Querying the dead

Listening to a Webern score without being able to read it must be rather like studying a great  architectural mastepiece without having access to a ground plan.  ...  The new [music], when it eschews any links with the past, can be absorbed only by those who are able to hear the music and read the score (the aural equivalent of the architect's blueprint).

ERICH LEINSDORF [1]

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Why should listening to a piece of art music be like studying a piece of architecture (or anything else)? Why shouldn’t it be instead like taking a tour of a palace (castle, cathedral)? 

     Does one have to study the shooting script and the production designer’s storyboard in order to “absorb” a film of Eisenstein, Godard, or Tarkovsky?  Or read the source code of computer programs used to produce some of the art works at MOMA in order to “absorb” such works?  

What exactly does the ability to read a score amount to? 

     When in 1854 the conductor Hans von Bülow sent Richard Wagner some scores to review, Wagner responded with a letter in which he admitted his borderline incompetence (if not impotence) as a score reader:

     ...[H]ow am I to get any clear idea of these [scores]? You know how abominably I play the piano, and that I cannot master anything by that means unless I can get a clear conception [of the music] beforehand.  What I get from a simple reading [of the score] is not enough ... to arrive at an idea of a composition.[2]

     Did Wagner have the ability to read a score?

     If not, then should we say that Wagner – one of the most revolutionary composers in history, the man whose harmonic innovations dominated compositional thinking for half a century – was unable to “absorb” challenging new music?

     And if Wagner did have this ability, why make such a big deal of it if this ability amounts to so little?  Wouldn’t making it a necessary condition for absorbing new music be as vacuous as making the ability to move one’s fingers a necessary condition for playing the Hammerklavier Sonata?

What else must be added to the ability to read scores to make the entire package sufficient for “absorbing” challenging new music? 

     What exactly was missing in the ‘skills-and-abilities package’ of Hector Berlioz – the composer of revolutionary gargantuan orchestral works, one of the most important conductors of the century, and certainly a competent score reader – that made him unable to comprehend the Prelude to Wagner's Tristan and Isolde?:

     I have read and re-read this strange page; I have listened to it with the most profound attention and a healthy desire to discover its sense; ... I must confess that I have yet to discover the least idea of what the author wishes to do![3]

     Why was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony “incomprehensible” to the superb violinist and an important conductor-composer Louis Spohr?[4] 

    Why was the virtuoso pianist and respected composer Ignaz Moscheles unable to make sense Chopin’s harmonic innovations, which he described as “inartistic” and “inconceivable”?[5] 

     Why was Bruno Walter, an excellent pianist and one of the past century’s great conductors, unable to understand atonal and serial compositions and went as far as to deny that these compositions constitute music?[6]

     If there is nothing that all and only score readers who “absorb” challenging new music have in common, then why bother stating necessary conditions (like score reading) for what depends on some kind of mysterious ‘neuro-cognitive luck’?  Why couldn’t a functionally illiterate music lover be neuro-cognitively lucky to “absorb” challenging new music without reading scores?  (After all, when luck is involved, pretty much anything is possible so long as one gets lucky enough.)

What does it mean to describe a score as “the aural equivalent of the architect’s blueprint”? 

     Should reading a score produce in the mind’s ear an aural image of what the composition would sound like if heard in actual performance? 

     How would this work for all those professional musicians who lack absolute pitch?  (The list of such ‘neurological defectives’ reportedly includes Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Furtwangler, and Bernstein.[7]) 

     If the music one hears in the mind’s ear  is in a wrong key (or is based on a transposed tone row), doesn’t it make the score at best the equivalent of a copy of the architect’s blueprint in which all dimensions have been changed by a constant factor?    

     Wouldn’t such ‘transposed mental hearing’ already seriously falsify a good deal of contemporary music in which the aesthetic emphasis is on timbre, color, and texture rather than on pitch and rhythm?  (In such cases, a transposed mental image may be ‘interval isomorphic’ to the original work, but will distort its aesthetic significance as much as a reproduction of a painting in which all colors have been shifted along the color spectrum.)[8]

     And just how much aural imagery should be expected from reading the scores of complex modernist orchestral works written after 1945?  Wouldn’t even professionals with absolute pitch and good score reading skills have their aural imagination defeated by the staggering complexity of simultaneous combinations and cross-movements of multitudes of pitches, timbres, textures, rhythms, and dynamic gradations?  This was Elliott Carter's experience as a member of the jury at the 1963 festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music (all jury members were professional composers).  Faced with the score of Penderecki's Threnody, Carter tell us, "almost none of us could have imagined how [this work] would sound from the score alone."[9]  And the Penderecki piece is not even as complex as some other modernist works from the same period (e.g., those of Carter or Ferneyhough).

If a score is “the equivalent of the architect’s blueprint” (never mind the “aural” qualification), shouldn’t score reading yield a clear understanding of the work’s “ground plan”?  (If that weren’t the case with architectural blueprints, nothing would ever get built.)

     How would that be possible with compositions which have no “ground plan” at all, i.e., compositions in which the values of musical parameters are based on arbitrary choices (e.g., Cage’s Music of Changes and Atlas Elclipticalis, Stockhausen’s Gruppen) or on mathematical models of stochastic (random) processes (e.g., Xenakis’ Pithoprakta)? 

    As for non-aleatoric music, how is it that score-reading professionals can find a new work attractive enough to perform it (or repeadly listen to it) without knowing its “ground plan”? 

     It took the pianist Charles Rosen – who was one of the soloists in the premiere performance of Carter’s Double Concerto – a long time before he "began to realize slowly and painfully" (how slowly, Rosen wrote, he was ashamed to admit) that the rhythmic organization of that composition’s coda employs a long-range polyrithm rather than the familiar cross-rhythms.[10] 

     It took the violinist Rudolf Kolisch even longer to identify (around 1932, and not completely) the tone row in Schoenberg's Third String Quartet, the work Kolisch premiered in 1927 as the leader of the Kolisch Quartet.[11] 

     The tone row of Boulez' Le Marteau sans Maitre - one of the canonical works of post-war serialism - remained unknown for more than twenty years after the work's premiere.[12] 

     And it took at least twenty years for Elliott Carter - who himself had produced some of the most complex musical works ever written - to recognize significant rhythmic regularities in the music of Varese, the music he had known since his early youth.[13]

     So, if professionals can perform (or listen to) a work for years without knowing its ground plan, why should non-professional music lovers be advised (let alone required) to have this kind of knowledge as a prerequisite for rewarding encounters with new music?

     Why not instead accept Webern’s advice that "knowledge of  serial operations is not required for full appreciation of [twelve-tone] music"?[14]  Or embrace the moral of Charles Rosen’s reflection on his experience as a performer of Webern’s music:

     I have played [Webern’s Variations for Piano] for years never knowing exactly what the tone row was that determines the succession of pitches until I read [its analysis], and I can't say that I am now in a better position to play, or to listen to, the work.[15]

                                                                    *    *    *  

But enough querying the dead.  It is time to let Leinsdorf go back to conducting his period-instrument orchestra of angels and wrap things up with a couple of concluding remarks.

A few rhetorical questions mixed with chronologically scattered historical examples may not amount to much in a way of empirical evidence, but what little evidence they do offer makes me believe that, when it comes to encounters with challenging new music, score-reading professionals have no dramatic advantage over non-professional (including functionally illiterate) music lovers who bring to the concert hall an open mind and substantial familiarity with stylistically diverse music, including music of recent vintage.  For both groups the best experience is likely to be close to what the great Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola described in his diary after attending the world premiere of Webern's Concerto Op.24 (at the time Dallapiccola was in his fourth year as professor at the Florence Conservatory):

     ... I have not managed to form an exact idea of the piece; but that it creates a world of its own seems to me unquestionable. ... Though I did not understand the work well, it seemed to me to have an aesthetic and stylistic unity on which one could not wish to improve.[16]

     That Dallapiccola's initial impressions of the Webern piece – "a world of its own", "an aesthetic and stylistic unity" – were vague and very general is not in the least surprising.  New music which radically re-thinks (or departs from) familiar styles and idioms may or may not have deep artistic significance, but if it does, it cannot reveal the full scope of this significance quickly and easily, for that would only prove the work's artistic shallowness.  What it can do is offer the listener glimpses of something interesting (intriguing, alluring, enticing) to make him want to listen to it again. And listening to the work again (and again) not only will allow some of the work's constituent sound events to convey their previously unnoticed aesthetic or emotional significance, but also will help (those who are interested) to grasp the musical meaning of the work's various formal properties encoded in the score.  To use the example of Elliott Carter once more, what made Carter's much delayed discovery of rhythmic regularities in the works of Varese possible, he tells us, was that over the years he had "listened to [these] works in excellent live performances."[17]

It is also worth noting that professionals may invest time and effort in studying the score of a difficult new work for reasons which have nothing to do with the work's artistic merit.  They may be under contractual or ethical obligations as performers, editors, referees, or teachers.  They may be motivated by collegial relations with the composer.  They may be prodded by professional jealousy or driven by insecurity because they see the composer as a competitor or as a threat.  Or they may want to keep a busy professional life because they consider it an important component of their self-identity and psychological well-being.

      Since none of this applies to non-professional music lovers like myself, it would be simply irrational for me to invest time and effort in studying a difficult score (if I could) without having a good reason to think that the music notated in the score is worth the investment.  And the only good reason for me to think so would be if I heard a performance (or recording) of the work and found it interesting enough to want to learn more about its formal (structural, organizational) properties.  Which is why Leinsdorf's musings strike me not only as delusional fantasies of a curmudgeonly musical snob, but also as a manifestation of score fetish at its most perverse:  In order for me to have a good reason to study a score, I must first study that very score!

Finally, none of what I have said was meant to suggest that studying scores contributes nothing to the pleasures of being a music lover.  Those who study scores outside professional obligations obviously find the activity intellectually stimulating and/or aesthetically rewarding.  I have no doubt that this makes for a richer musical life. 

     I do think, however, that the rewards of studying scores, especially post-tonal modernist scores, are separate from the rewards of listening to the music notated in those scores.  If one cannot hear (for lack of absolute pitch) a piece of music as being in the key of F# minor (the way one hears a voice on the phone as Mother's voice), looking up the key signature in the score will not make the Siciliano in Mozart's A major piano concerto sound more poignant.  And if one cannot hear that at a certain point the orchestra begins the retrograde version of some earlier stated material (the way one can hear the retrograde of a simple triad as being just that), learning from the score that this is what happens may be intellectually satisfying, but I doubt it will make the music of Berg's operas (where such palindromic constructions are common) sound more heart-rending.

     Which is to say that one need not deny the importance of tone rows and modulations to the submediant to maintain that music is no more about those things than wine is about organic chemistry and soil management.

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1.  Leinsdorf, E., On Music, Amadeus Press, 1997, pp.133-134.  

2.  Schonberg, H.C., The Great Conductors, Simon and Schuster, 1967, p.128.

3.  Holoman, D.K., Berlioz, Harvard U. Press 1989, pp.543-544

4.  Spohr, L., Louis Spohr's Autobiography, London, 1865.

5.  Kroll, M., Ignaz Moscheles and the Changing World of Musical Europe, Boydell & Brewer, 2014, p.83. 

6.  Ryding, E. and R. Pechefsky, Bruno Walter: A World Elsewhere, U. of California Press, 2008, p.244. 

7.  Crutchfield, W., “There may be more to music than meets a typical ear”, New York Times, 23 December 1990.

8.  Perhaps this is just one of those seemingly meaningful but in reality hopelessly imbecilic analogies (which Leinsdorf most likely lifted from Harold Schonberg’s book The Great Conductors).  Equivalence is a symmetrical relation (holds in both directions), but I doubt anyone would think it meaningful to describe an architectural blueprint as “the visual equivalent of the composer’s score.”  If anything, an architectural blueprint should be described as “the aural equivalent of a musical score” since, for experienced builders, reading a blueprint may well produce in the mind’s ear an aural image of a  ‘symphony’ played by hammers, drills, saws, forklifts, and bulldozers.  And who’s to say that this aural image (or a recording made at a construction site) is less musical than, say, the works of the Italian futurist composer Luigi Russolo?

9.  Carter, E., Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, U. of Rochester Press, p.41

10.  Rosen, C., "The Performance of Contemporary Music: Carter's Double Concerto", Critical Entertainment, Harvard U. Press, pp.288-293. 

11.  Arnold Schoenberg Letters, U. of California Press, 1987, p.164

12.  Koblyakov, L. 1977. "P. Boulez Le Marteau sans maître: Analysis of Pitch Structure". Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie 8, no.1, 1977, pp.24-39.

13.  Carter, E., Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, U. of Rochester Press, p.147 fn. 

14.  Stadlen, P., "Serialism reconsidered", The Score 16, 1956.

15.  Rosen, C., Freedom and the Arts, Harvard U. Press, 2012, p.231.

16.  Dallapiccola, L., "Meeting with Anton Webern (Pages from a Diary), entry of 5 September 1935, Prague", Tempo No.99, 1972. 

     Of course professionals who 'get' difficult new works usually get them faster than non-professional music lovers, if only because the professional’s accumulated knowledge along with listening and analytic skills honed by years of professional-level training and practice will almost certainly accelerate the process of familiarization.  But there is nothing interesting about this kind of advantage because it applies to professionals in every field, from theoretical physics and molecular genetics to automotive repair and residential plumbing.

17.  Carter, E., Collected Essays and Lectures 1937-1995, U. of Rochester Press, p.147 (fn), italics added.