recordings of it evidence of at least tacet acceptance?  And if the 1998 score is going to interpose such a change, should there not at least be some indication of how and/or why?  (The battle scene in Act I of the 1994 score (no. 5f) has at one point cymbals matching the reading of the 1998 score of the overture, and that might have been the source of the change; but I would like to have been told.)

I think the most curious variant reading is one that was revised at some point before the 1989 performance and recording.  The 1960 reading of the horn line in the final canon before the coda was this:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1960 G. Schirmer score, p. 38, bb. 225-230

Note the lack of a syncopation at the end of b.227—and it is to be heard thus in the early recordings, even though this departs from the strict canon with the other upper parts.  For me the puzzle is why it was ever this way at all—but it upholds the old maxim of philology that the more “difficult” reading is more likely the original.  (Who would think to modify it to this reading?)

The three scores printed in the 1990s all give the syncopated figure, yielding a more conventional strict canon:

SOURCE:  detail of scan of 1998 Boosey & Hawkes anthology, p. 34, bb. 225-230

And, until now, that was the way I thought it had always gone.


I will return periodically to instances of publishers accumulating more confusion than clarity.  That works exist in multiple versions doesn’t trouble me in the least.  Indeed, I find such differences to be of consuming interest.  But I am irked when a publisher makes a text more difficult to access, and particularly so when the information is ambiguous or misleading.  Still, it does give me something to write about.