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Work in Intangible Media
Studies in bibliography |  |
2. Music
The points that can be made about the nature of verbal works are
directly
applicable to thinking about music, even though the medium of
music,
sound, is less enigmatic than the ontology of language. What is
immediately comparable about the two is that in each case the notation
present on paper provides instruction for some kind of performance and is
not in itself—except in unusual instances—part of the work of
art. Com-
posers do sometimes create scores that are meant to have visual
appeal,
but the result is not necessarily a mixed-media work, unless the
composer
intended that anyone listening to a performance of the music
should also
be looking at the score. Nevertheless, such scores limit the
freedom of edi-
tors to alter the design of the notation, in much the
same way that shaped
verbal texts do. Another similarity between musical
scores and verbal
texts on paper is that each can be the basis for a
silent performance as
well as a rendition out loud. Many people are adept
at "hearing" music
by reading scores, though when they do so, they are
not experiencing the
work in the medium in which its creator intended it
to be experienced
(unlike the silent readers of verbal texts). No two
performances, silent or
aloud, can ever be precisely identical, for the
most that a score (like a
and delimits, a variety of performances.
The composer Richard Wernick once said, "Conductors and compos-
ers are
privileged in that our training has given us the capacity to hear a
piece
of music as we see it on the written page. But, unfortunately, there
is
an intermediary between the music and the public." This comment was
criticized as "silly" by a writer for the New York Times
(John Rockwell,
on 17 December 1989), but one understands what Wernick
was getting at:
every performance may depart from what the composer
intended. To me,
the problem with Wernick's statement is not the word
"unfortunately"
(which bothered Rockwell) but the idea that the musical
work is present
on paper and that those trained to read scores can
experience "the mu-
sic" directly. Will every trained reader of a score
of Wernick's "hear" the
music exactly as Wernick does? Will even Wernick
"hear" it the same way
every time he looks at it? In other words, the
reader of a score is an "in-
termediary" just as much as a person
performing aloud. It is in the nature
of works in intangible media that,
however determinate the instructions
for their recreation may be, the
texts of the works themselves are always
indeterminate. Textual critics
of music have available to them not only
written and printed texts but
also evidence of specific performances, both
in anecdotal accounts and in
sound recordings. All this material is essen-
tial for following the
textual history of a piece of music over time, but only
a part of it is
relevant to the study of authorial intention. Editors of music
have to
realize, along with editors of verbal works, that no single text can
accommodate all aspects of textual history simultaneously.
And many of those who use or discuss editions of music need (like
readers
of verbal editions) to learn more fully what the function of a
scholarly
edition is. When Donal Henahan commented (20 March 1983)
on the first
volume (
Rigoletto
) of the University of Chicago critical edition
of Verdi, he
noted that not every "discovery or interpretation" in the edi-
tion will
be "honored" by every performer. "Interpreters," he said, "will
always
want to slip the bonds. The eternal struggle between purity and
practicality is not merely inevitable but one of the dynamic forces that
keep the musical world going around." This is a peculiar way to talk about
a scholarly critical edition, especially since Henahan recognizes that
the
text is a product of critical judgment throughout and that the
editorial
annotation calls attention to many unresolved cruxes. To speak
of "slip-
ping the bonds" when one does not "honor" the text, which
suggests that
one is being a renegade, fails to acknowledge a primary aim
of a scholarly
edition: to give readers evidence for reconsidering the
text. The poles of
"purity" and "practicality" (if they are poles) have
no meaning in relation
to texts of music, or other works in intangible
media. Accepting any text
negligent; and departing from any text as a result of critical evaluation
is not being "practical" but is simply being responsible—it shows an ac-
ceptance, that is, of the responsibility that follows from understanding the
status of texts as fallible instructions for the recreation of works. Whether
one's goal is a stage of authorial intention (as in the Verdi edition) or a
stage of a work's later development, the makeup of the tangible text is a
matter of judgment, as is the range of performance that seems justified
by it.
Distinguishing between authorial intention and authorial expectation,
which I have often found useful in discussing textual questions relating to
verbal works, can also help to clarify textual dilemmas posed by music.
Thus the amount of interpretive variation and outright embellishment
engaged in by performers is a matter of convention that has differed from
one period to another. Composers of the past naturally expected their
work to be performed in whatever manner was conventional at the time,
but their own textual intentions may have been different. (There is, for
example, reason to believe that Verdi came to disapprove of some of the
embellishments regularly added by singers in his time.) To the extent
that
evidence is available, textual criticism and scholarly editions
should delin-
eate intended texts as well as those that were actually
heard by listeners.
Furthermore, the concept of expectation helps to approach the issues
argued about in the "early-music" debates of recent decades. Composers
clearly expected their works to be performed on the instruments available
in their own time, and they probably thought of the sounds produced by
those instruments when they read music silently. But does it follow, as
"early-music" adherents claim, that one is not being faithful to authorial
intention if one listens to music played on instruments developed later
than the composers' lifetimes? Not necessarily, if one regards composers'
expectations about instruments as a separate matter from
their intentions
to have certain notes and interpretive instructions in their scores. The
differing sounds of instruments made at different times are (like varia-
tions in tempo and volume) just one of the variable aspects of individual
performances. As the pianist Malcolm Bilson has pointed out (14 June
1998), instruments have always "played a role in determining interpreta-
tion," and performing a work on instruments of different periods is one
"avenue" for exploring what the music has to offer.
The use of modern instruments for earlier music is not analogous to
the
modernizing of verbal texts, an issue that has generated equally ve-
hement debate. Such modernizing normally refers to spelling and punc-
tuation, and the equivalent in music would be the modernizing of the
notation in scores; neither practice is defensible in scholarly editing since
to interpretation. For verbal works, the equivalent of modern instruments
would be modern pronunciation, which also is a feature of performance
encompassed within the framework that is provided by the set of printed
or handwritten instructions (a point not contradicted by the occasional
presence of rhymes or puns that require earlier pronunciation). The aural
texts of performances (including the nature of the sounds produced by
varieties of the "same" instrument) are thus, for the most part, materials
for social textual criticism (dealing with public texts and their reception),
whereas the study of authorial intention is primarily focused on visible
(notated) texts—at least when there is a written tradition that can be con-
nected with the creator(s).
But of course some music, like some verbal work, does not have a
written
tradition. Folk music of the past may have been transmitted by
imitation
over a long period of time before being written down, and at
present
there is music that has not yet been written down (as there was at
any
given moment of the past). Performances of pieces that originated in
the
past but that are not yet reported in written form or in sound record-
ings (or for which there is an independent living tradition) have a different
status for textual criticism from performances in the present by the
person
or persons who are creating or improvising the music as they
perform it.
Performances of the first kind provide evidence for
recreating intended
texts, whereas those of the second kind constitute
the intended works
themselves. Thus jazz, often created in performances
of this second type,
is analogous to such verbal (or partially verbal)
works as those produced
by performance artists and story-tellers.
The comparison between works of music and those of verbal language
brings
to mind another connection: verbal texts are often combined with
musical
ones (as in songs and opera) to form mixed-media works. The fact
that in
vocal music some sounds are produced by human voices is not
what makes
such works mixed, for the voices are simply musical instru-
ments;
rather, the mixed-media status of these works is produced by the
presence
of words that have meaning apart from the music. (Opera is of
course
mixed in a further way because of its use of the physical art of stage
sets and costumes.) Textual criticism of these verbal texts can be pursued
as one would any other verbal text; and, in the case of those written as
separate works (with no thought of their being set to music), variants
from
the original texts cannot be considered errors if they were the
intended
readings of the creators of the musical-verbal works. The many
similari-
ties between literature and music underlie the fact that in
musicology as
in literary scholarship there is a tradition of textual
study; and many of
the scholars currently engaged in editing music are
well versed in the
theoretical writings that editors of literature have
produced.
|
Work in Intangible Media
Studies in bibliography | |