* EXTRA * EXTRA * A newë work is come on hond

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield—hardly someone that I expected would come up on this blog—once categorized the issues facing the US intelligence services as the KNOWN KNOWNS, the KNOWN UNKNOWNS, and the UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS.  Today I present something which I suppose must fall into the very rare category of UNKNOWN KNOWNS.  This is a “discovery” in the sense that it has been recovered from obscurity, but as it was originally published it would be hard to say that it was truly one of the UNKNOWNS.  

The November 1919 issue of the Oxford literary review The Topaz of Ethiopia (which sounds like it ought to be a Humphrey Bogart movie) contained at its centerfold the following piece of music:

SOURCE:  digital scan of a digital scan [!]; unpaginated middle bifolio of The Topaz of Ethiopia Vol. I no. 4 (Nov. 1919);
For larger image, see this page.

And what musical W.W. was in Oxford in November 1919, particularly smitten with French music?  None other than William Turner Walton, aged 17,  right in the middle of failing all three attempts at his Responsions.   

The credit for uncovering this miniature goes to Dr. Eric Webb, who found it in the course of doing research on Robert Graves, one of the editors of this short-lived journal.  Among the others were G. H. Johnston (Lord Derwent), a Sitwell connection, which provides a link to Walton.

My congratulations to Dr. Webb, and my thanks to Stewart Craggs for passing it along to me; and to Alessandra Vinciguerra of the William Walton Trust for allowing me this “scoop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

No doubt this scenario has repeated itself countless times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

3. Handel with care?

The blurb on the back of the recent Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship (2013) begins

Absolutely.  And although the focus of this blog will generally be sources written down and printed before the digital age, increasingly our access to such sources is through some digital means—an image on the screen, whether or not it ever makes it on to paper in our hands.  Inevitably this blog will often deal with the IMSLP, the International Music Score Library Project—a massive database of musical sources, mostly printed editions, but some manuscript copies or and even “born digital” files that need not necessarily ever have made it to paper.  There are full scores, vocal scores, parts, arrangements and transcriptions, and more recently even recordings.  The idea behind it is to make public domain material accessible globally—although of course what is in the public domain varies across the globe according to the copyright laws of any given jurisdiction.

There is much good to be said about the IMSLP, but I think many of its users have little sense of the problems inherent in this sort of resource.  Principally, as a wiki there is tremendous inconsistency in the quality, quantity, and reliability of the information it makes so readily accessible—even when the contributors to the site include major research libraries.  As an example, here is what the IMSLP currently displays at the head of the section marked “Full Scores” for Handel’s oratorio Messiah (which Handel was in the middle of writing exactly 275 years ago):

SOURCE:  cropped screenshot of http://imslp.org/wiki/Messiah,_HWV_56_(Handel,_George_Frideric) (accessed 30 Aug. 2016)

These first items seem to present two different digital images of the autograph manuscript (the “composing score,” as it is generally called).  The second of these items (it currently appears in two different scans—IMSLP #18920 and #296169) is a scan of a facsimile published in 1892 as Vol. 45a of the German Handel Society’s complete edition.  The bulk of the project was the work of an individual, Friedrich Chrysander (1826-1901).  For his Messiah facsimile, Chrysander sought to draw together all known autograph material for the work.  This volume thus contains not only the whole of the composing score (British Library R.M.20.f.2), but also a few settings in Handel’s hand in the “conducting score” (held in the collections of the Bodleian Library, Oxford), as well as two settings of the text “How beautiful are the feet” which Chrysander mistakenly thought related to Messiah (amounting to some 25 pages from yet another manuscript in the BL—whose Handel holdings have all been digitized and made available), and a few sketch leaves at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.  This facsimile is therefore not intended to represent a single source:  it is an anthology of sources.

The first item listed on the IMSLP (divided into four files—#414200-414203) has a very misleading description.  Despite the claim that this is the “holograph manuscript,” these files together comprise a color scan of the same (black-and-white) 1892 facsimile that appears in black-and-white scans immediately below.  It troubles me that the scan omits the title page and front matter of the 1892 facsimile, and thus presents itself to be a scan of the autograph itself.  There are plenty of tidbits to reveal its true identity.  The source is indicated as being “State and University Library Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg (D-Hs):  M/B/1722.” A user familiar with Handel sources would know that D-Hs has a very important collection of Handel’s conducting scores, the bulk of it coming to Hamburg through Chrysander himself.  The composing score of Messiah, however, is not in that collection, but in the British Library, as noted above.  D-Hs has made available a digital scan of M/B/1722, and it is much more honest than what is in the IMSLP:  there is the front matter for all to see—and indeed we see from the book plate on the inside front cover that this copy was originally the property of its editor.

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://gcs.sub.uni-hamburg.de/PPN818310642/2000/0/00000002.tif

IMSLP #414200-414203 does not include that image.  But Chrysander’s printed page numbers are there, which should arouse some suspicions.  There is no signal to the user, however, that these files have pages from several different documents—anthologized in print in 1892.  Anyone turning to these files to do their Handel research will get a false sense of the document(s).

That would be bad enough, but Chrysander’s facsimile is false in another important respect—no matter which scan is consulted.  In his efforts to produce as clean a facsimile as possible, Chrysander doctored the images.  In his preface, he complains of an earlier facsimile issued by the Sacred Harmonic Society in 1868:

“Handel’s music paper is always the best of his age, but yet the ink often shows through.  In the printed photograph, the ink of these passages appears on the wrong side of the page with the same thickness and blackness as real notes, if it has not been previously carefully removed.  In the London [1868] facsimile the photographic plate is generally printed off rudely without any such cleansing.  The result is that the notes that show through seem to have equal value with the written ones, and make the page not only ugly, but in numerous places illegible, and even give rise to false readings.  I have removed more than ten thousand such blots from the London edition by comparison with the autograph.”  (Preface, p. v)

In his removal of “ten thousand such blots,” Chrysander sometimes went too far.  Here is a glimpse of Chrysander’s facsimile:  the tenor staff of bb. 111-122 of the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord”:

Source:  cropped screenshot of IMSLP #18920

http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 21 (pdf p. 41)

Here is the same excerpt as it appears on the scan available on the British Library website:

Source:  cropped screenshot of http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=r.m.20.f.2_f012r

 And, for good measure, the same selection as it appears in the new facsimile issued by Bärenreiter in 2008:

Source:  cropped from a digital scan (600 dpi) JPEG of the printed facsimile.

It appears to me that these last two are identical—and I would guess that the scans that appear on the BL website are the same digital files used in the production of the Bärenreiter volume.  (I gladly acknowledge that it was Donald Burrows’s commentary in the new Bärenreiter facsimile that drew my attention to the doctored Chrysander facsimile, and to these details particularly.)  The text in the new BL scan is replete with the blotches and blains that Chrysander so painstakingly removed.  But in his clean-up, Chrysander changed the text:  his fourth note is clearly on the fourth line (a C# in the tenor clef), where the blotted version reproduced in the later scan extends well into the fourth space—and that D is confirmed by the doubling in the viola line (which had no blot and so did not need to be cleaned):

Source:  viola line of Chrysander facsimile, as above; this is in alto clef

This D is the reading Chysander ultimately adopted in his edition of the work, with no comment about the apparent discrepancy in his facsimile.

Speaking of the blotchiest bar in the tenor line here (b. 119), Max Seiffert (who, after Chrysander’s death in 1901, brought the edition of Messiah through the press) comments

Source:  screenshot of http://petrucci.mus.auth.gr/imglnks/usimg/0/0b/IMSLP17693-Handel_Messiah.pdf, p. x (pdf p.8).  Seiffert’s A = Handel’s composing score; O, G and H are copies by John Christopher Smith (O is the copy in the Bodleian, G is at the Morgan Library in New York, and H a subsequent copy that was acquired by Chrysander for the Hamburg library.  Why doesn’t Hamburg scan THAT for the IMSLP?).

Compare the two images of the composing score here (bb. 119-120 from “And the glory of the Lord”—Chrysander from IMSLP #414203 on the left; BL scan on the right):

John Tobin (who edited Messiah for the new Handel complete edition, the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe—a project to which I will have cause to return in later posts) reads Handel’s procedure here differently than Seiffert—but then again Seiffert may have only seen the score via the already doctored facsimile.  According to Tobin (who translates this into the treble clef):

Source:  scan of John Tobin, Handel’s Messiah:  A Critical Account of the Manuscript Sources and Printed Editions (1969), p. 190

“Obviously in error,” and it is easy enough to see how Handel’s copyist could make such an error.  Tobin’s putative original reading fits the blots which the BL scan shows, but would be less clear from the 1892 facsimile’s reading (even blotty as it remains in this instance).  Seiffert complete misses out the E.

Just as another example of Chrysander’s tidying up, here is the 1892 facsimile’s presentation of something out of the Bodleian conducting score (which he included because it was in Handel’s hand); note particularly the annotations at the top of the page.

Source:  screenshot of IMSLP #18920 http://imslp.nl/imglnks/usimg/7/7f/IMSLP18920-PMLP22568-HG_Band_45a.pdf p. 281 (pdf p. 301)

Here is the page as reproduced in the 1974 facsimile of the conducting score:

Source:  a digital scan (600) JPEG of the printed facsimile (f. 57 of part II).

Not only has Chrysander eliminated a lot of the marginalia, as Donald Burrows points out, he has misread “Miss Young” and converted it into “Mißion.”  Note also his tempo marking:  allegro Larghetto.  (Whatever that means.)  In the original, is it allegro, that is, struck through—or is that just a stray smudge?  (In Chysander the smudge is eliminated.)  Its placement to the far left suggests to my eye that it was added after Larghetto, and thus maybe less likely to be a cancelled (earlier) marking.  But the sources are inconsistent for the tempo marking of this movement:  the version (for bass) preserved in the composing score is marked NBallegro; another version reads Andante.  Yet another lacks any instruction.

And so on.  With a work as textually well-documented as Messiah, the problems posed by these IMSLP items (and what they claim to be) scarcely do any real harm.  Indeed, by the time you read this, it may have been fixed.  (Check here.)  Even so, there have been tens of thousands of downloads of these files—if the IMSLP figures are to be believed—so somebody is using them.  This is surely the tip of the iceberg, and caution is advised.  

2. Risky business

It’s not news that music is a risky business.  Even with the narrower field of musical text, there is an element of risk.  Certainly music publishers are now more than ever in a risky business:  they compete for what is apparently a diminishing number of customers, and this competition may be against free legal downloads even more than against other publishers.  For a composer, notation is itself risky—virtually every element fraught with potential misinterpretation.  If they choose for their music to be performed by live musicians (and that is no longer the no-brainer that it used to be), they must give up some degree of control of “their” music:  the score is the inevitable nexus between the person trying to get the musical material in and those who would get the material out.   And I find the issues that arise from that interface compelling.

Much of what I will write in this blog has been said before—sometimes, indeed, because I want to point out things others before me have said (and done) that deserve renewed attention.  One such example is a small booklet by Walter Emery, published in 1957 by Novello & Co.  He called it Editions and Musicians, but I think his subtitle says it all:

Emery can get preachy at times.  At times that is stimulating, at times perhaps a little tedious.  I appreciate every page of this book, even when I find that I disagree with him.  For example, Emery concludes his chapter “The Need for Editing” thus:

“The fact is that until an editor has done his work, and done it properly, no performer can safely play old music, no analyst can safely analyse it, and no historian or critic can safely assess it.  The editor’s work is the foundation on which all other musical and musicological activities are based.”  (p. 14)

Really?  I can remember a time when I would have endorsed every word of this, but no longer.  It is not that I am against good editions of music—on the contrary, even when they cost a bundle.  It is really the word “safely” that bothers me.  Implicit in it, I think, is the idea of a definitive conception of the piece in the composer’s head, and that we are obliged to try to get as close to that as we can before we do anything else.  Moreover, I think Emery would say that these other activities (performance, analysis, criticism) that occur without such a proper editorial foundation are doomed eventually to crumble.

I’m skeptical that such a definitive conception ever existed in any meaningful and permanent way, and even more skeptical that such an idea could be conveyed to anyone else.  Think of the composers—first-rate composers—who couldn’t leave well enough alone.  (Not just “well-enough”—we might sometimes tend to gush with phrases like “apparent perfection.”)  Chopin might be an extreme example of this:  not only was he praised for “ever different expression” (and “Chopin never played his own compositions alike twice,” etc.), but those remarks are consistent with the documentary record of his own manuscripts and the editions that flow from them (i.e., all sorts of authorized variant readings).  Even given the fascinating editorial collation that has been unfolding through the superb Online Chopin Variorum Edition, isn’t there perhaps just too much here for anyone to take in?  Must the establishment of every authentic Chopin text of a work be complete before anyone can “safely” (to use Emery’s word) perform or analyze or critique it?  Could Emery be satisfied if an authentic text (say, a copy of the first French edition of a work marked up by Chopin for his pupil Jane Stirling) was all that a performer had seen?  This is, of course, extremely improbable, given the glut of Chopin editions on the market, settled in domestic piano benches, littering cabinets and weighing down shelves.  When Emery writes of the need for editing, it is a need to redress a context dominated by editing that was not done “properly” (again Emery’s word).

Or consider J. S. Bach, for whom, as Christoph Wolff has put it, there was apparently “no such thing as ‘untouchable’ text,” evidenced by his changes (not just “corrections”) even to his published works, and his revisions and reworkings of  (for example) the cantatas as he reused them in a subsequent years.  These are often instances where it is difficult to argue one reading is better than the other (indeed, there a few cases, like the two versions of the Canonic Variations, BWV 769 and BWV 769a, when it is seems impossible to say definitively which version came first).

Or Mendelssohn—whose “Revisionskrankheit” was a chronic (fatal?) compulsion to tinker away endlessly at his completed works.  At some point in this blog I will eventually return to the case of Mendelssohn’s celebrated “Italian” Symphony—a work that until recently was known only in its first version; Mendelssohn’s second thoughts prompted him to rewrites of the last three movements; the first movement he ultimately deemed unredeemable.  All this notwithstanding, it is one of his most popular works with audiences, who don’t seem to have noticed how unredeemable it is.  But more on that later.

In my first post, I mentioned the very different manifestations of Mussorgksy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, diverging in many respects from the autograph score, but still holding a secure place in the repertoire of pianists and orchestras.  I’d guess that Emery would regard any performance of the Rimsky-Korsakov version (or the editions derived from it) as a travesty.  But what about when later minds uncover new ways of hearing a piece—and a composer even embraces those new readings?  (Think Bob Dylan’s response to Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along the Watchtower.”)

I have been delighted to see that the editorial principles behind the new Works of Gioachino Rossini (Bärenreiter) take into account not just the authorial conception of the works, but also these works in performance, accumulating non-authorial performance traditions.  The score of the recent edition of Il barbiere di Siviglia (ed. Patricia Brauner), for example, includes in appendices not only three substitute numbers Rossini composed for later productions, but also several vocal variants (i.e., ornamented versions) that are extant in Rossini’s hand in as many as three (differing) sources.

Source:  cropped scan of p. 504 of WGR score of Il barbiere... (Bärenreiter, 2009)

Beyond this, however, the critical commentary includes materials about the performance tradition not directly deriving from Rossini:  a) the libretto for a Neapolitan-dialect version with spoken dialogue, and b) an extensive essay (59 pages!) by Will Crutchfield on “Early Vocal Ornamentation.”  I think it is a pity that these gems lie in the comparative obscurity of the very pricey commentary volume.

Would Emery say that as these latter variants are not from Rossini (but rather from the early performance tradition), a “safe” performance would be no performance at all?  Or that analysis or critique would be meaningless because it doesn’t relate directly to the composer?

Then again, just because Chopin was known to interpret his music anew each time, he didn’t take just any pupil; should we read his varying instructions to them with similar caution?  His famous remark to Filtsch (“We each understand this remark differently, but go your own way, do as you feel, it can also be played that way”) could hardly be regarded as interpretive carte blanche for any pianist.  Still, there is a sense in which G. Thomas Tanselle’s conceptual distinction between the text of the work and the text of the document might be useful—another idea I will be returning to in later posts.

I find that I’m more willing to see more risky performances, ponder risky analyses, and read risky critiques.  The safe alternative seems embalmed (fossilized?) in an established text, when the text itself was never sufficient.  That said, inauthentic readings (when they are known) should be acknowledged as such.  The situation can become bizarre, such as an exchange prompted by David B. Levy’s review of a critical edition of Beethoven’s ninth symphony by Jonathan Del Mar (1996).  (Levy's review is “Urtext or Performing Edition?” in Beethoven Forum 9/2 (2002), pp. 225-232).  Del Mar’s edition is a remarkable accomplishment in many respects, but Levy is astonished to see Del Mar depart from an established reading to favor a variant that is admittedly authentic (mvt. I, b. 81; the D in flute and oboe, rather than the familiar reading of B-flat):

Source: detail (woodwinds only) of scan of p. 13 of Del Mar’s edition of Symphony no. 9 (Kassel:  Bärenreiter, 1996)

[Here is a performance of this moment with this text.]

This “new” (original) reading results in a curious discrepancy in the subsequent appearances of this figure, where there is no leap of a sixth.  (This isn’t really an issue of recomposition in the recapitulation, but rather a different conception of motivic unity.)  Yet, as Del Mar remarks in the critical commentary, this D appears in all sources (which for this instance means the autograph (below), five scores made by copyists, and the first edition score and parts (1826)).  Del Mar surmises that the Bb (which first appeared in the 1864 Breitkopf edition)

“… was apparently invented by analogy with 276/80,346 [later recurrences of the motive].  Yet Beethoven wrote d in both instruments in A, so it can hardly be a mistake.”  (p. 25)

Source:  detail of screenshot of http://beethoven.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/beethoven/pix/sinfonien/9/1/990/00000020.jpg  
(mm. 80-84 as in Beethoven’s autograph f. 8v.)

 Levy puzzles that Del Mar would depart from the reading that would support “many published analytical studies… [which] have drawn attention to the significance of the perfect fourth (and its inversion, the perfect fifth) not only within the first movement, but throughout the entire work” (p. 229).  Del Mar replies:

“… where I as a sensible musician have to judge that the reading in the authentic sources is inconceivable (no less)—and especially where I can show how the error could well have arisen—I will present the more likely text. But if it is conceivable, I have a duty to stick to what Beethoven wrote. So despite all published analytical studies—which inevitably were based on the text they had in front of them—I restore Beethoven’s D in movt. I, m.81. Sorry: if we subsequently find that the analysts’ text was faulty, their studies will have to be rewritten. That is quite simply inevitable, and to argue that we must print a text that accords with previously published analytical studies is obviously putting the cart before the horse.”  (p. 105)

No need, in my view, for these “risky” analyses to be “safely” re-written:  the analyses can account for the work as it came to be known.  More significantly they document an important aspect of reception history:  our(?) sense of what the product of a genius should manifest, with (in this instance) an organic unity of motivic development encompassing the whole work.  The altered B-flat is no less a part of Beethoven’s 9th symphony (i.e., the cultural property it has become) just because Beethoven didn't write it.  If, with Del Mar, we regard the B-flat as bad editorial judgment, we must now correct it; we can't eliminate the effects it has had over the years (and we could, if we chose, continue to play it and analyze it), but we do have to acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it.  Those who disagree with Del Mar should still acknowledge that Beethoven didn't write it, but they may argue however they may that Beethoven meant it.

As my envoi, take this example from Emery (p. 19), who quotes Donald Francis Tovey’s hedging conclusion when faced with an (unknown) chromatic error in his text of the F# minor prelude from Bach’s WTC II: “a harmonic point of peculiar subtlety.”  But of course.  That’s what we expect from a genius, right?

1. The weight of tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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