Introduction. Musical Texts and Contexts: Stairway to Heaven or Highway to Hell?

BRUNO FORMENT

Orpheus Instituut

As if it were yesterday, I remember how, when I was a little boy, my piano teacher handed over the title and imprint of the first seminal score that was to reside on my instrument’s desk: the Notenbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach, published by Henle Verlag (J. S. Bach 1983). What an indelible impression that volume made upon an eight-year-old! I recall that, while thumbing through its pages (which I did quite often), I was confronted with such unfathomable things as a table of ornaments, an editorial preface, a critical report, and a mysterious word on the cover saying Urtext. Filled with pride, I returned to the music academy to hand the dark bluish grey album to my piano teacher, who took the score, proposed a first piece (Christian Petzold’s g-minor Minuet BWV Anhang 115), and played it for me. But consternation followed immediately thereupon, as she began to spoil the pristine pages by pencilling fingerings, dashes, and dots above and on the staves. So much for my spotless urtext! No matter what I felt about my teacher’s scribbles, fighting with the clean typography, I had to endure the same abysmal spectacle lesson upon lesson, with dozens of marks for dynamics, articulation, and expression accumulating, turning my musical treasure into a palimpsest. By the time my life as an apprentice pianist with the Notenbüchlein was deemed over, the “Henle Verlag Urtext” had become, so to speak, “her text”—a piano teacher’s artistic-technical script, notated on top of a dead composer’s (idealised) score, and grafted onto a young, dutiful performer’s fingers and body.

I took my revenge. Many years later, I presented what I remember to have been a magisterial rendering of a three-part Bach invention before an examination jury. Again, a heavily annotated Henle Urtext underlay my performance, but I played the piece by heart and with my whole heart. So impassioned it was, indeed, that I took a slightly different tempo than the one I had been taught, and added—oh, disgrace!—lush pedalling and rubato. The gesture did not please the jury: I remember my teacher coming to see me, right after the exam, first to congratulate me on my audition and then to repudiate my musical interpretation—“that was Romantic, boy, not the way one plays Bach these days.” In hindsight, I should have responded by inverting Wanda Landowska’s legendary quip: “You play Bach his way, and I’ll play him mine” (Watson 1994, 110)!

Had I been aware of the phenomenon of historically informed performance (HIP) at that time, I would not have felt so hurt and resentful towards both my teacher and Bach for seeming so inhospitable to a young musician’s creative aspirations. Like most teenagers, I had not yet fully come to grips with the sensitivities of notated Western art music and the plain truth that, for compositions to become the audible matter we call music, they need to be transduced or, rather, trans-muted, undergoing a transformation from silent, symbolically coded prescriptions into physical actions on a sound-producing interface. Although the artistic responsibility for that transmutation is attributed to performing musicians, those actions are never arbitrary; rather, they are informed by an authoritative corpus of texts, contexts, and subtexts—with “texts” understood according to the broadest sense of the term, that is, as any language that can be notated or scripted. The score underlying a performance constitutes but one such text, usually joined by a gigantic set of alternative versions, “similar” compositions, instructions, conventions, opinions, and the like. Determined by, and themselves determining, performers’ artistic (and pedagogical) orientations, skills, and worldviews, these texts drive artistry in more ways than some would readily admit. ¹ The encounters between J. S. Bach’s Urtext, my piano teacher’s instructions, and my performances as an adolescent offer but one instance of musicians’ negotiations with texts of all sorts. It is to the latter topic that this collection of essays turns.

Negotiating textuality and contextuality

Music practitioners and scholars maintain manifold modes of negotiation with musical textuality. One radical orientation has it that musicians should do without scores and rely exclusively on their auditory senses. It is well known, for that matter, that the pedagogy, performance, composition, and understanding of music have never depended exclusively on musical literacy, as several oral traditions—historical and contemporary, Western and non-Western—testify. François Couperin famously advised the readers of his L’art de toucher le clavecin “not to show the score to children until they have a certain quantity of pieces in their hands,” it being “almost impossible that, while looking at their book, their fingers should not be disturbed and contorted, and that even the ornaments should not be altered; besides, memory is formed much better by learning by heart” ([1716] 1717, 12, my translation). ² In a similar vein, but more than two and a half centuries later, HIP cellist Anner Bylsma is recorded saying that “the mastering of an instrument never goes through reading first, and then playing. It goes through playing first, and then reading—and having good colleagues, especially people who play other instruments” (Sherman 1997, 209). ³ Both assertions presuppose that mimicking the playing of a skilled musician can substitute for deciphering a score, without compromising musical content. All the same, an underlying musical text remains essential as far as Western art music is concerned, even when transformed by a surrogate author like Couperin the harpsichord instructor, Bylsma’s “colleagues,” or my piano tutor. ⁴ A “good musician,” Robert Schumann once remarked, “understands music without a score, and a score without music. The ear must not need the eye and the eye must not need the (external) ear” (1854, 1:28). ⁵ But the scriptural (or ocular) and aural remain standing as two branches of a single tree—a text-based and -producing art form—that cannot be cut down so easily.

A second, no less radical orientation towards textuality assumes the sanctitude of musical texts, beginning with the compositions themselves, or what remains of them on paper. In the present volume, though, we will not debate yet again whether there exists an ontological entity called a “musical work,” the intellectual properties of which can be represented through a score. ⁶ After all, vital deviations can exist even between different “first” and “critical” editions of the same “work”. Multiple scores of one and the same composition can divulge different amounts of detail, with varying quality and accuracy, as well as varying relevance for the context at hand. We cannot expect the lacunary “diagrams” from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to provide as many performative minutiae as, say, a score in the tradition of New Complexity. Neither should we be surprised that historical sources with a demonstrable link to live performances are not necessarily annotated more densely.

By now, historically informed performers have forsaken the quest for the holy grail of the “authentic” or “definitive” text; instead, they have come to recognise the limitations of transmitted musical code, emphasising the need to turn “shorthand” or “thin writing” into vibrant performances (Haynes 2007; Kuijken 2013). HIPsters tend to rely for this on con-text-ual documentation of all kinds—theoretical treatises, vocal-instrumental methods, annotations, and the like. Thurston Dart (1954, 15) once contended that “every scrap of information that an early composer conveyed to his performer by means of the written notation he used must be treated as though it were gold; it is very precious, and far more valuable than any editor’s opinion, however enlightened this may be. ”⁷ In Dart’s wake, an army of contextual gold diggers has hunted for treatises, methods, and other sources that can lend an allure of intellectual-artistic integrity to the sonic renderings of music early and not so early. Total immersion in a musical style or period helped by vintage materials has thus come to supplement the hunt for the princeps. But the sense of antiquarian prestige has remained. Already in The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, Arnold Dolmetsch (1915, 23) emphasised the presence of “both the German and the French versions” of Johann Joachim Quantz’s 1752 Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen in his personal library, “as well as most of the other works quoted in these pages.” And “if I had not been the owner of these precious books,” Dolmetsch continued, “I could not have accomplished my work, for it is only by studying them again and again, at leisure, for years, that the light has come to me. The reading possible at a public library is necessarily too superficial to assimilate the details of such an intricate subject” (1915, 23). Buy the antique copy or facsimile, if you can! Dolmetsch’s words betray an ambition to transcend current practice and knowledge through a deep, emphatic reading of historical (con)texts. ⁸ With the compositional text itself being insufficient, HIP demands that musicians inscribe their interpretations into scholarly verifiable text-ures, made up of historical “evidence” and accredited by extensive liner notes and similar documents.

The acute critic will immediately identify limits to such musical con-text-ualisation. The first concerns the fluid boundaries between text and context. How “open” or “closed” can a composition be? Where to locate the liminal space between the “piece itself” and the “outside world” (Korsyn 1999)? What is a composition’s immediate “good neighbour”—to use Aby Warburg’s concept that is central to Björn Schmelzer’s essay? And to what extent are composers’ preparatory sketches and unfinished drafts intrinsic to the composition—in-texts, rather than con-texts? ⁹

A second issue pertaining here is whether extra-musical discourses that affected a composer in creating a work can be fed back into performances of that very repertoire. Some modern authors have acknowledged that “authentic meanings of a work arise from our relating it to an array of things outside itself that we believe gave it meaning in its original context,” but “these things are not inherent in the score,” as a result of which they “are not susceptible of presentation in concert” (Tomlinson 1988, 123). Xiangning Lin’s essay in this publication boldly updates this view, exploring analytical tools and digital multimedia to artistically represent a composer’s extra-musical influences directly in performance.

A third question concerns the degree to which contemporaneous primary sources can be both comprehensive and synchronously aligned to compositions and performances. Among primary sources, not everything that shines is necessarily gold. To begin with, the amount of available documentation varies greatly according to historical-geographical area: some repertoires are exceptionally well documented, while others are not in the least covered. Moreover, information from one context cannot be merely extrapolated to another, in particular when dealing with musical repertoires that are sensitive to regional, generic, and stylistic differences. Nevertheless, HIP has witnessed idiosyncratic precepts (such as the ideal harpsichord-cum-violoncello continuo proposed in C. P. E. Bach 1762) becoming conventions for vaster swaths of repertoire than was often meant. Many historical testimonies fail—or deliberately refuse—to confide every single trick of a trade; others are by no means up to date or muse nostalgically on an ideal past; and still others are simply not up to the task of articulating insights with the competence necessary to convince modern-day practitioners (Koopman 2019, 6). In no later than 1686, Andreas Werckmeister complained about over-codification in his time, about the “hundred special rules . . . prescribed for beginners,” which in his view could be replaced with simpler foundations (96, my translation). ¹⁰ In a different realm, Voltaire held that the arts of his day were awash in “a prodigious number of rules, most of which are useless or false. We will find lessons everywhere, but few examples. Nothing is easier than to speak in the tone of a master about things that cannot be executed: there are a hundred poetics against one single poem. One sees only masters of eloquence, but almost not a single orator” (1792, 311). ¹¹

At the same time, alternative performance options, which would be worthwhile testing, have been dismissed a priori because they were not recorded by one or another piece of “evidence” (Lawson and Stowell 1999, 24). It takes courage for musicians to openly acknowledge their deviations from the written record. Imagine a disclaimer in a programme warning concert audiences: “We know the texts say ‘A,’ but we shall nonetheless perform our own ‘B’ tonight.” ¹²

Too many texts?

In the “Age of Abundance” that is the early twenty-first century, it is no longer a scarcity of texts that seems to be at stake; instead, it is a lack of tools with which to retrieve the right information from the clouds of digitised materials that are spread all over the World Wide Web, via silos such as Google Books, Gallica, Archive.org, and so on. Music professors are increasingly complaining—justly or not—about students dismissing printed critical editions in favour of online freebies, irrespective of whether the latter scores are prepared by amateurs or digitised by world-class institutions to which an earlier generation had little or no access. ¹³ Music publishers are worried—justly or not—that open access may end the golden era of the urtext, edited facsimile, and critical edition. ¹⁴ Whereas earlier generations encountered difficulties in locating a copy of a trustworthy source at a library within travelling distance, current generations have a hard time picking the right source from a plethora of available materials (including digitised early prints and manuscripts) and in retrieving information from it. If something needs to be transmitted to young artists nowadays, therefore, it is the tools and skills to navigate their way through the textual jungle.

One such toolkit for text mining is offered by the library that occasioned this volume: the Ton Koopman collection at the Orpheus Instituut (Forment and Van der Linden 2021). The unique asset of this former private library consists of the thousands of handwritten indices the owner and user, a noted HIP musician, provided for the twenty thousand (or 350 running metres of) scores and books. Nearly every volume contains a list of keywords, followed by page numbers referring to passages our collector found noteworthy. Written on separate slips of paper in the case of old books, or directly into the front matter of modern exemplars, Koopman’s indices map knowledge in intricate ways, translating textual, musical, and iconographic content into concepts that are not only surprisingly consistent but also comprehensible to modern musicians. Some keywords are straightforward topical terms, personal names, or toponyms, yet many others represent ongoing research questions in HIP: What to do with the fermata in Lutheran chorales? How to configure and set up a choir or orchestra for certain historical repertoire? What about the issue of overdotting? And so on. Each of the linked passages in the sources represents but one possibility in the eyes of a certain author; when brought together into a master index or a database, Ton Koopman’s indices reveal a whole range of options for artistic practices that previously co-existed in a network of ideas and agents, and that can newly co-exist in a performed presence.

Koopman’s indices do not merely enable artists and scholars to dive into the primary sources more easily; they also help them articulate their artistic choices vis-à-vis textual archives. For, like authors, musicians—within and outside the Western art tradition, HIP and other—are willy-nilly relating their artistic acts to texts, inserting their practice and the discourse around them into a polyphonic texture of earlier “writings.” ¹⁵ Whether adopting an attitude of compliance (children fulfilling their music teacher’s instructions), allusion (citing or paying homage to another), summation (offering a “definitive” version), or outright subversion of norms, canons, or traditions, to create and perform music is to negotiate one’s own artistry with existing texts, if not to converse with the dead. ¹⁶

Performative acts and texts ¹⁷

In the present volume, ten artist-researchers critically re-evaluate musicians’ relationships with texts of various kinds. In which ways, each of them wonders, do texts (re)shape performative acts? Where to situate the limits of textual negotiation, with respect both to musical interpretation itself and to the extent to which texts encroach upon autonomous artistic choices?

The singer, choral conductor, and music theorist Niels Berentsen opens the debate with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities posed by lacunary compositions from the Middle Ages. While the goal of “reimagining” (i.e., reconstructing and performing) such pieces is to hypothesise complete originals, he argues that the lacuna or “gap” must remain a permanent feature of the musical “work”—the latter as understood, with Umberto Eco, in its full openness, serving as a unique place for creative engagement with the past. Reconstruction offers a tool to revalue the network of textual possibilities available to the historical composer.

Björn Schmelzer goes one step further, contending that the compulsive drive to fill in each and every gap left by the past is at odds not only with Eco’s open artwork and the Renaissance non finito (whose very incompleteness completes the work) but also with music’s potential engagement with the inseparably entwined actions of remembering and forgetting. Referring to the historical disposition of books in Aby Warburg’s art-historical library, he proposes that the textual gap stages the emergence of a divided or fragmented subjectivity that appears to originate from an external source but is in fact intrinsic, creating an unsettling ambiguity that draws readers in and compels them to alter their intended course of investigation. Historical sources do not constitute descriptive testimonies of the past, for that matter; they are enigmatic, diagrammatic, symptomatic. Schmelzer consequently does not treat musical sources as parts of a complete historical narrative in productions by his own ensemble, Graindelavoix, but rather allows them to function as engines of alienation and disruption.

What happens when music-textual artefacts are not merely completed, but released to a level on which, instead of a pre-existing work (or our imagination thereof), a historical practice provides an opportunity for Werktreue? Organist, pianist, and choral conductor Jonathan Ayerst explores this idea through improvisations on canonical repertoire by J. S. Bach. He argues that improvisation can yield many versions of a score that is taken as a point of departure. Discussing the implications of improvising in terms of cognitive processing, ontological beliefs, cultural situation, and skill development, he shows how characteristic features of a model can be reinterpreted as a repertoire of expressive functions and compositional devices.

Turning to printed textual objects and their typographical and physical characteristics, the soprano Elizabeth Dobbin investigates how late seventeenth-century French anthologies of songs evolved in terms of readability and manoeuvrability. Aesthetically pleasing and designed with the user’s convenience in mind, these publications, dedicated to salon culture, open up broader cultural perspectives, especially when performed with historical decorum and affective economies in mind. Negotiating the gap between the printed music and performances in accordance with society’s dictates, she argues, is a crucial consideration in the search for the lost art of salon song.

A second group of essays leaves the realm of early modernity to probe an area that is typically associated with canonical repertoire and, consequently, with stable musical texts: the nineteenth century. And yet, as the pianist Camilla Köhnken argues, performers’ dealings with Great Works evolved notably even after the “Beethoven paradigm” or “work concept” (Goehr 2007) had emerged. Köhnken’s scrutiny of memoirs, letters, reviews, printed scores, and other sources documenting the careers of Carl Czerny and his student Franz Liszt shows how the two composer-performers helped create the “Beethoven myth” while adopting alternative attitudes to the Great Composer’s textual legacy. The story of Czerny and Liszt studying and performing Beethoven marks a notable transition in perspective for performer and listener alike—a shift in focus from performers’ inspired live renderings of scores to dead composers’ venerated legacies, mediated by humbled performers through preconceived interpretations.

Both perspectives have continued to persist up to this day, as the cellist, conductor, and musicologist George Kennaway explains. Deploying metaphors from biblical and legal exegesis, Kennaway distinguishes two fundamentally different attitudes in the realm of the urtext: while one seeks to discard textual accretions to a maximum extent but is faced with the challenge of multiple co-existing musical interpretations, another seeks to include as many textual supplements (a concept also investigated by Clare Lesser) as possible, thus necessitating careful curation by the performer. This dichotomy raises questions about discursive limits and control: Who has the authority to decide what is “extra-textual”? Is it beneficial at all to make a definitive choice between textual approaches?

The cellist and gambist Kate Bennett Wadsworth joins Köhnken and Kennaway in their archaeology of nineteenth-century performance texts. Her analysis of contemporary editions of, cadenzas for, and annotations to Robert Schumann’s Cello Concerto shows the performer/composer bifurcation at work: whereas melodic and expressive portions of Schumann’s composition were left intact in performances, experienced cellists typically overrode the original text in passagework, flourishes, cadenzas, and codas. The latter changes to Schumann’s score have come to be seen as irreverent by posterity, yet they may be necessary to maintain a sense of vibrancy and freshness when performing this repertoire.

But do performers have to “interpret” at all? How much do they have to invest analytically or hermeneutically in a score before playing it? The conductor and musicologist Nir Cohen-Shalit paints a sharp, unidealised picture of nineteenth-century German orchestral practice in order to advocate “interpretation-free” performances, relinquishing fixed, preconceived ideas of how a musical work should go. Such a flexible style of orchestral performance, he argues, should be based on a spontaneous co-creation between the conductor and the orchestra, rather than on the former’s centralised power and authority. Considered “under-rehearsed” from the modern perspective, such an approach is almost unthinkable in a world of polished, (over-)edited content, and yet it could potentially liberate Romantic scores from the tangles of concert-hall routine and encourage values of pluralism, curiosity, and exploration.

Xiangning Lin pursues an opposite way. In her chapter on Maurice Ravel’s “Oiseaux tristes” (from Miroirs), which opens the third and last portion of this volume, dedicated to the twentieth century and its aftermath, the Singaporean pianist proposes a multi-layered artistic inquiry that incorporates intertextual analysis, musical interpretation, conscious performance practices, and autoethnography. Exploring the correspondences between Ravel’s music and Edgar Allan Poe, she highlights the challenges of translation, translocation, and artistic ownership in the context of global connections and exchanges. Her multimedia production of “Oiseaux tristes” (which can be enjoyed on this companion website) serves both as a platform for expressing the latter challenges and as a demonstration of the potential of historical poetic ideals and modern creative agencies to contribute to the process of recontextualisation and translocation.

Clare Lesser brings the discussion on musical texts and acts full circle through her deconstruction of these very concepts, as well as notions of “supplement” and “repetition,” through the cases of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Plus-Minus and John Cage’s Four⁶. Such scores, she argues, embrace undecidability by means of their experimental notation and thus encourage radical interventions by their interpreters. Each repetition occasions a new supplement, resulting in a process of decentring between text and act that generates future realisations and works—a continuum of genetically connected, but eventually idiosyncratic, performative progeny. Repetition undermines the centre as a fixed place, acting instead as a function that allows for the evolution of the line, maintaining supplementarity while creating new realisations. The blank cheque of performance is a phoenix, Lesser concludes, with each new realisation rendering the previous one into ash, ready for the next iteration. The performative act remains virgin, therefore, even when repeated infinitely in a chain of play and supplement.